"...and a tenner on Mince Pies".

 

I have received notification of the accounts pertaining to Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs' gig at the weekend and, unusually, we appear to have made a profit, insomuch as we didn’t actually lose money on the night and everyone involved in the production got at least some pocket money to take home. This may, you might contend, be the idea of the game in the first place, but as anyone involved on the live gig circuit will tell you, the easiest way to amass a small fortune in the field of local music promotion is to start off with a large one.

Fortunately we were able to harness the goodwill built up over many years’ toil by the good folk of Live at The Institute (see blogs passim), who were prepared to adopt their old roles for one night only in order to throw us a Christmas party. Neighbourhood Tony was to readopt his role as MC for the night – a popular host always seeming endearingly within reach of forgetting the name of the act he is about to introduce. As well as The Dogs, we were Fern Teather (and sidekick Bongo Boy) and one Rob A, one of my imaginary internet friends who, although I had corresponded with at length via the electric internet, I’d never actually met in true life. I’d invited him on the strength of his group’s new vinly album, which I’d ordered out of solidarity with a fellow artiste and of which I was pretty uncertain how it would be received by the Kelvedon crowd, a constituency generally used to being treated to the sort of acoustic balladeering frequently unleashed by (say) Ken Bruce during his daytime radio reveries - Jamie Lawson, for example, is a LatI alumnus. Rob, it quickly became clear, was not of this persuasion. As he worked his way through the line check under the watchful ears of sound factotum James, Mr. Wendell sidled up to me. “I wasn’t expecting that” he muttered. It wasn’t exactly Daft Punk getting up at the Newport Folk Festival and launching into ‘Get Lucky’, but it wasn’t far off. Helen grinned a grin. “I feel like I’ve been transported back to the eighties and have just seen a really early gig of a really massive band”.

A massive band was quite the opposite of what he was being, however, given that The Disappointment Choir traditionally follows the time-accepted notion of the pop duo by having two members. Disappointment Bob was however, tonight, a man on his own. Facing down the crowd, singing all the songs, playing guitar, triggering the drum machine, cueing the synths – all of these things could, on their own, be considered to be quite a stressful night’s work, but to do them all at once could be regarded as unnecessarily penitential. After Fern’s thoughtful circle-squaring set of beautiful acoustic ballads, during which she mentioned that the last time she’d played The Institute she was just starting her Kickstarter campaign to pay for the recording of her album and here, two years later, the last available copy of the CD was on the merch table, Rob hauled his keyboards centre stage, the lights dimmed, and he began.

I was at a table with Mrs K. a woman of generally forthright opinions on the potency of cheap music. The number of times we have to skip stuff that comes up on random play in the car doesn’t bear mentioning. She leaned over attract my attention. I braced myself. “This is wonderful” she breathed “We need to own this….”. I breathed a little sigh of relief of my own. Why had I doubted him, them, and myself? With the no-bar set up (the venue is a bohemian bring-your-own kind of gig, which means there’s none of that lobbing J2O bottles at the glass skip behind the bar that you get at many other listening venues) the audience were able to give The Disappointment Chorister their full attention, and we in turn received his.

After a quick tune up backstage, I had to put on my roadie shirt to go on and adjust Helen’s microphone back down from Rob’s height (he’s a lot bigger in real life than he looks on screen), then those lights come up and we hear that crowd and we remember why we came. Our set was a bit of a blur after that. We spoke (at length), we played some old songs, some brand new songs (agreeably, the new ones received many appreciative post-show compliments, which is in the direction we really should be going), we enlisted Bongo Boy to add some percussion to our set (somehow James managed to find another couple of channels on the desk post-sound check – it was either that or Sam was going to have to hit them really hard), and we sent the good people of Kelvedon back out into the night, musically satiated to a man, woman and (one) dog.

For we are Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. And this is what we do.

"One of you should have worn a hat; that's what made me get the camera out..."

