I
have pitiably few claims to actual fame, and those that I do
entertain are closer in the actualité to pub quiz questions along
the mildly obscure lines of ‘Name three Kinks drummers’ or ‘What
links The Green, Green Grass
of Home and In
a Silent Way?’ One
claim I do hang on to is that I believe I am the only person to have
appeared on an episode of BBC Radio Suffolk’s Introducing
and on Re-Introducing
on the same evening. The former with the estimable Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs’ most recent digital release, and the latter
being an archive performance from 1998, broadcast as part of Stephen
Foster’s invaluable trove of live tracks, studio sessions and
vintage interviews stored on a bewildering number of formats in a box
room somewhere in 56 St. Matthew’s* Street.
The
show recently revisited the 2000 Ipswich Music Day, wherein I played
as part of the Suffolk Songwriters showcase alongside such luminaries
as Tony James Shevlin, whose reliable progress through the last three
decades can be measured in the performance of his song Nobody,**
which in this incarnation was a rather testy, Costello-esque
rendition entirely apropriate for the times. It was during this year,
you see, that barbs were exchanged within the letters column of the
local evening paper regarding the value, self-worth and deleterious
effects of the dreaded covers and tribute bands that were laying
waste to a generational swathe of Suffolk music talent. I, and indeed
Mr. Shevlin, were part of this scourge in no small part due to our
continued insistence on playing in The Star Club – a Beatles
specialist band which in no small way funded our ability to function
as independent singer-songwriters outside of the (Star) club circuit.
The
only reason I remember this is because I made a dedication to one
‘Albert Herring’’ from the stage at the time - I’m guessing
not the actual greengrocer’s assistant from the Britten opera, but
a nom-du-plume/guerre intended to upset the apple cart under the aegis of
which we were ruthlessly expoiting the limited music-going resource
of the region, and this
was when you actually had to write a letter down on paper, put it in
an envelope and take it down the post box first before seeing if
they’d print it later, not like all of this half-witted digital egregiousness you get below the line these days.
Fittingly,
the song I played was about starting your own band if you didn’t
like the ones you were seeing (and later recorded by Songs from The Blue House). I also got my friend Matt up to do a proto rap on a
track first recorded by my
band gods kitchen (and
which – rater cleverly I thought – references the Beatles track
‘I Feel Fine’) and
dedicated my song Stretch Armstrong (about
a band from Colchester who had unwittingly helped me through some dark
times) to an old friend
I’d first met when I was living in a kitchen and
trying to make it in an Indie band. So, yeah, I guess I was a little
put out at being told that the decline and fall of the Suffolk music
empire was down to me and my mates playing some sixties hits.
It
was only upon listening back to the broadcast (it was the Alanis
Morissette joke that gave it away) that I realised that this was the
very same performance I had been gifted afterwards by sound visionary
Dave Butcher of the BBC, and rather cheekily gaffa taped on to the
end of my CD-du-jour ‘This Much Talent’ - similarly made up of
homespun recordings and stories from the frontline of hearth and
heartbreak that I was exploring around this time. The irony of all
this being that almost my first appearance in the local paper’s
music section about twenty years prior to all this had been a similarly primal
howl about covers bands stifling the talent and invention that was
surely waiting to break through. I still tut approvingly today when
the never ending wheel of outrage spins, spins, spins on its axis of
indignation.
As for the protagonists of Y2K’s music wars – well,
that year’s headliners were Soul Kitchen, which tells you something
about longevity in the club scene (they also closed the show in
2019), ten years later The Star Club (who also played later that day)
were invited back*** and were hence unable to go and watch some kid
called Ed Sheeran elsewhere in the park, who later had a stage named
after him. So I guess we didn't manage to kill the scene off after all. And Harry,
who I’d dedicated a song to earlier sought me out backstage. “Oh
mate” he said “That was a really thoughtful thing to do. But I
wasn’t in
Stretch Armstrong...”
*Thrillingly, the signs in the underpass there put the apostrophe in three different places.
*He’s
doing it a bit more Americanary, recently – although
the last time I saw him do it was at Maverick, which may account for
that.
**That’s
where the photo at the top comes from.
