What You Give is What You Get

In the town hall square, tuning up for a daytime show with Tony James Shevlin and The Chancers. A massive stage has been erected, drum kit, backline and monitors are all complimentary and in place, the band on before us are tearing through a terrific version of ‘Barracuda”. It’s a long way from clambering up on to the back of a P&O trailer and peering twenty yards to your right to see if the other guitarist is playing the same bridge as you. Lovely, tight forty five minutes. Blinking in the sunshine afterwards I realise what a culture shock it is to come off stage and still have a good couple of hours of afternoon left.

Snap!

The Maverick pop-up Medicine Show has been relocated to a leafy grove and looks, feels and sounds all the better for it. I am to wrangle a series of  short solo, small band and off-roading sessions from artists who are (mainly) appearing elsewhere at the festival. Charlie Austen*, who has a self-constructed suitcase-based percussion set up (“I’m playing all this myself you know, it’s not loops”) performs an as-yet unreleased balled called Four Tiny Frames which unaccountably sets off my hay fever**. Red-eyed and sniffing, I congratulate her on the perfect timing with which her sunglasses fell down on to her face mid-song. “I definitely planned that” she grins.

Snap!

Matt Owens is playing guitar for someone else at the festival, but drops by to perform a few numbers of his own. This is the joy of The Medicine Show. He calls in two hours before his allotted stage time, checks out the gear, asks my name, returns an hour later with a beer and we chat amiably about his beautiful vintage acoustic guitar. By this time I would have done almost anything for him. He gently explains what he needs in terms of sound and we tweak things variously until he’s happy, or as happy as an ex-member of Noah and the Whale can be in a field adjoining the goat enclosure. During his set he engages affably with the queue for the portaloos, which snakes along the track fronting the paddock. “Good time to choose to go for a wee” he advises sagely.

Snap!

Our Man in the Field are a trio with a guitar, bass, cello configuration who are setting up under the stars and by the light of a fullish moon which glints off the river. They’re using backline for the guitar and bass which means I have to work with their levels, and everything else needs to be carefully balanced against them. Two of their coterie have already advised me as to their sonic preferences regarding the performance and I have taken their suggestions on board, and then refer back to them a couple of songs in to see what they think. I’ve deliberately kept everything low so that we have to lean in to get the sound. One thinks I’m taking the piss. I explain that it’s a combination of my character of ‘Grumpy Sound Man’ and my naturally sarcastic-sounding tone that is probably misleading. Another admits that their suggestion about the balance of the backing vocal was probably wrong. My character graciously reverts to the prior mix. On stage they are joined by fiddle player extraordinaire Chris Murphy, who despite meeting them that afternoon and being invited to sit in, sounds like he’s been rehearsing with them for a decade. It’s enthralling, moving, breathtaking music - the sort that Guy Garvey might have made if he’d moved to Woodstock in 1968 and signed to Warners. I remark to his partner that Chris’s playing is exquisite. “Mind you, I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know?” “Yeah, but it’s good to hear it” replies Barbara Hershey.

Snap!

Picturehouse have assembled in a community hall to see if our old PA still works and to run through a few of the more untenable numbers in the set for our forthcoming quarterly show in Stowmarket. “It’s a long time since I rehearsed in a village hall” I say. The walls are lined with portraits of benefactors and plaques recording gifts of clocks, indoor toilets and the addition of a kitchen. The Drummer is on his phone. “Someone’s added me to the village WhatsApp group and I need to tell them it’s not my drone” he mentions by way of explanation. “In the old days” someone sighs wistfully “the only way you’d get a call out here would be someone ringing the phone box outside to complain about the noise”.

Snap!

The Bury Folk Collective have invited me - the newly appointed head of a benevolent dictatorship - to bring my This Much Talent project to perform at their monthly contemporary folk night. For someone so used to hiding behind a microphone and an amplifier, the bare bones of an acoustic evening bring forth a whole new set of challenges. Fortunately audience interaction is not only permissible in such circumstances, but encouraged. I emerge from an acoustic guitar instrumental reverie to enquire of Mr. Wendell whether that really was a rendition of Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’, which he assures me it was. By the time we’re on someone has located the switch for the mood lighting. Gib on electric bass*** and Wendell on Gibson jumbo are seated, I’m front and centre telling a lengthy introductory anecdote about how thrilled I was when Geoffrey Kelly out of Spirit of the West had agreed to play on my new CD****, how that never would have happened during the era of phone boxes and what an incredible job he’d done playing on it. “Whereas, tonight…” smiles La Mulley, holding her flute up to the light. “Such a tiny little thing, and yet so expressive!” remarks a flute-loving audience member afterwards.

“Isn’t she just?”

*Explaining to my neighbours in The Moonshine Bar, who are back-announcing their turns and then inviting folk to pop round the corner to see who’s on, I explain “It’s ‘Charlie’ as in the BRIT Awards drug of choice, and ‘Austen’, as in the author…” 

“I had not made either of those connections” remarks MC Smithy, drily.