There is an idea expanded on and monetised in the popular pamphlet Freakonomics that with 10,000 hours practice you can make pretty much anything look casual. We didn't quite go that far in terms of rehearsal time but a lot of prep went into this week’s Tony James Shevlin and The Chancers gig at The Kelvedon Institute. In my adjunctory role as Stage Left Chancer I was able to contribute, suggest, advise and prompt, but the final decisions upon matters of set list, vocal arrangement and appropriate chord inversion were ultimately down to the guy whose name was on the poster - we did, however, defer to Tiny Diva (Stage Right, vocals and percussion) upon matters of wardrobe. “Not those shoes” she issued sternly. “Undo another button on that shirt” came forth sagely.

The set list had been timed, pruned, checked for lyrical subject matter, keys, tempos and instrumentation and ‘tween song intros had been buffed and burnished appropriately. We were in a listening venue, so stretching out on the lyrical exegesis was going to be okay – no danger of losing them while Shev explained, with the benefit of eight by ten glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, how he came up with that tricky middle eight before the key change. It did not go quite that far, but the intro to Déjà Vu (a song written by TJS at the behest of Larry Page on behalf of Reg Presley, who then went on to record it with three quarters of REM – I necessarily précis here) probably took longer than it did to play the song itself.

There were a couple of new numbers in the set* which were nice for me because I had much less of the redoing the parts that were on the album to perform and more of the this is the arrangement and can you find a bit to go in here? sort of thing to play with. They are also a couple of absolutely corking songs which I really rather hope I’ll be invited in to wrangle when the time comes to record them. That's never a given, of course - only the other night we were discussing the lot of the touring band session guy for (I think it was) Chris Isaak, who I believe takes his whole band in to record an album except for the lead guitarist, who is replaced for the duration by a studio hound and who then presumably has plenty of time to nurse a deepening sense of grievance while he does all those odd jobs around the house that he has not had time to do while he’s out recreating those parts on the road.

So when the time came for my big number I made absolutely sure I was in tune, stepped back slightly so as not to intrude on either the sight lines of those in the front few rows or the raw power of the wall of sound being coaxed from my ten watt Vox and waited for my cue. As it happened, this was the point at which Shev decided to go off-roading. He went into his spiel about the infinite number of songwriters with an infinite number of typewriters. He then continued, guaranteeing that for the duration of the song every single person in the house would have their attention focused completely on his delivery at the microphone. “We did a gig a couple of weeks ago and I accidentally bent my thumb back so far it touched my wrist, so whenever I play an F sharp minor it really hurts, and F sharp minor is integral to this next song. So when you see me doing this face…” (at this point he pulls an expression worthy of Robin Trower at his grimmacitically correct best) “…I’m not doing that lead guitarist face, it means it really, really hurts. Anyway, here we go…”  

*Songwriter’s shorthand #36 – “They’re all new to you, but this is a new one for us too…” 

Photograph of The Kelvedon Institute reproduced without the express permission of Keith Farnish.

"I keep getting the nagging feeling I've slept somewhere before..."*

I had the great pleasure of attending the palatial country pile of Tony James Shevlin (pictured right, performing at The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville) this week for the purpose of brushing up on a few licks in advance of our return to active duty in Kelvedon next month. As well as conquering the expanding markets of the Suffolk borders Shev has designs on several territories far west of the Posh North Essex demographic and was pleased to be able to confide that he was fairly confident of securing an engagement in Athens, Georgia this Summer - this being the home of Pylon, Matthew Sweet, The B-52s and (probably most notably) REM. He mused that this would be a splendid opportunity to perform a number close to both the hearts of his potential audience and to himself - not his regular function band staple Love Shack, but the self-penned and Troggs-tastic Deja Vu, recorded by none other than Reg Presley himself with one-time jobbing backing band Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry. The only problem was that he couldn't comprehensively remember exactly how the two decades-old song actually went.
"What did you do?" asked concerned co-vocalist and percussionista Jules. "Find an old demo, hook up the record deck, search through your old lyric folder..?"
"Looked the video up on YouTube for the chords and found the words through Google" he confirmed happily. "Isn't technology wonderful?"


