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…”

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.

Print The Legend...

I've, ahem, dropped a new compilation of the blog (to buy, click in the links section) - I believe that's what the modern media folk say. this is the introduction, written by m'learned colleague Shev, who appears in the book almost as much as I do.

 I first met Shane Kirk in 1997 when I auditioned for his Beatles specialist band The Star Club. I was feeling very pleased with myself until he dryly informed me that I was the only applicant.

In the intervening years we have shared many stages together. When I have a harebrained musical idea, he is most often the first person I call. “Do you want to help me start a songwriters' night?” “Shall we start a band where we pretend to be an American family playing Country songs?” The answer is always yes.

There have been many books written about the goings on and antics of rock stars. This is not one of them. However, this is one in a series of books that you may enjoy if you want to know both the struggle of writing, recording and performing your own songs with very little prospect of retiring on the proceeds of these endeavours, as well as spending your weekends working in a covers band, playing songs you wished you'd written, in pubs you wished you weren't in.
Someone had to write this book; I'm glad it's Shane Kirk.

My name crops up in a few of these stories. I look forward to more musical mayhem with the author. And then reading about them...

He also very kindly supplied me some notes. In the immortal and probably entirely fictional words of Salieri...

  

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”.

"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.  

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”.

“Not my circus, not my monkeys…”

You can see how it happens. You’re cooped up in a van or a car or - if you’re really lucky - a bus for hours at a time, and when you finally emerge blinking and yawning at your destination there’s some guy with a clipboard who wants to know if you can drop ten minutes off your set since they’re running “…a bit over”. That’s not your fault – you showed up early, you’ve got your own DI box all ready and you’ve even remembered to put on a clean shirt. What’s this guy’s problem? That’s the third time in a week… It’s no surprise that by the end of (say) three weeks on tour, the barricades are manned, the drawbridge is up and the metaphors are flying thick and fast.
 
For those of us who have taken a glimpse beneath the gilded cage’s security blanket it is obvious that the vicissitudes of a life on the open* road might well drive anybody to distraction - not every singer would respond to the news that no-one in the immediate vicinity has any idea how the (tech spec-promised) guitar amplifier operates with the grace under pressure demonstrated by Marty O’Reilly in The Barn at Maverick this year, who simply hoofed it back to the car park and borrowed one off The Rainbow Girls (they were a hoot and a delight last year, by the way). If you ask a random sample of stage managers what their favourite thing about the band they’ve just had on at their festival was - the music or the lyrics - they are more than likely to answer “their punctuality”. No wonder people employ tour managers. That way you can have someone else remark upon the poor quality of the piano you’ve been given without you having to get involved yourself.** Essentially, the stage manager/artist/tour manager interface runs very much along the lines of that of the late Johns Peel and Walters, whose relationship the lugubrious DJ and National Treasure once described as being “…like a man and his dog, each imagining the other to be the dog.”

So, in between assembling a forty-six piece gazebo from scratch with no instructions (then screwing it to the wall so it didn’t blow away), vacuuming the stage, disposing of untold bottles of half-drunk complimentary water, finding Mick the Electrician to install a lamp backstage (“I’ll be there before it gets dark…”), continually asking people to kindly move their camping chairs out of the way of the main thoroughfare and making subtle winding up gestures to folk who were far more entitled to be on the stage than I was - let’s face it, no-one’s ever spent fifty quid to watch a guy in board shorts make an announcement about the dog in the car park - I was lucky enough to spend time with some very good company, all of whose music I greatly enjoyed, many of whom I announced in terms which clearly left them wondering whether there was someone else due on stage rather than them, and some of whom I salute here;

Sam Lewis was charm personified and greeted my standard artiste enquiry (“Would you like an introduction and how’s your time keeping?”) with an expression of glee that I hardly think it warranted, even at that early stage in proceedings. “Hell yeah” he enthused. “Make sump’n up - tell ‘em I’m the world’s tallest man!” He apologised for having to rush off to do a session for the BBC straight after the show and entrusted his complimentary meal voucher to me to pass on to some worthy or needy soul, which was lucky, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to get mine at this point. So, thanks for the ham and chutney bap, Sam.

Hannah Aldridge was very tall (we underestimated the mic stand extension both times she appeared for us) and so impossibly glamorous that we offered to line check her guitar for her so that she could make a big entrance on the first night. She played again on the Saturday and very politely asked if I would “…do that thing again?” Never one to turn down an opportunity to show off, I played the intro to The Who’s Substitute. “I know her Daddy” said Mary Gauthier later “fine songwriter”. It clearly runs in the family.

