Fear and loathing in Walton-on-the-Naze

The events of the last three weeks seem to have thrown Picturehouse much more together, in both a fraternal and a musical fashion. After the debacle of a farrago of the Walton show, where regular viewers will recall we played to an audience best described as widely spaced, and less than hysterical in their response, we have enjoyed the good times provided by subsequent more enthusiastic audiences exponentially more, and we are on the verge of cancelling a couple of shows at some of our more low-key residencies as a result. 

Admittedly we have genuine excuses for the diary clashes, but there is a definite feeling that if we’re not going to have fun while we’re out then we may as well stay at home and have fun instead, which seems a sensible enough approach to adopt, especially when we consider the roll call of past members who have quit the band in the past simply because they’d rather see their wives, girlfriends and/or children at the weekend than get home at one in the morning having spent a unfulfilling Friday night with some people whose opinion of the merits of our set list seem diametrically opposed to our own. It’s not exactly going up the river after Colonel Kurtz, but there are some weird experiences to be had out there, believe you me (not least that time we encountered the team who play darts, at Harkness). 

There are only so many times you can enjoy the mantra of what you didn’t play being intoned at you before the thrill palls, frankly, but it’s so much easier when you’ve had a good gig to begin with, hence the clear out. We have some new and interesting places to be going over the next couple of months, so we’ll see what these box- fresh delights have in store for us – as in any relationship, we have to keep moving forward, other wise we’re just going to end up with a dead shark on our hands. 

Speaking of new and exciting things, we look forward this weekend to the live debut of our good friend and one time radio show producer (hence the name), Producer Simon. Some friends of ours in Her Majesty’s Press, charged with discovering if there was any truth in the proposition that someone could be taught to play guitar, from scratch, in a month, to a standard at which they would be able to play with a band happened to mention this to me. Of course, being in the pub at the time as we were, the obvious idea came that there was only one way to find out – ffiiiigggghhhtt! 

In the absence of that, all we had to do was find a suitable victim / volunteer and put it to them that the idea of potential humiliation and shame at the hands of a baying pub audience was exactly the sort of thing that would start off their weekend in a sprightly fashion. Producer Simon, being not only literate enough to record his experiences in written form for the paper but also a frustrated would-be guitarist of long standing seemed ideal for the job and after assuaging his doubts through the power of Kronenburg he signed up for the task. 

He was coming along nicely when he asked if he could have a sneaky advance run-through with us last week, although his combined bar counting, lip chewing and furrowed brow NLP learning technique did receive a bit of a set back when Kilbey quite rightly identified one small factor which may have affected his nascent guitar-flinging career in that he’d learned the single version of the song and we were doing the album version. There’s more to it than just sticking your fingers in the right place, splaying your legs and waiting for the adoration of the public you know (as the lap dancer said to the Bishop). More news, and hopefully Si’s update from the other side of the fear fence, as we have it.

"It was the best of times, the worst of times..."

One of the interesting things about playing in two different bands, one a principally acoustic-based vehicle for original songs and collaboration, the other an electric guitar-heavy covers combo, is the contrast between the two, the, if you will "little differences" as Vincent Vega once so notably mused. On friday, for instance, Songs from The Blue House played at one of the country's finest venues, The High Barn in Great Bardfield, a sixteenth century edifice reeking with history and redolent of a great beamed cave, with perfect acoustics, a sympathetic crew, and an appreciative audience. We were there ostensibly to launch our new single, but since the download isn't ready yet, the vinyl idea had been nixed, we forgot to video the performance of the track at the album launch gig and it wasn't deemed worth pressing up any CD's, it was a low-key sort of shindig in terms of pimping some merch, so we decided to play some of our favourite songs, mix it up a bit and have a good time. And a good time we indeed had. A healthy turn out of family, friends, regular band devotees and interested and enthusiastic strangers, and a liberal application of Brewers Gold, meant that we enjoyed bantering with each other and the crowd to what would probably be regarded as an unnecessarily lengthy degree if it weren't for the fact that we were all enjoying it terribly. We had some new songs to play, the joy of which were that some of them were better than the ones we'd already recorded and released, and so there was a great feeling in the group that we were still moving forward, still stretching, still improving, and the performance itself reflected that. As a writer it is gratifying in the extreme when generous and talented souls apply themselves to the performance of something you've had a hand in creating and it's especially pleasing when something you've lived with for a while can come alive and bring hairs up on the back of your neck when it's being exercised in front of a roomful of people who are getting the vibe, feeling what you're trying to do and more than willing to show their appreciation. A microphone and a handful of chords make for a potent course for your endorphins to flow freely along, and so it's no real surprise that when the aftershow finally wound up back at The Blue House, the sky was blushing pale and the rooster next door was already crowing. I know how it felt.
Next night I was in a windswept seaside town in a bare white hotel back room, setting up my amplifier next to the toilets. It was, shall we say, a compact and bijou turnout in terms of audience attendance, most of whom preferred the sanctuary of the bar and the sanctity of the sea view, a long grey North Sea miasma, where even the gulls had battened down the hatches for the night and abandoned the promenade to the gale whipping down the east coast. The dismal evening which followed wasn't our fault, I know this because a large gentleman with a forked beard and bike club patches told me so, (and besides, last time we played for a Bike Club we had a whale of a time - on that occasion we were more than happy stay stay on for an extra half hour, but then on that occasion there were more than twelve people to play to) - We were simply the wrong band in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, the lesson here seemed to be that if you're going to organise a motorcycle club rally and bike run to the coast on a Bank Holiday weekend, best make sure The Eurovision Song Contest isn't on on the same night first, eh?
It was a long old drive home, but as I pulled into my home town, just feeling about half past dead, Roddy Frame sang to me from the CD player - Life's a one take movie. I don't care what it means.

