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

“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar it meant that you were a protest singer.“

A couple of blogs ago I wrote about writing and recording with my long-term Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha Tony James Shevlin. He sidled up to me at the office. “I don’t know about the intrinsic artistic integrity of the recording in terms of fully mastered digital release - do you want to make a video?” (I’m paraphrasing). So we got together again and made a stripped-down, if you will, ‘unplugged’ version with him on the expensive acoustic guitar he bought in Nashville and me on what they call, just North of the Humber, the Durrbrurr.

We’ve decided to put it out there in the online wild partly because we feel we need to make a statement upon these crazy, unprecedented times with our crazy, unprecedented rhymes, and partly because these things otherwise tend to sit unloved in musty drawers until they’re old and irrelevant, and no-one wants that, least of all us. Not at our age. 

It’s not the longest protest song ever written - I mean, it’s got one less verse than ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’, which Bob Dylan wrote when he was only twenty two. Mind you, I could play that when I was twelve, and I think that says quite a lot. 

I showed it to my wife. “Remember” I said beforehand “They say that the camera adds ten pounds.”

“Christ” she responded. “How many cameras did he use?”

https://youtu.be/5Sxg9saaqVs

“...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

"What's this song about? It's about four minutes..."

We are legion – those who, for whatever reason, have a handy compendium of easily digestible chapters on or adjacent to our coffee table, night stand or nightsoil disposal unit. The Meaning of Liff, Does Anything Eat Wasps, All These Little Pieces, any number of amusing anthologies of readers’ letters (until you realise that Telegraph readers aren’t doing it in a sense of irony or mildly-detached whimsy, they really are that bonkers) and/or Dear Mr. Kershaw, a collection of notes sent to musicians purportedly from a Mr. Derek Philpott questioning the logic and syntax of various lyrics. Julianne Regan, I recall was a particularly good sport regarding the perceived inconsistencies contained within Martha’s Harbour and Mr. Fish-out-of-Marillion even hosted his reply on his own Facebook page for a while. These are wrought, as one respondent writes, “...in the style of a neighbour’s particularly strident objection to a routine owner-builder development application before the local council”.

 

This term we receive the difficult second album, more of the same but flavoured ever so slightly with the feel that most, if not all, of the correspondents are now in on the joke* – not least as there is a dedication thanking the various roadies, relatives, personal connections and fans who got responses through ‘the back door of the industry’ at the start of the book. “Oh, it’s you again” begins Saxon’s Graham Oliver’s note. Nevertheless, unresponded entreaties litter the volume, some little more than the sort of clever-clever Tweets that pop stars routinely ignore and some, beautifully flighted deliveries which invite you on to the front foot before fizzing away past the off-stump leaving you batting at air. Christopher Cross and Eddy Grant – and thereby we - are spun particularly delicious leg breaks, for example.

The emphasis here, then, is on the writers themselves – or more frequently their drummers, bass players and retired guitarists – to expand and explain according to their wit, sense of collusion and degree of detachment which some master better than others. Chip out of The Tremeloes deals with tremendous dignity in being addressed in a superb muso in-joke as one of ‘The Whammy Bars’, Henry Priestman overdoes the puns, Dennis Locorriere throws himself heartily into character and Chris Difford reflects acerbically on being hailed at airports as “Glenn”. Although there’s nothing quite so epic as Bruce Thomas’s lengthy exegesis on Oliver’s Army as contained in the first volume, Stan Cullimore’s letter wends at length with the sort of wry observation that got Alan Bennett two series of Talking Heads.

In the midst of all this there are some genuinely intriguing (and presumably) shaggy dog stories which I imagine we’ll all be seeing on Wikipedia before too long. One might well believe that The Big Figure once borrowed Will Birch’s floor tom-tom for an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test, but what to make of Roland Orzabal’s fond reminisce of an anonymous Scandinavian weather girl, or Verden Allen’s definitive Google fact check-inspiring commentary on All The Young Dudes?

