"I wrote some new songs,I thought I'd play 'em. I didn't know what else to do with them"

We have been writing songs at The Blue House (hence the catchy name of the band) collectively and individually - some scraps of riffage and chordwork, and bouncing lyrics and tone poems back and forth across the ether and Our Glorious Leader has even got as far as committing some of them to hard drive. Some of them have been composed during car journeys with the demos on the CD player ("How did people write lyrics before cars were invented?" muses The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley, our resident chanteuse. "They wrote them in tandem with each other" I reply pithily). 

Some of them are quite good - I'm particulary impressed with the work OGL has undertaken in wrangling one particular set of mine onto a tune by guest piano-botherer TT, a reflection on a trip I took to New York - everybody should have a New York song I reckon - I think it is lyrically sourced in a melange of The Eagles' "Whatever Happened To Saturday Night" and Boo Hewerdine's "World's End", TT reckons it reminds him of Ralph McTell. Hmmmm... 

So when we are contacted by our friends at The High Barn in Great Bardfield with the offer of a half hour acoustic set in three days time it seems obvious in SftBH terms that we should use the occasion to road test the new material, notwithstanding the fact that High Barn Records are also our label and we have an album to promote. Faint heart never won Radio Two airplay and all that.

We gather in the control room at the studio adjacent to the venue, Me, La Mulley and TT and look expectantly at the rather shaky figure of OGL. He was up until half three finishing off the vocal on one of our more recent creations and is currently a bit short on sleep, food and, by most reckoning, vital life signs. He's also pretty much the only one that can remember how the songs go all the way through, and we're on in two hours. What could be simpler? 

We work on our parts together, TT manfully arpreggiating at the piano, me capo'd at the second fret to make things easier because they all seem to be in E and La Mulley nervously adding some harmonies to things that seemed so much easier to sing along with in the car. It's all coming together, mind, and we smile affably at the other acts as they pass the control room window being shepherded to the stage by our friend and sound engineer Simon, who isn't entirely convinced by the claim that we don't actually know any of the stuff that we're due to play, at least until the fourth time he's performed this operation and his cheery thumbs ups have turned to slightly worried frowns - he was there for the soundcheck, or 'first run through' as we called it. Finally we decide that there's no more to be gained from further repetiton and retire to the venue's bar for refreshing Brewers Gold and brave-face-on-it smiles, not least at our record company boss, who can't quite believe it either.

Showtime for the indiscreet, and standing on the stage OGL confesses himself to be "shitting it", which is not entirely reassuring for either us or the audience, who are similarly not relaxed by my joke involving mishearing my wife saying she wished I had "..an amazing pianist", still, it's the one thing I actually have rehearsed in the short time between hearing about the gig and doing it, and so I'm determined to use it, as it were. And so off we go. It's a wonderful thing when the synchronicity 'tween audience and performer(s) seems to be just right. 

We introduce a song by explaining that OGL and TT are both fans of The Who, although of different albums, and so we are going to perform a song which creates the bridge between Quadrophenia and Who's Next , and do you know, it very nearly does, even given that neither of those albums is necessarily noted for featuring a bodhran-style hammering on an acoustic guitar (open-tuned to 'C' for the occasion) or an unnecessarily Neil Young-style backing vocal, both courtesy of yrs truly - the lyric for the BV is only six words long, and I still had to write it down... 

The default solo in Falling, a standard run up and down the scale (imagine George Harrison on an off day) followed by some ambitious finger-tapping which had TT in hysterics a few minutes ago actually works in context, and by the time we get to the last song in the set we're pretty confident that we're about to have pulled it off, and so we hammer on. There has been a discussion in the car on the way to the gig about what the lyrics to this last one are actually about, and La Mulley has been surprised to find that OGL has stumbled upon the real heart and soul of the song lurking soft and hidden, unsuspected beneath the still waters of the typewritten word. 

I won't tell you what it's about - you may, one day, have the opportunity to work a meaning out for yourself, and in the best traditions of songs that do things, it'll make it's home in whatever dark drawer of your mind that it chooses to, but for us it is still new, it's still finding it's way and as the climax of the song comes shooting through the veins of the chords our singer is briefly overcome, and the words tumble out in a torrent of raw emotion, like a crystal moment of grief and pain and loss, and a bewildered hatred of things that he just can't understand. 

Well, that's the way I heard it. You can't buy it, its not for sale.

Multicore Blimey!

The Board of Directors of Songs from The Blue House have had a very good meeting with Our Beloved Record Company regarding our plans for global domination of the acoustic pop (folk-and-country-influenced sub-division) market this week, and flushed with our success at making notes and following fully exposed agendas are looking forward to meeting with the organizers of a local festival who have asked Our Glorious Leader to curate their Acoustic Stage. I am attending in a capacity which is not so much Butch Cassidy to his Sundance Kid, but will be characterized later with the suggestion that I am issued with a t-shirt bearing the legend “James’s Bitch”. I wouldn’t mind, but it wasn’t even him who suggested it. 

This is a preliminary get together just to ensure that everybody knows who should be doing what to whom, and by when, and as such is naturally hosted in the saloon bar of The Dove Street Inn. OGL has forsaken his usual working attire of brewery branded polo shirt and is sporting a nice jumper, which is a measure of how seriously he’s taking the whole thing, and I am in my usual Saturday garb of a pair of his cast-off jeans, which indicates how seriously I’m taking this year’s diet. 

 Introductions are made, notes are produced and we settle down to work our way through the list, Myself, OGL, The Festival Organiser and Louise who has been co-opted onto our team as nominal Stage Manager, even though she’s not entirely sure what one of those does. This will all be explained in due course, but firstly, to the agenda! OGL and I are enthused about the idea of bringing our experience of these sorts of events to bear and are soon enjoying throwing suggestions and questions into the mix – the first of which principally concerns the mixer. 

The acousticity of the stage is implicit – bass players will be allowed small amplifiers since no-one plays one of those big double bass things any more, but every thing else will be going through the mixing desk and PA speakers – drums will not be mic’d up. Now, I know what you’re thinking – how come all this technology is being brought to bear on making what are essentially hollow boxes with strings on louder through the application of electricity, diodes, transformers and speakers, when the truly acoustic nature of the mighty percussionist’s art, le batterie, the second oldest profession, is denied the basic comforts of being made louder? Well, we don’t make the rules, and anyway, they’re used to it by now. 

We have a number of suggestions to try and ensure that the day runs smoothly for crew and performers alike, gleaned from years of turning up to outdoor gigs to find that the stewards don’t know who the stage manager is, the stage manager can’t find the sound guy, the sound guy is in a mood because he hasn’t been given the stage set ups of any of the bands’ line ups and the group on two slots before you is running half an hour late because the second band on the bill were late setting up and then got an encore. We propose our list of essentials. 

These may sound obvious, but not all have been covered, and these are based on grim experience in the past. Firstly – a stage. Sounds pretty rudimentary, but although the performance area will be under the cover of a marquee, the rest of the park, ‘backstage’ and the audience area will not. Spend eight hours trudging backward and forward over the same patch of slightly damp grass in sensibly sturdy boots with a selection of bass amplifiers and drum kits and you soon have an area of cut up turf which most closely resembles Wigan Athletic’s centre circle, and which tends to do for ease of performance what Wigan Athletic’s Titus Bramble does for calm, clear-headed defending. 

 Monitors – say, for example, that you have a half deaf fiddle player who is playing out in the open air, where the sound wafts away on the whim of the breeze and who can’t keep track of where the beat is because he can’t hear either of the guitarists either. Point a wedge-shaped monitor speaker at him and turn it all the way up to twelve. I’m not saying this has happened to us at every festival we’ve played. I’m saying it happens at every indoor gig too. Chances are someone else will have a similar story.

 Get us a portaloo. Some of the turns will be either playing outside for the first time, will be in front of lots of people they know, or conversely lots of people they don’t know, will have driven long distances with little opportunity for comfort breaks, or will have been behind the sound desk all day with nought but a Shell garage all day breakfast triple decker sandwich and a family-sized lucozade for company, or will have been at the beer tent all afternoon, or will have a personal evacuatory ritual which must be conducted precisely five minutes before showtime. You don’t want these people queueing behind three families with crying toddlers, two guys full of off license Merrydown and half a dozen pre-teens who desperately need to check their make up at the public toilets ten minutes across the park when you’re running to a deadline, trust me. 