The Call Came Through at two fifty-nine....

Friday afternoon at the office, and the phone rings. It's Kilbey, who is in a bar with Barry The Singer. They've popped out for a quiet half of mild and a bowl of chips and been buttenholed by the manager, who's frantic at the band cancellation he's just had - can we fill in? Initially, of course, the idea holds no appeal whatsoever, what with it being friday afternoon and me having a serious work head on, and I point out that since we haven't any gigs in the duiary for a couple of weeks, I've put my amplifier into the shop for a service, but Kilbey points out that he's got a spare and can pick me up and drive me there and back, at which point the prospect becomes a whole lot more attractive. I agree that we really should help out, and check out early from the day job to power nap in preparation.
We set up, me with a borrowed amp and a selection of effects pedals that I've only seen from a distance but which offer a pleasing variety of echo, flanging and other kid-in-a-sweetshop like effects, which once I've sorted out, I am now very much looking forward to playing with. Over a pre-gig fag and a beer I am aware that I am being shouted at. "John Terry !" exclaims a voice. "John Terry!". After the last gig we played here, when a chippy young gentleman held the door to the toilets open for me and beckoned me through with a cheery "There you go Dad!" I have taken the precaution of applying groomtastic hair care products in order to give me a certain spiky facade, but I'm not entirely sure that I'm quite in the Chelsea captain's league, quite literally, however a nearby gentleman of restricted height is convinced that am the spit of him, and insists that his friend take a picture on his mobile, all the better to fox gullible friends (and presumably those with reasonably poor eyesight). Having said that, someone else (astonishingly) said the same thing later, and it makes a nice change from being mistaken for Darren Anderton.
The wee fella made another appearance later on as, mid set...well, you know how your parents used to make an arch with their legs and you used to run through it with a beaming smile on your face? That happened, although I'm pretty sure that wasn't his mum hoisting her skirt up to allow his passage, as it were. Spirits were high, comments were exchanged and someone decided to pick him up. Brilliantly, he responded by then hoicking a couple of people over his own shoulders, barging out of the back door and depositing them in the garden with a determined "...and let's see how you like it!" expression on his face. When he requested a song later, it would have been churlish not to accede.
It was a good show - lots of dancing, not least between some ladies who were obviously very close friends, and two of whom helped put some gear in the car afterwards. Celia, if that was indeed her real name, was absolutely charming and proud enough of her four piercings ("It's alright, there's nothing south of the border") to show one to a fortunate member of the band, possibly because she especially appreciated the Kylie song we did as on off the cuff encore. As we relaxed afterwards with a nice Merlot and reflected on the random chances that incidence sometimes throws your way we agreed that it really was splendid way to spend a friday evening. It really was just like going to the pub with your mates.

"We'd like to do a song that's been very kind to us..."

In the world of Songs from The Blue House, we are preparing for another assault on the hearts and minds of the great listening public by winding up into the release of our version of Blue Oyster Cult's seminal classic "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". At a meeting some time ago with our beloved record company this was to be a combination tie-in vinyl seven inch, CD single and download as well as an upload of our performance of the song at the album launch gig last year to YouTube.