In the end, there are countless hours of amusement to be had dipping in to this fun-filled compendium dotted, as it is, with occasionally inspired philosophical tenets. Who can deny Francis Dunnery’s almost Nietzschean “You can debate with your quick wit and your sharp mind, you can create intellectual pitfalls for us Northerners to fall into, you can outsmart, outwit, out flank and out manouevre all of us at the same time, but at the end of the day, all of your studies and countless hours spent in books and debate will prove themselves useless. Because no matter what you say, we’ll just kick your ****in’ teeth in anyway”? 

 

‘How much more bleak could it be?’ you think to yourself.

None. None more bleak.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39902360-dear-mr-pop-star

https://unbound.com/books/dear-mr-pop-star/

*They, it has been confirmed, most certainly are.

Thank you to The Philpotts for inviting me to be part of their Blog Tour, and hello to all my new visitors. Welcome aboard, do have a browse through the back catalogue. Here are some suggestions to get you started. 'Moby Dave' always seems to go down well at parties.

Moby Dave

My Night with Gretchen Peters

I am not Tim Dowling 

Ted Bidits

      

"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 left my heart in Papworth General..."

“What’s the first rule of song writing?” asks La Mulley, stage front and centre, resplendent in frock coat and boots. Her rhetoric hangs heavy in the air. “No-one wants to hear about your kids” I respond. “And what’s the second rule?” I enquire by way of reply, thereby fulfilling my part in the pantomime. She leaves a beat. “Once you’ve had them, you can’t stop talking about them”.

We are on stage at Papworth Village Hall, a construction roughly comparable in dimension, design and acoustic qualities to St. Pancras Station, at the behest of charitable foundation Play Papworth and about to present Where We Are – one of a couple of numbers lifted wholesale from the repertoire of Songs from The Blue House and here presented with a degree of trepidation by scion combo Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. Our nervousness is not so much generated by the prospect of playing a rarely-performed obscurity from our back pages insomuch as that Tony Winn, whose part in the arrangement of the song is pivotal, had caught his tie in his concertina during sound check and we were concerned it might affect his performance if it happened again.
Of such concerns are the occasional musician’s contemplations made up  - others can be considered as such examples as “Whose turn is it to drive?”, “Do you mind if I come up a tad in the monitors?” and “So where shall we have dinner after the sound check?”

The answer to the latter question turned out to be the magnificently monikered Rocky’s Pavilion one of a number of choices afforded us, and which we approached despite the sage words of my good friend Neil, who once advised me never to sit down to eat in any establishment which is showing the football. Upon entry we were ushered to the restaurant area, which looked as if bedecked for a wedding, and where soft lighting subtly ebbed and flowed in both luminescence and hue. The haunting sound of Dido wafted atop the layer of kitchen mesosphere, and we felt ourselves nodding gently off as we surveyed our menu choices. To enliven ourselves we skipped across diverse conversational subjects – whether a Portobello Mushroom constitutes a vegetarian burger or if it is just simply a big mushroom in a bap, for instance. We considered what music we, or our partners, might have played at our funerals. “Mrs K. wants that Green Day one about having the time of your life at hers” I proffered. “Good Riddance?” enquired bass player Ant. “A happy coincidence”, I concurred.

Our waiter scurried back and forth in the largely empty dining room. One other couple occupied a table further along the French Windows beneath a sepia print of Muhammad Ali towering over a be-canvased Sonny Liston in the first minute of the first round of their 1965 heavyweight title rematch. “You wouldn’t want to have paid for a ticket for that” I proposed, pondering as to whether the rather extended gap betwixt decision and delivery of our supper were somehow down to there just being the one guy on duty and him having to change into chef’s whites to complete our order.

Helen responded to some mansplaining regarding the artist Norman Wilkinson with a consideration on the subject of her legwear, which was decorated with text from the works of Shakespeare. “You do tend to find it attracts people’s attention – you know, they're wondering which play is it, what font are they using - that sort of thing?” indeed, the gentleman beneath the framed photograph by table twelve appeared to have developed a keen interest in deciphering the works of The Bard whenever he thought that either we or his dinner companion weren’t looking. "I swear that was twelve point Verdana when she sat down" his rather flushed expression seemed to say.
  
Attentive tweenagers opened doors upon our return to the venue and solicitously wished us a good evening before we settled in to watch the openers – local band The Komodo Project, pleased to note that one effect of the cathedral-like roof canopy was that applause reverberated in a most satisfactory fashion.

