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

“Everyone else is doing it - so why can’t we..?”

Back in the opening overs of the Great Unpleasantness, we were just about gearing up for Helstock (see blogs passim.) which in a different universe would have* taken place about a week after we were all finally told off and sent to our rooms to think about what we’d done. 

A year later, it was looking as if we were going to have to postpone or cancel again, before someone in Posh North Essex suggested we (or rather, ‘they’) host one of those online virtual festival thingies that we’d been hearing so much about recently - that way we could get more players in, there wouldn’t be a venue capacity on attendees, the queues for the toilets were definitely going to be a lot shorter, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything.

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs had a couple of remotely recorded and edited audio-visual submissions accepted, and having been invited to submit something of my own for consideration, I went back to the neglected corner of the bookcase where I keep my big book of things I’ve made up out of my own head, blew the dust off the spine and pored through the contents with a rheumy old eye until I came across this old thing, originally written on the back of a boat** somewhere up an Irish river, probably in Cork, and originally committed to hard drive some years later on the first Songs from The Blue House album, on which Olly from Crouch Vale played spoons.

Originally a quasi-comedy interlude in gods kitchen gigs (how dare you mock my suffering!) we ended up playing it at a lock-in back in Ireland some years later which was quite the blast but, as befits my advanced maturity and attendant gravitas, I decided to rework it in a more reflective manner hoping to reach out to those many fellow travellers on the road to love’s redemption I’ve shared asphalt burns with over the years.

I believe Clapton tried the same thing with ‘Layla’.

https://youtu.be/00X0QEoT6rA

*And indeed still might have done, depending on your philosophical bent and/or outstanding view on String Theory.

**Whilst travelling upon, not literally marked up in anti-foul paint on the stern.

“...and a scarecrow in my bed”

I had been away. A long way away. I had loved, lost, been an idiot about it, and even people - my people - were beginning to suggest that if things weren’t exactly rotten in the state of Shanemark, then at least a little spring clean and an airing of the furniture might be the way forward. They were right. So I went away.

A friend of mine had talked about a half-remembered film - there was a denouement involving a beach, a misunderstanding, a tragic accident; all of this filtered through my muddy head and twisted itself into a narrative wherein a therapist’s simple instruction - “Draw your family” - drew on me to the point where I focussed in so much on her narrative that I forgot to consider my own.

I’d already written a song called “I’m Sorry”, and so I figured that I couldn’t just hack over that old ground even though, once again, I truly was. 

I had borrowed a sturdy travelling guitar flight case for the trip which was the only thing I guarded (genuinely) more carefully than my life (it still holds purpose to this day - there’s a twelve-string guitar in it round at Shev’s house as I write) which I occasionally wiped the salty sea air off and strummed as if my life depended on it. To this day sometimes I still think it really did.

Anyway, I wrote a song - one of the songs - and came back and recorded it. I threw in a Byrds lick - which doesn’t come across terribly well on this recording - and Stephen Dean played the hell out of the drums, in his Pete Thomasesque way; Gibbon did some amazing bass, and I stayed up late to record the shipping forecast, which I had listened to every night for the previous two months - not as an affectation, but as a genuine tool for survival as I sailed the sea and totally missed the Crowded House gig that I had tickets for, and that all my friends had gone to. We dubbed that in, crouched over a cassette machine in a caravan in Westerfield - where the dream begins.

I heard it again tonight.

You can too.

If you like.

https://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/track/a-long-weekend

I've Looked at Crowds from Both sides Now

 

I was involved in an online discussion this week after someone posted in a music forum asking what the good folk of the internet thought was a reasonable amount of money for a covers band to ask for if performing for two hours. As you can imagine, the responses were measured, responsible and thoughtful to a tee. No, of course they bloody weren’t. Digressions included the suggestion that covers bands were the work of Satan, why anyone would want to play to an audience of people who buy their music in Tesco in the first place, and how music is a gift which should be freely offered and lovingly accepted. I’m paraphrasing, of course, apart from that one about the so-called Tesco audience, or ‘Clubcard Man’ as I like to call him[1].