**I don’t get hay fever.

***”Judas!” etc etc

****”It’s three tracks and lasts…well, it’s a compact disc, it’ll last for ever…”

Libraries Gave Us Power…

There is a theory, admittedly discussed principally over three hour lunches and mostly with my good friend and occasional musical employer, award-winning songwriter Tony James Shevlin, that prophets rarely prosper in their own land. He posits the example of being denied access to the open mics, speakeasys and songwriters’ showcases of Chicago, until a well-placed expression of disappointment in this country’s finest Hugh Grant diction magically gains him entry. If Richard Curtis had been directing this would probably be the bit where Andie McDowell breathlessly intones “Is it still windy? I hadn’t noticed…”. The third wheel at one particular recent lunch attests to the power of the foreign accent* - “Meanwhile, I’m stuck out on the door like a dick”. Our colonial interlocutor is one Scott Stilwell, who much like a minor character in Love, Actually, Tony has met in a bar in America and who has followed him home.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect, of course - a trait, once again, I share with the esteemed writer/director of The Boat that Raped - however the very presence of Scott attests to the beguiling power of the non-indigenous performer. He is here to take part in a short tour of England**, at least in American terms, and on the penultimate night of the jaunt a healthy following has assembled to see the pair of them trade songs, stories, and occasionally accents in the convivial surroundings of a local library. The show is sold out and whilst I am impressed. I am also slightly jealous, as a recent planned expedition to a theatre in Colchester by my musical paramours had to be pulled as advance ticket sales meant that the audience would only just have outnumbered the band, and even for a seven-piece, that’s a sobering statistic.

Tony relates some well-worn and road hardened anecdotes while Scott, an owlish character in full moon glasses, a John Deere cap and double denim, is more of the moment - a fact I only glean because he uses something I said to him in The Green Room*** during one of his introductions. Although individual songwriters in their own right, these two have collaborated, and as they alternate between playing and listening raptly (as are the rest of us) there are subtle additions to the others’ performance, mostly in the form of keening harmonies which bring to mind the best work of (say) Boo Hewerdine working in tandem with Darden Smith. I can see how the most in demand product on the tour so far has been the album that they’re both on which, in an ironic twist, doesn’t exist. At an earlier show they have been upbraided for performing songs that haven’t been recorded, which seems harsh, even for Stowmarket.

Although struggling with a head cold, Scott gamely goes for the notes anyway and his suffering gives him an attractively husky tone which in the interval**** I mention brings to mind the best work of John Prine. In a further twist, he performs a song called Dear John Prine in the second set before giving way for one number to another of Tony’s songwriting collaborators and performers. Me. It’s terribly generous of Scott to make way - this is, after all the reason he’s here in the first place - and it’s very kind of Tony to invite me up. It’s also slightly nerve wracking as if this is the one song they don’t like, it’s going to be pretty obvious what the uncommon denominator is. Fortunately, we make it through to the end, harmonies intact, and pausing only to savour the generous applause I return to my seat.

The boys finish off the rest of the set, the lights go up, there is the sound of chairs being pushed away across the floor, creaking limbs being unfolded, the rain outside has abated, and the vapers are already in the car park. As we make our way toward the cloakroom, I feel a tap on my shoulder. 

“Nice song”.

*It’s exaggerated for effect. Tony’s actually from Burton-on-Trent, but you know what they say, just because you’re from Burton, that doesn’t make you a pint of Bass.

**It is revealed during the show that Scott once took a three hour drive from his home to see Tony play in Kansas City. On a slightly deflatory note, Scott confirms that he would also have driven that far for a barbecue.

***The dressing room - not the high end coffee shop down the road from where we had lunch. I’ve never seen so many electrical sockets in one room. Again, at the library, not the coffee shop.

****There’s a raffle, of course there’s a raffle.

Schrödinger's Acoustic Spot.

After a short delay (of about a year and two months), I am off to The Maverick Festival (see blogs passim) for a weekend of country, blues, folk and Americana in the country, and this year - due in no small part to the ravages of The Great Unpleasantness - with added East Angliacana in the shape of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. 

We are contemplating our name on the playbill outside The Barn Stage prior to soundcheck and considering - even with the Americanisation of dropping the ‘U’ - how much room it takes up on posters. “I’m thinking we might change our name to ‘The Neighbourhood’ confides Mr. Wendell. “Yes, but those three, four and five letter words aren’t really the issue here, are they?” points out WAG Becky phlegmatically.

I am also here in my guise as Stage Wrangler for The Medicine Show - a pop up boutique stage for the off duty talent to stretch out with some covers or, in some cases, simply warm up for the main event. Tucked away in a paddock behind the bar, I am doing the equivalent of tightening the rigging and checking the bowsprit for woodworm when I hear the first of the turns being announced in The Barn. At which point I remember that we’re the first turn on in the barn…

A short sprint through the crowd later I have managed to retain both my stage shirt and my dignity and we haul away into our opening number. The unspoken advantage of being bottom of the bill is that you are, necessarily, often top of the list for sound-checks, and so we are buoyant from the off, confident that our pre-show run through of The Byrds “You’re Still On My Mind” has settled the nerves of the sound crew, and Helen, who did ask if we could follow it up with “…something we know”.*

Fiddly seems unencumbered by the lack of most of his pinkie, which he apparently managed to remove with some sort of mechanical implement earlier in the week, just as Turny’s banjo-fingering digit has grown back after that incident with the secateurs some weeks ago, and we are all - band and audience - pleased to be back in the room/barn, doing what we like to do best. We, telling stories with wood and string, and they listening, applauding, and buying our records afterwards. 

A VIP area has been set up to thank those who retained their tickets throughout The Great Unpleasantness but it is empty. No-one wants to be swanning around drinking free Big Drop when there’s an actual, physical manifestation of a festival happening just over the velvet rope. There’s a palpable sense of relief all round, an exhalation of pressure - one agent mentions that we’re the first band he’s seen play live in two years. Poor bastard.

Job done, and back to the acting, I welcome the legend that is Jon Langford to The Show with the immortal words “THE Jon Langford?” He is a grizzled old veteran of the punk wars, hunkered down in a big hat and sheepskin jacket that makes him look like the sort of rancher who has had to deal with his reckless youngest son shooting off his mouth in the saloon in town once too often. He also greets me with his beautiful deep Welsh burr by name all weekend, enquiring after my welfare each time. The sort of turn you are prepared to crawl over broken riders for.