We were up next, our confidence (tie-related shenanigans notwithstanding) having been bolstered by a successful run-through a few days earlier in the considerably more intimate environs of The Dove Street Inn in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich. We’d decided to rehearse the set in as live a performance scenario as we could envisage, which essentially involved inviting as many people as we knew to the pub and doing a dress rehearsal in public - thereby getting used to the vagaries of monitoring and mic techniques, working out a few introductions, such as our “First rule of songwriting” schtick and, as it happens, staying up until much later than was sensible afterwards eating cheese and crackers with our beneficient hosts, putting the world to rights over pints of lovely Brewers Gold. In the spirit of many American establishments we put out a tips jar and were able, at the end of the evening, to at least contribute toward our pro bono sound engineer’s diesel money, still have a few Euros in loose change and not even have to break into that 100 Yuan note.

To conclude the evening, the magnificently bonkers Vienna Ditto, whose photo of our sound check is at the top of the page. I will merely repost what I wrote online about them. Wow, well that was something! Impossible to categorise, but if you put the guitarist from The Black Keys together with one of The Chemical Brothers, added in the singer from The Sundays and back projected a bunch of old OGWT films behind them while drinking mushroom tea you might be getting somewhere close.

My travelling companion – co-guitarist and singer Mr Wendell - and I packed up the car and prepared for the return home. “I think I’m going to change my stage name” he said thoughtfully. “To Papworth Everard”.       

Four people go into a room…

A return to traditional values this week as for the first time in about three months the lion’s share of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs convened over ale and instruments in order to knock a couple of ideas around with a view to bolstering the running time of our folk/country concept –if you will - Popera prior to our next engagement, in November. This seems like a long time away, but once you’ve factored in school governor’s meetings, a sojourn in California and the banjo player rehearsing for and then appearing in a theatre production as Dracula* the number of your actual available days diminishes alarmingly, and this is even before you’ve dragged the bass played out of a photo session with Kelly Brook**.

The evening went very well – the sketch of an idea that I came in with was subject to rigorous examination and various arrangements attempted, rejected, tweaked and finessed while the subject matter went through a sort of Just a Minute-styled analysis to root out repetition (“You’ve used ‘dress’ in successive verses and ‘reception’ to mean ‘party’ and where you sign the register at a hotel, so…”), hesitation (“Come in on the beat and hold the ‘We’ through the bar”) and deviation (“But why would he say that if he’s already made his intentions clear in verse three?”). A minor chord was placed carefully in the coda, and a valedictory chorus added to the postscript. Then we sat round an iPad and recorded it, as if to one microphone.

One of the issues that arose during its construction was that as time moves on, the familiar idioms of song writing become less and less applicable. No-one waits patiently by the phone any more, or looks through old photographs, or sits down to write a letter, and although these things’ time may come again*** we’ve been trying to move on and avoid too many obvious anachronisms. Hence the protagonist in ‘Harrogate’ – one of a number of songs inspired by traditional English Spa towns – refreshes the browser on his phone. His paramour’s number is withheld. He doesn’t smoke.

I was talking about this with m’friend and colleague Tony James Shevlin, who had recently been co-composing in the home of country music with some ‘Mericans and we agreed that although there were certain conventions to be maintained, the times were, indeed, a-changin’. I told him about the song and canvassed his opinion on whether it was acceptable to couple ‘vol-au-vents’ with ‘what she wants’. “That’s nothing” he said. “I was throwing lines back and forth with one of my writing partners and we were working on the old one & three, two & four scansion and he ended a line with ‘Nashville’”.

“Blimey” I replied “How did you write your way out of that one?”

He at least had the good grace to look mildly sheepish. “We ended up with ‘Johnny Cash will…’”               

 

*We don’t think he’s accompanying himself on this occasion. It is a an instrument with a long and noble history, but announcing the entrance of the Prince of Darkness to the haunting strains of the five string banjo is probably a theatrical step too far.   

**True story.

***I’ll bet Paddy McAloon thought he was on pretty safe ground when he committed the line “As obsolete as warships in The Baltic” to paper back in the perestroika-happy mid-eighties (‘Faron Young’).

 

 

 

 

Karaofolkie.