Now, I actually have some sympathy for the former position, in that if you search in the press archive of my career[2] you can find an interview in which I express basically the same opinion. A local heavyweight on the band scene had a quiet word with me at the time and I accepted his reasoning and position without necessarily agreeing with it. You could that sort of thing back then[3], before all this electronic malarkey made it easier for people with no experience, knowledge or common sense to opine endlessly about stuff they know nothing about – that sort of “I don’t understand it and so it isn’t a thing” attitude. The sort of people who pooh-pooh the idea of Moon landings, or Beatles remasters.

I don’t want to tell your business, but I’ve seen a few things in my time, and so I feel it is only fair to share with you my wisdom and experience, gleaned over the course of, oh, about the last two weeks, as it happens.

The Pub Band.

Scroll back far enough and you will find the very first entry on this blog, which details a trip out to a provincial town, the consumption of a KFC and some interaction with the locals. Flash forward (checks, sighs) thirteen years and the process is alarmingly similar. Some of the set list is even the same. Only this week I pointed out that when we started playing 5ive’s “Keep On Movin’” it was in the charts. Since then they’ve had time to split up, reform (twice), collaborate with Brian May and release four (four!) Greatest Hits albums – that’s one more than their actual album albums. Whereas we...well, if our mission is, as some online commentators believe, to strangle the nascent indie scene in it’s birth pangs, we’re not doing a very good job. As I write we are a week away from Sound City Ipswich, a multi-venue celebration of original talent. I, on the other hand, am watching a shirtless man in a pub car park explain that people are afraid of him. It’s not all glamour in this game, I can tell you. Apparently I should be doing this exclusively for the sheer joy of making music and basking in the glow generated by the shine in people’s eyes as they look on fondly. I reflect on this as I drive home to pick up the case of leads that I have forgotten to pack earlier[4], watching the fuel gauge slide inexorably into the pink. Maybe if I smile at it, it’ll refill itself?

TOP TIP: The idiot check is your friend. Think “What would an idiot leave behind..?”

 

The Hired Hand.

I am required and requested to attend, at Mr. Shevlin’s behest, a gathering of The Chancers – a combo assembled in order to better promote a selection of his recorded catalogue in the live performance arena. I am to play rhythm guitar, keep my mouth shut (he’s heard me sing) and not trip over the furniture. He has sent me the prospective set list on Spotify – in the olden days he’d have had to put a cassette in the post and fax me the chords[5] – so I can play along with it in the comfort of my own home before we get together and he can let me know that they’ve changed the key of most of the songs and can I play bass on these three? Nevertheless, he buys me lunch after practise on at least two occasions and lets my dog on his sofa while we run through the songs until we drop. At the gig itself, since I’m also playing in the other group on the bill, I cunningly disguise myself by wearing a different shirt and a hat, thereby melding seamlessly into the background until people hardly even notice I’m there. That guy who said I looked like something Shev had found by the side of the road and brought back from America aside, that is.

TOP TIP: You don’t realsie how much heat is expelled through that bare bit at the back of your head until you put a hat on it. Bring a spare shirt.

The Original Band.

Once you’ve admitted to writing the songs, you really have to own them. And sing them, and play them – frequently all at the same time. Also the phrase “This is a new one” is often redundant in that for many of your audience – if you are lucky enough to have one in the first place – they’re all new. This is also why many people don’t like going to see bands that they haven’t heard, or even heard of, because they don’t want to take the chance that they might not like it. It’s a bit like Morris Dancing, or incest[6]. We are lucky enough to have an open venue willing to put us on (once the pre-theatre dining crowd has cleared out), a supportive local radio DJ or two, and since there are seven of us in the band any venue that we play in looks like it’s getting a good crowd in early doors, at least up until we get up on stage, at which point it tends to look as if there are now many more free tables than there were before. Three of us were in a pub in Stowmarket playing ‘Take It On The Run’ last week, and now here we are doing three part harmonies on a song called ‘Easy Money’ which its author wryly introduces as being “...about being in a band.” Mr. Wendell takes the second verse. “Jimmy Boy sells used cars, but the owners never know...” and I silently fill in my response “His fairies keep him sober for the day.” I don’t know why, it’s not even the same melody, but it’s stuck there now. I think that’s why they don’t let me sing other people’s stuff. Toward the end of the set there is a lengthy slow ballad. “Are we emoting?” asks La Mulley. “We are” I reply firmly. “This song has been played twice on local radio in the past two weeks” I announce. “Which is once more than ‘Down By The Jetty’, and if you know anything about Radio Suffolk that’s quite the achievement.” It’s also a testament and tribute to the goodwill of broadcasters in the field who are willing to play a six minute track by an unsigned band, and without whom we’d all be culturally worse off. I mean, you can’t even Morris Dance to it. To close, we unplug and array ourselves amongst the audience and play an acoustic song. Luckily there are some free tables at the front. “Thanks for taking us on” I say later as we’re being paid[7]. “No worries, we’ve had a good night” she says.

