In Spite of All The Stranger

 I had reason to rummage around in the big box of things under the bed the other day (no – not that one, the other one) and came across a veritable trove of treasures*. Ticket stubs from the Clapham Grand in 1982, a Cosmic Puffin laminate, several issues of Those Were the Days, and some hard copies of old photographs. One of these was signed – a couple of signatures that one might furrow a brow over, given that the picture itself was of three of the most famous men to have walked the planet, and a drummer.

To back track slightly, I used to play in a Beatles specialist band called The Star Club. It was instigated mainly as an excuse to go to the pub with our mates - a function that Picturehouse serves to this day - and somehow became quite the popular attraction. We didn’t really go for the later stuff, pretty much basing the set around anything up to Revolver and leaning heavily on the Hamburg days, but without the toilet seat and amphetamines. By the time we had replaced our front man** we were getting gigs further afield than our home town. Spalding, for example. And Clacton.

Clacton was a bit of a trek, but quite a lively night out. The venue*** was close to the sea front and so rather than idle away the hours between set up and showtime**** simply smoking, drinking and watching the clothes go by there was an opportunity to feed tuppences down the coin roller or try and win a cuddly toy in the grabber while smoking, drinking, and watching the clothes go by. There was a kebab shop on the way out of town which we used to call into for late night sustenance and soakage after the show where The Drummer would accompany the carving of the doner rotisserie with anguished howls of pain from the bench outside. It was on the way back from a show on the A133 that we heard that Diana had died.

We were in Clacton one evening enjoying a pleasant post-gig pack down when an elderly gentleman***** wandered over to have a word. I’m not usually a big fan of the post-show meet n’ greet as it usually involves someone who wants to tell you what you should have played, how you did it wrong or – on one notable occasion – a précis of how they negotiated Edinburgh city centre in a Volvo FH 460 only last week, but were happy to be at the show now. The Singer seemed to be deep in conversation, which left me free to coil some leads and Fast Fret****** my strings at least. He (The Singer) beckoned me over. “Tell him what you just told me” he said to the man. “I was just saying” the auld feller recounted “…that you boys are as close to what it was like in the early days as I’ve ever seen. It really takes me back. I’ll tell Pete next time I see him.”

I raised an enquiring eyebrow at our vocalist as if to say ”Pete? Who the in the name of George Martin is ‘Pete’ when he’s at home?” I was then formally introduced to our interlocutor. “This is Ken. Ken Brown.” “That name rings a bell…” I thought. Followed shortly by an internal “Oohhh…you mean Pete…” Sure enough, he did mention it next time he saw Pete and came to the next gig with autographed photos for all of us, which we insisted he also sign, even though he isn’t in it. So that was the night I met the man who met the man who played Twenty Flight Rock in The Quarrymen. I like to think that it was our version that swung it.

 

*Or, alternately, a big pile of useless crap which is going straight in the skip when you die. I’m paraphrasing, but barely.

**We did not subscribe to the Bootleg Beatles’ strict delineation of roles and occasionally added some harmonies where -in the opinion of our drummer – “…there should have been one”. Not really one for the purists, it must be said.

***I want to say Tom Pepper’s?

****Mach Schau! as it were.

*****I would say he was about the age that I am now.

******A proprietary brand of cleaner and lubricant.

Caveat Musicus

 Well now, firstly, let’s start with the rant I put on the Facebook…

That thing where an event puts out an APB for folk to play their (say, for example) food festival, so you round everyone up, ask the band to put their diary on hold for that day, forward the ‘organisers’ your expression of interest and a couple of links, send a follow up email, and they still can’t be bothered to reply to you, even to say “no, thank you”.

It’s always the musicians who are the afterthought, the disposable aspect, the #nomoneybutgoodexposure fall guys and girls. A pox on the event wranglers who are more interested in £ per stall frontage than common courtesy.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

As you might imagine, I was not in the best of humours at the time.