To Coggeshall, where the annual cricket and beer festival demands to be entertained on its traditional Thursday droop as the good folk of Essex recover from the Wednesday quiz and look forward to the Friday night live band. La Mulley has assembled a crack squad of top-flight session musicians (or Myself, Mr Wendell and Ant Ragged) by the simple expedient of opening up her address book and texting the first three random names her dialling finger falls upon, and after some earnest discussion and cross-functional market analysis we have assembled a lovingly curated set of numbers based on our shared musical chronology and (crucially) things with not so many chords to remember.

Rehearsals have been entertained – at one, held in The Snug at The Blue House, The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Our-Glorious-Leader (having been ejected from his office for the evening) thoughtfully sends a capitalised document of encouragement to the printer – and we are reasonably sure that our mix of jaunty self-penned fauxgrass and re-imagined pop hits will, if not cement, then certainly temporarily gaffa tape our position in the acoustic pop pantheon.

No little proportion of our practise time has been given over to set pacing, vocal arrangements, capo placing and relative dimensions in time and keys however much of it, admittedly, devoted to discussing the post-fame rehabilitation of the PG Tips chimps (upon hearing that one of the leads is now forty two Ant enquires solicitously if she is “…still hot” and “…has had any work done?”), upon which fonts are acceptable in a post-glyph desktop design landscape, and whether it is ever appropriate for a gentleman to sport Speedos in a family leisure pool. My inherent uncertainty regarding the difference between a font and a typeface remains unexpressed in such blistering company, however I'm pretty certain on my position regarding budgie smugglers. At one point this is our considered nom-de-musé, however upon hearing the howling response to Mr Wendell’s haunting melodica playing we are inspired to settle upon an alternate moniker for the collective. We are The Neighbourhood Dogs.

Taking the stage at nigh-on ten o’clock after a day’s cricket and its attendant refreshment possibilities may be seen as a challenge to some, especially having to follow a rousing marquee-wide singalong of The House of The Rising Sun from the prior turn but the team rise admirably to the challenge with only passing reference to various bits of paper scattered at our feet – Mr Wendell wisely sits for most of the set to make it less obvious that he is squinting at chord sequences, ascending majestically to his feet in time for his flawless rive gauche melodica recital. La Mulley emotes in her signature style (and wedges), Ant slips between double bass, vocal harmonies and heroic levels of Yakima Gold consumption and even former SftBH banjo-slinger Turny Winn chips in with a couple of prime examples of our banjo-as-fried-egg analogy (in that if you pop one sunny side up on top of almost any foodstuff it almost always improves the dish - thus it is invariably so with the banjo in popular song).

We encore with an unscheduled three chord thrash through North of Nowhere, which leads to an impromptu Breaux & Wood-esque routine being performed before us to the delight of the assembled Sunnydonians. “Thanks to the umbrella lady!” cries Mr Wendell at the conclusion of the set. A voice from the audience responds witheringly “It’s a parasol. You dick”.    

       

“Not my circus, not my monkeys…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, for the record, she was very punctual.

 

 

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

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

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

 

Amazing Adventures in Time and Spaceward.

There’s been a gratifying response to my last post regarding The World Service and our adventures in The Big Music, to the extent that some folk have expressed an interest in uncovering the actual sound recordings that we made at the time. From a dusty corner of his digital archive, my good friend James Partridge has been kind enough to retrieve and host delicately preserved copies of these artefacts, wrapped carefully in old newspaper and bubble wrap, and I am pleased to be able to offer you, dear reader, the opportunity to hear these things and make your mind up regarding our merits (or otherwise) first hand.

First, a bit of background. The World Service had been in existence for a couple of years by the point we made these demos, although principally in a slightly different aggregation to that on the recording, the former line up’s career having concluded when the self same James had invited our then bass player to join his band and he, Steven ‘Kilbey’ Mears, had agreed. Singer Stephen ‘Wendell’ Constable and I split the band, reformed without telling the drummer and started looking around for suitable replacements, which led us to recruiting one Donald Hammond on bass, his brother Gibbon (later to become a pivotal bass-playing tri-corner of Songs from The Blue House) on keyboards while Gary Forbes, second cousin of Simple Minds’ bass player Derek, became our drummer. Eagle-eyed SftBH completists will have already spotted that this is the line up referred to in the lyrics of Start One of Your Own (still available for digital download http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/youre-so-vain). 