 And so it goes on - “Do you have a multicore”. “A what?” “Don’t worry, I’ll get one”. I also make a mental note to remember spare strings, leads and batteries. Someone will have forgotten to check their electronic tuner, the active DI circuit in their Takamine or their chorus pedal, and the gig’s on a Sunday and in a park. That’s no time to be panicking when you can’t tune your guitar because none of the little red lights come on when you plug it in. In those sorts of situations the only reasonable thing to do is blame the last person to use your tuner/guitar/chorus pedal or, if in doubt, the fiddle player.

 There are a numbing number of these sorts of things – little practicalities which will just help the whole thing run that little bit more smoothly than if we’d forgotten to do them. Band gear specifications, a gazebo for the mixing desk in case of either rain or shine, or both, a crate of bottled water for the parched and/or nervous performer, an agreed chain of command and responsibility and a form of identifying pass or t-shirt which means that everybody knows who’s responsible for doing what, and when. 

Louise quite literally perks up. “Can we have them in girl’s styles? A nice strappy top or something, only I’ll look terrible in one of those baggy XL men’s sizes”. At last, a suggestion that really makes sense and we dutifully make a note on our lists of things to do. “And I’m not really familiar with what goes on at these gigs – I mean, what’s a practical sort of thing to wear on the day?” asks our stage manager. We agree silently and speak as one. “Generally cut-off shorts, really small bikini tops, that sort of thing” we propose, sagely. “Pretty much anything you’d ordinarily wear to wash the car”.

“Busy Doing Nothing, Working The Whole Day Through…”

To the Barry Bunker! The new wave of British pub bandery takes a new twist as the Picturehouse talent, or at least the stringed aspect of the team, convene in darkest Essex to run through a few new things with which to replace the departing Bass Player’s repertoire of plunks, twangs and squeezes. 

Having slimmed down from an expansive four-vocaled five piece whose mission statement was to play the things that you’d forgotten you liked to the more regular three-up-front-one-at-the-back formation favoured by so many of our contemporaries, it does feel rather as though we’ve abandoned the Dutch free-flowing total football style we were previously employing in order to adopt the meat n’ potatoes work ethic of the sort likely to be managed by Sam Allardyce. 

Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that you understand (unless you’re a Newcastle fan, or chairman, or both), it’s just that there’s a lot of it about. However, needs must, and so we are gathered in front of a PC, with two people plugged into it via a DI box, listening to tracks on MP3, downloading lyrics, burning CDs and streaming audio. I, rather anachronistically, am sitting at the table with an acoustic guitar, a pad of scrap paper and a thick-nibbed marker pen. 

It’s a mighty long way from that pleasant domestic scene portrayed on those early Fairport Convention albums, with the band all gathered round the table having breakfast together, presumably before leafing through some scrolls liberated from Cecil Sharp House in a leisurely fashion, working out a bass riff in the living room and then breaking off for a quick kick about before tea; It sounds heavenly, but this ain’t the garden of Eden, things ain’t like they used to be, and this ain’t the summer of love.

On the way down I have been privileged enough to hear the songs that Guitarist Barry, Now-Bassist Kilbey and AWOL singer Wendell have been working on in their own time – a lovely mélange of CSN harmonies, reverberating guitars and sampled strings which sounds a lot more like it’s benefited from the kitchen table treatment, even if Barry’s production relies slightly more on the implied threat of the appearance of the kitchen sink. It’s seriously quite lovely and never more so than during a number entitled ‘Turquoise Blue’, wherein the embarrassment of relaying the decade-old lyric is overcome by the simple expedient of translating it into French and getting a teenaged girl to whisper it only barely just above the wash of the backing track. It makes the sound of phosphorescence on a tranquil sea lapping gently at a sandy beach in the moonlight. Put it this way, it’s no “I Wanna Rock n’ Roll All Nite”.

Back at the ranch, exciting news regarding the partially dormant gods kitchen (missing believed retired by some, a mere whisper of a rumour of a legend to others and used principally to frighten youngsters into concentrating hard during guitar lessons let they too be drafted into our ranks) This is yet another excursion into uncharted territory in that it’s a band playing original songs (mine) in a style which comes back into fashion around every four or five years or so, and since it’s been a good year and a half since we’ve trod the boards, I’ve rustled up a couple of gigs for this year just so we can get our ticket stamped and carry on our membership of the ‘we exist as a band, we do’ club, which we’re now into our fourteenth, or fifteenth or somesuch year of doing, cruising comfortably along below the radar of popular indifference, which in a town like Ipswich isn’t half as tricky as some people make out. 

I fondly remember the small ad I put in the paper when I was putting the band together – “musicians required, into baggy shirts and A minor”. It’d get you put away these days. However, I digress - when Ken Stringfellow toured as part of REM and then hung on to do a few extra dates with The Posies to which a dozen or so punters turned up (they did at the Norwich gig at least – and I would know…brrr it was draughty in the venue that night) I knew exactly how he felt. Only scaled down – we aspire to a dozen followers these days, but I very much fear that in the same way that video was alleged to have killed the radio star at one point, the DVD boxed set has pretty much put paid to the chances of our target audience making their way down to The Steamboat on a cool Thursday evening. So naturally I’ve asked two other bands to do it as well, just to keep the numbers up. Needs must.

And finally to the last round in this game of musical chores and in my capacity of Chief Foil for Our Glorious Leader, I am due to call Our Beloved Record Company on behalf of Songs from The Blue House to check up the details on our forthcoming download single. From doubling the riff on Girls Aloud’s “”Love Machine” on an acoustic guitar in someone’s kitchen to chasing up Suzie from the office about the possibility of doing some festivals on the back of our radio sessions to promote “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” in one short day, and to that from learning the b-side to “My Ding-a-Ling” on a four stringed nylon-strung guitar, in a mere quarter of a century? Huh, kids today. They don’t even know what a transit van is.

"He's not the best guitarist in the world..."

Second show for replacement frontman and jobbing guitarist to the stars 'Barry' tonight. In a typical move for the group we have engaged the services of a fast fingered fret frotter and made him, principally, The New Singer, a displacement of abilities unsurpassed since we moved a great bass player onto guitar and then entreated another one to hop aboard and then made sure he was on keyboards for a large proportion of the set while I, a guitarist by inclination, filled in on bass. To avoid any confusion, Barry has brought us all badges featuring the legends 'guiatrist', 'bass player', 'singer' etc. Our frequently topless drummer, who is at least a proper drummer, has decided to wear his badge neatly inserted through a nipple, which we trust was previously pierced, but with that boy you're never entirely sure about this sort of thing. My disquiet and vague sense of unease is shared by at least one sensitive member of the audience, although I didn't feel the need to bury my face in my hands. It was a bit sore by the end of the night apparently. Who knew?
Anyhoo, Barry ventures as far as putting his safety blanket, I mean guitar, down for one song, but is discomfited enough by the experience to pick it up again for the next, and seems much happier for it. He also has an unnerving habit of knowing the right notes for everything, which when you've managed up until now by employing broad approximations of things can come as a bit of a shock to the system, but adapting to the change in circumstance with the ease of a seasoned player, I find the best approach is to simply let him get on with it since it makes both of us happy to hear all those widdly notes being played in the right order for a change, although a 'tween set enquiry as to when, exactly, Joe Satriani joined Graham Coxon's band isn't posited entirely with a tongue in cheek. A side effect of this though is that it does tend to up your game when it comes to solos that you know are going to be followed shortly by something bigger, better, faster, more. That's the comfort zone with it's dividing wall thoroughly knocked through, an extension planned out the back and patio doors installed then.
We've got one more show this year with The (nominal) Bass Player on board before he retires gracefully to spend more time with his brass band, The Other Guitarist switches back to bass, we learn a whole bunch of new things and I (as far as I'm aware) stick to standing towards the side and occasionally shouting a Clash song towards the end of the set. The new, improved, Adrian Belew version, that is. I'll check the wording on my badge very carefully before that one. Onwards! Upwards! Forward in all directions! You are present at the birth of the new Picturehouse. And so merry christmas, and a happy new year. This is going to be fun.