*The phenomenon known as Duvet Ja (Thanks to Harry Harris). 
 

The Show-Off Must Go On.

I’ve been doing a bit of stage managing and MCing recently – it helps keep the old chops in order when there are gaps between gigs - and an interesting discussion came up the other night during the post-performance cable winding when one of the crew remarked that he had enjoyed one of that evening’s performers a great deal, but was concerned that there was a point where their ‘tween song banter had threatened to be more entertaining than the songs. Having introduced said turn with a rather splendid quip I’d harvested* from Twitter, which sailed blissfully over the heads of many of the assembled, I'd been happy to hear someone engaging with the audience to such a degree that this might be an issue in the first place.

Meanwhile, a knowing sigh issued from The Soundman Formerly Known as Our Glorious Leader (TSFKaOGL), who has endured many introductions on my part which have been in danger of lasting slightly longer than the songs they presage. Upon our return from a short tour of Denmark with Heavy Big Pop funsters As Is** some years ago we were in possession of two souvenirs, one being a live recording of a performance which had been recorded from a very expensive looking and immaculately maintained sound desk directly to stereo, and the other an only very slightly shorter cassette of all the on stage chat we’d edited out from between numbers in order to fit the gig on to a single C-90 in the first place. Many’s the time Songs from the Blue House emerged refreshed from a beer festival set to be enthused at by a passing tegestologist with a hearty – “You were great!” [beat] “Really funny!” “Not heartfelt, or moving..?” sighed TSFKaOGL ruminantly, back here in the present. A sympathetic assent came from latter day drummer TNDB, busy unravelling a monitor lead over by the power amps. "That guitarist..."  

The thing is, we didn’t really do any outright comedy songs – certainly a couple of wry observations on the human condition, and one light-hearted skiffle through my romantic past, and yeah, maybe the hick yokel faux-country rendition of Fat Bottomed Girls was played for laughs, but most of our set was definitively bedsit confessional Americana. Certainly the one about killing burglars had a neat pay-off and couldn’t really be described as a romp (it was also the one which usually got the biggest cheer with theatre audiences in the Essex/Suffolk borders region). I just couldn’t help chatting away between numbers, especially if someone was busy tuning, retuning, changing instruments or trying to decipher the set list – all of which can conspire to create an uncomfortable silence, especially if you’re in that first date frame of mind which so many performers and audiences find themselves in during their inceptive experience of each other. This is how Peter Gabriel got started, you know. One minute you're explaining who came up with the chorus that time in the dressing room in Sudbury, the next thing you know you're dressing in an evening gown, wearing a fox head and hanging your balls round your neck in a burlap bag*** for effect. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum, I can’t stand a stage full of people busily going about their business whilst fortifying the fourth wall and so I feel compelled to fill the gap with chunter. I know. It’s a knack.

Since my role with my current employer is to mainly stand at the side, play the twiddly bits from the album and occasionally do some Pat Donaldson-esque harmonies I’m not called upon to speak. Regular accomplices may be astonished to learn that I am blissfully happy with this arrangement. It’s not my circus, after all. Besides, I don’t want him to ask me pointedly to work up a version of  Talk Too Much…  


*Or 'stolen', if you will. Thanks and kudos to whoever came up with that 'Miss Marple' gag. It may have misfired slightly with the audience but two of the band who had yet to make an entrance remarked that "...that was hilarious!"

**I found a copy of our twelve inch single in a second hand record shop last weekend. Ooh it took me right back, it did.

***We never quite went that far.

Showtime for the indiscreet, and standing on the stage…

After two days of singing in the car on my way to and from work I am pretty happy that I’ve remembered all the words for my comeback solo performance (“For one night only, folks, roll up, roll up”) at The Kelvedon Institute in Essex, sandwiched between Cambridge-based master of lugubriosity David Stevenson and club circuit veteran Mike Silver. To appropriate a metaphor I heard recently, I am the sauce between the burger and the bun – not satisfying on its own, but something that will hopefully make the whole experience a little more piquant. At least this is the theory. 

