Another Happy Day

I’m occasionally of the opinion that if I were to write an autobiography, and simply stop at the point at which we started getting gigs in London, it would be a rip-roaring success with an unholy clamour for the sequel – of course in reality wouldn’t even be worth the tax Amazon would dodge on it. I’ve very much lived my career so far in a sort of parallel universe to those who have made it though, and who have retired to a life of speaking tours, and the occasional showcase gig in (say) Pompeii. Nevertheless we share many of the fundamental aspects of our life and experiences. I’ve got sleeping in the van stories, sleeping in someone’s kitchen, sleeping in a dormitory at a community centre in Denmark…in fact upon reflection, very many of these rip-roaring anecdotes involve either finding, or being overly concerned with securing, places to sleep. There more I consider it though, the more I tend toward the school of thought which holds that I may have misjudged the mood of the memoir-buying public in this respect.

Neil Young has a great (now confirmed) urban legend about him listening to mixes of his new album whilst sitting in a boat on the lake outside his home in California with the house serving as one half of a stereo speaker system while his rehearsal PA, set up in the adjacent barn, served as the other. My equivalent story involves listening to Magical Mystery Tour whilst leaning against one wardrobe - which had the left-hand speaker atop it - while the other side of the harshly split stereo was being channelled via a chest of drawers on the other side of the room. Admittedly I didn’t have Graham Nash in the boat with me while I shouted “More barn!” at my road manager, but we were stoned and looking through kaleidoscopes at the time, and if anything’s going to convince you of the genius of Paul McCartney’s bass playing, that’ll be it.

You see what I mean though – it’s hardly doing our second gig at Woodstock, is it?

I do have my own little moments though – like this morning, when the SftBH song ‘Another Happy Day’ came on in the car through the magic algorithm of random play. I see by reference to the electric internet that it came out over twelve years ago. Twelve years before that I was covering Gram Parsons songs in gods kitchen, which had a nice sort of synchronicity when we put a GP in-joke on the credits for our next album. Back in 2005 though, we were in the middle of a hugely creative and collaborative patch. I think we were still making up the set list as we went along whenever we played live, which certainly kept things interesting for the rest of the band, whilst at home the creative nucleus of the band swooped and dived around each other like two starlings hatching a plot. Helen and I were chipping in on songs with each other remotely, but I think this was one of the first times we sat in a room and decided we were going to write a song together. She wrote the words, I came up with most of the progressions and Mr Wendell, along for the ride for the evening, provided a vital intervention with the odd passing chord in the bridge (he described it as either a “Paul Weller chord or a Beatle one…”) which forever after I had to check the fingering of before we played it live, and without ever quite getting it quite right.

The whole thing was intended as a sub-Bible tribute song (certainly on my part) - an intent further magnified when everybody else declined to sing it and I had to adopt my best Boo Hewerdine croon in order to perform the vocal. It was never going to win me first place on an obscure singer-songwriter edition of Stars in their Eyes, but given that my usual party trick up to this point was a note-imperfect rendition of Tonight’s the Night I reckon I got away with that one. Occasional auteur Pete ‘Radar’ Pawsey – a man who had (and I strongly believe still has) the uncanny ability of being able to tinker seemingly pointlessly for hours on end before coming up with a moment of inexplicable genius which puts the cherry on top of whichever Bakewell you’re currently involved in icing – put on a Skywriting dobro part to counterpoint Russ Barnes' lovely answering mandolin. As evidence of both our creative and collaborative instincts we then decided that what the outro really needed was a sung/spoken rapid and rhythmic vocal at the end, which we duly adjured from our friend Matt* who accepted both the commission of writing a short essay on the theme of Another Happy Day and the lack of attention afforded him when he actually came to record his part with impressive equanimity. To be fair, his wife was wearing an astonishingly short skirt when she accompanied him to the studio, and the sofa in the control room was not a forgiving place to sit and think, or even to just sits, so at this remove perhaps you’ll forgive us our temporary distraction from the job in hand.  

We also overdubbed and timecoded the sound of James’s camera, which we’d noticed made a sound in the same key as our song when he switched it on, and which he was duly credited with playing in the sleeve notes. Studio engineer and unflappable sound guru Steve Tsoi arranged the stereo microphones with an impressively straight face for that session, I seem to remember.