So, farewell then….

Wendell, The Singer in Picturehouse, has been on the phone to a friend. “So, what do you want to do next Sunday?” says his mate. “And then it hit me” he relates to us later “He’s in San Diego”. It is Wendell’s last gig with us for the foreseeable future, as commuting in from (say) California for occasional gigs in (say) Felixstowe has quite sensibly been deemed an unreasonable incurrence of expense when it comes to the travelling budget. Also leaving are our hosts for the evening, and so we’ve decided to pretty much play everything and since writing set lists is a bit of a chore we’ve decided to do them in alphabetical order. This is quite liberating as we’re opening with something that usually comes toward the end of the set and ending with an opener. 

The set list is long, and in Arial. "It's the most readable font" says Wendell knowledgably. Present and correct are special guests, children, wives, girlfriends and loyal supporters. It’s going to be fun. There is also the suggestion that as they’re leaving it would probably be best if we finished off all the booze before they went and if there were any chairs, mirrors, light fittings or tables anyone fancied then they probably wouldn’t be missed either – “Leave the darts board though” counsels The Singer sagely. “Is it going to be this loud all the way through?” asks a barman who hasn’t seen us before. “No, no” we say reassuringly. “It gets much louder later on”. Wendell is on good form, self-deprecatingly pointing out that even if we did that alphabet song “A-B-C, D-E-F, G-H-I-J-K..” he’d probably still need the lyrics written down. 

First up on the guest list is Andy Trill on bass for ‘By The Way’, which Gibbon, The Bass Player, doesn’t really like doing, but which gives him an excellent opportunity for an early cigarette break, once he’s adjusted the strap to more slap-friendly proportions. Because it’s a ‘B’ song it’s also early in the set, so Trill’s still on his first red wine of the evening when he’s called into action. Next up are one of Kilbey, The Other Guitarist’s, sons and his mate on bass and guitar for I Predict A Riot – usually a bit of a set closer. They rock out while Gibbon does his ‘other job’ on keyboards and Frisky Pat, The Drummer, resplendent in Motorhead T-Shirt and tattoos thrashes the kit to within 2.25 centimetres of it’s life. First set – just over an hour and a quarter I reckon, and the second set’s longer than this one. “Good to see you not starting the set with The Strokes for a change” says someone at half time. “Ah” says Wendell “We’re actually up to ‘L’ now….” 

Everyone’s very much aware that this is pretty much going to be our last chance to do all this malarkey in this form and so the stage tricks are very much to the fore – Pat is beautifully timing the Frankie Vaughan-esque cymbal crashes to match my high kicks, although admittedly London Calling is not really the epitome of a cabaret showmanship showcase. Still, it’s a nice warm up for later on when, liberated by the reappearance of Trill, now reinvented as guitar shredder par excellence (vis his astonishing extended My Sharona solo after which I was only too pleased to be playing the next song on bass upon my return to the stage) I am moved to explore the hidden Hair Metal front man within me. Although I am convinced that I am moving with the snake-hipped insouciance of a lithe part-Coverdale, part-Mercury combination, a mid-number glance at the mirror facing us from the back wall reveals that poor application of hair products to a newly-shorn barnet means that I look like nothing so much as an Andy Riley re-imagining of Robbie Williams as Mr Coconut Head. Still, it’s addictive stuff this foot-on-the-monitor crowd teasing. No wonder he gets het up on tour. 

Speaking of on stage legends, the tail end of the set gives us a chance to welcome back, as Wendell says, the best of all our many guest tambourine players, the legendary Neighbour Neil (there’s a video of a previous performance on our Myspace site, unbelievers) for a spirited The Only One I Know, fellow font-fan Neil combining both of his patented dance moves (a shuffling hopping bounce and an arm-waving move which looks like the sort of thing you’d execute if you were drowning in a swimming pool filled with golden syrup) into a tour-de-force example of the arcane and mysterious art of Bezzing. We’re now down to the last scheduled number. All the way through, poignant lyrics have been popping out of the songs and into the real. “All my life, watching America”, “I’m running down the road trying to loosen my load”, that sort of thing, and now Vice’s “See you later” has a whole new poignancy for me as Wendell bows out.

I reckon we’ve done somewhere near three hours tonight and in a worthily bathetic fashion someone wants to hear something we’ve already played. I steal one of Reado, The Old Drummer’s lines “If you want to hear some more, you’ll have to book us again”. We do a couple more anyway. We were bound to. Safe journey Wendell. See you later.

The Ballad of Chris de Burgh.

The third Songs from The Blue House album, Tree, is now out and unleashed, free to wend it's wandering way wherever it may go. A couple of review copies have already wended their way onto Amazon for instance, which is not bad for something which is officially not released until November. Sadly, the budget didn't extend to flying reviewers in to The Blue House, playing it to them once under laboratory conditions and then escorting them out under cover of darkness bound by a secrecy clause and besides, James hasn't dusted in there for ages. 

With it's posting to reviewers comes the inevitable wait to see what they all think, and so far we're doing quite well - batting a steady seven out of ten average with a couple of very kind remarks which we'll doubtless cut & paste into ads and flyers in the hope of enticing people into our fold. With reviews though, you either take them all at face value or none of them - you can't be picking and choosing the ones you want just because someone has ventured an opinion you don't agree with, after all we did ask them in the first place. An uncomfortable situation has arisen, however, with regard to one of the songs "In My Arms" which I'm responsible for and which we regularly introduce live as being our attempt to be the first forty year-old boy band. 

It was originally recorded for what I like to refer to as my "solo album" and which several other people have referred to as "a bunch of demos" - entitled 'This Much Talent', I did it at home with Gibbon on bass, keyboards and drum machine wrangling, and originally featuring a faux-naif twelve string solo by Wendell Gee as well as a three part harmony climax (giving plenty of room for the good-looking one who can't sing to stand at the back looking wistful, should any real forty year old boy bands chance upon it and put it on the soundtrack to a major movie, which wasn't the original intent, but would certainly go a long way to helping with the overdraft should it come to pass and, as we all know, all things must pass). 

Our reworked version has prompted two seperate comments so far that it is "…a bit Lady In Red". This I find worrying, on so many levels. We've tried to hick a couple of things up a bit on the album, and we've included a few in-jokes for the musicological literati to spot, but this one really passed us by. The really disturbing part is that, having had a listen back, they may have a point. It's an instructive lesson in how perception varies between people, and now I'm concerned. 

Not so much about the songs on this album, it's more the one I had lined up for the next one about a spaceman who goes travelling, gets on a boat for which the ferryman is demanding payment before he reaches his destination (on the other side, as it were) and then sleeps with his children's Nanny. We might have to work on the arrangement for that one.

Guerrilla you’re a desperado…

I’ve seen the footage on YouTube of Babyshambles putting on so-called guerrilla gigs, oh yes. It’s the new showcase, apparently – surreptitiously circulate the news to a few discreet and loyal fans (on your MySpace site, say) sit back, and wait for The Man to be devastated by your circumlocution of the traditional album-gig-merch treadmill. It’s nothing new, of course. Back when I was someone, our band put on a gig of which we, the band, were only allowed to tell one person each and we still managed to fill a decent-sized room. 

Del Amitri once toured the entire US of States playing busker gigs and crashing on people’s floors and Ian McNabb-out-of-The Icicle Works recently cancelled a couple of ‘proper’ gigs in order to allow him to play at fan’s houses instead. Although his apologies to those who’d bought tickets to go and see the full, mighty McNabb experience live in concert were fulsome enough, there was a certain inference that popping round to someone’s house, being plied with booze and being able to crash upstairs shortly after emptying the fridge of three-in-the-morning munchies was far preferable to hiring a van and driving half way across the country to soundcheck in the afternoon, pay a support act, deal with a recalcitrant lighting engineer and then pay for a dodgy B&B with no room service having trawled the surrounding area for a curry house still open at two in the morning, and you can see his point. 

