What Four Words?

I did my first gig in 1980 - that’s the year before Dare, Moving Pictures, Tattoo You and East Side Story were released. Not that that’s got any real relevance here but I see a lot of biographies that start this way.

In between then and now, I’ve been the guitarist in a blues rock power trio, and a baggy-shirted visionary playing The Big Music; a foil in a heavy-big-pop four piece jagged soul band, an acoustic troubadour, an electric wanderer, a founder member of the East Angliacana movement, festival stage manager, three-time author, the quiet one in a Beatles specialist act, and someone who was once part of a group who convinced a theatre audience in our home town that we were a travelling family of Appalachian musicians named the Guitarres. Good times.

I was supposed to have sung my final hurrah in Y2K with the release of an album called ‘This Much Talent’ which bade farewell to both my so-called career and the CD format and yet, here we all are. 

This Much Talent - an all-encompassing body of artistes and auteurs - first made its appearance on a fundraising compilation in 1989, the purpose of which was to raise awareness on behalf of the Venue for Ipswich Campaign. Veterans of the VIC wars still talk fondly of the infamous Caribbean dressing room wrecking exploits of (probably) Noel Gallagher and in hushed tones of the Carter USM expedition with which certain members of the support band still, to this day, bore their partners rigid whenever ‘Sheriff Fatman’ crops up on re-runs of Top of the Pops. Well, one certain member does, anyway… 

I am overly pleased to reflect that some people who were on that compilation (and on This Much Talent Volume 1) are also on this EP - not least my de-facto co-producer and recording mastermind Ian Crow, who probably rarely has thoughts of re-recording the seminal oeuvre of his band at the time, Edible Vomit. Few who purchased the bargain £3.50 twenty-six track cassette look back from a distance with anything but fondness, I’m sure, on the haunting refrain of ‘Chunder Violently’.

However, back to the update. ‘Showtime’ is on that very compilation, albeit with a bum chord which I’ve finally  eliminated, and which dates from so much earlier in my writing expeditions that I distinctly remember being inspired by a Bob Dylan quote that someone had pinned up on the wall of our sixth form common room. This dates its writing to about forty years ago.

As is the way of these things, I should point out that forty years before that, people were coming up things like Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’, but it remains to be seen how far we’ve come in the meantime. It has certainly been an education in revisiting the thoughts and prayers of a fledging songwriter with the benefit of four decades of cynicism and disappointment but without barely having to change a word - maybe a tense or two.

Here it has been elegantly redressed by Pete Pawsey and his Twenty Bars / Chemistry Set West pals before having a last minute one-take flute part added by Helen Mulley. James Partridge, who recorded the original Tascam four track Portastudio version, insisted on the inclusion of four words which had been excised from the re-imagining, for which I am hugely grateful. It was our “…the movement you need is on your shoulder” moment.  

For ‘Stop That for a Start’ I was able to welcome back to the fold Stephen Dean and Richard Hammond, whose combined rhythm section propelled gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) throughout the nineties and beyond, and who were able to burnish their original arrangement before Nick Zala remotely added pedal steel and then Steve Constable - also of gods kitchen, The World Service, The Company of Strangers, The Star Club, The Perfectly Good Guitars, The Canyons and Picturehouse (no, not that one) – was in one session able to vocalise as Crosby, Stills and Nash and was conveniently on hand to nod meaningfully in the background when Ian mentioned that he had an e-bow kicking around somewhere. Steve also made a long and sustained case for a couple of Neil Young power chords to be subtly re-inserted into the outro right up until the final mix. He won.  

‘The Merchant of Venus’ is a recent write and has been through a few iterations. At one point, deep into a second bottle of Pinot Noir one evening I considered that ideally it would have a flute solo by Geoffrey Kelly, whose band Spirit of the West had been a massive inspiration when I was on the same bill with them at a club in Peterborough on the tour which inspired ‘Home for a Rest’. Through the modern medium of the electric internet I was able to secure that very thing a mere week later. Many thanks to Hugh McMillan from the band for facilitating contact and to Geoffrey for his help and encouragement.

Helen also sang on this one and Ian added – of all things – an autoharp he had just picked up for a song. As it turned out, this song. 

Dirk ‘The Drummer’ Forsdyke did a sterling job on the tricky task of putting his part on after we’d done much of the tracking work – never an easy assignment at the best of times – and then Ian was finally reunited with VIC tape producer James Partridge, who added the Steve Wynn-inspired guitar part at the end, advised on some harmonies and reflected on how different his life might have been if he'd signed up for Otley College, just down the road ‘pon the lef’ hand side, all those years ago.

And so here we are. Thank you to everyone who helped, advised, opined, and all the great performers and writers whose work I’ve absorbed over the years either at a distance or in person, and whose influence has inevitably seeped into every pore of this project. If you can hear it, it’s probably in there, maybe even on purpose.  

https://thismuchtalent.bandcamp.com/album/belgian-whistles

Strange Days Indeed...