Upon reflection, I guess this isn’t the sort of anecdotery by which rock memoirs are judged after all. “We wrote a song, we recorded a song, we hung out with our friends and ate rotisserie chicken from the Tesco’s in Tiptree” it pretty much runs. Still, whenever he hears Harvest on the radio while out cruising in his LincVolt, I wonder if Neil Young chuckles to himself and thinks “That day with Nash on the lake. Man that was fun…”?   

*In the same way that Matt came up with the rap part on this song, our friends Wendell and Kilbey did some guitar parts, a friend of Helen’s Dad played the accordion and the mandolin player’s girlfriend came in and did a lead vocal for us. At times it was a bit like the von Trapp family in there, with us going “Adjure, adjure, to you and you and you…”.**

**Do it in the accent.

Happenings Ten Years Ago.

There was a reunion of sorts at the weekend, wherein grizzled music veterans - alumni and alumna of the  school of hard folk which was Songs from the Blue House - reassembled at Fiddly's country gaff The Hovell to catch up with what we'd all been up to recently. We had a pretty strong line up, including the two Steve's from Too's "Then There Was Sunshine" guitar chorus and TT, who'd travelled from distant climes in order to barbecue things and get gently sun-pinked. Freed from all that having to tune guitars and play chords in the right order malarkey, there was a relaxed vibe amidst the wafting aroma of sizzling sausages and gently toasting halloumi. A couple of us couldn't resist taking the beaters to Fiddly's home-built vibraphone and improvising gently in the hazy summer heat, and besides, there were many fewer wasps inside the shed than out. 

It wasn't always as relaxed as this though, you know. We once had albums to launch, benefit gigs to play, EPs to release, message boards to moderate...if only there were some sort of time capsule we could...oh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060822045026/http://www.songsfromthebluehouse.com/arch0905.htm
      

I Don't Get Around Much Any More

I received a telephone call from Our Glorious Leader on Saturday, welcome not least because any call from him usually presages larks and adventures to some degree, but especially on this occasion because it turned out that he had about a hundred CDs for me to sign as part of the successful Kickstarter-led release of the fifth Songs from The Blue House album, ‘Live’. We had always intended the fifth of our releases to be recorded in front of an audience as this would mean that we could give it a suitably packaged title to follow our sophomore* effort Too, which was in turn followed by Tree and then IV. At one point we discussed presenting the CD in a small fruit container to emphasise that the title was a small play on words, or ‘punnet’. Why my career in marketing hasn’t blazed like a comet across the firmament is a mystery to me, it really is.  

I listened to it in the car this morning, and it really is a thing of wonder. I’m as much a fan of the band as I am a member and although I’m not suggesting this is our Rock of Ages (the last time we made a reference to The Band a kindly reviewer helpfully pointed out that we were ‘deluded’) there are real moments of clarity when the realisation that we didn’t just write these songs, but that we lived them cuts like a knife. Breaking These Rocks is a genuine commentary on (then) current affairs which goes where hard science can’t, Song V is a true story set in root-fifth Cinemascope, counterpart Song III is a three act Linklater screenplay performed in four and a half minutes. Of course there is shade at the heart of the performance in that although we’re not quite at the stage of being "Hilton Valentine’s Animals", over the course of a decade there will inevitably be some comings and goings – of the original line up Jimmy quit for one, and then Jody got married – and that the performance we recorded was actually the launch gig for our previous album gives some clue as to the recent slackening off in our work rate.

 

As fascinating to me as its parent album is the associated outtakes and rarities collection** put together as one of the packages we hoped to entice our online benefactors with. There is our very first demo version of Bike – sounding pretty much the same as the version that kicks off the live album. There’s the version of Fairport Convention’s Rosie which we put together for Ces, that brace of psych-folk Beatles reworkings, Gibbon’s close harmony-led gospel version of When God Created Angels, the instrumental from our Steely Dan period that we never got round to finding lyrics for, the one that, conversely, we had two fully formed sets of words to decide between, the Judas Priest cover.

 

As I say, we didn’t just record this music, we lived it, and there’s a side to me which is gets more melancholy by each day that it looks increasingly like we won’t be living it again any time soon. Mind you, one guy did pick up the House Concert option on Kickstarter. He’s asked if we can do it at his place in the South of France…                      

You can find our music at http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/  

  

*Annoying, isn’t it?

**I’m fully aware that in terms of our commercial profile, pretty much everything we’ve ever released is a rarity.

"Spare a talent for an old ex-leper..."