For we in Songs From The Blue House, however, these are not choices we are forced to make – no-one’s booking us anyway at the moment, and so my neighbour Neil’s query as to when we were going to get off our collective backsides and do some gigs so that he could see us again received the paraphrased retort that if he were so keen why didn’t he just book us himself? And so he did. With the privileges of promoterdom came responsibility for writing the set list, organizing backstage catering and booking a support band and so it came that on Saturday evening we assembled in his newly refurbished kitchen/diner with four cases of Brewer’s Gold, two kinds of chilli and Kilbey and Wendell from Picturehouse, who were to play a short set of their own compositions (see www.myspace.com/picturhousebigband for an aural introduction) before we went on and did a slightly more drawn out version of the same thing. 

When I say ‘we’, the SftBH line up is a fluid and wonderful concept – the core quorum of three is usually enough to establish that a show can go ahead, however on this occasion the lure of good food, good company, and the possibility of crashing out upstairs once the fridge had been emptied of munchies had drawn out eight of us into the mean streets of the sweet, sweet candy town that is Ipswich, including occasional contributors Nick on pedal steel all the way from Rickmansworth and TT on keyboards; and we’re not talking about a big living room here, by any means. Fortunately the Picturehouse vintage synthesiser was smaller than TT’s regulation issue piano and so, with his encyclopeadic knowledge of all things keyboardy he was able to manipulate an approximation of a piano sound out of it, even if it did look as if he were permanently about to fall off the dusty end on the more expansive numbers.

Fiddly (all the way from Thorndon) sat in a chair so he didn’t break his bow on the ceiling, everyone in the audience settled into sofas and armchairs, bits of vacant carpet, alcoves and the stairs (and in the case of Ruby, sleeping through her first gig at the age of two and a half weeks, her carry cot*) and we began. The first two numbers were songs that I sing, coincidentally in the same key, unfamiliar to Nick and so I was gratified to hear him enquiring of TT as to how the second one went, all the better to make his performance as sympathetic within the arrangement as possible. “It’s the same as that one” he replied. Everyone’s a critic… Still, on with the show! The constraints of playing as acoustically as possible (sadly there’s no such thing as an unplugged pedal steel guitar or, for different and more prosaic reasons, a banjo you can turn off, but I digress) mean that your performance in these sorts of situations is subtly altered – dynamics and interaction with your fellow performers, and indeed your audience, are much more focused than if you are all separated by coils of leads, banks of speakers, batteries of lights and yards of space, and so you end up playing differently, -odd as it sounds - more humanly (although again, in terms of banjo players this is a relative term**). 

It’s an exercise more bands should undertake, especially where it concerns the blending together of voices. At one point I got so excited by the sound of acoustic guitars, four part harmonies, a fiddle and the lonesome keening of the steel that I posited the idea of playing all of side two of GP and I had a pretty good chance of getting a majority vote on that if it hadn’t been getting on some. In the end we had a splendid set of our own material, the audience appreciated it, the promoter was more than happy (we’ve played to smaller crowds in pubs, believe me), and we had a good time playing together, not least because (a) we like it anyway and (b) someone else has invited us to play in their cellar next month so it was a nice advance dry run. 

We could still smoke indoors at this venue, hang out showing each other bits of guitar chordery that we’d come across, muck about with some covers, work on harmonies and invite each other round to our houses/sheds/studios to start writing the next album before staggering the two doors down the street back to my own home for the night. And forty eight bottles of Crouch Vale ale, thirty bottles of lager, two boxes of wine and a couple of chillis isn’t a bad rider to have worked through by the close of play. No wonder it’s the new touring. 

*Sorry about that Ruby – when it comes round to “So what was your first gig?” in future years you’re just going to have to grin and bear it.

**I know – I’m doing it on purpose for cheap comic effect – Tony Winn, our resident banjoista, is a terrific player, a marvellous songwriter in his own right and adds immeasurably to the arrangements when he participates. He also knows when to leave a space, and sometimes it’s what you don’t play which adds to the sound as much as what you do play. Especially where banjos are concerned***

***I know – I’m doing it again but, you know, fish, barrel, shooting, it all adds up.

Throughout, I have referred to The Promoter. Obviously, as a happily married couple (happy anniversary guys) our neighbours JessunNeil make these sorts of decisions together, jointly and with a fond accord.

One Door Opens…

A meeting! The band is, naturally, an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internalaffairs -but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more: Order, eh -- who does he think he is? As this week's officer I have summoned the collective to The Dove, the better to discuss what we're going to do when Wendell, The Singer, http://wendellio.blogspot.com/ goes off on a three month world trip, all the better to find himself, some better gigs, and very possibly that set of keys he lost last time out.

We have lined up our good friend, and Picturehouse Small Band producer Andy Trill, formerly of Mr Fish-out-of-Marillion's band to mind the mic, throw some shapes and try and slow down enough for us to try and keep up with him. Despite having thrown shapes in South America, rocked The Cavern and been hospitalised in the former Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe due to alleged overconsumption of bloody marys, Mr Trill is going visibly pale at the thought of putting down his guitar for a couple of songs and simply fronting the band. And this isn't easy by any means for someone who's currently sporting a Sardinian tan. He covers up the nervousness by suggesting that we simply cover Thin Lizzy's 'Live and Dangerous' and be done with it. This suggestion isn't getting a lot of house room with The Other Guitarist, it has to be said. 

Further bombshells ahoy, however as The Bass Player gently suggests that it's time for him to "Do a Reado". Not play drums exceptionally well, in this instance, but retire from active work with the band. Oh dear. Wendell who, lest ye forget, is sabbaticalising for three months anyway, is panic stricken. "What are we going to do without Gibbon!?!?". "We?" I suggest. The Other Guitarist is upset, but sanguine. "I'll miss you" he says. The Drummer less so - "You c*nt!" he opines, merrily. There is more grog taken, Bass Players are toasted and anecdotal stories are revived - one involving an previously un-thesaurused but overly-repeated and gynaecologically descriptive word which (thankfully) escapes me at this point. 

We drink to The Drummer's new daughter's arrival and reassure him that o, really, all babies look like the drummer from Lovejunk. They do though, don't they? Winston Churchill with a mohican. And with sorry hearts we set a deadline for The Bass Player's notice period to expire. The Other Guitarist is about ready to swap back to his first instrument, the bass, The Drummer is offering to zebra-skin everybody's guitars, and there is a thankfully short-lived discussion about getting band tattoos. I think it fell down around the point where we were discussing whether it should read simply ""TPHBB" or "The Picturehouse Big Band". 

The Drummer reckoned that, depending on conditions and where he had it tattooed, he could have both.

A Can of Peas?

And so, to The Dove, where The Singer and I are due to launch the book of the blog of the band and so are astonishingly nervous. I have been into the local BBC radio station earlier in the evening and been interviewed on the drivetime show, during which I have managed to shoehorn into the general chat the phrase 'crypto situationist agenda' which makes me almost as happy as chipping in with "You should see the size of his shoes!" Both of these have been suggested by chums, both of whom I will meet later on this evening but only one of which will turn up later with two crates of cunningly re-branded Brewers Gold with new labels and everything stuck on. They threatened that they'd get their kids to do it.
The interview was great, the readings at the show (by DJ Simon Talbot out of http://www.theurbansofa.co,uk were fantastic - he has the gravitas, delivery and tone that we who have never worked for the BBC can never aspire to - and my parents turned up. Little sister (Don't you do what your big sister done) tried, but the artist formerly known as D J Chatterbox's spiel outdid even her signlanguaging skills, and more fast food arrived than even our hungry chops could deal with.
As literary launches go (not that I have an enormous backlog of experiences of this sort of thing to go on) I think it was a hit. And now, having had the company of more ex-drummers than one rough old acoustic set could ordinarily bear, I'd like to thank The Dove, The Crouch Vale Brewery, Picturehouse , My Family, My Neighbours....you get the idea.

"You can check out any time you like...."

