“Everyone else is doing it - so why can’t we..?”

Back in the opening overs of the Great Unpleasantness, we were just about gearing up for Helstock (see blogs passim.) which in a different universe would have* taken place about a week after we were all finally told off and sent to our rooms to think about what we’d done. 

A year later, it was looking as if we were going to have to postpone or cancel again, before someone in Posh North Essex suggested we (or rather, ‘they’) host one of those online virtual festival thingies that we’d been hearing so much about recently - that way we could get more players in, there wouldn’t be a venue capacity on attendees, the queues for the toilets were definitely going to be a lot shorter, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything.

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs had a couple of remotely recorded and edited audio-visual submissions accepted, and having been invited to submit something of my own for consideration, I went back to the neglected corner of the bookcase where I keep my big book of things I’ve made up out of my own head, blew the dust off the spine and pored through the contents with a rheumy old eye until I came across this old thing, originally written on the back of a boat** somewhere up an Irish river, probably in Cork, and originally committed to hard drive some years later on the first Songs from The Blue House album, on which Olly from Crouch Vale played spoons.

Originally a quasi-comedy interlude in gods kitchen gigs (how dare you mock my suffering!) we ended up playing it at a lock-in back in Ireland some years later which was quite the blast but, as befits my advanced maturity and attendant gravitas, I decided to rework it in a more reflective manner hoping to reach out to those many fellow travellers on the road to love’s redemption I’ve shared asphalt burns with over the years.

I believe Clapton tried the same thing with ‘Layla’.

https://youtu.be/00X0QEoT6rA

*And indeed still might have done, depending on your philosophical bent and/or outstanding view on String Theory.

**Whilst travelling upon, not literally marked up in anti-foul paint on the stern.

“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar it meant that you were a protest singer.“

A couple of blogs ago I wrote about writing and recording with my long-term Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha Tony James Shevlin. He sidled up to me at the office. “I don’t know about the intrinsic artistic integrity of the recording in terms of fully mastered digital release - do you want to make a video?” (I’m paraphrasing). So we got together again and made a stripped-down, if you will, ‘unplugged’ version with him on the expensive acoustic guitar he bought in Nashville and me on what they call, just North of the Humber, the Durrbrurr.

We’ve decided to put it out there in the online wild partly because we feel we need to make a statement upon these crazy, unprecedented times with our crazy, unprecedented rhymes, and partly because these things otherwise tend to sit unloved in musty drawers until they’re old and irrelevant, and no-one wants that, least of all us. Not at our age. 

It’s not the longest protest song ever written - I mean, it’s got one less verse than ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’, which Bob Dylan wrote when he was only twenty two. Mind you, I could play that when I was twelve, and I think that says quite a lot. 

I showed it to my wife. “Remember” I said beforehand “They say that the camera adds ten pounds.”

“Christ” she responded. “How many cameras did he use?”

https://youtu.be/5Sxg9saaqVs

Danny Whitten's Legacy

A quick rehearsal last night in preparation for my forthcoming appearance at this year’s Helstock (see blogs passim) wherein I shall be performing as part of revolving-door be-lineupped family ensemble The Arctic Mulleys, having run out of bands of my own to reform over the past decades’ soirées and not having had time to form a new one since the appearance of the Theotrio at last year’s event, after which co-conspirator Mr Wendell stopped returning my calls. I will be performing on the acoustic guitar in support of The Birthday Girl in our customary opening slot – a bit like The Levellers do to herald the start of Beautiful Days, but indoors and with a sight fewer camper vans - after which I shall to retire gracefully to the buffet in order to investigate fully the results of the evening’s entry-by-possession-of-an-interesting-cheese-only admissions policy.

My original suggestion for my appearance was to revive and perform the three song demo which first brought me into the orbit of La Mulley’s main squeeze and paramour Lord Tilkey some years ago. This now ancient and revered artefact consisted of two original songs recorded to cassette tape along with a cover version of Danny Whitten’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” which we knocked out at the end of the session on the basis that he didn’t have a copy of the song, he wanted one, he didn’t know anybody he could tape it off, and I knew how to play it. It seemed a pretty sensible quid pro quo in return for securing his services behind the Tascam four track, on an overdubbed guitar solo, and then on some suitably Eighties synth* - this is exactly the sort of creative endeavour and home recording solution solving that Spotify has put a stop to, I should add.**

When it came to recording IDWTTAI James generously added a plaintive harmony on the chorus which very much enhanced the whole melancholia of the thing and topped the session off nicely. We were in a bit of a rush and so it wasn’t until later that we noticed that in my reverie I had sung (inaccurately as it turns out) “If you wait here just a little bit longer/If you will won’t you listen/to my heart?” and James, not unreasonably, had echoed in a perfect fifth “…if you wait, won’t you listen…” the cumulative effect of which was, when listening back to the beautifully blended vocals in the finished version that we appeared to be singing “If you widdle…”. We should have toured as Charles Hawtrey and Crazy Horse.

