"I bet you say that to ALL the bands..."

 

And so, once more unto Ipswich Music Day! Long-term correspondents will be fully aware that I have held forth at length on this subject many times over the course of this Blog’s existence, and rightly so. It is the largest free one day festival in the UK, and up to forty thousand people spread around half a dozen stages is no small beer when it comes to sharing your musical wares. Having been lucky* enough to play a number of times in various guises over the years, I am keen to help with Mr. Wendell and Gibbon’s attempts to list all of our respective appearances. Pete Frame might be ordering extra stationery supplies if he were to try and map the various connections but a good leaping-off point might be, say, The Perfectly Good Guitars – a prescient delve into what we now call Americana and conceived and performed a perfectly good few years before festivals celebrating such roots and country touchstones as Hank Williams became established boutique events in themselves.

During my sitewide perambulation I encounter most of the old family. Tommy Lee is playing the Town 102 Arena with his band The Chancers, who include tiny diva Emmylou Mandolin. On stage when I pass by is a dance troupe who loudly proclaim their love for The Nineties. “It was all so cheesy! Before everything got so serious!”. I mean I reckon they’re understating the global geopolitical effects of the Gulf War, conflict in The Balkans and the collapse of The Soviet Union, but we did get Barbie Girl so, y’know, swings and roundabouts. Wendell G. Guitar is of course due on stage with Ophelia later, and even Billy-Bob is to be found lurking backstage at the BBC paddock. At The Grapevine Tent I encounter The PGG’s stage manager and roadie Kilbey Guitar, who is sitting in with the lavishly harmonious Walford and Bayfield. As is pointed out among the crowd, if you’ve got Kilbey on stage and you haven’t given him a mic you’ve got a serious excess of vocal to play with already. At one point he is introduced to the audience - “It’s Kilbey – I don’t know if that’s a forename or a surname?”
“It’s all one word” someone responds. “Like Madonna”.

I bid my fond farewell to Picturehouse Big Band alumnus Andy Pearson and make my way over to the Monument Stage, where Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs are to finish off the turns** at six o’clock. As a band wrangler of occasional calling myself I am pleased to find a sound engineer who has a copy of our stage spec, a stage manager who mentions that they are running slightly ahead of schedule and who confirms load on and off times and, most satisfyingly, a large, prominently displayed clock, attached to the side of the awning. There is also a shaded area backstage, a tent for tuning and string changing (this will become very much appreciated by Mr. Wendell not once, but twice during our opening four numbers), ample supplies of water and a dedicated portaloo. There is also a merch table which we don’t really have anything to flog on per se, but which does help shift another copy of 'SFTBH Live' on the back of our version of Not That Kind of Girl.

We have fine-tuned the set by the simple expedient of playing everything the day before at a small soiree in Thorndon and going round with a set list and asking people what they enjoyed most. We also helped raise literally thousands of pounds for Alzheimer’s charities and for E.A.C.H.*** by the way. Yes we DO do a lot of work for charity. The usual festival line checks, a quick shout into the monitors and we’re off into swinging East Angliacana shanty ‘Heaven’ which is a terribly effective opener at these sorts of events as each vocal comes in on successive verses and there’s an acapella bit at the end which makes mixing on the hoof a good deal easier than if we’d soundchecked with (say) The Bends. Coincidentally, at Thorndon the previous day we had actually soundchecked with The Bends. Mark on the desk**** is riding the faders with aplomb, relieved by our pre-show entreaties that we don’t need the monitors set to ‘stun’. “The fiddle’s too loud in the wedges” somebody prompts. “I haven’t put any in the wedges” replies Mark, remarkably sanguine for a man who’s been sat under a gazebo with only a Tesco value prawn sandwich and a two litre bottle of warm cola for over six hours already today.

We come in triumphantly under time and are mildly surprised to hear cries for another song, not least from our stage manager. It’s genuine encore time, and so we pull out something old and unrehearsed and bouncy from our shared back catalogue. In the mosh pit, Mrs. K remarks to her companion, “This one is about a girl who was in your class at school”. We finish on the dot of seven and since there’s no-one following us, we pack down at leisure, remembering to thank Mark again. “It’s a pleasure” he replies. “You were the best group we had all day”. There are some transport logistics issues and so La Mulley, Wendell and myself start the long, slow trudge across to the other side of the park, guitars, flutes and whistle in hand. It’s not until we’ve passed Waxie’s Dargle on the University of Suffolk stage that it occurs to me that Helen had three guitars in her car when we came in, and we appear to be carrying just the two. I phone Gibbon. “Um, sorry about that, do we need to come back for you?”. He is relaxed about the situation. “I could do with the walk”.