“You don’t say…”

It’s not the worst experience I’ve ever had with well-meaning civilians. That was probably the time The Star Club were contracted to play a charity gig on the basis of our well-acknowledged popularity, agreed a (much reduced) fee, played our (verbally) contracted two sets then had to do a runner after a disgruntled audience barged into the dressing room to berate us, physically hassled a couple of our camp followers and bad-mouthed us around town on the basis that there was no incidental music, raffle, and the house lights were on throughout. That the entire audience could fit into our allotted backstage space tells you something about the amount of promotion that the (so called) organisers had put into rounding up an audience. After a quick post gig conflab in a lay-by on the way home we deducted some petrol money and gave our fee back, chastened by the opprobrium generated by our willingness to lend a hand. I don’t think we ever donated our services to charity again.

Of course, worse than the willing volunteer, the well-meaning organiser, the out of their depth committee member are the people who have a hugely monetised organisation who, as an afterthought, reckon “D’you know what? We should have some music.” These people value nothing more than the free exchange of talent (or at least ability) for a parking space half a mile away from the stage and a guest pass to some event you weren’t going to go to anyway. They generally have no idea what constitutes a PA, a power supply, how big the footprint a five piece band requires is or what a gazebo behaves like in a high wind. At this point you may care to revisit the Blazing Saddles scene wherein Gene Wilder explains to Sheriff Bart who he is dealing with.*

Let’s lighten the mood. I have played an end of term Thank You gig for a bunch of teachers** where the Head made sure there was enough material allocated from the buffet to keep us so well fed that the second set had a mildly sluggish air***. We did a free show (at our instigation) where the landlord dipped into his own pocket to drop two hundred quid into the tip jar, and a corporate do where, although we had to fill in a risk assessment and take out public liability insurance, we had a free go at the burger stall and a sofa backstage. Even when we had to run a four way extension across the road to a nearby house for the village fete we got - get this - a vegan burger with vegan cheese.**** 

My advice, well, who knows? Check things. Is it lucrative? Will it be fun? Can you go home and, in the form of that anti-smoking ad from the seventies, sink into an armchair and mutter to yourself “‘as bin a good daayyy.”

In the immortal words of Jim Steinman and/or Meatloaf (delete as applicable according to personal preference) two out of three ain’t bad.

*I won’t lie to you, we had a residency in Spalding during which we were introduced to our minder, who we immediately nicknamed Mongo.

**One of them threw up into a Tesco carrier bag behind the sound desk and - heroically - carried on chugging Chardonnay like a Boss. I won’t have a word said against Primary School teachers. Apart from that one I fell out with after the ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ incident of 2006.

***He later joined the band, trivia buffs.

****No, you’re judging.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

 I was invited out for lunch at a (genuinely nice) restaurant the other day in the company of The Present Mrs. Kirk which was called ‘Starlings.’ We knew instantly that we would be able to remember the name as we sang in unison a something from at least twenty-eight years ago called “Two Starlings, hatching a Plot” which is one of the worst, most ill-conceived and badly constructed numbers I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through. And yet, and yet…we could both sing the chorus on the fly, off the bat, and with three decades between the single performance we ever saw and heard of this song and the date we received the reservation. Sometimes it ain’t what you do, it is the way that you do it.

In the mobile listening station* today Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” cropped up, and I was reminded that in the earlier days of my folk/country/ (if you will) East Angliacana band Songs from The Blue House we would regularly accept commissions for beer festivals the agreed performance duration of which would far exceed our actual nominal set list. This - for me at least** - was a challenge which offered a gratifyingly enormous opportunity for artistic experimentation and the chance to, as we professed at the time, go off-roading. The version of Carl Perkins’ “Matchbox” – pitched somewhere between the Harrison/Clapton/Edmunds late night TV special captured through the wonders of a Videoplus code and the Gregson and Collister live version from ‘Home and Away’ proved a reliable crowd pleaser. The “Follow me for the changes and try and keep up…” version of “Tonight’s the Night” perhaps less so, although a six-piece band having your back and prepared to jam on an (at least) seven-minute version of a two-chord dirge in a pub in Margaretting is a feeling very few of us are able to look back on in the fondest terms. I think we are split about fifty-fifty on that one.

