“That looks great under a plaid shirt”. “Everything looks great under a plaid shirt…”

 

In truth, we in The Picturehouse Big Band don’t usually get many reviews. Sometimes we barely get an audience, and so we were delighted to enjoy both at our longstanding quarterly residency at The Pickerel in the heart of swinging down town Stowmarket.

In attendance was one Carl Allen, author of London Gig Venues, estimable photographer and veteran of the nineties indie wars, where we first came across each other in the white hot crucible of the East Anglian heavy big pop scene, and who only recently found our single in a second hand record shop and snapped it up for - as our singer commented drily - slightly more than it cost at the time.

We had decided to use our sound check time wisely, eschewing the usual run through a couple of verses of Take it Easy and asking - basically - if the PA was on and had invested a couple of weeks in learning some new songs which we could theoretically try out and see if they could successfully make the transition from rehearsal room to pub carpet. It also meant we spent less time smoking in the car park, which at our our collective ages and at this time of year is asking for either a nasty cold or to be hit be a passing Audi.

Turns out that Drive My Car is - as long as you don’t try counting bars in the intro - quite the fillip (such an instant keeper that we did it in the encores). Lady Madonna less so. Still, a creditable effort. And to the set(s) proper, we had both mixed things up a bit and forgotten to print any set lists, which created the dual jeopardy of not quite knowing what was coming next and having to remember whether The Singer was playing a guitar on this one or not. Fortunately The Keyboard Player had programmed all the sounds, in order, on his kit and had a list on his phone and so was able to mouth, mime or shout clues as they came up. A latecomer mentioned afterwards that he’d seen us several times in the past, but hadn’t seen us do any of the songs in the second set before.

The crowd was lively, impressive in scale, and up for a good time. At one point I asked if someone had turned the monitors up as I could hear a great deal of doubling up on the choruses. “No” The Singer remarked, gesturing toward the pub full of folk clamouring for a third encore behind him. “That was them”. Being the last gig of the year for us, we bade everyone a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and steamed off into the night. And so to our review, and to the splendid photographs which Carl had kindly made available by the time I was home and unloaded, which I present herewith.

Picturehouse

The Pickerel, Stowmarket, 7 November 2026.

Being in a covers band is a tough gig. Everyone's heard 'A Crazy Little Thing Called Love', 'Wonderwall' and 'Brown Eyed Girl' belted out in a corner of a pub more than enough times - that's why most cover bands suck. Lack of imagination sticking with the formula.

I'm here in a pub in Suffolk to catch Picturehouse, mainly because I've reconnected in person recently with guitarist Shane Kirk, whom I used to see frequently playing with Ipswich's great late 80s power-pop hopefuls, As Is.  In the ache of bands that never made it, As Is, should, coulda..... You get the idea. I saw them in practically every Ipswich and Colchester venue, even a showcase at London's Powerhaus. But I hadn't seen, heard or even photographed Shane on stage for well over 30-years. Maybe the longest gap I've had between seeing an artist!

Shane's traded in his Hohner Les Paul copy for Gibson's real thing, well, it's what we men of a certain age do, spoil ourselves upgrading to the best toys once the kids have passed a certain age.

But enough! Picturehouse start with a stretched out soundcheck that morphs into a try out for new songs, Beatles songs. Apparently the group previously traded as The Star Club playing early era Fab Four songs before they were fab. They sounded pretty faithful, but I'm not really a fan of The Beatles, so let's move on because after a brief break they return and it gets better, much better....

As covers bands like Colchester's The Rezidents and X-Kaminski prove, great cover acts cherry pick the great, choice cuts from an artists back catalogue, rather than just skim off the greatest hits. You want something by The Cars, Talking Heads, Del Amitri or REM, well Picturehouse deliver the great cool songs, not the big hits. They start with 'The Bends' by Radiohead, had it been a faithful version of 'Creep' I would have walked out on the spot.

For me, those left of centre choices makes the band so much more than a wedding function sideshow. I'm surprised and delighted by the band. They have a full sound, but they do have three guitarists, keys, bass and drums, all expertly played. I'm a bit disappointed when my daughter (who I took with me) tells me she's tired and wants to go in the interval. Until we meet again Picturehouse, and I will not leave it another 30-years Shane!

https://www.facebook.com/musicvenueman/

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.