Both David and Mike are acoustic guitarists of the dropped tuning variety, and so to spice up the constituency of middle-aged white males with jumbo guitars I have elected to delve back into my formative years and perform on an electric and through a Marshall combo, all the better to coax out the subtle nuances of the sound of the Telecaster, and to embrace the inevitable Billy Bragg comparisons. Also, I’m a thrasher, not a picker, and this is going to be much easier with the benefit of amplification. Back in the day I actually played a few pubs in Peterborough where the locals still recalled Mr. Bragg honing his craft, including one locale called New England. True say, brothers and sisters. 

Since I’ve borrowed the amp I’m not entirely sure what it’ll sound like but things are satisfyingly simplified by there being a channel which simply has three controls – one for volume, one for treble, and one for bass. This should be a reasonably easy line check. Worryingly, no sound emanates from the rig once I’m all plugged in and so I start switching leads, jiggling knobs, looking for a previously unnoticed ‘standby’ switch and then am relieved to spot that I have actually plugged into the footswitch socket on the front of the fascia. Satisfied that no-one's noticed this elementary faux pas, I stride confidently to the front of the stage to check the monitors. Still no sound. Bugger! Friendly sound engineer James points out that after all the cross referencing of cables for brokenness, I have omitted to plug the lead back in to the guitar. The carefully constructed façade of effortless cool has thus cracked somewhat. 

Still, guitar sound done, there remains a popping on the microphone which has been set up for someone who can actually sing properly and since I subscribe to the Tom Robinson up close and personal method of waiting until I can feel the wire gauze on my bristles before emoting (and I’ve shaved today) this is clearly going to prove problematic. Luckily a pop shield is sourced and I am able to both relax into my usual mannered vocal style and also put it on the end of my nose so that I look like a muppet, a beloved tradition of many years standing. Sounding like one is something I'm going to have to come to terms with. Second up on the bill, I am introduced on stage by club MC Tony Winn, who gets my name wrong and I launch into the first number, a rowdy thrash about shameless marital infidelity written in the form of a confessional from a fictional third person. Most of tonight’s are, in fact, as I have decided to eschew the songs James and I have been writing for Songs from The Blue House entirely and play some old. 

After the first couple I am relaxing into the set, and although conscious that this probably not what most of Mike Silver’s audience were hoping for, they are kind enough to applaud the good bits and pass discreetly over the unintentional jazz chord in one middle eight which I decide to hang on for another fifteen bars in the hope that they’ll think it’s part of the arrangement. I think I got away with it. Adrenalin has given me an extra couple of notes on the range, and I’m enjoying the freedom afforded by playing standing up to pace the stage, backing off the mic for loud bits and coming in close to emote sections of what I believe to be breathy intimacy, but what the attentive punters probably understand to be character-led diversions into the persona of a nuisance phone caller. We’ll see, when we review the recording afterwards. 

The last song comes around and I haven’t fluffed too many chords, have got most of the words in the right order, and have a satisfyingly lengthy round of applause ringing in my ears. I get my gear off and out of the way and bump into Mike who is warming up backstage and who very kindly observes that “I’ve never heard of you, but that was great!” There’s nothing like a bit of peer praise to give you a readybrek glow in a situation like that. Obviously, he’s about to go on, play an hour of wonderful songs, sing in a rich, warm voice and pick guitar parts which are almost baroque in their composition and execution (and get most of the crowd singing heartily along with the choruses) and so he can afford to be generous, but it’s still very kind of him to take the time to mention it. Turns out I’ve sold a CD as well. 

“That sounded great” says James “I’m not sure what the recording will be like though because when I checked the headphone mix I could hear James Hurley and I’d forgotten to turn my interval mix on the iPod off “ It’s probably for the best. Nothing extinguishes that space cadet glow like listening back to the recording and realising that, yes, that guitar was out of tune for the second half of the set and, no, nobody really did laugh at that joke you put in to the introduction to that other one. Still, I have my memories. Misty Brewers Gold-coloured memories, of the way I was.