“You’re going to have to hurry us up” said Tim-out-of-Police Dog Hogan when we were getting close to kick off. “He’ll go on forever if you let him” he added, nodding over at the other Tim on the far side of the stage. For a seven (or was it eight?) piece band they set up darned quickly, with a minimum of fuss about who can hear what in the monitors (but then Rob on FOH did a sterling job all weekend getting mixes together quickly) and were one of the bands who occupied themselves by simply running through a few songs in the paddock backstage prior to their stage time. I didn’t get the chance to ask Other Tim whether people acted more outlandishly around him so that he would write about them in The Guardian. I shall be checking to see if my super hero-referencing introduction makes the cut anyway, even if I didn’t do it with that in mind. We all have our different approaches – for example Giff on the main stage was very much a Bob Harris-band whisperer (he took over on Sunday, much to the relief of anyone who’d already been on over the previous couple of days, I imagine).  

Another chatty and endearing turn was Thom Chacon, who was happy to hang out backstage and made a point of checking out other singers, complimenting them, finding out where they were from and eventually asking if he could watch Mary Gauthier from our snug hidey hole at the side of the stage. “She’s been such an inspiration”. I didn’t buy much over the weekend but I made a point of digging out his (“all analogue”) vinyl album from the company store before I left.    

Sadie Jemmett’s set got switched from The Peacock Café, which I was more than happy about because it meant I got to listen to her beautiful songs. Even though her scheduled appearance had now been swapped, meaning that some people who’d planned on seeing her in the evening and would now find that she’d already performed she remained calm, grounded, and was by quite a long way my biggest crush of the weekend.

Having helped out Hannah Aldridge with a spare guitar after she’d broken a string on hers, The Goat Roper Rodeo Band then went through three of their own themselves. They appeared last year and I was more than pleased to have them back with their close harmonies, big thumpy rhythms and feelgood stage performances. About twenty minutes in I noticed that one of their guitars was lying on the stage with a string hanging off it. Then I noticed one of the guitarists gesturing frantically to the (replacement) guitar he’d also broken one on. By the time we’d raced each other to restring our respective instruments (he was first – I think the combination of adrenalin and terror helped him through) he had just enough time to snap one more during the next song before I handed him back the one I’d now managed to tune. I last spotted them under a tree in the rain, at two in the morning, still singing gloriously together.   

The GRRB been hanging out earlier with The Mae Trio, who appeared a tad bewildered at what an Australian folk band were doing at an Americana festival at what was clearly a petting zoo, in England. Well, when you put it like that, I suppose, yes... They closed with an amazing acapella version of a Kate Rusby song which had me going round for the rest of the day collaring people who’d missed it and making them promise me they’d see them in The Peacock Café on Sunday.

Dan Beaulaurier and The Hallelujah Trails was my band of the festival – all great tunes, Tele lead breaks and backing harmonies over solid grooves. Having warned their extraordinarily affable drummer that Police Dogs Hogan’s guy had fallen off the drum riser the previous night because we’d set the kit up too far toward the rear of the stage he assured us that he would take extra care not endure the same fate. I had made a point of checking the pronunciation of everyone whose name looked like it had potential to trip me up, and so it was mortifying to announce The Hallelujah Trails being fronted by…um…ah... Beautifully, guitarist Jeremy stepped in before I had to suffer the indignity of referring to my programme, squinting like someone who had decided not to bring his reading glasses (I hadn’t) and subtly muttered “Dan Bo-lare-ee-ay” out of the side of his mouth. I trust the audience appreciated the dramatic pause. Good job too, otherwise I may have had to resort to Joey Tribbiani’s notorious smelling farts technique, and nobody wants that.

Finally, a word for the magnificent Mary Gauthier (‘Go-Shay’) who demonstrated unimpeachable decency, dignity, openness, warmth, and not only charmed the crowd (and crew) throughout her time with us but delivered some songs of rare quality with a great performance to boot. Every one of the other artists who made a point of checking out the show clearly adored her, both professionally and personally, and I can thoroughly understand why.

And, for the record, she was very punctual.

 

 

Thanks to Des at www.nearthecoast.com (with whom the copyright remains) for the photo of me at the top. That's how I roll.

*Or, with five minutes to go before a sound check that the sat nav is telling you is in a field about twenty minutes from where you are currently blocked, diverted, rerouted or stuck behind a slow-moving tractor.