It's hard to know what to say about a day like today. A reunion of sorts, as the original Star Club line up decamp to Spalding for another of our occasional forays back up the road at the behest of The Landlord Formerly Known As Big Paul for another of his farewell parties (we think we're on about the fourth by now....) A new venue for us - The Birds, which is owned by The Evil Empire (Greed King) and as such is a designated Hungry Horse pub - you know the type. I'm riding shotgun with Reado, and Wendell and Kilbey are in the advance train; this car doesn't know what we're going to play, and the other one does, and as such is far more nervous about the occasion. Still, Paul's looking well, we pay our respects to CJ's tree ("It's taller than she was!") and set up in front of the widescreen TVs showing the bike race. Paul is happy to accept a copy of the book (see sidebar for details) and isn't shy of pointing out a basic factual error within seconds. Okay, so the Pink Floyd poster is in The Red Lion, not The Bass House. Derrr. 

We are treated to dinner before we kick off with a few regular covers, after which we are to recreate our halcyon days of Beatle-cover-mania. There are nineteen songs on the set list, so that's a tidy thirty minutes in Beatle terms. Thing is, none of us have played most of these for, oh, three years or so? What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, autoplilot is a wonderful thing, and I find that as long as you don't concentrate too hard, it's a bit like riding a bike. A slightly rusty bike that doesn't seem to have been oiled for several years, but a bike nonetheless. Once you get onto it, it's a dream, although even with the rapidly down-tuned guitars, some of those high notes are just a gnat's smidgen away from being perfect. All that listening to Swing that Reado does in the car is blissfully apparent though, and it's a pleasure to be rooted to the back of the stage beside him once again. 

Once again, it's all over too soon. For the audience, that is - a whoopin' and a hollerin' and a chuckin' money into the bucket to fund our petrol fare home (The Evil Empire's largesse does not, unfortunately, extend to an actual financial contribution of their own) and so we chuck in a couple of repeats and splendid closing "It's The End of The World As We Know It" which seems somehow appropriate. We meet and greet some old friends, hug some new ones, compare hairstyles and attitudes, and pack up the PA for one last time in Spalding. 

We think....

"I think it's just that the band's appeal is becoming more selective..."

Back in the saddle with the Picturehouse posse and we decamp to Needham Market for the evening on a glorious warm Bank Holiday weekend saturday. Now you can blame it on the sunshine, possibly the moonlight even, at a push, on the smoking ban, but it becomes apparent that our usual jokey "We're still pulling them in then?" when confronted by a large empty space where the audience should be, is going to be eerily prophetic. Come showtime there are eight people desultorily hanging out at the tables in front of us. We make sure that everyone's got a drink and has been to the toilet, and we begin. 

It's been a while since we played together, notwithstanding last week's expedition up the road where The Old Drummer stood in for the night, and we are surrised to find that we are playing remarkably well. Seeings as how we're amongst friends we throw in a few things we haven't played for a while and it becomes clear that, proportionally at least, we're going down better than we have for ages, so we throw a few more in. The piped music in the bar hasn't been switched off, so the 'tween song banter has the air of being performed as if on an afternoon radio show, with guesses being made as to what we're listening to, and we're all having a good old time. 

A short break wherein we try and name acts that contain a weapon in their names - Britney Spears being one inspired suggestion - and we're back on track - trying out that new Pink Floyd number (not medleyed into the Haircut 100 song as was suggested at rehearsal) and with several filthy adaptions of song titles issuing forth from behind the kit, where The Drummer has discarded his top in the balmy summer heat and sits with his glowing hirsute chest and tattoos proudly on display. "Look" says The Other Guitarist "He's taken off his shirt" (-beat-) "...and put on a jumper!". 

A lady of certain vintage gets up and dances enthusiastically as we pile into the party set for no other reason than because it's fun. A couple of late arrivals boost us into double figures, we take a couple of requests and bring the evening to a happy conclusion. The dancing lady collars us outside and launches into an enthusiastic summary of our performance in a mixture of broken English and rapid Spanish. There is something about the guitarra in there which sounds definitely complimentary, which is nice, and we pack up in an eerie, silent and deserted bar, which looks exactly as it did when we came in. It is all very odd.

Still, it gives us time to admire anew The Drummer's refurbished kit. He has covered it in fake zebra hide. "Well, I was bored" he explains. It's very nice. Well, we're assuming it's fake....

"Just gimme some of that rock n' roll muzak!"

 I have a fear of corporate gigs. It’s not just that the idea of being the background to a bunch of company drones trying desperately to neck as much expense account vodka and feel up the girl (or boy) from HR as is conceivable in as short a time as is humanly possible, no, it’s based on pure, true, human experience. 

Back in the day when I was in a Beatles specialist band called The Star Club we generally had a whale of a time. I recorded at the BBC’s studio in Maida Vale, doing the same songs the Fabs had done, and eating in the same canteen that Jimi Hendrix had presumably got a similarly poor full English fry up after his session, and I’d met the original bass player from The Quarrymen who told us we had the spirit of the band. We also had a couple of stalkers, and a matching set of polo neck sweaters (to each other, not the stalkers). We were, however, a working band and as such were once booked as company entertainment at a corporate do in Ipswich for a firm I’d worked for previously, wherein was promised fun, frolics, a disco, and a little surprise cabaret turn. 

Once we’d got over the astonishment and indignation involved with the caretaker putting out the chairs being Ipswich Town F.A.Cup-winning goalscorer Roger Osborne, we settled into our role for the evening, that being to provide two sets of rollicking early-era Beatles music and not being too obvious in hoovering up the buffet. At our first break, we realised quite early on during the cabaret interlude that this was to be a home-grown affair. Three lads from production lined up on stage and the telltale strains of Tom Jones’s version of “You Can Keep Your Hat On” powered from the PA like a doom-laden harbinger of excess and, sure enough, half way through the first chorus, the climactic scene from The Full Monty was being replayed before our very eyes. 

The thing is, Randy Newman writes a good song, and he takes time to get there, and so having peaked (as it were) quite early in the number the lads were desperately looking for somewhere to go to take their performance higher. Stage left, the one who looked like a slightly out of condition Frank Carson (hello Jamie!) took to the idea of grabbing one of our guitars and miming along to the song with it. Backstageleft, our John shuddered visibly and looked around for a towel (later to be discarded for ever) with which to wipe it down before he had to strap it on to play the second set. I took a break from proceedings to visit the toilet and was intrigued by the dozen-strong queue outside the disabled toilet. “ has promised blow jobs as long as her knees don’t give out!” announced one chirpy temp, happily sinking another gratis Stella.

 When I came back from the Gents I noticed that the queue had gone down by three. As it were. Fun, fun, fun you might think as, indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, I do. But when you’re completely straight-down-the-line sober on lime and soda, and wondering whose cock has been wiped up and down the back of your 335, it’s no party, I can tell you. And at this point I’d already been told that my mic had been up Max Splodge’s bottom at a previous engagement by the sound crew. Still, we’d seen Backbeat, and somehow this seemed just a validation of our quest for authenticity - drugs, hookers, seedy characters, cup-winning goalscorers.... Still, we were all grinning during the first chorus of “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” after the break. But that ain’t unnecessarily so.

"I think you'll find one drops 'in' to reception, not 'along'...”

It as become apparent to James and Myself over the past few gigs that the original concept of a nice little acoustic band has morphed slightly, specifically at the point where we are engaged in setting up the third of three onstage monitoring systems in addition to the front of house PA. 

Well, 'stage' and 'house' are terms which don't really apply so much as 'gazebo' for we are at another al fresco lunchtime engagement, this time for the Mid Suffolk District Council's open day, where the good tax payers of Needham Market can enjoy face painting, live music and tours of the Chief Executive's office, chair-sitting included. It's a nice little fete-like occasion which is enlivened by the presence of a police car which periodically emits siren howls and a fire engine, which doesn't. The boys (and girls) in the smart blue overalls of the fire service are wont to occasionally set fire to a chip pan, resulting in a vast plume of flame and smoke, before demonstrating their party trick of extinguishing it which on a non-smoking site seems a little gauche. 