As of now this has been downgraded slightly in that it will certainly be available as a download, but we're still waiting to hear if anyone at the studio has had time to look at the live footage yet, let alone edit it all together into a seamless performance-based file for posting on the web. Reading yesterday about how Jimmy Page had to recreate the ambience of Madison Square Gardens at Shepperton for some of the close ups in The Song Remains The Same, I'm also concerned that the shirt I wore for the gig has lost a couple of buttons since then and so any retakes we need to do present the potential for horrible continuity errors. Possessing the twin virtues of impatience and compulsive worry, as I do, you can probably imagine how I'm feeling at the moment. 

We are hoping to use our forthcoming gig at The High Barn in Great Bardfield (home of OBRC) next month as a launch party. I'm sure everything will come through in time - it usually does, and I then manage to enjoy the sensation that there was really nothing to worry about all along. The second album turned up on the morning of the launch gig for instance, which saved us the ignomy of having a big sold-out gig for which there was no actual tangible product to be presented. Same thing with the download, really, as it is unlikely that folks will be sitting rapt in the audience with their laptops, all ready to simultaneously hit the 'buy' button after a dramatic countdown, possibly involving streamers, party poppers and a big back-projection of a stopwatch, and besides, I understand the wireless coverage out there is awful. 

The genesis of the song's arrival in our repertoire is a tale long and convoluted. I distinctly remember Our Glorious Leader James messing about with the riff in the studio for the 'Too' sessions after a bit of tuning up and remarking that it would be a good thing to try and reinvent, and after we'd done a beer festival for what was then merely our favourite venue and not OBRC, the payment for which was a day's studio time, we thought it would be rather a laugh to have a go at it. 

Anyone familiar with the original album version will note that there is a lengthy middle section involving wailing guitars, and since we are principally an acoustic-based folk/country/bluegrass/blues/pop crossover hybrid (there isn't a genre sub-section on iTunes, we've looked) this was clearly going to be somewhat of a challenge to pull off. As in so many of these situations however, we simply rang Fiddly Richard and told him that he'd have to do something with it, and then contacted then friend of the group, now stalwart associate member and songwriter, Tony 'TT' Turrell with a view to filling in the gaps underneath. 

I had an idea that he could do something like the piano intro to Genesis's 'Firth of Fifth' while Fiddly wailed away over the top of it and since he can pretty much play anything at the drop of a hat (his 'Theme from Roobarb and Custard' is a thing of wonder) he acquiesced, came round to The Blue House, showed us a few things which we applauded warmly and then arranged  to meet us at the studio. The combination in the final version of his rolling piano chords underpinning Fiddly's swooping solo, underpinned by Helen's ghostly counterpointed flute and the cymbal swells really is quite an aural experience. Naturally, that's the bit we've dropped from the single/radio edit version for reasons of time and concentration constraints.... 

It's a lovely barn, The High Barn, and so we determined to record as live as possible in the centre of it, with TT at the grand piano on stage being flanked by Fiddly and the fragrant-and-charming Helen Mulley, who was to add spooky flute, and the rest of us, including two (count 'em) banjo players seated in a circle down on the floor of the barn. Tony 'Ellis' Winn came up with a banjo intro which we all loved, and we settled down to enjoy a day's mucking about in the studio. 

People came and went, bass player Gibbon and Helen improvised some backing harmony vocals, Hel introducing the elusive 'blue' note to proceedings, Pete 'Radar' Pawsey enjoyed his usual studio technique, which involved running the track over several times while he blew, hit, strummed, stroked and stared at various things (the look on producer Chris's face as Radar unpacked what looked like a child's zither and proceeded to hammer on it for a bit while trying to get a level is still one which some members of the band treasure as their favourite moment of the day) and Fiddly improvised and practised until he'd got several takes that we thought we could work with. 

Rough mixes taken away and listened to, Chris very kindly agreed that we may as well do the whole thing properly if we were going to do it at all, and so invited us back to finish off some percussion and do some mixing once everyone's ears had recovered slightly and so we, naturally, turned up with a drummer and the news that we thought it could probably do with a proper rhythm track. Now at this point you may have sensed a slight flaw in our plan - you'd think that the sensible point at which to lay down a drum track in these days of computerised mixing desks, click tracks and digital edits would be at the point we recorded the basic backing for the song, wouldn't you? And you'd be right. 

Paul 'Reado' Read however is a man who is unlikely to shirk a challenge and so having listened carefully to the sound of some musicians sitting in a circle in a barn and playing a song some of them barely knew while trying to monitor a piano some twenty feet away committed the tiny yet significant tempo changes, lapses in concentration and fluffed intros to memory and, incredibly, managed to play along with the whole track as if he'd been there in the room in the first place. His only bone of contention being that there should be significant amounts of cowbell present in the final mix. 