TOP TIP: Be yourself. There’s already one of everybody else. Ironic, I know, coming from someone who spends some of his gig time pretending to be Kevin Cronin.

The Singer-Songwriter.

“Do you know anyone who could do a twenty five minute set to open the show” came the question from a local impressario. “Yes” I thought to myself “I bloody do!” Back around the time I used to get interviewed by the local paper and asked to give my thoughts on whether covers bands were a good thing or not I used to do that sort of thing at the drop of a hat. I used to wear a hat in those days you know. I volunteered myself and was pleased to be offered the commission. Now then - if you thought standing on stage playing some songs you’d made up out of your own head was a nervy prospect in company, imagine doing it all on your own, just you and a guitar (or piano, or accordian, or triangle – although songs performed on the latter do tend to be all in the same key). If you’re particularly intent on making things easier for yourself, and have been inspired by seeing Steve Kilbey or Marty Willson-Piper perform recently, try borrowing a twelve string guitar and using that. The extra tension really puts an edge on things. I’m talking here about the high-tuned octave ‘G’ that if you’re not careful, could have someone’s eye out if it pings mid-show. It didn’t. I performed a six song selection of my back catalogue to a standing ovation[8] and totally failed to sell any Merch. Neither of the CDs and not one of the three books I had on display in the foyer. And I had to buy my own sandwiches.

TOP TIP: There’ll always be someone who talks loudly and at length through your set. We have a name for you people at Singer-Songwriter Club[9].

The Crew.

 

If you’re the sort of person who has read this far, you’re probably aware of that meme – I think it’s attributed to Henry Rollins – regarding the behaviours appropriate to a performer when dealing with the stage hands. Essentially, they should get paid more than you, and Don’t Be A Dick. One could argue that no-one goes to a gig to watch the stage crew, and that's why the musicians get paid so much but that's the tinder for a whole different kettle of online conflagration right there. As Jackson Browne so memorably put it in his song ‘The Load Out’ “They’re the first to come and the last to leave” and I can tell you from personal experience that a ten hour shift can be extraordinarily tiresome if not ameliorated by the sort of drummer who offers to lend you an appropriate microphone and a clip-on tuner when the pick up on the twelve-string guitar you’ve borrowed turns out not to work after all. Run the power[10], allocate the channels, vacuum the carpet, tune the guitars, find out if the singer prefers a boom or straight microphone stand, have a spare guitar lead, a tuner, a capo. A spare guitar even. If you’re doing your job properly, they won’t even know you’re there. Have a set list to hand with the guitar changes (if any) marked on them. Go to the toilet before the set starts because if you go in the middle that’ll sure as hell be when the guitarist breaks a string, or that drink someone’s perched on the edge of the stage falls over into the power supply you’ve carefully Gaffa taped down beforehand. All of these things and more should be borne in mind. And after the show is over, you have the pleasure and privilege of loading all that equipment out and into the van, possibly in the rain, while the performers gladhand each other[11] and sign things. On the other hand, out of all of the roles that I have played and described – and here’s one for the online community to chew over – guess which one I actually made money on? Backatcha Rollins.