Still, it gives us something to watch as we embark on a marathon hour and a half set in the overcast morning, the prework on the gear resulting in a lovely clear sound both engazebo and across the site. We have TT with us on piano today and his trills and flourishes lend a splendid extra musical palette to our performance and we are enjoying the day, the company and, as we play Then There Was Sunshine, the sun itself breakng through the clouds. Gibbon, on bass, is struggling with the concept of a non-mid set fag break, and so when Shelagh, Fiddly's wife, presents the band with a piece of cake each from the stall, he is keen to enjoy it immediately, emboldened perhaps by the sight of TT playing sparkly arpreggios with one hand and eating a burger with the other. And they say men can't multitask. 

We go for Song V, where Gib doesn't come in until half way through the first verse and he accepts the challenge of finishing a large wedge of chocolate cake before resuming playing and, like a pro, manages the timing perfectly, although I do have to dep on the backing vocals, what with him having adopted a hamster-like aspect with regard to his cake-storingly large cheeks. A great set, a lovely day, and nice to see our friend songwriter David Stevenson who has made his way down the A14 from Cambridge to see us, calling in at Felixstowe on the way, If you know anything about East Anglian geography you will realise that this is quite a serious overshoot, matched only by Tony Winn's effort one year on the way to Farnsfield where he was enjoying both the open topped sports car he was in and Bob Dylan on the stereo so much that it was around twenty miles on before he realised he should have turned off some twenty five miles ago. 

Gibbon and I then relocate to our separate  homes for a quick nap before setting up in the evening to play with Picturehouse - the rest of SftBH are reconvening at TT's for a Big Pink-like evening of merriment and jammery, but The Bass Player and I have our regular gig at The John Bull to go to. As comparisons go, these are considerable - PHBB have a set of doughty covers to perform although, as ever, you can't please all the people all the time. At the break one individual regards our set phlegmatically. "Do you just do the ones on this list?" he asks. "Pretty much" I reply, although since we're all in a good mood there may be room for negotiation. "What did you have in mind?" I offer. "Just, well, something nice" he replies sadly. "I've just got to go and talk to some of those people over there" I say. 

Nice is as nice does really, for we have ended the first set with Kilbey's son Liam and a friend joiningh us onstage for a splendid version of Razorlight's Vice. If there were any nerves, they weren't showing and the lad's insouciant teenage demeanour must surely contain as much pride as his father's openly beaming one does. It's a proud and happy moment, and cameras are well in evidence. I duck out of the way so that proud mother Clara doesn't have to keep explaining who the old guy in the Hawaiian shirt is to her neighbours. 

On with the second set and another guest pops up in the form of birthday-celebrating chum Andy Trill, who will be standing in for me later in the year while I'm away. A disturbingly good guitar solo later and he's back off to nurse his post-party hangover once more. Mind you, if he thinks he's suffering, it's nothing to what the audience have to put up with during the end of the set encore. Weighty rock tomes may well postulate at length on the liberating influence of atonal jazz mavericks like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman on popular rock music, but there's no place for it in the solo to My Sharona. Then it just sounds like someone improvising badly. 

Or perhaps just playing the wrong string. Or, as I prefer to maintain, in the words of the great Eric Morecambe "I am playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order....". It's a shame - that was the only song on the list that the guy in the break thought was 'nice'.

“Lookin’ out at the road rushin’ under my wheels”

One of the issues in forming “a nice little acoustic band – we’ll just roll up and play” is actually getting some places to play in the first place. Back in the early days of Songs from The Blue House, when James, Gibbon and I staged a series of pre-emptive raids on beer festivals and acoustic/songwriters nights this wasn’t so much of an issue, as since we only had half an hour’s material anyway, we were able to either get up and do our thang and get out of the way before anyone noticed it was the same six songs we’d played last time or drag up whatever other stuff we could remember which meant that the set became mainly covers anyway, and besides, who doesn’t love a rip-roaring acoustic version of I Wanna Be Your Dog to close the evening? 

These days, now that the line up has grown to the point where there are around half a dozen of us on a quiet day, such guerilla tactics aren’t always so possible or indeed permissible, and so we find ourselves settling into whatever surroundings we can and then settling back to enjoy the ride, wherever it may take us. Hence, only recently, we’ve played a birthday party in a village hall in Northamptonshire where we turned up early and then drove for five miles in each direction trying to find a pub that was open before realizing that there was one next to the venue, albeit one that didn’t open until seven and for which you had to book in advance if you wanted a burger making up. 

We have also been on the back of an open-sided trailer in a park attempting to communicate with a sound engineer who is a good hundred yards away and who has no direct means of contacting the group other than an odd sort of pidgin sign language (a carrier pigeon with sign language would have been handier) and who has to come out of his mixing tent to actual see where we’re pointing to things that we can’t hear (I know – “a nice little acoustic band”, we said) . Being a park, and with a parkie’s responsibilities being what they are, they locked the toilets at bang on half five. The lads who’d spent all afternoon in the beer tent weren’t best pleased, apparently. 

There was the beer festival in Little Totham where it had been raining torrentially all morning. When we turned up there was a boat in the back garden, which indicated a level of preparation of Noah-esque proportions on somebody’s part at least. Having decided against risking it with elements by setting up in the garden we managed to cram two guitarists, a banjo player, a small p.a. system, and a bass player into the area next to the restaurant, a space about eight feet square and from which we’d had to move the spare cutlery and the salad for the barbecue before we could fit the mic stands in. “Right” said James “So where shall we put the piano….?” 

It was a good gig actually – the closeness and intimacy of the thing made it so that we were all playing together and off each other rather than performing our parts by rote, as being on the back of flat-bed trucks unable to hear what anyone is playing is wont to encourage. I was so into it by the last song that I didn’t notice that the rest of the band had retired to the restaurant and were accompanying my vocal from there, including a game TT, of whom only an extended forearm and hand could be seen playing a few low chords on the black notes. It was like being accompanied on keyboards by Thing from The Addams Family. They were very good about dropping into an unannounced Bob Dylan number mid-chorus and even a departure into some Buffalo Springfield didn’t throw them. Shaney let me follow you down, as it were. 

And last week we got a plum gig with the rather marvellous Derrin Nauendorf at a club in Chelmsford. Wendell came down for the trip and we were pleased to be able to greet Derrin’s drummer Mark outside the venue with an East Angularly drawled “Yew wanna git yower hair cut boiy!” (Marky sports an impressively perky Mohican at all times). “What the f*** are you doing here?” he responded, not unreasonably not expecting a couple of homeboys from the ‘hood (or pasture, in Ipswichian terms) to be pulling up at his gig. “We’ll be your support act for the evening!” we chirruped. 

Another fun night – a promoter working tirelessly to put on some good music in his town, bringing in veterans of Radio 2 and Glastonbury, American touring bands and up-and-coming singer songwriters just starting to make an impact on the scene, organizing the promotion, sound and lights himself and spending his evenings organizing flyers and promotion. There must have been fifteen people there. It’s not all Shea Stadium, ligging with Sting and all back to the hotel with two birds each for these guys, you know. Someone asked if the promoters had made sure that these gigs were worth our while. Oh yes, every single one. 

This week, a charity barbecue in the shadows of a nuclear power station. You can’t buy this sort of exposure.

It was forty years ago today….

Sometime in 1967, a strange and wondrous sound descended on the Stowmarket Recreation ground – an unearthly psychedelic occurrence, wrapped up in smoke and lights and gift wrapped in long hair and cheesecloth. Give it forty years and the Songs from The Blue House cavalcade is parked up in pretty much the same place as the Pink Floyd’s van (for it was they) must have been all those years ago, ready to gently sway the inaugural Stowfest, a one day celebration of live music, beer tentery and mobile burger vans, populated by gently grazing grown ups, and rammed with teenagers wearing jeans that seem to be either two sizes too large or one size to small for them, and who are delighted that for once they haven’t had to catch a train anywhere to hang out, do a bit of gentle emo-ing and drink breezers with their chums.