I take time out to burst into Dana Immanuel’s backstage enclave to wish them well for their show. “You won’t remember me!” I exclaim. “I do…” purrs cajonista H, albeit in the sort of tone which suggests that somebody may have forgotten to renew a restraining order. “Do a fabulous show!” is all I can think of to blurt. I resist the temptation to go the full Wizard of Oz and continue “…and your little doggie!!” in case I’m dragged away by security but do manage a strangled “I love you!”** The next time I saw Dana was at two in the morning singing ‘Wagon Wheel’. As you do.

Saturday dawns full and bright, and I have another day of my virtual twelve hour house concert to enjoy. M’good friend and occasional employer Tony James Shevlin puts in a shift in the afternoon and then later again in the Stygian gloom of the evening, where we are delighted to bump into Rich Hall, later to appear in his own show, but currently mournfully regarding the line up for the John Prine tribute to take place in The Peacock Cafe (another barn in all truth), which has been COVID- safeguarded in terms of ventilation  by the simple expedient of taking out about a third of the wall. 

The queue for the stage is considerably larger than some of the audiences I’ve seen, but Rich is kind enough to look obligingly like he knows me for my souvenir snap. During a gap in proceedings on The Medicine Show I take to the stage myself, indulging in a few songs just in order that I can say I trod the boards as a solo artist once again. Helen is later annoyed that I didn’t summon her to perform and I gravely inform her that this constitutes misuse of the radio under the Stage Manager’s Code. She nods solemnly, abashed.

On Sunday I have a lighter line up than I deserve, and so have mostly to make sure Tony Winn doesn’t fall off the stage during his return to the live arena. He is ably supported by The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley on vocals, who is keen that her offspring should be attendant to behold her magnificence. The boys are working the festival and so I offer to summon them via the power of wireless communication. “I thought that breached the Stage Manager’s Code?” she suggests.

I summon my inner Captain Barbossa. “It’s not so much a code, Missy” I explain piratically. It’s more a set o’ guidelines…”

*Diva

**That from me to them, not the other way round, in case you were wondering.

Throwback Thursday

In these uncertain times many of us – not all, by any means – have found time for reflection, for casting our minds back, for remembering*. As the title of one Suffolk-based compilation once had it Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits or, as Gil Scott-Heron more prosaically put it;

"The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.

They want to go back as far as they can.

Even if it's only as far as last week."

Many of my reflections are prompted by whatever comes on in the mobile listening station on my way to work. That I can listen to pretty much any one of the albums in my collection merely by flicking a switch on the steering wheel is still tantamount to witch craft in my opinion, but I’m happy to let the random selection throw up whatever it feels like, safe in the knowledge that if I don’t feel like listening to this particular song for whatever reason, there’ll be another one that I definitely do like in a minute. Or nine or ten minutes if something from that Yes compilation comes up.

Regular readers will know that I’m not averse in any way, shape or form to revisiting past glories – I wallow in nostalgia in the same way that C-list celebrities wallow in the attention of the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, but this isn’t about what I wore to work this week, or what I was flaunting while I was doing it, it’s about – in the words of Goffin and/or King – Goin’ Back**. This has been quite the week for throwing up my back pages – there was the live recording from Denmark on which my friend and compadre Ross manfully attempted to replicate some rather complex three part harmonies on his own, shortly after which having listened to***, he started posting updates on the social media about his new home in Denmark. Spooky.

Last night it was the turn of Songs from The Blue House, for whom I used to contribute comments very similar to these, regarding what we’d done, where we’d been and who we’d done it to, with or for. Even now I occasionally whack up something from this blog from the (fairly) recent past that some of the participants have no recollection of enjoying. I had a good listen to the first album we did together, and had kind of forgotten how good it sounded then, and consequently how proud I am of it now.

There are a few genuinely stunning songs on there that even back in the day we had quietly dropped from the set once we had moved on to beer festivals and parties in the park. Gathering band members, exploring the highways and byways of Posh North Essex, a pregnant La Mulley expanding in all sorts of interesting directions. The band is gone, the website domain returned to the wild, only the recordings preserved in aspic. I missed those days. I went to bed nostalgic and slightly rueful.

And then when I woke up, I remembered The Wayback Machine.

*I believe that the good folk who work in those drive-through testing centres they have nowadays are reminded periodically of festivals they’ve been to in the past, their day consisting as it does of getting up ridiculously early, shitting in a portaloo and then standing around in a wide open space in the rain, eating terrible food and waiting for something to happen.

**Yes, I did watch Echo in the Canyon last night, why do you ask?

***Grammar police, please check.

Bury my heart at Stage Manager's Knee.

The post-festival comedown is generally not what one might term “a good trip”. There’s the unpacking, the washing, the nagging thought that you’ve left a mallet somewhere in a field or that cows will choke on that last tent peg you couldn’t quite prise out of the ground, and the knowledge that tomorrow, it’s back to the old routine. Admittedly, some might say that going to a festival in the first place isn’t a good trip either, but these people have not been to Maverick. Free from the incessant online drip, drip, drip of bad news, celebrity gossip, paparazzi upskirting and relentless political idiocy, it is a safe haven of heartsong music, positive vibes, late night sessions, good food and fine company. There are no below the line comments at Maverick.