The great unpleasantness of 2020 has touched us all in different ways. Mr. Wendell messages to say that he had a dream in which Eric Clapton had moved to Felixstowe and was invited out for a slightly glum drink with Picturehouse (“Everyone just wants to talk about George...”) whilst I myself am recently awoken from a fever dream in which cardboard cut-outs of the band were included in a press conference conducted by a producer friend of ours, wearing a balaclava and menacingly reading a list of demands (“More reverb in the monitors” most likely being top of the list). I mean, I’ve had the Les Paul out and attempted to annoy the neighbours by widdly-widdling at top volume but that wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been, principally because they’d moved out the week before, so it’s not really the same as pulling the full Pete Townsend in a pub in Stowmarket. But then again – what is?.

In other off-CV engagements I was recently involved in a responsibly-distanced garden gig, wherein the list of T&Cs quite respectably outpaced Van Halen’s notorious M&M-centric rider by a good few pages. Notably, audience members were to use wipes to clean the facilities after use and then discard them in a conveniently placed bin, a measure which festival promoters might want to take a good long look at for the 2021 season, assuming this wasn’t just a ploy on behalf of the hosts to get people to clean their bathroom for them for free - something which can’t of course be entirely discounted.

I enjoyed the show, especially given that these days I rarely get to play to any more than thirty or so socially-distanced people anyway, so it wasn’t too out of the ordinary an experience for me, despite my being the designated driver for the evening inevitably taking the edge off my finely-honed and expansive performance style, but it was also a sobering reminder of what we have (hopefully only temporarily) left behind. One of my co-performers reflected sadly on his entire year of work disappearing into the ether within a single forty eight hour period, and of the curious virus that swept through the tour bus in early February.

For those of us slightly more on the periphery of the business of show of course, the impact has been softer in terms of actual able-to-pay-the-rentiness, but similarly dispiriting in terms of bring Key of G-based folk/country/blues/rock/pop to the masses. I speak, naturally, of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs, whose occasional sojourns into the fetes, festivals and provincial theatres of East Angular were also brought to a summary stop by the impact of the lockdown. We’ve had a couple of get-togethers in the country since then, utilising the space afforded by Fiddly’s English country garden on one occasion and a freshly broom-swept workshop on another. “Don’t worry about the mice” he said reassuringly as Helen attempted to retrieve a half-consumed brownie during a tea break. “They don’t affect the three second rule...”

I also had a one-to-one with banjoista Tony at his recently re-finished country cottage (painted in ‘Red Stallion’, I’m told. It’s also a film) remembering chords to recently-forgotten songs and finessing our first-ever co-write! There’s one song in the set where we swap roles, and he gets to play guitar (and do the “Can you hear the banjo?” quip) and I suggested that I might refamiliarise myself with the chords of G (natch), C and D in order to best perform my supporting role. He retrieved the five-stringed instrument of joy from its case, ony to find that after months in isolation it was perfectly – and I mean electronically tested by specially calibrated instruments – in tune. This never happens. We sighed at each other. “No-one will ever believe us...” #fakenews

All of this set-list remembering malarkey is not entirely of an altruistic mindfulness-restoring nature, of course. We have an unusual show – a good two hours betwixt breakfast and lunch - so we’ve had to remember even the ones that weren’t in the festival set. In another box ticking first, we’re playing in a churchyard. My suggestion that we knock out a quick version of Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues has been quietly paddled to the side of the suggestion pool, but nevertheless we approach the event with all the accumulated professionalism, decorum and gravitas for which we are rightly respected withn the tight-knit world of East Angliacana. “Where’s the venue?” someone asks.

“You can’t miss it – it’s the dead centre of the village.”

"Back When I Was Someone..."

I  have pitiably few claims to actual fame, and those that I do entertain are closer in the actualité to pub quiz questions along the mildly obscure lines of ‘Name three Kinks drummers’ or ‘What links The Green, Green Grass of Home and In a Silent Way?’ One claim I do hang on to is that I believe I am the only person to have appeared on an episode of BBC Radio Suffolk’s Introducing and on Re-Introducing on the same evening. The former with the estimable Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs’ most recent digital release, and the latter being an archive performance from 1998, broadcast as part of Stephen Foster’s invaluable trove of live tracks, studio sessions and vintage interviews stored on a bewildering number of formats in a box room somewhere in 56 St. Matthew’s* Street. 

The show recently revisited the 2000 Ipswich Music Day, wherein I played as part of the Suffolk Songwriters showcase alongside such luminaries as Tony James Shevlin, whose reliable progress through the last three decades can be measured in the performance of his song Nobody,** which in this incarnation was a rather testy, Costello-esque rendition entirely apropriate for the times. It was during this year, you see, that barbs were exchanged within the letters column of the local evening paper regarding the value, self-worth and deleterious effects of the dreaded covers and tribute bands that were laying waste to a generational swathe of Suffolk music talent. I, and indeed Mr. Shevlin, were part of this scourge in no small part due to our continued insistence on playing in The Star Club – a Beatles specialist band which in no small way funded our ability to function as independent singer-songwriters outside of the (Star) club circuit. 