Beer Festivals and a dearth of material can make for fortuitous bedfellows. Think of the good folk of Sproughton being treated*** to a six-minute psych-folk exploration of gods kitchen’s “The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes” say, or 5ive’s “Keep on Movin’” reimagined as a country hoedown. Lest we forget, Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs’ debut performance at the Coggeshall Cricket and Beer Festival was scheduled to climax with a performative rendition of Tiffany’s**** “I Think We’re Alone Now” before we realised that Tony Winn was in the audience and also knew a couple of our songs so we could get back on and make amends.

Sometimes preparation itself can be the enemy of luminous rapture. Think, friends, of the entirely sober logical process which suggested that we should preface every song in The Star Club***** set at The Pickerel in Stowmarket with a Lawrence Ferlinghetti-esque reading from ‘Revolution in the Head’ up to – and including – a rendition of the 1967 fan club-only track “Christmas Time is Here Again”. I won’t lie to you, if the mood in The Pickerel darkens it does it quicker than a 2026 eclipse. We weren’t so emotionally scarred until we tried “Rubber Bullets” and they called out The National Guard.******

And so my message – if any there be - is this. Take the low road, the road less travelled, the road to the aisles. In thirty years,’ time, someone – someone – will be looking for a restaurant and laughing to their partner “Ah, yes – you remember, it’s called ‘The Wave’”. 

 

 

*Skoda Karoq with the tracks on ‘random’

**I am including both the band and the audience in this exclusionary conceit

***OOAA.

****Tommy James and the Shondells for purists.

*****Beatles specialists. We’re  on YouTube.

******”This is, Rob, a lie..!”

Her boyfriend plays in Scritti Politti, Aunt Sally's brown bread…

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs have a new album out. It’s longer than Nashville Skyline, but shorter than The Ramones’ first album and sits, thematically, somewhere between the two. From the first tentative WhatsApp to the band suggesting that if we were to do a series of studio recordings, which songs did we as a group think we’d most like to preserve, to the culmination of the recording, mixing, designing, pressing, merching and launching process, we’ve had a ball. Everybody involved brought their A game, people reached out with undue generosity - not least our hosts at The Dove in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich who opened their beer garden, their barbecue and (and they didn’t have to do this at all) their till to us. I think we managed to thank everyone involved at the time (and a big hello to The Black Feathers, who flew in from Nashville specifically to be with us)* so there probably aren’t any missing accolades to explore beyond the exceptional continued service to the East Angliacana scene of the peerless Stephen Foster, who continues to be a beacon of enthusiasm and who nabbed us for an interview after the gig which will be on air in the next couple of weeks. In advance of the broadcast I would like to formally not apologise for my enthusiasm in describing one noted local musician as the fried egg of the Ipswich music scene, the slightly spiky reference to the local venues who couldn’t find the common courtesy to be bothered to reply to a simple email** and, to reiterate as Helen noted at the time we decided to start the band, hang on - we’re not quite done yet! In the meantime, here are some photographs, courtesy of Dave Markwell, of that sunny Sunday afternoon when it seemed like the Summer would never end…

https://helenandtheneighbourhooddogs.bandcamp.com/album/anything-that-moves

*Some parts of this sentence may not explicitly be of a factual nature.

*It’s your call, but I think they enjoyed the custom of sixty or so thirsty and hungry folk on a Sunday afternoon at The Dove.

It is a question as old as time itself…

 …where does Gaffa tape* come from? We all know where it goes – securing trip hazard-friendly cables, affixing pedal boards, muting the strings behind the nut on the guitar so the frequencies don’t resonate at high compression, repairing mic stands, that joke our drummer used to do where he put it across his face and claimed he’d been pictured in the Sunday Sport…but where from? I am explaining my theory to an increasingly credulous proprietor of a musical supplies store that – much like The Candyman, Beetlejuice or Katie Hopkins – if you say its name three times, it is beholden to appear. “I’ve got some you can have, but not a whole roll” he explains. “Exactly!” I say. “No-one’s ever a got a new roll, but there is always some about”**

I am on the lookout for tape as part of my backstage kit for The Medicine Show pop-up stage at The Maverick Festival, of which I have written at length previously and on the subject of which I sold two books at this year’s Company Store. I usually try and keep some spare strings, leads, a guitar stand, a strap and an actual guitar in the trailer just in case of emergencies. Oh, and a fridge. This year I also have a new PA amplifier and mixing desk, powered monitors, a fixed power supply and a novel new effects loop – all of which I will at some point or another over the weekend be completely baffled by and have to call for assistance in order to attend their functionality. Obviously by the time I’ve confidently got a handle on it all it is time again to hand in my two-way radio, pack up and go home but, y’know – it’s not a sprint.