Once again I had the pleasure and privilege of wrangling the small-but-perfectly-formed Travelling Medicine Show stage, where the unwashed and slightly dazed are treated to impromptu sets from many featured artists from the festival playbill proper, as well as guests, friends and – through chance, good fortune and a short notice cancellation, a respectable quorum of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. I tend to treat it very much a series of personalised house concerts, and there are always a couple of undiscovered gems to be unearthed along the way. This year's main contender - for me - was Riley Catherall, whose intimate songs were so precious and fragile under the late-night stars that I almost daren't turn him up too far lest the magic burst. Having said that, the boisterous Lachlan Bryan set that followed was probably my overall festival highlight not least for the story that started with a reference to "...a famous Australian pop star. You've only heard of one. Yep, it was her" and the intro which ended "...and if there were any justice in this world, Garth Brooks would be living in a lodge at the end of Kim Richey's' driveway!" (audience cheers). 

 

I think I’m getting almost competent at this malarkey, in that there were only a couple of incidents of note – one being where my short term panic at the lack of foldback from the onstage monitors on Saturday morning was quickly forestalled by my inspired reckoning that the big On/Off button on the power amplifier at the side of the stage should probably be depressed. The other was when the missing output from the electric piano meant that the Mute button on the mixer amp should not be. Still, it’s one up from that time I called the site spark up on the walkie talkie to complain that I had no power from the generator to the front of stage four-way and he pointed out, with a somewhat meaningful look – more in sorrow than in anger - that someone had unplugged the relevant socket in the trailer in order to connect a phone charger...

 

There are also the little things that you pick up along the way that help oil the wheels of the day. Only one artist this year turned up without a lead, so having one to hand is important. A guitar stand on stage is always very convenient for the busy guest, having a capo to hand certainly endears you to a certain stripe of guitar player, and it turns out that a colouring book and a set of crayons also comes in unexpectedly handy. Some of these people are, after all, bass players.

My post-festival blues were largely mitigated on this occasion however, by a hasty pack up and run in order to appear on BBC Radio Cambridge (and Suffolk and Norfolk and Essex) as an artist in my own right with Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs on the Sue Marchant Show. Sue, a tireless champion of folk, roots, country and all and any other sort of creative music making is the sort of old-school DJ who invites people in to her studio to play live, makes sure people know where to find you online and in concert, gently guides the broadcast where it needs to go, and carries a bag of CDs with her in case the central online server goes down and takes the extant BBC jukebox with it. As she points out, she would then be one of the few broadcasters in the country still able to put out a show.

We are to sit in between eight and nine in the evening and have been kindly invited to play a couple of songs live in the fairly compact and bijou studio while we're there, to which effect we have decided, naturally enough, to bring a vibraphone. Sue is not in the slightest fazed by this, and deftly organises a six channel mix on the go whilst simultaneously cueing up the next song, back-timing the fade into the traffic report and organising a Facebook Live post. It’s really quite the spectacle. We chat, we play, and Sue is audibly enthralled by the vibes, getting Robert to give us the audio equivalent of a twirl. After an all too quick hour, we are back outside broadcasting house and agreeing that what might have seemed a risky strategy (we did an old song that Robert had never played on before as our opener) had really paid off.

 

“I wanted vibes in Songs from The Blue House” says Fiddly, referring back to a previous musical venture “But it never came off for some reason”.

“Dad” says Robert “I was four”.

This just in...or ‘out’, rather.

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs, as a band, has always been very much a live entity. Songs tend to be stretched and manipulated, so that cues and endings are dictated by the feel of the moment, and communicated by nods and cues. This does not not always sit well with Fiddly, a man who prefers to operate under formal arrangements, at least in musical terms. “That’s not the way we did it last time” has become a familiar, if plaintive, refrain at Dog Central. With this in mind he suggested that we record some rehearsals in order to fix the format of our material, and put an end to all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace once and for all.

We did so, and it turned out that when we listened back to our efforts we had some pretty special performances on disk. What if, we thought to ourselves, we tidied up a few of the looser ends and mixed these down properly? And so on a few spare evenings and weekends we tramped out to The Hovel – Fiddly’s rehearsal studio-cum-shed – sometimes singly, and on occasion en masse, in order to redo a few errant harmonies, fix the odd timing aberration and generally buff up the bridges.

Sometimes we dropped things out entirely, and on one occasion a couple of us turned up to find that someone had had a moment of inspiration and added a complementary vibraphone part while no-one else was watching. It was very much an old-school approach in terms of getting it together in the country without click tracks, sans autotune, and eschewing cut and paste technology. What you have here is essentially the sound of a bunch of people playing some songs in a room (even if – admittedly - not all on the same day).

Our thanks are due to the devotion to duty of Fiddly Richard, who spent an awfully long time in his back garden either compiling endless alternate mixes for our approval, wiring up headphones, tracking down errant buzzes in the system and enthusiastically chasing pigeons away in order that their incessant cooing wouldn’t bleed onto the vocal tracks.  

Singing and playing by Steve ‘Mr. Wendell’ Constable, Richard ‘Gibbon’ Hammond, Shane ‘Skirky’ Kirk, Richard ‘Fiddly’ Lockwood, Robert ‘Young, Young Bob’ Lockwood, Helen ‘La’ Mulley and Tony ‘Ellis’ Winn.