The only reason I remember this is because I made a dedication to one ‘Albert Herring’’ from the stage at the time - I’m guessing not the actual greengrocer’s assistant from the Britten opera, but a nom-du-plume/guerre intended to upset the apple cart under the aegis of which we were ruthlessly expoiting the limited music-going resource of the region, and this was when you actually had to write a letter down on paper, put it in an envelope and take it down the post box first before seeing if they’d print it later, not like all of this half-witted digital egregiousness you get below the line these days. Fittingly, the song I played was about starting your own band if you didn’t like the ones you were seeing (and later recorded by Songs from The Blue House). I also got my friend Matt up to do a proto rap on a track first recorded by my band gods kitchen (and which – rater cleverly I thought – references the Beatles track ‘I Feel Fine’) and dedicated my song Stretch Armstrong (about a band from Colchester who had unwittingly helped me through some dark times) to an old friend I’d first met when I was living in a kitchen and trying to make it in an Indie band. So, yeah, I guess I was a little put out at being told that the decline and fall of the Suffolk music empire was down to me and my mates playing some sixties hits. 

It was only upon listening back to the broadcast (it was the Alanis Morissette joke that gave it away) that I realised that this was the very same performance I had been gifted afterwards by sound visionary Dave Butcher of the BBC, and rather cheekily gaffa taped on to the end of my CD-du-jour ‘This Much Talent’ - similarly made up of homespun recordings and stories from the frontline of hearth and heartbreak that I was exploring around this time. The irony of all this being that almost my first appearance in the local paper’s music section about twenty years prior to all this had been a similarly primal howl about covers bands stifling the talent and invention that was surely waiting to break through. I still tut approvingly today when the never ending wheel of outrage spins, spins, spins on its axis of indignation.

As for the protagonists of Y2K’s music wars – well, that year’s headliners were Soul Kitchen, which tells you something about longevity in the club scene (they also closed the show in 2019), ten years later The Star Club (who also played later that day) were invited back*** and were hence unable to go and watch some kid called Ed Sheeran elsewhere in the park, who later had a stage named after him. So I guess we didn't manage to kill the scene off after all. And Harry, who I’d dedicated a song to earlier sought me out backstage. “Oh mate” he said “That was a really thoughtful thing to do. But I wasn’t in Stretch Armstrong...”

*Thrillingly, the signs in the underpass there put the apostrophe in three different places.

*He’s doing it a bit more Americanary, recently – although the last time I saw him do it was at Maverick, which may account for that.

**That’s where the photo at the top comes from.

"Hello Bongo..!"

We are not entirely strangers to the concept of experimentation over in The Doghouse. Having negotiated the potentially choppy waters of one-take, in the round recording on previous occasions and employing techniques involving things like rehearsing, playing the songs live prior to the session & maintaining exhaustive crib sheets regarding time, tone and instrumentation, we decided to embark on our latest day out at an austere Baptist Chapel in Cambridgeshire in the spirit of those freewheeling troubadours from the seventies, who got it together in the country over a pot of steaming lentil soup, a few massive joints, and the sort of record company largesse that we can only reflect in wonder at these days. Being booked into a five-star hotel for a week’s suite swapping and songwriting might sound like a great deal to some, but you’re hardly likely to come away with something like ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’, no matter how many hours you spend finessing your top line. So, swap the lentil soup for a cafetiere of Dark Roast Italian Blend, the joints for McVitie’s digestives and the record company largesse for some homemade Ginger-free Gingerbread People and you’ve pretty much got the picture. To enhance the period vibe, we hadn’t all rehearsed together for about two months and had decided to do a couple of new songs, one of which we’d played live, once, in 2016. So far, so Traffic.

One might presume that this reckless approach to our limited recording time would stymie the creative flow, but having being through the early stages of the Kübler-Ross model of recording (over-anxiety, slight relaxation, knocking it out of the park) we found ourselves at the point where we generally agreed that getting a good performance was going to be more of an end point to aim for than spending many hours of studio time nailing down a stone-cold classic single which we could then give away on the internet to as many as eight or nine of our friends (other oblique strategies in a similar same vein to this included going out in the street and randomly handing out ten pound notes to strangers, which we also decided against as a band exercise). After all, if artists like Richard Thompson, Neil Young and The Rutles could produce classic albums by dint of knocking out three takes of a number, deciding on the best one and moving on, why shouldn’t we? Shoot Out The Lights apparently took three days to record. The follow-up took even longer.

Also along for the ride on this occasion, Sam ‘Bongoboy’ Thurlow, who had incidentally been at that gig where we’d done ‘As Yet (Untitled)’ and had so impressed all of us with his percussive work with Fern Teather that we took the opportunity to invite him along for the day, if only to give Fiddly something to keep us all in time on his behalf. Open-minded, amiable and above all, cheap, Sam did indeed keep things on track, and previously perilously floating tempos became grooves under his beneficient percussedness. Once we’d warmed up with something we did know, time came to start jamming on autologically named new item ‘Snug Song’ (if you think that’s lazy you should have heard the working title*). Gibbon tried some different bass lines, tuned down, retuned, forgot he’d retuned and played a non-dropped ‘E’ by mistake. Turny Winn alternated between squeezebox and harmonica, Fiddly regaled us with another tale from ye olden days – this time about an acquaintance who ate garlic butter sandwiches for lunch and rolled his glass eye betwixt buttery fingertips in between times in order to clean it, and Mr. Wendell attempted to impose some authority upon the situation by striding up to the performance area, a flurry of Christian leaflets in his wake and rallying the troops with a declamatory “Right – now let’s nail this fucker!”