As always, I am spoilt this year by the kindness and generosity of the talent giftfully given by the best of the turns. A late-night banjo and vocal solo spot from Ryland Moranz turns out to be one festival-goer’s personal highlight. I am discussing the best form of travelling suitcase to mic up with my colleague Smithy from The Moonshine Bar next door, and we agree that it is probably some form of Samsonite, as evinced by the charming April Moon, who gently correct the description of their music to “Canadiana” and play a country-folk version of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ as a thank-you for their wonderful sound mix.

The Dead Religion are hugely, embarrassingly talented and slip me a copy of their CD once I’ve stopped telling them over and again how hugely, embarrassingly talented they are. Jerry Hannan’s exquisite dobro player Sven asks for my number, recounts jamming with Bob Weir and explains that their fiddle player missed the Friday set as he was over here competing in the world frisbee championships. “We weren’t expecting him to get to the final, but that was on Saturday and so here he is. All week we’ve been practising saying ‘Sorry for your loss’.” On Sunday Bearfoot Soul shows up with his own PA, power amp, rack of loops pedals, iPad and attendant sound engineer.*** Subsequently Jason McNiff turns up with an acoustic guitar and a version of ‘Blues Run the Game’ he learned from Wizz Jones. All Americana life is here.

Back at home I unpack the bedding, the tent, the torch, the spare guitar stands, the camping stove and the laundry. As I lower the parcel shelf and close the tailgate I glimpse, unmistakably, nestled among the bag o’ leads a cylindrical objet d’etude. It is a part-used roll of Gaffa tape.

 

 

*It’s alright – you can call it ‘Duck Tape’ although, technically, that’s a brand name.

**This will later be disputed by someone who has bought crates of the stuff and now suspects that he may indeed inadvertently be the source of all of the black gaffa tape in the wild. Like Jimi Hendrix and those parakeets.

***I am reminded again of the possibly apocryphal story of the FOH engineer at The Cambridge Folk Festival asking Ry Cooder what he wanted and being handed a single quarter-inch output jack lead. “Plug that in” he said. “And don’t fuck it up.”

Studio Tan.

 

To The Steamboat, whose long and storied history intertwines with my musical back pages to a not insignificant degree, as regular blogavistas will attest. On this occasion Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs have been employed second on the bill at Folk at The Boat, a celebration of the monthly sing around sessions conducted at the pub and a chance for us to shake off the studio cobwebs and flex ourselves in the bright sunny air of an Ipswich waterfront afternoon. The venue is literally a stone’s throw from my front door but due to the vagaries of the port authority’s historic delving among the cuts, a twenty-minute walk along Ipswich’s glittering waterfront. Hence La Mulley and I are mightily relieved to find, upon our arrival, a hand pump dispensing delicious Brewer’s Gold – generally a harbinger of good times to come.

We are also relieved to welcome a pair of special guests for the day. We are short a banjoista, guitarist, harmonica wizard, singer and concertina player for the day, however these divers talents are all concentrated within one person, and so in the absence of the mercurial Tony Winn we have accommodated not only willing volunteer Indigo Turnbull (who has been sternly admonished that one does not simply ‘plonk along’ with HaTNDs and so has literally sat at the feet of our five stringed guru in order to cover the banjo parts on three songs) but also Fiddly Richard – all the way from Thorndon – who has agreed to reprise his parts on the three songs which close the set and whose presence at a folk festival seems wholly appropriate. In the mean time, we are a core of five, including Professor Steven Turnbull on keyboards, who we initially brought in to cover the fiddle-based vacuum in the live show, and whose stellar contribution to the recordings have both impressed and delighted everyone who has heard them. I suspect even himself.