**For a tour manager’s point of view, please see http://www.ontourlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/Maverick-Rebecca-Kemp-Interview.pdf

 

The Boy in the Bubble

It’s called Under The Dome, I believe. The story is that a small town has been cut off from the outside world and in turning in on itself discovers the best and worst, the resourceful and the hurtful within its community. The Simpsons Movie is based on a very similar concept. Maverick is the myth made flesh, especially with the level of phone signal we enjoyed at Easton Farm Park, where the annual festival of Americana - now in its seventh year - played out all the drama and suspense of a disparate group of individuals thrown together and forced to use their basic knowledge, low cunning and improvisational skills to survive together. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the stage crew.

As Stage Manager for The Barn, my job was to make sure The Talent were on site, on time and to not get in the way of the guys from the PA company, who were doing the actual plugging in and switching on, and who conducted mysterious conversations over their walkie-talkies involving things called XLRs, DIs and SKGs. Across the festival similar ragged bands of folk were engaged in the same rituals – announcing the next turn, hoping we’d got the pronunciation of their name right and then, counterintuitively, given the astonishing level of talent that passed through our cobwebby portals, hoping they didn’t run over and were off in time for us to repeat the whole process again for the next act.

The crackle of the radio brought forth a fresh challenge with each new transmission and assistant stage managers were dispatched across site to beg, borrow, steal or otherwise rustle up amplifiers, drum kits, mic stands, drum keys, gaffa tape… Conversations between us took on a Masonic tone as we compared stories from the front line in hastily-taken breaks for coffee and food from whichever vendor had the shortest queue*.

“Seven minutes over earlier, but we pulled it back after Hannah finished early”.

“Do you have an SM-58? Not on the entire site? No - not the beta!”

 “We need a spile at the Moonshine Bar. And bring a mallet”

“There’s a pig loose in the artists’ hospitality area”

I don’t know what it is with me, tour managers and pianos, but I had another chance to shine this year. I mean, I don’t mind taking down an entire drum kit and replacing it on the riser with a piano whilst also clearing away the previous band’s equipment and all in a ten minute window of opportunity before your scheduled start time, but you could at least then get your employer to play it. Still, we should be grateful she didn’t set fire to it, as one washboard player did at the climax of their set, brandishing it above her head** in a Hendrix-esque fashion to the delight of the crowd. If only it had been a banjo.***

There were so many fine and talented people performing over the weekend that I couldn’t hope to do them all justice by summarising their skills in so small a space, but Mary Gauthier notably drew several of the day’s prior attractions back to the stage on Saturday night – part mother hen, part eccentric aunt, full-time inspiration, she was so down home and folksy I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tapped out a corn cob pipe before taking to the stage. I asked her if I could line check her guitar for her. “Oh, don’t worry about that honey, I’ll just get on up there and get started”. I pointed out lights and monitor tech Max and she made a point of checking who the guy on the front of house desk was. Sometime into the set she tuned her guitar down to a low, ominous D which rattled the fillings. “Push it hard, Young Rob, make ‘em rumble” she chuckled over the PA. I swear she winked at him. In the wings next to me Thom Chacon whooped with delight.        

I had to leave early on the Sunday of the festival in order to be available to perform on The Grapevine Stage at Ipswich Music Day as part of Tony James Shevlin’s backing band The Chancers. Here, the roper boot was comfortably on the other foot, so I made sure that I got my gear on stage as quickly as I could, turned the volume down on my guitar so as not to interfere with the acoustic guitar tweaking while I tuned up, and waited patiently as the sound engineer asked us to give him a line check on each of our instruments and on our vocal mics in turn. I also remembered to thank the stage manager for his attention after the show, said that I really appreciated the onstage monitor mix and hoped that we’d given a good account of ourselves. The MC gestured, palms down, to the audience who were generously showing their appreciation in a spirited way. Then came the line I’d been missing all weekend. “There’ll be more” he assured the crowd. “…just not from them”.     

 

*When refuelling, time is of the essence. At one point I saw the production manager eating a full English breakfast off a paper plate without breaking stride as he stomped purposefully over to sort some issue with the bar.  

**The washboard, not the piano.

***I know. Open goal, I couldn’t resist.

“Ted Bidits!”

Another year, another Maverick. From the Stygian gloom of the original Barn Stage, where we had to brush the cobwebs from our hair, shake them loose and let them fall before starting our set to the bright new world of queue-less bars and brightly-painted drag acts, what a long strange trip it’s been over the six years of the festival’s existence.

From such humble beginnings I have at least attended, if not played, every year since the festival's inception; nevertheless it was with no little trepidation that I found myself with a clipboard, a wristband and the title of Stage Manager at this year’s event, charged with the holy mission of administering the smooth running of The Barn Stage, the myriad duties of which included ensuring that those with camping chairs stayed exclusively on the left-hand side of the central divide. This, I’ll state for the record now, was the most stressful part of the weekend. I’ve been heckled on stage before, but never during someone else’s set and by someone waving a banjo and gesturing angrily at the space around their travel rug.