We (Songs from The Blue House) did a pop show the other day at The High Barn in Great Bardfield, which is where we originally turned up some years ago to do a set at their beer festival, the fee for which we negotiated down to a day's recording at which we did a version of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". This set in motion many trains of endeavour, not least the one which lead to us featuring in The Word Magazine as a bunch of Rock Dads (I've gone on about this at length before many, many times) which in turn meant that our friend James Kindred, who we'd corralled at short notice to do the accompanying photo for us, got sent a press pass to the Latitude Festival in order to do some shots with Peter, Bjorn and John. He put them in deck chairs eating ice creams if I recall correctly, and his submission featured in the next issue. Kind of serendipitious, I reckon.  

Anyhoo, long story short, we were belatedly launching our cunningly-titled album 'IV' at the gig and decided to do a chronologically-based set list starting with the first song we wrote and finishing some hour and a half later with the most recent. Since there's a fully-automated 69-track digital studio right there it seemed a shame not to record the whole thing for posterity, and once the engineering voles had cleared enough space on the hard drive (in the old days we'd just have taped over someone's precious once-in-a-lifetime, life-savings-consuming two inch demo master tape and left them weeping at their inability to cough up the £50 required to preserve it for a month in storage, but then I suppose that's progress for you) that's what we did.

In the great tradition of epoch-defining live albums (I'm thinking All The World's A Stage, On Your Feet or On Your Knees, or perhaps Showaddywaddy's Live in Germany) we'd now like to put the recording of the gig out as a CD or download or somesuch. Which is where you come in.

We have decided to employ the phenomenon of crowdsourcing (as opposed to crowd surfing - that didn't go so well that one time, but then I blame the supper club-style seating plan) to provide some lowly sound engineer with the means by which to both feed his family and to be able to afford the electricity required in order to be able to switch the studio equipment on for long enough to be able to fix that sloppy tuning in the second number and put enough EQ on the audience mics that we don't have to use the second-hand crowd track from The Adicts' Rockers Into Orbit. I hear we're going to leave in that bit about percussionist Mick Harding being able to kill a bear with his man hands.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter page, which details a number of enticing packages that you can invest in, and which also features a short video explaining our predicament vis-a-vis finance in which I end up threatening Our Glorious Leader with a battery powered drill. Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1807726723/songs-from-the-blue-house-live-album             

"Okay, Songs From The Blue House, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hurry you..."

Our kind and munificent record company have finally started looking at their watches, tapping them meaningfully and making raised eyebrow gestures toward the clock whenever we turn up to add another cello, bass trombone, vocal or mandolin to the masterwork in progress, and have faced us down with the sort of offer that James is increasingly negotiating with his children - "Okay, one more, and then we really have to go to bed". In our case it's not "one more" story, rotation of Thomas The Tank Engine on his track or YouTube viewing of monster tractor racing, but one more day of easy-going studio work before they start asking us for money every time we turn up. Which is fair enough - at market rates we've already spent about twelve grand's worth of their money (or, as we like to think of it, they've invested that much faith in our ability to produce a half-decent album while not bumping into the furniture) and we are over our agreed deadline. Four weeks may seem like a long time to put together sixteen songs, but we've not had the luxury of gathering everyone together for a couple of weeks pre-work and rehearsals and then decamping to the studio en masse for the duration of the sessions and then calling people in from the chill-out lounge when we need them to do a bit more work on their bit. A keyboard part has been put down btween prog-rock tours of Scandinavia and The Netherlands, a pedal steel solo between moving house and working on the new McFly album, a cello part because Liz was in the studio working on one of the other albums being recorded there, and a fairly integral acoustic guitar part after our protagonist managed to wrap up a training course in double quick time and scoot off to see us in the afternoon. We are moving air here, and so merely plugging things into a home PC isn't going to cut it once the thing is mixed, mastered, laser etched and delivered (or downloaded) - hence the airy studio and expansive (and expensive) selection of studio gadgetry involved, however now the pressure is on to not compromise all the hard work we've done (and cajoled people into doing on our behalf) so far just because the meter's very audibly running. The album itself is a medley of an affair. Some folky, some country, some acoustic pop and some confessional singer-songwriter, and so how it all hangs together is a peculiarly irksome nut that we're still no nearer to cracking than we were when we arranged all the songs in alphabetical order after the very first rough mix. There are a multiplicity of singers (and a dearth of the second album's big selling point - our female vocalist) and so the murky water of the stylistic content is further muddied by the changes in who you're listening to delivering it. Nevertheless, the material is strong, and so once everyone's downloaded it onto their computer and hence to their iPod where they'll listen to it on shuffle, that's really not going to matter too much. I think I may be the last man in England who listens to albums all the way through. The clue's in the title though - these are songs from The Blue House, and so whatever's best for their delivery is what makes the cut.
And so, heads down, ears open and let's get ready with those pursed lips and thoughful, furrowed expressions as we attempt to guide these steers into the corrall and brand 'em with the SftBH iron. It's tempting to try and rush this part of the process, but in the same way that you can't hurry love, in our game we long ago discovered that it's not over until The Fat Controller sings....