“Dude – look around you…” I admonished with an appropriately Saintly import.

As a team bonding session the day struck all the right notes, as did the group albeit – paraphrasing, if we may, a response to the great Andrew Preview – not always on the same take. We ran down a couple of versions of a pretty-much improvised song which took us up to clearing out time. Perfectly, as it happened. As the last chord died ambiently down, an arpeggiate sequence of notes trilled across the fading Dsus2 I was holding on the Tele. I glanced sideward, searching for the gently flailing fingers which would indicate that Turny was finishing off the song with a gentle banjo coda. Helen, next to me at the microphone blushed and scrabbled to turn the alarm off on her phone. “It’s five o’clock. Time for me to put my eye drops in...”

*’None More Eighties’, as the chord progression in the bridge and chorus are...go on, have a guess.

The Hit Factory

During a discussion around the art of songwriting (or craft, or pastime, or however it is you prefer to refer) at The Blue House last night, we were trying to come up with a suitable simile for the process and preferably one which didn’t involve ‘evacuation’. After a tiresome day – the highlight of which had been an innuendo-strewn thread on her Facebook page regarding how much work she had to do – I had asked if anyone wanted to try and get a song together and so Mr. Wendell, Helen and I had assembled in order to knock one out. As it were.

I’d been inspired by a ‘Dangerous Building’ sign hanging on the outside of a house of someone we used to know, and an offhand remark made by The Artist formerly known as Our Glorious Leader as a police car drove by with its siren wailing as we passed it. I made a few notes, had a scrap of a melody and anxiously mailed Helen to ask if she knew of any songs called “This Property is Condemned”#, as it seemed too good a metaphor to have remained unused so far thus in popular song. I knew that there was already Love’s The Only House, and When It Was Ours based broadly in the same post code, however she suggested that this ground may previously have been adequately covered by Shakin’ Stevens. I did a bit of digging and it turns out This Ole House is quite the death ballad when it comes down to it, and about as lyrically cheery as You Are My Sunshine. This in turn reminded me of Gregson’s first tenet of song writing; Cheery words – maudlin tune / Downbeat lyrics – happy dance chords. Having mucked about with a Neil Young chord progression* at our last rehearsal (who doesn’t?) and, ahem, borrowed a couple of turnarounds I now had a traditional structure, a big chorus (which had a tendency to morph into Meatloaf’s Paradise By The Dashboard Light if I didn’t keep a close eye on it) and a middle eight. Which is where the guys came in.

As I say, we were all a bit tired, we all have inviting-looking sofas, and were of necessity making a late start on things due to domestic commitments in combination with that Helen lives about a forty minute drive away from where we do. And on a school night. On my morning commute, a chance selection of some Art Blakey (of all people) popping up in the mobile listening station had put the idea of making the song a kind of shuffle and so I gamely tuned up, ran through the structure for them and waited for the resulting opprobrium to manifest itself. “Hmm – that’s got something” I heard one of them say. Mr. Wendell attached a capo to his trusty Gibson acoustic and started transposing chord shapes. Helen hummed a harmony line. Twenty minutes later she suggested that the instrumental section not be the same as the verse, chorus or middle-eight but “…go somewhere else”. Accordingly we went somewhere else which, it turned out, meant that we’d effected an accidental key change which manifested itself when we got back to the chorus. Wendell smiled as he realised the new chords fit perfectly simply within his be-capo’d inversions. Helen hummed a solo, we counted in an ending, Wendell and I figured a little harmony intro riff which lent itself to an echo of Crazy Little Thing Called Love. All these little influences and hidden mind cupboards being opened up and rooted through in search of that elusive last ingredient to just finish off the dish before us. We played it through, then played it through again. Sated, we returned to our discussion about the process. “It’s like swimming” said Hel. “You never want to go, but afterwards you feel great”.

As Wendell drove home, we listened to XTC and talked about the writing process. Knowing I was going to post something up I wondered if there was an inspirational Andy Partridge quote I could use to illustrate and illuminate it further. And that’s where I found this.


*At least that's what I say. Wendell reckons it's from Headstart for Happiness.

# Update; Friend of the band and recording mentor Fenton Steve points out that Maria McKee was indeed way ahead of us. I should have known that as I own this album. Ironically, it's the one where she looks a bit like Helen on the cover.

Thirty Eight Things to Go Wrong.

So, our final rehearsal before next week’s expedition to darkest Colchester is completed. You couldn’t really call it a dress rehearsal since when performing on stage Turny often puts on a skinny tie that makes him look like a member of a late seventies post-punk power pop combo – how you always picture Ric Ocasek out of The Cars during their Just What I Needed pomp, say. Mr. Wendell has taken to wearing a polka dot shirt which lends him the slightly whimsical air of a Robyn Hitchcock, and Helen had taken to sporting a pair of spray-on leggings covered on Shakespeare quotations until she noticed that the ‘Ham’ from ‘Hamlet’ was emblazoned perfectly on her upper thigh. I myself usually pick out the cleanest checked shirt in the wardrobe, which is frequently the one I wore at the last gig, so carbon-dating the age of any band I’ve been in through the medium stage wear has become an increasingly knotty issue over the past two decades*.