The Misfits written by Shane Kirk

There Is Nothing (The Wave) written by Helen Mulley and Shane Kirk

What’s The Moonlight For? written by Tony Winn

Harrogate written by Shane Kirk

https://helenandtheneighbourhooddogs.bandcamp.com/album/the-back-of-the-big

"...really explore the studio space this time"

 

Mr. Wendell and I are exchanging text messages. In Ye Oldene Dayes we would probably have waited until it was six o’clock* and then rung each other whilst looking out of the window. It’s the weather, you see. We are due out at The Hovell (sic) to continue fixing and mixing the putative new Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs EP but as Fiddly – de facto engineer, producer, remixer and designated Record Company Um & Err Man – points out, they don’t salt the roads out his way. Nevertheless, time and tide wait for no man** and so we embark on the potentially hazardous trip out to the middle of what the registered voters of Nowhere are said to regard amongst themselves as a bit of a backwater. Narnia-like, Fiddly’s garden is the snowiest of all the places we drive through on our journey. “I do my best work in these conditions” I remark over a steaming mug of tea in the kitchen. “Remember that session for the first Blue House album?” Fiddly does. “It took me four hours to get home from that one”.

We are due to have a bit of a listen to our work so far, Wendell has a harmony to do on one of the new songs, and we’re going to beef up the choruses of something that at this point has two official titles and may well end up with a third if it is not careful about how it conducts itself. In time-honoured fashion, I’ve also found a bouzouki part for the middle eight of the new one. “You’ve always got a bouzouki part for the middle eight” remarks Helen via email when she is informed of my honourable intentions regarding The Misfits. If you look at the text, black on white, in isolation, it could almost come across as admonitory. “He’s not putting a bouzouki up my middle eight!” responds Mr. Wendell via CC. And then he got off the bus...

Cheese shop sketch and Third Man Theme once again summarily avoided during the bouzouki work, we have time to review the various bits and bobs that Fiddly has appended to the rough mix of “What’s the Moonlight For?” AKA “What’s a Rainbow?” AKA “What’s The Moon Light For?”*** These turn out to be a number of percussion tracks, which he flips through in turn in much the same way as Heston Blumenthal might talk you through his latest tasting menu. With a flourish he tears away a cloth which turns out to have been covering a rude flight case. “Here’s the kit!” he proudly exclaims. There is a cabasa, there is a guiro, a tambourine. There are not one, but two cowbells. It’s like nepeta cataria, only for guitarists. We beaver away playing through the tracks and indicating that these are the rhythm parts we would like enacted forthwith, only ideally on the beat and without undue recourse to Bezzing around the studio at the same time – apparently it plays havoc with the close-miking. We check the forecast again. Snow storms due at half past nine. Time to move on.

Once Wendell is set up at the pop-shielded microphone, having been sternly instructed not to sway back and forth, we start with the vocal overdubs. It’s not a big room, and is cluttered - by now not least with a number of discarded percussion instruments – and so I am perched behind a drum kit, out of his eyeline so as not to be distracting, but air drumming enthusiastically along with the faint feed hissing from the headphones. “I can hear you, you know” he remarks laconically, as I attempt a stick spin which climaxes in me unsuccesfully attempting to pluck it from the air before it lands on a sixteen inch Paiste crash cymbal. “I think you should, er, go again” I remark as casually as someone who has just enacted a particularly avant-garde Bill Bruford-style roll around the kit should. Ever the pro, he nonetheless nails the next take (while I sit on my hands throughout) and upon listening back to double check for timing, phrasing and intonation errors, enthusiastically mimes the cajon part that portends the section where we come out of the instrumental bridge section and go into the middle eight he’s just double-tracked.

Fiddly bursts out of the wardrobe-sized control room, at remarkable speed for a man of his age. “That’s it!” he enthuses “That’s the tambourine part we need, right there!!”
“I was doing the diddley bit on the boxymathingy” protests Mr. Wendell.
This was bad grammar of course, but that is how Wendells talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia—in our world they usually don’t talk at all. 

*It is one of the great tragedies of our time that a generation has grown up with no appreciation of the rich seam of textual imagery contained within Mickey Jupp’s seminal 1979 pièce de résistance Switchboard Susan.

**We will enjoy a lengthy conversation with Fiddly regarding the riparian ownership rights of non-tidal waterways with specific reference to the Gipping above Needham Market. This is why it’s generally a good idea to get out there on time, especially if you want to get any work done.

***Because it’s made of cheese.

 

In Praise of TT.

 

I won’t lie to you, I’ve been lucky. The number of people who’ve been willing to throw their talent at whatever dumb idea I’ve come up with has, over the years - the decades even - been humbling. I once formed a band called The Free Albanian Airforce which featured a punk singer on bass, me on guitar, and a guy who once auditioned for Generation X on harmonica, for instance. Then someone actually gave us a gig. Our big showstopper was a version of JJ Cale’s “Call Me The Breeze”. At that point I wasn’t entirely sure whether he or the bloke who used to be in The Velvet Underground were the same guy. That’s how much leeway my friends have granted me, over time.

 

I have played The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (in full – the whole album) to a The Jam-loving friend, who still speaks to me to this day. I have opened a secondary school talent show with a Uriah Heep cover. I have persuaded a folk band that a twelve minute version of Tonight’s the Night is a perfectly acceptable way to close a beer festival. Apparently, according to me, Status Quo’s What You’re Proposin’ makes for a fabulous Sunday lunchtime jam. I am, in short, blessed.

 

None of this was put in to sharper relief than when I idly tapped in a few digits on the electric internet and happened upon Tony Turrell (I know him as ‘TT’) doing an acoustic session with the singer from Genesis Visible Touch (GVT for short). TT was (and for all legal purposes is) the keyboard player in Songs from The Blue House. We came across him first in a pub in Essex (this happened a lot in our recruiting process) and invited him to come and play on our version of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper. His brief (and this was my idea) was to play the middle eight as if it were an extended version of the intro from Genesis’s Firth of Fifth. “Okay” he said, and rattled it off as if it were a thing of no consequence at all. Non piano players may disagree.