With a rather overweening sense of ambition we then booked ourselves into Spaceward Studio in darkest Cambridgeshire for a couple of nights to do some recording. As we rolled up in a pair of cars overloaded with guitars and amplifiers the freshly-signed The Bible, featuring Boo Hewerdine, were having their gear loaded out into a considerably larger van. We nodded cheerily at him in the pub while we waited for their crew to finish vacating the premises at which he looked a tad startled and disappeared a bit further into his greatcoat. It probably would have been relevant to mention that Steve and I, in our capacity as fellow employees of Andy’s Records, had spoken to him on the phone on a hundred occasions, but we didn’t think to bring that up at the time.

Here are just a couple of vignettes from the sessions, which were perfectly curated by in-house engineer and recording producer Owen Morris. “I hate doing guitars” he remarked at one point as he nonchalantly swept a palms-width spread of extremely expensive faders up to ten so that Steve could put his coffee down on the end of the mixing desk. Posterity does not record if this is how he then introduced himself to Noel Gallagher prior to mixing Definitely Maybe.

I mentioned in my previous blog that there were shiny prizes on offer in the Rock & Pop Competition and I ended up taking one home in the shape of the ‘Best Song’ award for I’m Sorry. I don’t remember saxophone player Jane Leighton (as was) doing any more than two takes on anything and so that double tracked end solo with the third harmony and grace notes added was in all probability recorded in pretty much the time it takes to listen to it, a feat which I still find astonishing.

The End of The Rainbow is a snapshot of what was happening politically in the mid to late eighties from the viewpoint of a twenty-something singer-songwriter and one which I’m not at all embarrassed to stand behind today although as I point out to myself toward the end there, “You don’t get a medal for watching the news, reading the paper, or singing the blues”. In hindsight, Eric Clapton CBE may beg to differ.

The last song on the session – Danny Whitten’s Legacy - involved Gibbon playing the grand piano in the studio’s live room while we monitored his performance from around the corner in the gallery. After a few fluffed takes, tension was rising perceptibly as we were all well aware we were on a fixed budget in terms of both time and money. It also hadn’t worked in our favour so far that someone had pointed out that the rolling chords he was attempting to string together most closely resembled the theme from popular Sunday night vet-centric family entertainment All Creatures Great and Small. These were the days of rewinding tapes and possibly compiling a serviceable final version from a number of performances, not digitally click-and-pasting them to where they should be on the visual laser display unit, and so we were literally running out of space in which to store his work so far. As another take succumbed to the combined pressures of expectation and performance-related anxiety there was a significant pause, an intake of breath, an exhalation. Finally a voice floated ethereally through the monitors from the other side of the wall. “Don’t shoot me” he began phlegmatically. “I’m only the piano player”.

You can listen to The World Service here; http://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/album/world-service
(Tracks 1-6 recorded at Spaceward by Owen Morris - the Constable Mix of "Far Away" is because Steve didn't like the effect Owen put on his acoustic guitar at the start of the song and so he (Owen) asked him if he (Steve) thought he could do any better. It had been a long night. Tracks 7-10 recorded with the Neale Foulger/Steve 'Kilbey' Mears rhythm section on Tascam 4-track at at The Portaloo, Clarkson Street, Ipswich by James Partridge). 

There is a splendid Spaceward Studios archive online from which I stole the photo of the desk above, and which includes some pictures of Owen, a story about how Iron Maiden’s first demo got wiped, a shot of Julian Cope recording Fried and a list of bands who recorded there which as well as us (“demo”) includes Stiff Little Fingers. They recorded Alternative Ulster, which I’m not sure Mr Wendell realised at the time.
http://www.spaceward.co.uk/spaceward-studios/index.htm

Showtime for the indiscreet, and standing on the stage…

After two days of singing in the car on my way to and from work I am pretty happy that I’ve remembered all the words for my comeback solo performance (“For one night only, folks, roll up, roll up”) at The Kelvedon Institute in Essex, sandwiched between Cambridge-based master of lugubriosity David Stevenson and club circuit veteran Mike Silver. To appropriate a metaphor I heard recently, I am the sauce between the burger and the bun – not satisfying on its own, but something that will hopefully make the whole experience a little more piquant. At least this is the theory. 