There’s a nice sound onstage, an appreciative pub garden full of gently swaying folks, and the spoken introductions are mostly landing well. Witnesses for the band confirm afterwards that everyone was impressed with us, and even Steven - the onstage anti-Puck – seems to be enjoying himself. The Turnbull scion does a lovely job in covering for Tony in the same way that Jake Clemons covered for Clarence, (not least that he helped bring down the average age of the group by a factor of - as one member referred to it - “and the rest”) and Fiddly’s stellar soloing on fan favourite ‘Nelson’* fully justifies his literally having to have blown the dust off his stage rig before making his way to the the performance area. Apparently, it died when switched on at home earlier and he had had to dig out the manual in order to remind himself of how to program the effects loop, so he was a lot calmer than I would have been.

We check the time, close the set, pack down and gather another refreshing draught of Crouch Vale’s finest. Then back off the the ‘otel, two birds each.

 

 

*The introduction which concludes “This is a story about the boy who built the lighthouse and the girl he left behind” receives a gratifyingly folk-esque sigh of approval.

Thanks to Dave Markwell for the photo, and for having the faith to put our case to the committee.

“You’d best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... you're in one!”

 

Regular correspondents will be aware that I have been managing a music related project in a combination of PM, A&R and Producer roles recently. We find ourselves in need of artwork, and so much of the discussion around AI that has been prevalent this week (my local MP, a gig promoter and a music forum have popped up on my feed only this week, and there is this today - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/may/28/ai-art-is-boring-soulless-theft-visual-artist). Contributors to LinkedIn are routinely asked if they want to finesse their work (in the interests of full disclosure, I have not*.)

As a survivor of the Eighties indie wars, I remember that gig posters – or the most effective ones at least - involved a good deal of (literal) cut and paste, trips to WH Smith to buy Letraset, and copious use of the County Library photocopier. By then, Jamie Reid’s signature cut up newsprint was already passe. By the time I needed a cover for a cassette however, I outsourced that to someone who knew what they were doing and – crucially – had access to one of these new-fangled desktop computers that were being introduced, which made word processing and art design much more of a streamlined operation than had previously been possible. At around this time, crucially, the Musician’s Union were suggesting that synthesizers and drum machines should be banned as they were putting actual musicians out of work**.

Detractors decried the output of these machines as soulless, lacking in creativity, and homogenous, generic machine generated slop. Anyone could do it. Analogously, these are the very terms being applied online to the wave of local gig posters, caricatures and bands like (fairly IMHO) The Waterboys for one. The familiar trope of four band members all looking at somewhere slightly different on the horizon while trying to remember if they left the gas on while one of them stares steely-eyed down the barrel of the camera has been replaced by a plethora of Indiana Jones-adjacent stylised images of Collosi bestriding imaginary stages. It’s better than Comic Sans, I suppose.

I think that where we are now is at the Depeche Mode Speak and Spell phase of AI ‘art’ and design. Sure, it has been democratised, but whereas anyone can type “make these lyrics into a CD single cover” the new skill is going to be crafting the prompts you use to get the image you need without all of that messy recourse to airbrushes, batique and three expensive years at art school. Before too long, we will be at the Songs of Faith and Devotion phase, with those with the aptitude and skill producing fusion work, and those on the village hall committee having refined their technique to the point where their poster doesn’t look just like everybody else’s, overcoming the limitations of their imagination as we conquered Microsoft Paint before them.

Yes, there will be a shift in how we (or they) do things, but David Hockney paints on an iPad, and the Neat Records back catalogue was designed by humans, so let’s not jump right to judgement yet. For the record*** I am not using AI for the cover design – it is going to be based on a photograph which I took on my phone. And used some filters on. And some of the music has had auto tune applied to it, which corrects the pitch of the note using a computer. And digital reverb, which electronically recreates the effect of (say) Simon and Garfunkel’s engineer hanging a microphone in a lift shaft and then banging a drum at the bottom of it****. Where does it start? Where will it end?

 

 

*” Clearly,” you’re probably thinking. 🤔

**As is so often the case, Barry Manilow was the pebble that set off the avalanche.

***Hah!

****As per ‘The Boxer’, from Bridge Over Troubled Water.