Subsequently, TT roamed around the highways and byways of East Anglia with us, occasionally making oblique references to his time working with Mr. Fish-out-of-Marillion and, on one occasion (most excitedly for me) Heather Nova. He ended up writing my second favourite Blue House song, and playing an exquisite piano part on my first; gracious enough to take on board my advice about the dusty end without the merest hint of doyouknowwhoiam-ism.

As I say, I just wanted to tell you how lucky I’ve been. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Folk, People and Others; Tony Turrell.

How to make a small fortune in the music industry.

 

In short, start with a large one. Out here in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy (despite the inference offered by their name, media and publishing behemoth Universal have been conspicuous by their absence in my career trajectory to this point) the industry is largely self-financed. You’ll note I didn’t say ‘financing’. Even as I embark on my nascent career as a gig promoter, I am grateful to the good folk at HMRC for doing their sums properly and giving me back enough liquidity to temporarily play the Harvey Goldsmith card here in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich. At the library.

Yes, I though that too. Nevertheless, in ringing round the venues and cubby holes of Ippo, the one place that was cheap and available happened to be the County Library, where they are keen to make much of the available space and where Police Dog Hogan once put me on the guest list because I had berated myself on social media for being stupid enough not to get advance tickets for a sold-out show. In addition, due to the volunteer-based status of this evening’s staff, it is one of those hen’s-teeth rare gigs where the bands are getting paid and the bar staff aren’t.

Along for the ride are Californian songstrel and serial open-tuner Hanna Haas, and rising stars of the UK Americana scene Morganway, who sound like nothing so much as Fleetwood Mac in their pomp, but with an added fiddle player. All the members of the band who aren’t women have impressively Big Pink-era beardage. We, by way of contrast, can barely raise two and a half between us, but I have bought a new gig top, in a striking Paisley mode, which has de facto lighting tech Kilbey in rhapsodies. Also thinking of striking is TAFKAOGL*, here in the role of sound engineer, to which he has taken in an impressive fashion, all black t-shirt, cargo shorts and sturdy boots, and also seemingly able to exist on a diet of air and Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. I don’t think I’ve seen him eat since he started the job, although there was that Facebook post about a Scotch Egg once, so I guess he’s making the best of it.

He is also faced with the conundra of the multi-band gig format which means that once you’ve set up and soundchecked the headliners (Morganway) you then have to deconstruct the whole lot in order to mic up the openers (Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs) who seem to have, unaccountably, brought a vibraphone. This will be operated by Young Young Bob, who I fondly recall used to come to SftBH gigs with his Dad and sit, bored, reading Harry Potter during the set. There is so much percussion euipment banging about that we decide not even to try to get him onto the stage and so he is secreted behind the PA and lights at floor level like some sort of shameful add-on that we’re not really supposed to admit to. At the sound of a bell tree many of our audience may have temporarily considered dark thoughts regarding triggers and samples. I get the impression that James, simultaneously manipulating an iPad and miking up a cajon, may be harbouring certain dark intentions of his own.

Mr. Wendell, over on stage right, is impressively bushy of face, and has transcended his intended initial role in the band as lead singer and strummer to take over harmonies and lead guitar and has reached the stage in his career where he has two identical Telecasters – one capoed at the fifth fret, one let to run wild and free in standard tuning – on stage alongside his trusty Gibson acoustic. Needless to say, his guitar amplifier is set up on the opposite side of the stage to where Kieron-out-of-Morganway’s is. James make a Fawlty-esque harrumphing grunt. “Right...” he says.

The doors are scheduled to open at seven-thirty. At seven thirty-one, we are able let the first of our impressively susbstantial audience in. Much of the past few weeks has been spent worrying about the number of online ticket sales, the potential walk-up and managing the guest list. We have fourteen musicians alone performing, so it’s not like anyone’s going to be playing to an empty room, but it’s still gratifying to see the bar area filling up, the tables all occupied and extra chairs being retrieved from behind the photocopier. It would appear that I’m not going to lose my (Paisley) shirt and I’m not going to have to pull any of that Peter Grant shit after all. I’ve not really put on a gig since all you had to do was put up a couple of posters in your local record shops, but now there aren’t any of those either**, as I ruefully reflect with a local radio presenter who gently chides me that I hadn’t been in touch with him at all and the first thing he knew about the show was when Morganway’s drummer called him on his mobile asking to rent a hi-hat stand. “I’ll play their CD on the show” he says after their barnstorming performance, before adding pointedly “I’d rather have played it last week...”

The good folk of the library are delighted with the outcome. Our unusually thirsty patrons have given them a good night, we’ve rattled out a couple of new songs and given away some flyers, Hanna’s sold some of her beautiful tote bags and lightened her Merch case considerably, and James is deep in conversation about a couple of festivals he might like to get Morganway to play next year. “How was your first promotion?” he asks me. “First one I did I got nine people, and that was with Matt Cardle”. I am relieved and very slightly post-gig euphoric. “Hey” says a passing Morganwayer. “Nice shirt”.

*The Artist Formerly Known as Our Glorious Leader. 

**Thanks to Chris at Out of Time in Fore Street for exemplary gig poster display, by the way.

"Pay no attention to the man on the roof..!"