Both David and Mike are acoustic guitarists of the dropped tuning variety, and so to spice up the constituency of middle-aged white males with jumbo guitars I have elected to delve back into my formative years and perform on an electric and through a Marshall combo, all the better to coax out the subtle nuances of the sound of the Telecaster, and to embrace the inevitable Billy Bragg comparisons. Also, I’m a thrasher, not a picker, and this is going to be much easier with the benefit of amplification. Back in the day I actually played a few pubs in Peterborough where the locals still recalled Mr. Bragg honing his craft, including one locale called New England. True say, brothers and sisters. 

Since I’ve borrowed the amp I’m not entirely sure what it’ll sound like but things are satisfyingly simplified by there being a channel which simply has three controls – one for volume, one for treble, and one for bass. This should be a reasonably easy line check. Worryingly, no sound emanates from the rig once I’m all plugged in and so I start switching leads, jiggling knobs, looking for a previously unnoticed ‘standby’ switch and then am relieved to spot that I have actually plugged into the footswitch socket on the front of the fascia. Satisfied that no-one's noticed this elementary faux pas, I stride confidently to the front of the stage to check the monitors. Still no sound. Bugger! Friendly sound engineer James points out that after all the cross referencing of cables for brokenness, I have omitted to plug the lead back in to the guitar. The carefully constructed façade of effortless cool has thus cracked somewhat. 

Still, guitar sound done, there remains a popping on the microphone which has been set up for someone who can actually sing properly and since I subscribe to the Tom Robinson up close and personal method of waiting until I can feel the wire gauze on my bristles before emoting (and I’ve shaved today) this is clearly going to prove problematic. Luckily a pop shield is sourced and I am able to both relax into my usual mannered vocal style and also put it on the end of my nose so that I look like a muppet, a beloved tradition of many years standing. Sounding like one is something I'm going to have to come to terms with. Second up on the bill, I am introduced on stage by club MC Tony Winn, who gets my name wrong and I launch into the first number, a rowdy thrash about shameless marital infidelity written in the form of a confessional from a fictional third person. Most of tonight’s are, in fact, as I have decided to eschew the songs James and I have been writing for Songs from The Blue House entirely and play some old. 

After the first couple I am relaxing into the set, and although conscious that this probably not what most of Mike Silver’s audience were hoping for, they are kind enough to applaud the good bits and pass discreetly over the unintentional jazz chord in one middle eight which I decide to hang on for another fifteen bars in the hope that they’ll think it’s part of the arrangement. I think I got away with it. Adrenalin has given me an extra couple of notes on the range, and I’m enjoying the freedom afforded by playing standing up to pace the stage, backing off the mic for loud bits and coming in close to emote sections of what I believe to be breathy intimacy, but what the attentive punters probably understand to be character-led diversions into the persona of a nuisance phone caller. We’ll see, when we review the recording afterwards. 

The last song comes around and I haven’t fluffed too many chords, have got most of the words in the right order, and have a satisfyingly lengthy round of applause ringing in my ears. I get my gear off and out of the way and bump into Mike who is warming up backstage and who very kindly observes that “I’ve never heard of you, but that was great!” There’s nothing like a bit of peer praise to give you a readybrek glow in a situation like that. Obviously, he’s about to go on, play an hour of wonderful songs, sing in a rich, warm voice and pick guitar parts which are almost baroque in their composition and execution (and get most of the crowd singing heartily along with the choruses) and so he can afford to be generous, but it’s still very kind of him to take the time to mention it. Turns out I’ve sold a CD as well. 

“That sounded great” says James “I’m not sure what the recording will be like though because when I checked the headphone mix I could hear James Hurley and I’d forgotten to turn my interval mix on the iPod off “ It’s probably for the best. Nothing extinguishes that space cadet glow like listening back to the recording and realising that, yes, that guitar was out of tune for the second half of the set and, no, nobody really did laugh at that joke you put in to the introduction to that other one. Still, I have my memories. Misty Brewers Gold-coloured memories, of the way I was.