We ease our way slowly out of the park and make our way back on to the mean streets of Ipswich. You’re never more than twenty feet away from a musician, they say. “Isn’t that Johnny?” enquires Mr. Wendell, riding shotgun up front. “It is!”. I wind down the window. “Hey Johnny!”. “Raaarrrgggghhhh” he responds. “Raaarrrghhhh!”. Helen is transfixed, stuck between the Scylla of the red traffic light, and the Charybdis of Johnny struggling with the belt buckle on his shorts. It seems he may have caught the sun. Probably. “Raarrrghhhhh!!” he cries, triumphantly unleashing his bottom in our general direction. We are at least spared an introduction to Little Johnny on this occasion. Helen looks confused. “Who is that!?”
“Let’s not get caught” I say.
“What are you talking about?” she replies.
“Let’s keep going”.
“What do you mean?”
“Go”
“You sure?”
“Yeah”.

*Or talented. Brushes imaginary speck off shoulder. 
**Some might say ‘headline’.
***Which, coincidentally, is what it also felt like we spent on rides at the attendant funfair for Lord Barchester (8) on Music Day. It seems an odd state of affairs when a Zorb Ball is on a considerably higher hourly rate than a junior doctor; but I digress. 
****Top tip for new bands – find out your PA guy’s actual name. Shouting “Mr. Soundman!” mid-set makes you sound like The Chordettes.

"It Breaks My Heart..."

 

I am in receipt of a slew of mails and tweets from The New Wolsey Theatre regarding their revival of the so-called ‘jukebox musical’ Our House, which takes the back catalogue of eighties pop funstrels Madness* as a starting point and then weaves a compelling narrative throughout in order to produce a compelling, evocative and fun evening out for all the family. Or, if you’re Ben Elton, involves you dashing off a bewildering load of old tosh on the back of a fag packet in crayon before trousering eye-watering amounts of cash and hanging out at parties with Robert De Niro.

This minds me to recall my own time in musical theatre, playing the part of Hank Jr. Jr. in the stage production of The Perfectly Good Guitars, which played at The New Wolsey, at Ipswich Music Day and the Place des Héros in Arras as part of a cultural exchange. The narrative explored the story of what was originally the Guitare family and followed their fortunes throughout generations of Guitars as they journeyed from their original home in France to Nova Scotia, Maine and finally Louisiana, each new step of the journey prompted by the then-current patriarch of the family becoming involved in an unfortunate “…bit of trouble with a local girl”.

In reality this was simply a scheme cooked up between myself and one Tony James Shevlin after some time idly speculating whether we should form a band simply for the express purpose of being able to put every guitar we owned on stage at the same time – I only had the four to bring to the party but he had half a dozen at least and was able to throw in a couple of basses for good measure. After we’d come up with the name, Shev fleshed out the concept and made a few calls until we had a cast of actor/musicians – Wendell G, TT, Billy-Bob, and the Mandolin sisters (and cousins) Ophelia and Emmylou – with small back stories which meant that we could drop a bunch of our favourite bits of Americana into the mix and have a ball at the same time. 

Once we had arranged the set list we allocated showcase numbers to each of the group so that numbers like Steve Earle’s Only When I’m Blue, Tompall Glaser’s Streets of Baltimore, Love Hurts, and Bruce Springsteen’s From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come) fitted snugly into the narrative, each monologue ending with a resigned “…with a local girl” before we kicked into the song proper. It was the latter which gave us the biggest surprise at our first rehearsal when Tony ‘TT’ Turrell, (operating under his regular nickname) burst note-perfect into the rollicking key-change boogie woogie piano solo which closes Dave Edmunds’ version and which we’d previously agreed might be a bit much to drop into someone’s lap given the deadline we were operating under, which was to get the show on at The Wolsey as part of the Ip Art festival that year. After that we all upped our game a bit.

Shev based the show around the concept that we as a group had come to Ipswich to see where Daddy was stationed during the war (he’d been asked to leave after a bit of trouble with…well, you get the picture**) which we affected to be mightily impressed by. He wrote lines based around the gifted happenstance that a few town centre buildings had been recently converted into licensed premises (“They had a theatre, and they turned it into a bar….even the job centre is now a pub!”) and that “They even have a Route 66!” “It’s a bus route Wendell – it goes to Martlesham…”

By making it a show rather than a gig we managed to fill most of the venue on the night and many happy theatre-goers congratulated us on our American accents in the bar afterward – a couple even going so far as to ask us how long we were over for. The trip to France may have slightly confused the non-Anglophone audience, not least because many of the line up were also playing gigs with their regular bands at the same festival (“Eet is ze same singer as yesterday…but zis time ‘e ‘as got a ‘at!”) but probably the finest compliment to our thespian integrity came when we performed at Ipswich Music Day. As we compared notes in The Milestone - about five minutes walk away from the park down the hill - afterwards (“A triumph darling – you were wonderful! Mwah! Mwah!”) the landlord approached us with a mischievous grin playing about his features. “I had one of the people who saw your act in here earlier” he twinkled. “Saw the first two numbers, stomped out of the park, down here, ordered a pint and addressed us all in part and no-one in particular. ‘I can’t stand those fucking Yanks’ he said”.

*Other descriptions are available. 

**Allegedly based on why Geno Washington skipped town. Possibly. Yes, that one.