 

TOP TIP: An onstage proposal of marriage provides an ideal opportunity to tune the guitarist’s instrument while he’s not looking

[1] Since just now.

[2] My Mum’s house.

[3] And you could put anything in your dustbin, and the bin men would come right up to your drive and cart it all away. Not like today, with your coloured recycling wheelies and that. There were only three channels, and you had to get up from the sofa to change them. You never see white dog poo anymore do you? Etc etc.

[4] I thought “The last thing I should do is forget to put my gig case in the car.” And so, sure enough, the last thing I did before leaving the house…

[5] But, you know – the bins, eh?

[6] Joke. It’s from that quote attributed to (variously) Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Arnold Bax, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw that you should try everything once. And since I’ve looked that up, the phrase “Incest and Morris Dancing” is now on my Google search history. Honestly, the things I do for you people.

[7] The wages of sing.

[8] It was a non-seated venue.

[9] The first rule of Singer-Songwriter Club is YOU DO NOT TALK THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE'S SET AT SINGER-SONGWRITER CLUB. The second is 'No Smoking' 

[10] Someone will always ask if there’s any power at the front of the stage. The correct answer is ‘Yes’.

[11] Not a euphemism. At least not at the gigs I get to play.

"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.

"Do your Claude Monet!" "I'm sorry - I don't do impressionists..."

A chum flagged one of those memes on their Facebook page the other day – this one a product of the venerable Musician’s Union, which has a history of being very good to orchestral and session musicians and is widely ignored by the rest of us – suggesting that unless you were doing good works for charity you should not play gigs for free. A wizened old chestnut indeed. Having been on both sides of the paid/plaid* divide I can confirm that this is an emotive subject and has been discussed online many times before. The financially rewarding Star Club years went a great way toward financing the not-so-lucrative gods kitchen and SftBH epochs and yes, we did a lot of work for charity, notwithstanding the rather heated discussion we once had with some members of one bike club when we declined their invitation to spend our entire Saturday providing the PA and playing for their good cause – not because it wasn’t lucrative or that the charity wasn’t entirely worthy, it’s just that all of us had better things to do with our personal time on that occasion.

One of the online responses to my friend’s post was from a correspondent indignant about being continually told to monetise her art (I’m paraphrasing – there was a lot of text to summarise) which I can sort of see, or at least I could do clearly if I weren’t so completely mesmerised about the prospect of one day being in the position of insisting on monetising my own art. That would certainly help assuage a lot of low-level guilt about asking your friends and colleagues to spend an hour and a half driving in order to play a twenty minute ‘open’ spot when they could be more gainfully employed sewing name tags into their kids’ PE kit ready for their first day back at school. Or building furniture.

As it was, we spent two afternoons this weekend gainfully not monetising our art – firstly in Needham Market at a Fun Day where we were the starter course to a veritable banquet of open spots, a singer who was on The Voice, a bouncy castle and, later, karaoke**. Our host, who had a terrific voice of her own, made us thoroughly welcome and waited patiently while we phoned around to see if anyone in proximity of the venue had any microphone stands we could borrow, the privilege of digging them out and bringing them to the venue on our behalf they would be similarly un-monetised for. We had a good time, using it as a pre-session run through of the set for the next day’s gig, and Nicola put a clip of our performance on to the electric internet, prompting one viewer to comment that it was the best version of Love Minus Zero/No Limit he’d ever heard. So, no money, but good exposure.

It was also a useful try-out for the new instrumentation – we’d decided to eschew the familiar two acoustic guitar strumalong style in exchange for one of us going electric and the other going to California for a couple of weeks and this had been the first opportunity to see how it sounded live. A bit too long tuning between songs for my liking – Helen’s “Talk among yourselves…Um, I probably need to work on my between-songs banter a bit, don’t I?” had been merely the confirmation that I was spending a little too much time on capo-related tweakery of my guitar and so I decided that for the next day’s show I would brazenly break Robert Forster’s seventh rule of rock and roll and take another to go with the bouzouki I was using on one song. One of five, I should probably mention. Let’s face it, if you’re not being paid in items you can legally take to a superstore on the outskirts of town and exchange for goods and services you may as well indulge yourself in other ways - it’s only that we’d already decided on the set and we weren’t playing anything that demanded a capo at the fifth fret in order for me to conjure my inversions*** too that meant that I didn’t pack a third electric guitar to go with the other two.