 

Once again I am entrusted with temporary stewardship of the Medicine Show stage at The Maverick Festival – an annual (now in its eleventh year) celebration of all things Americana. This year’s event has much to recommend it in terms of a Commonwealth take on the genre, with bands from Australia, Canada, Wales and the Independent Republic of Yorkshire alongside such luminary risers as The Cordovas and Southern Avenue, both of which I caught during drink breaks in the action on my pop-up stage and of whom I’m sure you’ll be hearing much more quite soon. Of course the Lingua Franca of the genre is Hillbilly, and it is often quite the disconcert to hear a Southern Gothic, gibbous moon murder ballad being back-announced in a broad Sudbury accent. I will later have a conversation with Alicia Best from A Different Thread about there being nothing more country than singing in your own accent, or whether there should be a mandatory short written exam before you are alllowed to adopt the argot of the Louisianans during your performance - “Describe, in no more than two hundred words, what a ‘bayou’ is, and how you intend to get under it. You have fifteen minutes”. Later I learn that Alicia is from Manhattan.

The Medicine Show is a boutique-within-a-boutique part of the festival, situated betwixt bar and barbecue, and intended as an acoustic sorbet during band changeovers in the adjacent The Barn stage. Basically I get a list of artists – all volunteers, for this is no contractually-obligated add-on for their part – who are going to show up, plug in, and give it their best ten minutes or until I get the signal that (say) Danny and The Champions of The World are good to go. It’s a spectacularly popular diversion amongst both performers and civilians alike, with the former eager to get up and indulge in what is for many of us an experience akin to musical speed-dating, and the latter almost equally as keen to let me know that “….the vocals could come up a bit”. Oddly enough, it rarely happens the other way around.

I do have a couple of trigger warnings. Anyone who asks for “...a bit more reverb in the monitors” clearly needs keeping an eye on. Anyone who asks if you’d like to try some delicious tequila from their hip flask, on the other hand, can have as much or as little reverb as they darned well like. This year I am not called upon to mic up a flatfoot stomp box*, however I am presented with a pre-bug mic’d version with a DI output. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, relax. This time last year I didn’t know what a -20dB PAD and ground lift switch did either. I am also reminded that the most talented artists are also frequently the most personable. This year’s above and beyond award goes once again to Lachlan Bryan, his band, and fellow travellers The Weeping Willows, all of whom gave selflessly and at nothing under magnanimously maximum effort. They also all had leads, capos, tuners and songs and were ready to go the instant the start flag fell, even if that did mean passing over a Thai Green Curry for someone to hold while they played.

But it’s not all about the performances. Offstage, there is camaraderie, japerie, cheese, a chance to meet up and let off steam with your fellow musicians. If you spend most of your time cooped up in a van, who can blame you if you want to stay up until two in the morning loudly creating metaphors to describe the size of Lenny Kravitz’s genitalia, or replacing the last letter in words that end with an ‘S’ with the letter ‘T’? Frankly, I think they’d been hanging out a little too long with the Yorkshire contingent at that point and some of it had rubbed off. As it were. Sooner or later though, the music takes priority again. “He’ll be here at about twelve” crackles my walkie-talkie. “Should be fine. Oh, and he’s bringing his three year-old, so you’re on child-minding duties for ten minutes too”.

*Confonted with a stompbox, banjo, acoustic double bass and vocal accompaniment, I ask a passing sound engineer for any advice. "Make a run for it?" he suggests.  

The Kindness of Strangers

 We - Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - are not, it should be stressed, a band of independent means. Our fragmented touring schedule (we are not the most hawkish of gig-mongers) means that since we don’t play much* our concert-related income stream does not stretch to budgeting for a week’s recording in the country, two days’ mixing and a subsequent mastering session with a devoted engineer, even at mate’s rates. Hence we are pleased and grateful that our munificent benefactors Sam Inglis and Fenton Steve are the sort of chaps who enjoy nothing more than spending a bucolic Saturday looking concernedly at a whirring laptop, making sure we don’t knock over absurdly expensive microphones, marking out soundtastic sweet spots with masking tape, and making endless cups of tea for us (see blogs passim).

Our latest foray into standing in a big room and playing a song from start to finish, all at the same time, and hoping no-one lets off fireworks in the car park has been lovingly curated once again by our benevolent uncles from darkest Cambridgeshire, and we think it’s the best one so far. Three songs – one of which I distinctly remember demoing with The World Service in the function room of a pub that Google informs me was decommissioned in 1997 – wherein everybody gets a bit of a play, most of us have a sing, and the majority of folk are happy with their arrangements. Fiddly likes to prepare meticulously and has his own form of impenetrable musical notation which future etymologists are more than welcome to try to deconstruct whereas by contrast Gibbon (on bass) is far more of an improviser and a wing-it kind of guy, and so to get a take with which both are happy can be quite the calendar event.

As I say, we recorded these songs live - mainly around one magnificent Soundfield, with additional booster microphones for those elements which were getting slightly lost when fighting against the sound of Mr. Wendell’s mighty room-swamping Gibson acoustic. Meticulous attention to detail was then applied to the soundscapes by Steve (a considerable step or two beyond my contribution of “Could you tweak the banjo a bit?”) who passed on his thoughts to Sam, who then curated the finished objets. Our continued thanks for outside audio perspective, chapel wrangling, and biscuit provision are once again well overdue.

Please have a listen, enjoy if you can, and share at will. We truly appreciate it.

 

http://helenandtheneighbourhooddogs.bandcamp.com/album/nelson

*After the last recording session we did we immediately started looking to the next one. The first date that all six band members were available on the same day was five months hence.

 

Smoke gets in your eyes.