We ran through everything a couple of times, just to bed in new yet enduring bassist Gibbon, whose arrival in our midst has been necessitated firstly by the departure of original stand-up guy Ant and then also of his replacement, Producer Andy, whose lucrative side line in playing bass for Purple Rain – A Tribute to Prince means that since the recent surge of interest in the work of one of Minneapolis’ favourite sons he gets to fly by private plane into tax havens to perform the music of the Stack-Heeled Sex Impness of Funk rather than the slightly more staid East Angliacana’n fare we cater for, with, and to**. Also along for the ride is SftBH alumnus Fiddly, in whose shed we are rehearsing, and whose pre-match chocolate cake and tea we are fortified with. Not being a self-styled full-time filler of the ranks, Fiddles describes himself as a Three Legged Dog. Their approaches to the run through are both familiar and heartening. Gib wants to know which key to start in and after that pretty much anything can happen, and Fiddly wants to know how many bars we’re going to do at the end, so he knows when to stop. The only thing they really have in common is that they’re both actually called Richard.

We have secured the expertise of a proper sound engineer and their bespoke PA system for the gig itself, mainly because they haven’t received any more better offers since we asked if they’d do it for us a favour***. We have engaged two guest turns (“…a couple of mics please, and a monitor would be great!”) , arranged load-in and sound check times, forwarded details of parking, run off some posters, created events on three separate social media platforms, alerted the press and I have worked out the settings I’m going to use on all three electric guitars, the twelve string, and the bouzouki. I’ve also forwarded a copy of the stage plan and technical specs (although I did lose brownie points on that as it wasn’t formatted to print in landscape). And that’s just for one Tuesday night, low-key run through of some material before we go to record it in a couple of weeks' time. At one place I’m playing shortly they won’t even let your gear in the room unless it’s got an up to date PAT certificate****. Imagine what it’s like then for your local arts centre, folk club, open mic, songwriter’s showcase or blues club promoter who does this every week!  

We’ll leave a tips jar on the bar for you to show your appreciation.

 

*If I’m wearing a white shirt with a heart overlaid with an ‘X’ on the breast pocket it’s a photograph of As Is. That was a gift from a grateful record industry on behalf of Duranduran, whose “1988 single “I Don’t Want Your Love” fell swiftly from its debut chart position of #14, despite EMI’s best efforts to promote it through the dispensation of form-flattering wardrobe. Go on – try and remember how the chorus goes. See?  

**To be fair, he also plays in the Tony Winn Trio, so it's not all "Twenty minutes, off, helicopter, back to the Warwick Hotel, two birds each."

***i.e. ones that pay, and at least at time of writing.

****You’ve got Google – go and look it up.

After the Deluge.

“This is from a time when if your phone rang you had to pick it up and ask to find out who was calling you”. Thus Shev introduces another song from A Hard Day’s Night at Ipswich Music Day 2016. The heads of disbelieving teenagers sway sorrowfully from side to side behind the crash barriers at this fresh import, their overloaded minds still reeling from the introduction of the concept of The Album B-Side. The Star Club are reconvened, rehearsed, refreshed and ready to go again, on the (rightfully) restored BBC Radio Suffolk Stage.

Flashback: Reado has set his drum kit up, assembled sidestage in full working configuration, ready to be moved swiftly on to the boards at the culmination of The Martells’ performance. Indeed, we are tapping out the hi-hat rhythm along with their performance of Smoke on the Water when I decide that putting my fingers unnecessarily close to a pair of cymbals probably isn’t the wisest thing I’ve ever done this close to going on stage (in fact it ranks right up there with eating a portion of coconut just before sound check) and I step back - at which point a gust of wind catches the stage canopy and deposits a good proportion of the overnight rain therefrom and onto a less-than impressed and now decidedly damp drummer. This, clearly, is in no way amusing to me at all. In fact, it’s only slightly less amusing than when, after he has managed to towel off the worst of it from his finely-tuned drums, I step forward to sympathise (“What are the chances..?” I begin) and the whole thing happens again. First as tragedy, then as farce, as they say.

My white shirt and tie are soaked. I am the Mop Top Mr. Darcy. Kilbey wonders if I am going to wear sunglasses on stage. He’s considering not wearing his specs, thereby making himself look even younger than - rather unfairly, all things considered - he already does. Reado is keeping his. “Without them” he explains “I can’t read the set list”.

And so, slightly damper than we would ideally have been if given the choice, we kick off with the traditional set-opening medley of A Hard Day’s Night, Ticket to Ride and Taxman - we figure that if we can’t pause for breath then the audience won’t be able to either. And what an audience! Stretching back as far as the eye can see (admittedly we’re in a park, and so there are trees in the way) there are familiar faces, family members, friends, and of course a whole bunch of people who don’t know who we are. “We have some people who’ve flown in from Newmarket to be here” announces Shev. There is the well-timed beat of the seasoned front man. “I’m sorry – my mistake – New Zealand!”