Our Sunday host and de facto front-of-house sound engineer looked at the mountain of equipment we (I) was loading in to the cramped open mic-sized performance arena with a mixture of rising panic, fear and disbelief. “I didn’t see why I should make it easy for you!” I chirruped happily. She looked slightly less impressed than if I’d announced that there was a fortress of keyboards**** and a Mellotron still to come in, but took it all with good grace. Thankfully, she’d had a cancellation and so we had a bit more set up and pack down time than we would have otherwise allowed ourselves and also had an opportunity to drop in a couple of extra (unrehearsed) songs from our back catalogue – one of them a genuine request, which is always gratifying. With all of the history of recorded music stretching out around them as far as the ear could hear, someone wanted to listen to something we’d written. 
  
At a party recently, someone asked me what my ideal job would be. “Tim Dowling” I said. “He gets to go out at the weekend and play with his band, and then he gets to go home and write about it”.

And he gets paid for both.                                

 

*I tend to wear the familiar Neil Young/Rory Gallagher-inspired lumberjack shirt when performing my own works. And pretty much all the rest of the time too, if truth be told.

**That is, the singer had appeared on television’s The Voice, not that she appeared on the bouncy castle. I explained this line up to a friend, including the karaoke. “When does the fun start?” he replied, drily.

***Ooh, Matron, don’t! They can’t touch you for it.

****Thanks to @backwards7 on Twitter for that one.

I remember when it were all Fostex four tracks round here.

Being the old curmudgeon that I am, my advice to any up and coming young tyro who seeks me out in order to sit at my knee, all the better that he or she should benefit as I impart the wisdom of my years, is generally “Don’t bother – you won’t make any money, you’re definitely not going to become famous, and in five years’ time when all your friends have graduated and got proper jobs you’ll still be working behind the counter in Subway dreaming of your big break”. 

Sound advice, I think you’ll agree, and to be honest anyone who does actually accept and act upon it doesn’t deserve to be in a band in the first place. 

Proper tips however, always go along the same lines – don’t bother running a coach down to some ‘showcase’ gig in that London, it’s rarely worth getting involved with a self-funded compilation CD involving a perceived local ‘scene’ and never, ever, bother entering a battle of the bands competition (although, in the words of The Killers, all these things I have done).

However, in between my burgeoning radio career, finishing off the second volume of my memoirs, the warm thrill of confusion brought by Songs from The Blue House, and the space cadet glow formerly engendered by Picturehouse I realized recently that I have been neglecting the upkeep and welfare of Gods Kitchen, the post new-new wave Heavy Heavy Big Pop-lite arm of my ongoing dispute with the fates as to who has the more pressing need for that career, Elvis Costello or me (so far, he’s ahead on points), and so when our beloved local evening paper hoisted its freak flag high and created a social networking site for music lovers it seemed the ideal opportunity to poke awake the shuffling, dribbling near-corpse of the band, point it at the spot lights and wait for folk memory to kick in and remind it what to do.

By delicious chance, the nice people at the website have opened a battle of the bands competition, and rather than having to drag our weary bodies out to some godforsaken church hall somewhere and perform for the afternoon DJ on Heath Road Hospital radio like we had to in the old days, they’ve just asked for an MP3 to be sent their way. Well, what could be easier? We don’t even have to rehearse! By further fortune, should we make it through the first round of online voting and get as far as the five-band showcase gig, one of the judges deciding on our artistic merit and musical worth will be the singer from a band that one of our guitarist Kilbey’s kids formed a group with not long ago. 

It really was too delightful a chance to miss - and with any luck there'll be a place on a compilation CD to go with first prize too! Gods Kitchen is a four piece band and our combined age is over one hundred and seventy.

Listen to Gods Kitchen here https://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/album/south-of-somewhere