A day out for us players, too - a chance to check out the other bands, see who’s about, meet up with old friends and complain about the stage monitors to each other – a sort of bassman’s holiday, if you will. Some of the hair in our party is just as long as when Syd, Roger and the boys rolled up with their odd songs and crushed velvet trousers back in the day, but James’s Slovan Liberec football shirt is unlikely to have been de rigeur for the times which, as surely as ever, are a changin’. He isn’t going to though, as he likes it, he’s going to keep it on for the gig. Chanteuse and flautist Helen has turned up in Lily Allen chic, the rest of us are pretty much in regular Keith Allen chic – a selection of shorts and t-shirts, sandals and socks (aside from the immaculately-outfitted and coiffed Tony Winn in all white) which don’t quite challenge the black leather and spandex-clad combo setting up on stage two in terms of wardrobe exploitation. It is pointed out that if we had bottoms like that lady with the guitar, we’d probably wear a bit more spandex too, which I feel is a moot point at best, frankly. Still, no harm in checking, is there? 

The weather’s fine, the crowd is in expansive mood, the beer is on draught, and the organizers have very sensibly left a good deal of set up time between turns, given the double staged-ness of the event. We are looking forward to using this to the full as the advantage of being a nominally acoustic band and not having to lug heavy amplifiers and suchlike around is generally outweighed by the fact that at events such as these, harassed soundmen are usually momentarily stymied by not having heavy amplifiers and suchlike to simply stick microphones in front of and have to locate DI boxes to plug guitars into, once they’ve sorted out the four vocal mics we need first, of course. Add in a fiddle player and a banjo that needs a channel of its own and that’s usually enough to tip them over the edge into wanton despair. The upshot of all this is that, over time, the banjo player and the fiddle player have taken to lugging their own amplifiers around anyway as the monitors can rarely be trusted. Oh, and did I mention we’d brought along a drummer and a keyboard player for this one too? You can see the fear in the crew’s eyes already.

TT on pianner, a veteran of grander festivals than this (he’s what we like to call a ‘proper’ musician) has brought along his own in-ear monitoring system which means that he can hear himself perfectly, and also has the amusing side effect of making it look like he’s listening to his iPod throughout the set rather than concentrating on the job in hand. JP and I wait patiently, guitar leads forlornly in hands, as the time slips away. The breakfast DJ from local radio is filling in desperately in his role as compere. “Anyone got anything they want to say?” he asks. “Why don’t you play a record?” suggests Reado from behind the kit before making the poor man repeat his joke about two parrots sitting on a perch. The sheen of perspiration is now clearly visible to the naked eye. 

Come show time plus ten we are assured through complicated hand gestures and mimes that the out front sound is fine, although up on the trailer there is a palpable lack of guitars in the mix and, pleased as I am to be playing live in front of so many people and grateful that I know the songs well enough that a lack of foldback means that I can pretty much mime convincingly along with the best of them (a happy legacy of all those years spent in my bedroom with a tennis racket and a cassette of AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood” – I knew it’d come in handy one day. 

It’s never reassuring to be invited to start the set and be told that “We’ll sort out the mix as we go along” - we quite like the first song – it’d be nice if everyone was on it, but you don’t like to spend too long talking to the guy on the sound desk mid set, it’s terribly distracting for the crowd, who probably aren’t quite sure what “That terrible hum in the wedges” actually is supposed to be and you don’t like to come across as too much of a Prima Donna, especially James, who has officially been accorded the rank of Tertiary Donna so far, and hasn’t got all his badges yet in advance of an upgrade. 

Finally, during the last song, what appears to be the roar of a passing jet from nearby RAF Wattisham, but upon investigation turns out to be his errant guitar, emanates forcefully from the speakers at his feet. “They found it, then” he remarks in passing. We have become concerned over time that our departure from the stage is generally greeted by someone enthusiastically remarking that our set was “really funny”. We are spared this reflection today. “Wow” begins the DJ from the local radio station “You were really on time!” I wonder if Pink Floyd managed that ?

"You should do some Neil Young...."

The sweet, sweet joy of the music biz. It's been a busy week at Skirky Central - rushing up to Northants with SftBH for a party, then back down to Essex, where we narrowly missed the Asparagus Monks of Coggeshall before doing another set in a field and then off to sunny Felixstowe with Picturehouse, to play an extremely sweaty (and I never sweat onstage) set of covers with loud guitars and thumpy drums. In between, Songs from The Blue House got an airing on the radio and a mention in the Word podcast, we had a meeting with the record company and Wendell announced that his hard drive is on the mend and he's formatted the text for the book and just needs an acknowledgements list and some credits before putting the whole thing to bed. And then at the end of the Picturehouse gig, this bloke came up with a suggestion for the set....
Thumbs up to the bloke who wrote my horoscope this week, you got it bang on. It has been a good week. Now, about those lottery numbers....

"Do you do any Buffalo Springfield?"

I read an interesting diversion on the electric interweb recently, wherein a newbie to all this going out and playing a full two sets in public malarkey was buttonholed after a recent show and informed that his band hadn’t played enough songs that his audience member knew. 

His query was intended to ascertain what the correct ratio of covers to originals in a set should be and the forum responses varied from a wholly reasonable explanation that some people are never happy with songs they don’t know to an explanation of how another group member divides up his set list to provide reasonable periods of known and loved covers before sliding in a couple of their own, stealthily under the cover of contented familiarity. 

a bit more music and then perhaps they’d broaden their horizons a little. This, however, would only contribute more to the eternal battle between those on the stage, who are sure that they know best what an audience should be listening to, and those in the stalls, who are equally but almost always skewiffedly convinced of the same. You’d think they weren’t all there for the same reason sometimes. 

So when the call came through to The Blue House at three fifty nine from The High Barn to participate in their monthly acoustic showcase, by four we were on our way. To a lengthy discussion about what we should play. The first job was to round up the usual suspects – a band-wide group email revealed that some were busy, some were free, (some of them were angry at the way the earth was abused, by the men who learned to forge beauty into power, but that’s a different story) and some didn’t respond as the word ‘barn’ somehow set off their over-sensitive spam filter and they didn’t get the message in the first place. They didn’t get the mail that included the word ‘document’ either, because if you knock out the first two letters and the last three….you see? Well, it’s political correctness gone mad. Either that or health and safety, I can never remember which one I’m supposed to be cross about. 

The victim of all this de-spammery was our esteemed bass player and so he was excluded from the discussions about what to play, which took place between myself, singer-guitarist James, fragrant chanteuse and flute-monkey Helen and our wild card for the ride, Picturehouse frontman Wendell, who’d been thrown into the mix because he’s a both chum and because every so often we like to mix it up a bit and see what happens.

At a hastily-convened rehearsal the discussions really picked up pace. “So, what’re we doing?” enquired James, once he’d finished his baked potato with cheese and beans. Nothing fills a vacuum like that like opportunism and so I proferred my CD copy of the first Buffalo Springfield album, which contains a charming little sixties pop song by Neil Young called ‘Burned’ which I’d long hankered to have a go at. I have an advantage in the ways of Neil Young in that having learned to sing and play by strumming along with his Live Rust album I can pretty effortlessly drop into an appropriation of the Young-esque style at the drop of a harmonica. It’s uncanny, chameleon-like shading means that several people are fully convinced that I can’t sing properly* and lead one past band member to informally dub our Beatles specialist band “John, Paul, Ringo and Neil”, which if nothing else would make a great Willy Russell play, let’s face it. 

In the face of overwhelming ennui we were now one down in our quest to fill half an hour’s worth of hotly sought after stage time and moved on to the next selection. With our new album being due out on the HB label, we thought it only right to preview something from it and so started on stripping down the full band version (including pedal steel and banjo) to an arrangement for two acoustic guitars and a couple of singers who hadn’t even been on it. That took another twenty minutes, so by now we were flying. 

After a few more forays into our respective back catalogues of performances and writing credits we ended up with a couple of my old songs that didn’t get an airing often these days (one of which involved La Mulley transposing a three part saxophone part to flute), a song by Helen which was currently going through some discussion as to whether it was going to make the album at all, and a duet between Hel and Wendell on Gram Parsons’ version of ‘Love Hurts’. Oh, and James had decided to play bass. 

This was not a set list devised by a committee of movers and shakers looking to influence and win over an audience eager to soak up the familiar. This, surely, was tomfoolery? So, anyway, on the afternoon of the gig Wendell was spending a lot of time on YouTube instead of working and came up with the idea of doing The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, so we lobbed that into the set too. And why not?