Most of our children are in the crowd – an average of two each (although Kilbey is batting slightly higher than the mean. “What can I say?” he shrugs, with a charming grin). Mine is perched on the barrier front and centre waving delightedly and giving me the double Macca thumbs-aloft. “Good to see so many kids singing along. Good parenting, people” says Shev as we pause to catch our breath. In front of my side of the stage there is a synchronised jive party going on. “Give me a ‘yeah’! Give me a ‘yeah, yeah’! Give me a ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’” and we’re off into She Loves You. Just one more to go after this, two decades of twisting and shouting about to come to a frugtastic climax. You can meet and make a lot of people in twenty years. You can also lose a number. I’m not going to stop the party on their account, but a few of the names and faces get a couple of silent dedications, shades in the summer sun.

We’re packed up and ready to go, (fab) gear returned to sensible family saloon cars. “Keep an ear out” hints Reado. And I won’t have to pick up my phone to know it’s him!

Update - One Iain Blacklaw has put together a Flickr album from the gig. 
You can find it here; https://www.flickr.com/photos/16328652@N07/sets/72157669786875300 

                         

Run Until We Drop.

It's a bit of a call back compendium this week, as many threads from previous blogs start weaving themselves together into a whole. First up, those nice people at Unity in Music have posted an excerpt from my performance in a supporting role at Arlington’s Brasserie with the redoubtable Tony James Shevlin and the small-but-perfectly-formed Jules Shevlin. This was the occasion when I missed Fern Teather’s set and our host was contractually obligated to mention that a forthcoming showcase night would be attended by minions from the Karaoke Sauron’s empire hoping to spot victims for the next series of X-Factor. I’m not sure if anyone got the nod at that circus, but in the mean time Shev’s playing shows in the States and Fern’s organising her own album through Kickstarter. Do, or do not, as the phrase goes – there is no try.

They have uploaded/presented* Run Until We Drop, from Tony’s album Songs from The Last Chance Saloon, cleverly editing in his opening remarks (you can see me seated at the back ready to play some sterling bottleneck on Nashville State of Mind) and then skipping the lengthy intro wherein he explains the real-life scenario which inspired the song. Picture yourself in a classic American diner, maybe having a good coffee and a piece of pie. A motorcycle pulls up in the lot** outside (“I remember thinking that’s unusual – a British bike…”). The rider enters and takes seat at the counter...

I know it's considered vulgar to talk about money, but I received a PRS statement this week, which unaccountably veered into double figures for the first time - courtesy, I suspect, of the munificence of the Brazilian Songs from The Blue House audience. Dame Judy Dyble, who included one of our songs on her recent anthology, sold out the entire first run of the collection and there are reports of at least a couple of radio stations pulling our Little No-One out of the pile and playing that, which isn’t bad considering the forty or so years of collaborations which bookend it. It is a matter of some pride that La Mulley and I take our place on the sleeve notes beside such luminaries as Fripp, Thompson, and our friend Steve Mears, especially now that a second run means that they were able to clear up a couple of typo omissions...   

Speaking of La Mulley, Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs continue to rummage around under the bonnet*** of our prior compositions to see what we can fine tune, soup up or discard, with the result that as well as some new material we are able to present subtly different versions of previously well-beloved favourites based on the different approaches of our new collaborators. So far we have managed to rein in the urge to take our muse south of the border, down Mexico way, but if Mr. Wendell had had some castanets handy at that last rehearsal things might have veered away on a whole different curve. Someone at the day job asked me how things were progressing. “Artistically, we’re looking through sun-dappled leaves, warmth on our faces, bare feet in the loam our forbears trod, in union with…” “No” he said “Who do you sound like?” “Oh – probably Fairground Attraction”.    

 
 

* Or ‘dropped’ if you’re that way inclined.

** ‘Car Park’

***Or ‘hood’ if you’re reading this in Canada, the USA or somewhere where the argot of movies and TV series has overtaken everyday vernacular. I got a bit carried away myself earlier.

    

“Yes, there’s always been a progressive concept element to our folk-country pop music…”

After the timely demise of Songs from The Blue House I kept myself occupied musically by strumming along with the songs of Tony James Shevlin for much of last year, but as pleasant a distraction as that was I found myself still in need of a project. Over many years, ‘the project’ has taken the form of such divers articles as The Perfectly Good Guitars, Theodore, short-lived cover-wranglers Balls Deep and even an exploratory effort which involved playing Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album from soup to nuts.

These collaborative enterprises generally involve identifying an initial construct* followed by a general phone around to see who is interested in coming aboard for the trip. With The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley and I both being at the same loose end it made sense to see if there were some way we could run a few banners up a number of random flagpoles and see if anyone saluted. We threw a few ideas around with long time co-conspirator Mr Wendell before it occurred to us that very many of our original songs had a narrative structure to them - indeed they frequently employed the second-person accusatory tone so beloved of both Justin Timberlake and Arthur Hamilton. I wondered if we might put together a loose narrative involving extant compositions of ours and then, in order to keep things fresh, write some bespoke numbers where this concatenation of material displayed obvious plot holes. This would be our Babbacombe Lee, our Desperado**! We didn’t necessarily have to explain to anyone what we were doing, but it might make for a satisfying performance art project, we considered - perhaps ultimately to be staged in a similar fashion to that of the PGGs, wherein the band had characters assigned to them, the script providing a lattice which allowed us to put the songs in context.