After a couple of fallow years, during which time my body has had the opportunity to regenerate and recharge, I am to return to The Maverick Festival (I may have mentioned it in passing previously – here, here and here for example) in order to both curate the newly-installed Travelling Medicine Show stage and to perform as one of The Neighbourhood Dogs – proudly maintaining our tradition of avoiding doing consecutive shows with the same line up after I missed the last one, and with additional guitar and vocal talent supplied by The Artist Formerly Known as Our Glorious Leader, who is chipping in to celebrate that it is ten years since Songs from The Blue House played the very first Mavfest. In the interim, TAFKAOGL has scaled the slippery pole of ambition and adversity to inhabit his current hallowed role as Production Manager for the whole shebang, so he only has time to play a couple of songs before he has to scoot off to locate mandolin strings at four in the morning and chase up BJ Cole’s hotel reservation. Nonetheless, his timely contribution did help shift a couple of copies of the SftBH Live CD which I happened to have on me, so thanks for paying for Sunday evening's barbecue charcoal guys.   

The Dogs’ spot in The Barn is scheduled for eleven in the morning, which is the best slot to have if you have any ambition toward running an actual sound check - which we do - the changeovers between bands at the festival being a series of extraordinarily brief and time-bound operations. We are temporarily stymied in this endeavour as the entire Barn goes dark and quiet. Max on the desk scurries off to locate site electrical major domo Mick, who has already explained to me (with my Medicine Show stage manager’s hat on) that if such a thing were to occur, this would be a grave matter indeed. Thankfully, power is restored after a short delay, and in between subsequent wheelbarrow trips he cheerfully cracks that at least he now knows how long the generator runs on one tank of diesel. The wheelbarrows are loaded to the gunwhales with fuel containers. 

The Dogs are set up in good order and since we are constrained rather more by our finish time than when we are supposed to start, we decide to pitch straight into the set and add a couple of songs in the middle if needs be. Fiddly, a man of preparation and order, does not take this news quite as beatifically as we might have hoped, and scurries off to the car park to find his folder of notes and staves. By the time he has returned, it is just shy of our scheduled start time, and we ease into traffic for a lovely, great-sounding set. No disrespect to the gazebo circuit intended, but when we are on a big stage, with the monitors and lights and a willing audience, it turns out that we are quite good at what we do.

Twenty five minutes later I am off back to my perch by the side of the pop-up boutique section of the site, scheduled but not published, where turns from across the programmed stages drop by to give us the three songs they want to play in a stripped-back pressure-free zone tucked away (conveniently for me) just by the bar, across from the Coffee Link cart, and just downwind of Smokey Jones’ bespoke hand-crafted hog and brisket truck (wherein, ironically, prominently displayed is a stern ‘No Smoking’ sign). The three song theory is so that while bands in the barn are loading in and line-checking, our friends in the audience can stretch their legs, drop by the paddock and spend a short while looking at something unexpected rather than watch a couple of guys in black t-shirts plugging stuff in. It’s an inspired idea, and resembles nothing so much as speed-dating for artists and onlookers alike. I have a couple of questions for my production manager. “What does the button marked 'pad' do? Okay, thanks. On more thing – should the little blue lights on the DI boxes be flashing? Okay, cool. And where might the phantom power switch be, exactly? Grand! No, you’re fine, relax, see you later”. He does not look like a relaxed man.    

Between The Barn and The Medicine Show we develop a form of semaphore and signalling shorthand  in order to advise each other as to how close we are to set commencement and closure. The pressure’s slightly more on them since they have bands playing forty minute sets with ten minutes to change over between them, and I am pleased and relieved to be faced with exactly the opposite scenario, which means that at the very least I get adequate opportunities to graze the catering opportunities, which is not always the case for the hard-working festival crew member.  

As always, the turns with the most talent are also the kindest. One might for example forgive Lachlan Bryan*, who had already played a set on the main stage on The Green before pitching up to play for me, for thinking ahead to his lengthy flight back to Australia the next day. Instead, he responded to the awestruck boy congratulating him on his performance with a sprightly “Thanks man – do you play?” When answered in the affirmative he immediately handed over his guitar and hustled the young man off to a nearby bench where he devoted what might have been otherwise considered lucrative merch-signing time to encouraging him to continue to practise. Similarly, festival favourite uncles Police Dog Hogan ensured that the set list grabbed from the front of the stage by a kid who’d clearly been dragged along to a festival of Americana by his parents but had had a Damascene moment  - possibly in the midst of ‘Shitty White Wine’** - was passed around the backstage area and appended with every band member's signature before being returned, when they might more reasonably be concerned with packing away their gear and readying themselves for the long drive home. They didn’t see his face when he got it back, but I did.

An unbilled Christina Martin – not even playing the festival main this year – rocked up like an effervescent Sunday morning tonic and being in equal measure charming, funny and wonderfully talented gave a masterclass in making everyone in the field think she was performing just for them – me included. She was later bitten by a horse. Hugh Murray played a lovely, late-night set under the stars,  Stompin’ Dave Allen patiently and affably helped explore the crackling input issue (that sort of thing tends to get highlighted when you’re miking up a wooden crate atop which a man is about to tap dance whilst playing banjo behind his head). I don’t think either of them suffered subsequent equine-related injuries, but I’ve Googled it and there’s nothing on the wire.                              

As the Sunday sets drew to a close across the site and the stages started shutting down, a few stage wranglers drifted together and swapped personal highlights and lowlights from our scattered vantage points – as they say, twenty feet from stardom. “You know that drummer who was singing along so enthusiastically in (name of group redacted)?” said one. “Before the show, every single member of the band came up to me separately and asked if we could keep him in his monitor but mute him from going out front”.

As I say, the turns with the talent are generally also the kindest to their fans.  

  

*Progenitor of my new favourite sound desk catchphrase regarding echo on the foldback. “Noverb is goodverb”

**”This song has been very kind to us. In the same way that ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, say, was good for Middle of the Road”.