We didn’t see a lot of the evening’s entertainment, spending, as we were a good deal of time in the studio annexe next to the stage running through the set again just to make sure that we hadn’t made a series of catastrophic errors of judgement. It wasn’t that reassuring, to be honest, but we did enjoy the experience of watching several of the other turns walk past the studio window on the way to the stage alternately baffled and amused by our enthusiastic (to them) miming. 

At last our time came. We were to follow the excellent, splendid and thoroughly Blue House-endorsed Al Lindsay, whose John Martyn-esque acoustic stylings were beautifully counterparted by a percussion player and a double bassist and who indeed encored with a marvellous reading of Martyn’s “May You Never”. Uh-oh, an encore….we’d better be good.

So we took the stage, four people in a line up which hadn’t played together before, one of whom was playing an instrument he didn’t usually care for and with a set list comprising at least four songs which no-one outside the sound engineer was likely to have heard in their lives and, d’you know what? We bloody killed out there. In a good way. Helen and Wendell were on superb old-style country weepery harmonising form, James was ebullient, I jumped off a chair and windmilled during The Who song, which raised a cheer if not a faint sense that the audience were about to see a forty-year old man do himself an injury, and that hadn’t happened during “Won’t Get Fooled Again” since that time with the tremelo arm in San Francisco.

You could sense the voyeuristic thrill, and cut the air of anticipation with a chainsaw, or some other very large petrol-driven cutting tool. We retired outside for a post-show cigarette of relief, smoking being banned inside the building (It’s health and correctness gone politically safe, I tells ya) and I considered the question of “what to play”. Nobody knows anything; performers, audiences, critics. It’s all about the shared experience. If it works, it works, there’s no formula “These people do it for financial gain and we’re entitled to pass our opinions however we see fit” a correspondent had said (I’m paraphrasing). Too right. 

Al Lindsay wandered up to the sound man. “Do we, um, get paid for this?” he enquired, not unreasonably.
“No”.

*At least I think it’s the Young impression.

"Leave i', 'E's not wurf i' - Ooh, The Koiser Chiefs!"

We return the The Pickerel in Stowmarket, the residents of which fair hamlet are referred to in some circles in a non-ironic fashion as Slowmartians. Not ours, mind - we know which side our breadwinners are likely to be battered should we subscribe to such a foul calumny - and set up in a positive frame of mind, all the better to try out our 'new' songs, since the Stow Boys (and gels) are a friendly crowd and generally forgiving of our expeditions into the unknown. Some regulars still speak in hushed tones of our foray into 10CC's "Rubber Bullets", and warn their troublesome children that if they don't go to bed and get straight to sleep we'll come round and play it again. It sounded fine at rehearsal, honestly. 

This time we are to debut not only something by The Feeling (we feel a particular affinity with these coves as they themselves were a covers band up until just before their big break, although in ski resorts rather than in small pubs near railway stations in unprepossessing East Anglian towns which produce mainly paint, malt and processed chickens) and a piece of goth rock magnificence in The Damned's version of 'Eloise', for which Gibbon has been assiduously programming the sounds of darkness into his 90's-era keyboard and for which Wendell has been throwing impressively dramatic power grabs (cf Meatloaf) in rehearsal, as well as cultivating a moody mic-stand clutching hooded-lid performance persona which cunningly disguises that he is actually reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper gaffa-taped to the monitors. 

The set has a fairly regular feel by now, which can be the curse of the inattentive pub band, as although we might only play it every couple of weeks, if the pub crowd only sees you once every couple of months and you play exactly the same thing every time, they soon cotton on that you're not really paying attention to their needs. After all, The Kaiser Chiefs might only have two albums to pick from, but we've got the whole of rock history to cherry pick, and so there's really no excuse to settle on a set and leave it at that for the duration. We're not The Rolling Stones, after all. Clearly. 

There is an opening section through which we state our case - a bit of new stuff, a bit of eighties, a bit of seventies west coast Californian country rock (at which point my wife inevitably goes to the toilet, as a childhood spent in the back of cars shuttling her between parents to the soundtrack of Glenn Frey has left her emotionally scarred in terms of references to taking it easy and she can't bear the experience to be dragged back up through her psyche. Either that or she's holding out for something from Desperado). A nice run through the first set ensues, and The Feeling goes down well - given our exalted position in the rock hierachy we're never sure whether the common man is listening to the same thing that we are, and it seems unlikely in some cases, and so we are relieved that we've made a good pick. 

We are, after all in the business of show, and although (say) one of Gibbon's favourite albums is by a side project of someone who's played on some of the biggest selling albums of recent years, I don't see anything by The Bears making it as far as (say) The John Bull in Woodbridge Road. Their loss. The break gives us an opportunity to restock, regroup, refuel, sympathise with the ever patient Mrs Skirky, who has had a trampalike spill a glass of house white over her new frock and refuse to countenance getting a replacement in, and who has been drying it off under the hand dryer in the ladies' (always a dignified way to spend ten minutes) and also to respond to the number one mid-set question of our short but glorious career - the answer being, of course, The Jags. 

A quick set rearrangement for the second half means that we start off with one of our taking-a-flyers, set wise - the world may love OK GO's YouTube clips, but their actual songs are generally more of an effort to get into, however the group of Trivium T-shirted youth stage left are pleased at its inclusion. They are clearly in a band together and fills, licks and riffs are greeted with quiet consideration and occasional head-nodding-together memos to selves, which is great. I remember doing the very same at a gig by the Turnham Green Blues Band at The Thrasher in 1980, and it's encouraging to know that in twenty five years or so they too may be raiding their kids' iPods for things to play in pubs after their hopes, dreams and wild eyed ambitions of rock stardom have been cruelly dashed at the altar of fame by a cruel unfeeling public who can't make the distinction between genius and genre-hopping. That might, at a stretch, just be me, mind.... 

The time has come for Eloise, and with a few "good luck"'s and "see you at the end"s we launch hopefully into it. And, d'you know what? It works. The blams come in all the right places, the timing's right, the chords and runs come easily to work-ravaged hands* and at the end of the song the sweet, sweet candy sound of applause and cheering rattles through the air - it's like catnip for fortysomethings, it really is. I'm so pleased I do a guitar solo behind my head two songs later, pretending that I'm being post-ironic. "Ooh" runs my internal monologue "I think I may've put my back out". 

*Alright, so mainly ravaged by tapping computer keyboards all week, but you get the idea...I have to take cod liver oil tablets once a day at my age, you know.

As we know, one of this year's big ambitions is to publish. Sadly, Wendell's hard drive, along with text, photos (see how I didn't put an apostrophe in there?) and notes about my grande folie has crashed and burned, and so the project is delayed even further than it would have been if he hadn't already been concentrating on jobs that actually have a positive and immediate effect on his mortgage repayments. 'Twas ever thus. Being the good sort that he is he had been keeping this from me for as long as possible, but a Picturehouse rehearsal scheduled for his kitchen made it difficult to keep hidden.
Mr Wendell was calm, collected, and reassuring about the prospects of the book coming out this year, and assured me that he had kept Editor Jessica's post-it notes exactly where they were and could recreate the magic that only sub editing by someone with a far greater appreciation of the impact of a sub-colon than we have could bring. You can probably tell that she has no input into this farrago of a blog at all.
And so we sat down with the band to learn some new stuff. Having greeted Mr. Gibbon at my front door with a charming rendition of the solo from Show Some Love by The Feeling, I was surprised to find Kilbey doing the same thing to us when we turned up at Wendell's. Not as surprised as he was to receive a phone call from Frisky Pat calling from the band rehearsal room, mind, but fair play to 'im for fielding the "We're all at Steve's - where are you?" call with such admirable aplomb. As it turns out, Kilbey's up for a bit of guitar playing on this one, and I'm up for a bit of the ol' bass. Unfortunately, the first run through is so capable that the rest of the evening is given over to trying it one more time, drawing tattoo templates (on Pat), smoking in the garden, looking at Pat's mobile phone photos and checking out Kilbey's kids' band's MySpace site.
Don't tell 'em - we're thinking of doing a cover. I mean, A and G - how hard could it be?