In practise my job, as I explained to the talent, was to introduce them at the start of their set, gesture at them to get off at the end, and repeat any requests addressed to me regarding technical matters in a slightly louder voice and at someone who actually knew what they were doing. As long as I held up my end of the bargain, I expected them to fulfil theirs. All of the line up turned out to be fantastically talented, most of them agreeably accepting of our extraordinarily tight ten minute turnarounds between acts, and a few of them so selflessly accommodating that I found myself making a quiet note to send them flowers.

I think we did pretty well – I mean we lost twenty minutes to a lengthy sound check on Saturday evening which we never made back, but taking the compression off the bass, losing the gate on the vocals and poking up the mids at 160hZ is going to take time, there’s no disputing that, and if you want to get it right you want to get it right. A similar principle was behind my checking the name of The Goat Roper Rodeo Band four times to ensure I didn’t get any of it in the wrong order. Obviously ideally I wouldn’t have been introducing them on stage at the time, but we got through it.

It would be unfair to single out anyone’s performance on stage, but off it I certainly developed a soft spot for Eileen Rose (“How do you want me to signal that time’s nearly up for the set?” “A bunch of flowers?”) Trevor Moss (“If we dropped a number from the set that’d give you a chance to make some time up, yeah?”) and Hannah Lou (“It’s from Debenhams”) and the extraordinarily delightful Rainbow Girls, who patiently drew me a stage plan helpfully indicating where the tap board should be miked up, and when asked if they needed anything, asked simply for a higher drum stool and wondered if they might have kittens delivered to the backstage area.

At one point I found myself guiding the perfectly gentlemanly Neil Innes from Artist’s Reception to the backstage area. “What do you call a banjo at the bottom of the ocean?” he asked.

“A start”.

“Blimey – at Glastonbury we just get an orange and a cup of tea!”

 

Regular correspondents will be well aware of my foray into stage management at last year’s Maverick Festival during which I successfully got a keyboard on and off stage without dropping it, asked if Alejandro Escovedo’s bass player could be turned down a bit, prevented Jason Ringenberg from being crushed by a tree  and introduced Amelia Curran as “…probably the best Canadian singer-songwriter in this room right now!” after I had fallen very slightly for her, a flame I maintain to this day despite the fact that she never writes, she never calls, she never phones.   

Due to my less than exacting schedule, ‘tween stage time wasn’t terribly trying, to be honest. I wandered around the festival site vaguely offering help to anyone who looked particularly stressed, and as a result at one point spent thirty minutes queuing for a latte for That Nice David Booth, who probably knows what a lighting truss is and why you shouldn’t plug the input/output parametric EQ through the reverse foldback loop while the PFL’s being deployed - mine was very much the Sergeant Wilson role in all of this which is why I was in the coffee tent and he was standing next to a man with a black t-shirt and a maglite. Nevertheless I have been invited back, in much the same way as I was invited back for the Orwell High School First XV when I was thirteen and a half, which is to say although not necessarily of any great use aside from making up the numbers, I am willing, available and have my own transport.

 

This year, having not broken anything or been photographed in a compromising position over by the Tipis by the gutter press I have been promoted to The Barn, which to all intents and purposes is the main stage for much of the weekend and from where I shall have dominion over such folk as Hallelulah Trails (I’ve met them, they’re lovely, and they do a great version of ‘Jackson’), Feral Mouth (Norfolk newgrass and not, as one might suspect, Grindcore) and one Leeroy Stagger, who I’m assuming wouldn’t be taking such an ambivalent approach to receiving an introduction along the lines of Amelia’s should I improvise in such fashion again.

Having been on the receiving end of some pretty injurious stage management myself over the years, I’m quietly confident of being able to respond politely but firmly to most of the ad hoc requests that are likely to come my way, all the while employing a Pirsigian approach to The Talent but being aware that however much the band in possession would like to maintain their presence on stage (musicians tend to be one of the few sub-group of employees to regard knocking off early with a disdainful curl of the lip and/or eyebrow) any over-runs necessarily impact on the next domino in the chain, and with eleven turns and ten minute changeovers being the norm then time becomes a valuable commodity, virtually to the point of being currency. I once watched Neil Innes tune up a twelve string guitar for fifteen minutes before going on at a festival (to be fair these were pre-electronic tuner days and Keith Allen was on stage at the time) and to tell you the truth I’m not looking forward to having to pull him off halfway through “I’m The Urban Spaceman”.

 

The Maverick Festival is at Easton Farm Park from the 5^th – 7^th July 2013. http://www.maverickfestival.co.uk/