 
*Although to be fair this was in the eighties.

**shakes walking stick at the internet.

  

"...it's his brother, Alan!" "Oh Yeah".

 
 Back in the day(tm) we raised awareness and funds for causes close to our hearts not by appearing on Newsnight but through the issuing of badges, fanzines, and cassette compilations. For a while in the eighties there was a thing called the Venue for Ipswich Campaign, or 'VIC'. One of the things that came of this was Ipswich Community Radio, which exists to this day, and another (indirectly) was the CSV centre which provided community-based services and rehearsal space. 

Through the consciousness-raising auspices of the committee there also came about numerous gigs (I think it was The Charlatans who redecorated the dressing room at The Caribbean Club with pizza) by which means I got to play in a band supporting Carter USM, which I never fail to mention every time 'Sheriff Fatman' comes on 6 Music. I also appeared on one of these tapes (in two different guises) alongside many of the Ipperati of the day, many of whom had been recorded by one James Partridge with his Tascam four track facility, popularly known as 'The Portaloo'.

For some reason I was humming one of the songs from the collection today - not As Is's "The Big Adventure", not This Side of Summer's "Hole In My Life", not even my "Showtime" but ‘Alan Peel’ by Edible Vomit - sing along if you know the chorus!

Subsequent online research reveals that Edible Vomit gave their first gig to a little known Ipswich band at The Albion Mills, who went on to become Cradle of Filth. I mean, I don’t want to get all Only Connect about this, but it’s good to know we all helped out each other, whether we knew about it at the time or not.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/7287890-Edible-Vomit

"From Finborough to Fingringhoe..."

It’s tempting, I know, to consider me sitting back in my leather-bound armchair, puffing contentedly on a pipe and taking the occasional quaff on a stiff scotch as I dictate my memoir to a liveried flunky who then goes off to the British Library and uploads my latest reminiscence to an eager waiting public. Something about how the toilets in the Newt and Cucumber had a great reverb, or that bar whose gimmick was that all the tables had telephones on them, and the time that someone called the one nearest the stage to ask us to turn it down a bit as they couldn’t carry on their conversation without shouting, that sort of thing. Enquiring minds need to know - in fact only the other day I was parking the car when a gentleman stopped me to enquire whether I still get out and play and what the rest of The Star Club were up to. I informed him that our front man Shev was still writing and performing with his new band. “Ah” he shook his head wearily “But it’s not The Beatles, is it?”

I bumped into Frisky Pat, a drummer friend of mine the other day (at a child’s birthday party, where our respective scions were eating crisps and hitting each other with balloons – not unfamiliar behaviour from our time on the road together, as it happens) and talk got around to how the idea of being in a band is great, whereas the practicalities of missing tea and getting home at four in the morning so that a drunk person can shout “Sex on Fire!” at you repeatedly in between times for three hours gets a trifle wearing after a certain number of repetitions.

Nevertheless, I think it’s important to at least maintain the semblance of being in a band, even if that just means doing the occasional bit of writing and demoing at home just to keep your hand in, and so last week I foreswore the opportunity to go out and watch some of my friends playing music in order to stay in and make some of my own. Besides, once I start shouting for Kings of Leon songs after my third pint I tend to get on their nerves.

I had a simple little song which had previously been demoed and performed acoustically a couple of times, but I also had great dreams of swirling cinematic soundscapes of the sort McAlmont and Butler might hire Abbey Road to produce, or that Tom Scholz might dream up in his basement. I also had a nice bottle of Rioja, the riff from Love Will Tear Us Apart and a lyric which contained both the place name Fingringhoe and employed the term allopatric to describe a relationship. Here’s what happened...

soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywing…

So, having clocked in, I feel I have re-established my still-a-musician time-served credentials and can now get on with the business at hand. Perkins, plump up the cushions, bring me a fresh glass and let me tell you about the time one of our audience cornered my wife at a gig at The Manor Ballroom to ask if our first child would be named ‘John’ or ‘Paul’…