About this time the Ip-Art Festival was casting around for volunteers to perform and although being well aware of both the benefits and limitations of being selected to take part, I thought I might throw our collective hat into the ring despite not actually having a line-up, photo, web presence or biography (all of these elements seemed more important to the organisers than an actual sample of our music, the links to which weren’t required until the fourth and last page of the online application form***). Without necessarily meaning to participate in an act of Dadaist art-terrorism, I typed out a suitably pretentious**** biography, found a picture on my phone that we’d taken of a pretty hastily-assembled early version of the group at the Coggeshall Cricket Week and Beer Festival (we finished with a version of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ on that occasion) and hit ENTER.

And blow me if we didn’t get the gig.       

 

*”Why don’t we play all the guitars we own during the course of one show?”, “Why don’t we play a classic album all the way through?” and on one occasion “Hey – we all look good in this stag weekend photo – let’s form a band so we can use it!”

**We decided to name the nascent show after the set-opening scene setter, so it will be emblazoned on the flyers as “Helen and the Neighbourhood Dogs – Where Are They Now?” Not sure we’ve thought this through properly, tbh.

*** I’ve been doing this long enough that I remember when submissions were on cassette.
****I know - even judging by my standards...

“I don’t know who you are but you’re a real dead ringer for a post-feminist dialectic critique on the traditional gender-based mores of the patriarchy...”

Humming a happy tune in my head the other day as I do sometimes (it helps block out the voices) I found myself segueing effortlessly betwixt SftBH’s Not That Kind of Girl (originally from the album Too) and a tune by my old chum Tony James Shevlin entitled Would I Lie? What they have in common, beyond the key of E, a shuffly boogie back beat and an extraordinarily catchy hook each is that they deal with the thorny subject of embarking upon intrapersonal relationships. In short, they’re both about trying to pull.

My input on the former was that I made up the words and music out of my own head and then sent a version of it to The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley for approval and re-drafting as she was clearly going to have to take responsibility for delivering the polemic in song and since the phrase check your privilege hadn’t been invented at the time I thought it best to cede final edit on the lyric. She responded to by adding a whole extra verse just in case there remained any misunderstanding regarding the intent and also took out the line about being given “a damned good thrashing” which seemed fair enough, Portman Road seemingly being enough in the media spotlight at the time.

The revisions clarified our point, and we proceeded to rehearse, record and gig our new song whereupon it became one of our most popular numbers (a recent review of the live album mentioned it glowingly) to the point where when we were raising money through Kickstarter in order to cover the costs of pressing, dressing and posting the CD someone had requested that we video a unique version of it dedicated to them, which is why I’d ended up back in a studio with Shev in the first place, he being the director entrusted with recording the event for post-editry.

“Well” I thought to myself “There’s no point just wondering about it” and so I asked both Helen and Shev whether they’d consider getting together in order to see whether we could make a call-and-response combined version of the two songs and maybe go out and sing it at people if it went well, a suggestion which they both regarded with commendable equanimity, which is how we found ourselves working through an acoustic mash-up in Tony’s music room trying to ensure that no-one got the definitive last word and attempting to keep a lid on the raw smouldering intertextuality steaming up the windows.

Then, of course, we had to run through another couple of songs (that thing where a musician rocks up at the venue, bounds on stage, rips through one number to the enthusiastic screams of the audience and then disappears into the night with an inappropriately dressed girl on the back of his motorcycle happens remarkably rarely outside of the movie Purple Rain and besides there were three if us, so we’d need a sidecar at least if we were going to try to pull it off) so we chose Elephant, which Helen and I had played at last year’s Helstock (with Mr Wendell) and which I fondly like to imagine is the sort of thing The Indigo Girls might have released if they’d been produced by Clive Gregson. I also picked out one of my Shevlin favourites from the olden days of Suffolk Songwriters’ (he used to play to me, I used to play to him…) to complete the small-but-perfectly-formed set.

In response he started playing something that I was sure I recognised and that my hands seemed to be able to form the chords to through some sort of auto-folk memory. I even managed some harmonies on the chorus. “Where do I know that from?” I wondered aloud at its conclusion. “You remember” he replied “We played it once…at a party…in 1998”.       

"From Finborough to Fingringhoe..."

It’s tempting, I know, to consider me sitting back in my leather-bound armchair, puffing contentedly on a pipe and taking the occasional quaff on a stiff scotch as I dictate my memoir to a liveried flunky who then goes off to the British Library and uploads my latest reminiscence to an eager waiting public. Something about how the toilets in the Newt and Cucumber had a great reverb, or that bar whose gimmick was that all the tables had telephones on them, and the time that someone called the one nearest the stage to ask us to turn it down a bit as they couldn’t carry on their conversation without shouting, that sort of thing. Enquiring minds need to know - in fact only the other day I was parking the car when a gentleman stopped me to enquire whether I still get out and play and what the rest of The Star Club were up to. I informed him that our front man Shev was still writing and performing with his new band. “Ah” he shook his head wearily “But it’s not The Beatles, is it?”