The Snow Came Down on This Ol’ Town

 

Another day in the studio, and another chance to sit in a comfy swivel chair and stare at lines on a screen. Back in the old days, you see, folks got together and played a song over and over in a recording studio until at least two of the band got it pretty much right, and then a young person who’d expressed an interest in getting into music would sit poised over a rewind button for the next three days while everyone else watched the tape rewinding over and over again as the guitarist tried to nail ‘the one’ take that would be committed for posterity and the singer fretted that there wouldn’t be enough time left at the end of the sessions to do more than three takes on the harmonies.

Occasionally the Tape Op would be despatched for coffees, sandwiches or to wake up the singer to see what he thought of the latest solo, or to drag him away from the pool table/Spinal Tap video/ pub, depending on the salubriousness of the facilities. Once, I came back from a refreshing lunch to find that the engineer had locked the rest of the band out of the studio while his Mum cooked tea for him (we were working on decidedly different timescales). I think it’s fair to say that this studio was at the lower end of the range facilities-wise. 

George Harrison once notably responded to George Martin’s “Tell me if there’s anything you don’t like” with the legendary riposte “Well, I don’t like that tie”. On this occasion the singer responded to a similar enquiry from our bass player simply, “I don’t like him. Or his collection of porn which he insists we go and watch while we’re trying to do those guitar overdubs”. They were simpler times. The studio was in a converted stable. After the sessions were over we made a bolt for the door. These days, we stare intently at a screen on which our notes are displayed and endlessly analyse whether things are in time, in tune and of the correct amplitude. I’m not entirely sure what that means, which is probably why our engineer turned the displays off at one point and insisted that we simply listen to the track. And we had to go and get our own coffees. 

The luxury of digital editing is that no-one is too concerned about having to rewind the tape to the right point as “…that bit just before the middle eight” is clearly visible onscreen, as are the bits where the horns come in and that section where we put down a vocal just in case we’d need it later. The bits of paper with “gtr – left” written on have been replaced with drop-down menus and digital interfaces which mean that the spectres of the tape becoming see-through, stretched, stuck together or simply dropped have gone with the wind. Imagine though, the first Boston album with even more overdubs… 

As it turns out, the instant rewind is as much of a curse as a blessing, as I listen to the twenty-fourth take on the simple phrase “When I look back!” I am intent on making sure that this, the first line of the song, is as intense, visceral and moving as I remember it from the demo. The Singer is having trouble getting a reservation to ‘that place’, let alone a ticket, and The Engineer is laying his head restfully on the recording console, from which there emanates a slight thudding noise. 

My production technique is starting to look decidedly flaky. The phrase “Concentrate on the N” is received with blank looks from both, and justifiable mild irritation from the man wearing the rather fetching headphone ensemble. We decide to “get back to that one” and to play with Pro Tools instead. As any fule kno, Pro Tools is a system whereby you can pick up bits of digital information (recorded sound in this case) and move them. Back, forward, up, down – whether or not there’s something going on here and we’d like to keep it hidden, we’ll try almost anything once, and no move is forbidden. Naturally we rely on the integrity of our performance, and so there is absolutely, and I want to get this straight, no manipulation of harmonies going on at all. Oh no. At one point I drift off and am woken by a conversation involving E flat (it’s not all glamour in the music biz you know). 

There are manipulations of red lines on the screen, mouse clicks, and a cutting and pasting frenzy to put all but the most active of pre-school playgroups to shame. In the end though, as in the days of tape, the result will be the same. A small boy holds out his work and says “Look. Look what I did today!”

As an adjunct, this is one of the tracks we were working on that day. 

https://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/incredible