I bumped into Frisky Pat, a drummer friend of mine the other day (at a child’s birthday party, where our respective scions were eating crisps and hitting each other with balloons – not unfamiliar behaviour from our time on the road together, as it happens) and talk got around to how the idea of being in a band is great, whereas the practicalities of missing tea and getting home at four in the morning so that a drunk person can shout “Sex on Fire!” at you repeatedly in between times for three hours gets a trifle wearing after a certain number of repetitions.

Nevertheless, I think it’s important to at least maintain the semblance of being in a band, even if that just means doing the occasional bit of writing and demoing at home just to keep your hand in, and so last week I foreswore the opportunity to go out and watch some of my friends playing music in order to stay in and make some of my own. Besides, once I start shouting for Kings of Leon songs after my third pint I tend to get on their nerves.

I had a simple little song which had previously been demoed and performed acoustically a couple of times, but I also had great dreams of swirling cinematic soundscapes of the sort McAlmont and Butler might hire Abbey Road to produce, or that Tom Scholz might dream up in his basement. I also had a nice bottle of Rioja, the riff from Love Will Tear Us Apart and a lyric which contained both the place name Fingringhoe and employed the term allopatric to describe a relationship. Here’s what happened...

soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywing…

So, having clocked in, I feel I have re-established my still-a-musician time-served credentials and can now get on with the business at hand. Perkins, plump up the cushions, bring me a fresh glass and let me tell you about the time one of our audience cornered my wife at a gig at The Manor Ballroom to ask if our first child would be named ‘John’ or ‘Paul’…      

      

Empire Song

It was what, eighty-six, eighty-seven? Mr Wendell and I were in the fullest flush of our baggy shirts and pixie boots period – he more so than I, as I was still coming off the back of a serious Neil Young phase (still am, always will be) and so I trended toward the checked shirt and tasselled scarf rather than the suede that he favoured, shielded behind Blues Brothers shades but both of us in thrall to The Big Music. It was the fag end of the Thatcher years and so we had more than enough to keep us going in terms of targets for our lyrical barbs - Rod Stewart and Sun City, the French and Greenpeace, sexual politics which I barely understood (and am still working on) and politicians who were “…scanning the map for an island to defend”. The big beat of Mel Gaynor and the fierce Celtic hotwired soul of The Waterboys were our touchstones. Spitting Image was on the television, John Hegley was on at Glastonbury and Billy Bragg was putting out singles about The Diggers. These were heady times indeed.

 

In the middle of all of this we (were) entered into what was officially termed The Celestion Suffolk Rock and Pop Competition. Due to enforced line-up changes we only had five songs rehearsed at this point, which we played in every round. The biggest, most epic one of these was called ‘Empire Song’. “Stand straight, stand tall you can fight them all” ran the chorus “...it’s an attitude of mind. But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for, you won’t find”. We were non-com observers – grandiose, bellicose, living in a world of faux-grandeur that allowed no compromise between the new gold dream and the tumble on the sea – I, the lyricist, Wendell my willing accomplice mouthpiece. Take that, Bono! The song also had a lovely D-C-G chord progression in the verse that lent itself to a arpeggiated part on the electric guitar which I very much enjoyed phasing and chorusing in that 80’s way, over a majestic backdrop of big snare, twelve string guitar and sustained Hammond organ chords.

We made it as far as the final of the competition and, knowing that we were up against the finest that Suffolk could produce (or at least the finest that had entered, had hit the various judging panels’ buttons and who had all turned up in time for each round) we knew we had to exert a bit of what we referred to in our off-message moments as stage presence if we were going to take home any of the various trophies on offer. We had, after all (spoiler alert) beaten our main competition all hands down in the semi-final and were looking to repeat the experience (it’s complicated – I think a precursor to the Duckworth-Lewis method may have been involved). They, similarly, knew they were going to have to up their game.

Settling into our not-at-all rehearsed routine Wendell and I threw shapes, postured, jumped on and off monitors and, during one contemplative post-middle eight section, spontaneously sat together on the edge of the drum riser. I picked out harmonics, he faux-wearily addressed the state of the nation in song. The verse built, the chords achieved a certain stridency…I felt a hand in the small of my back. It gently urged me forward. “Up” it said. “Up, and let’s take these fuckers on”. To the casual observer we probably looked like a couple of hectoring students caught mid-SU bar debate (neither of us were students – the hectoring part is still open to what I suspect would be a very short discussion) sharing a microphone stand picked out in the stage centre spotlight. In our heads we were Jagger and Richards, Strummer and Jones, Tom Robinson, Mike Scott, Paul Weller in all his badly-fringed red wedge fury. “Stand straight, stand tall, you can fight them all, it’s an attitude of mind!” we shouted in unison. “But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for you won’t find”. I’ll remember the moment of that proprietal hand pushing me forward, reassuring me that we were in this together and that here was someone who really, truly believed in me until death or dementia take me.

We came second.