For those of you who have seen the YouTube footage of that sketch featuring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken, "More cowbell", I can assure you that it is a barely-fictionalised account of what went on that night. Then, of course, those nice people at The Word magazine ran a competition to find a bunch of 'Rock Dads' and since we pretty much fit the bill, we sent them a version of it, and blow me if we didn't win! An experience to treasure, not least for the little things that went unremarked at the time. 

As an example when, having waited for Robert Plant's crew to finish their lengthy soundcheck before we could load our gear on stage Reado then soundchecked his drums and cymbals by playing part of the mid-section of Led Zeppelin's 'Moby Dick', it was probably an in-joke too far for most of the anxious waiting audience. ). Then, when we were putting together the track listing for our latest album 'Tree', James and I kept coming back to the fact that we had this old thing in the bag somewhere and if we didn't drop it somewhere into the mix it'd very probably be lost for ever. 

Patient and with good grace as ever in the face of our ideas, our friend and engineer Simon Allen went delving through the hard driven archives to dig out our performance, dusted off the files, reformatted the mixes, tweaked, tuned and remastered the thing so it sat kindly next to our more recent efforts and probably wondered what else we'd come up with before he could relax and stop doing fourteen hour days for us. 

And so, with a little fanfare heralding our hopes and dreams of a foray into the pop charts, we are nearly ready to thrust ourselves upon the pluggers, producers and publishers of the industry, all because James decided one day to fool around with a half-rembered riff. It could all have been so different. The other thing we used to muck about with was Robyn Hitchcock's 'Brenda's Iron Sledge'. I wonder how things might have turned out if we'd gone with that one....?

You can listen to, buy or make a gift of the album version here: https://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/dont-fear-the-reaper

p.s. In the great file of "what might have been", I am reminded that Reado stepped up to the plate and offered to get us back on when The Waterboys didn't turn up. One of the great regrets of my life is that we didn't get to do our covers of 'Medecine Bow', 'The Whole of The Moon', 'This Is The Sea' (complete with Sweet Thing' segue)' and 'Fisherman's Blues' and get off before anyone noticed... :-)

I Want Your Essex.

This is relatively unfamiliar territory for us in The Barry Trill Experience, as I have come to affectionately rename the covers band for my own amusement - we’re still Picturehouse on the posters – for the second time in as many weeks we are venturing into darkest Essex, home of the white stiletto joke, Bluewater and one of a national chain of faux-Irish pubs which the last time I saw the inside of was on the telly being featured principally as a venue for fights between, and a good place to pick up, squaddies. The previous week we’d driven out to Mersea Island, which by only a cruel misplacement of geography avoided being the home to a thriving seventies R n’ B scene but is currently home to a number of caravan parks, an outdoor activity centre, a rugby club and, improbably, a vineyard. We were there to do our bit for charity and play a few numbers amid the swirling dry ice and spotlights of the Cosmic Puffin festival, issued with wristbands and load-in instructions after registering at reception, and more than happy to parade ourselves atop the stage behind the barriers, which only slightly slipped by about three feet when someone had the temerity to lean on them.

There’s nothing like dry ice, lighting, a stage and crash barriers to bring out the poseur in your average pub bander, and so it proved. Blissfully unencumbered by having worry about what we sounded like out front (that’s, like sooo the sound guy’s problem, yeah?) we had a whale of a time enjoying two of the other great benefits of doing a festival – the chance to hear some other bands for free (look out for The Fancy Dress Party – a sort of Arcade Fire juniors) and the chance to enjoy some bracing outdoor weather. Thankfully the event was staged indoors, as the teeth of a howling gale and sub-zero temperatures are no place for sensitive artistes like ourselves to be throwing shapes and so our enjoyment of the elements came principally as a result of the smoking ban. Apparently some folks had taken up the option of the weekend camping tickets, and as we drove away after our slot (a physical allergy to reggae forcing our driving bass player to vacate the premises) the St Bernards were being readied for action, their collar-mounted brandy barrels being topped up and their slavering great chops dribbling in anticipation of the night’s work ahead. I’m no expert, but I wouldn’t put any money down on the 2008 Mersea Island sparkling white being a great vintage.

And so to this week’s foray. Now then, Essex comes in for an awful lot of stick when it comes to stereotyping. A lot of it is very beautiful, the people are kind and generous (hey that little shindig to raise money for a children’s ward wasn’t organized by aliens y’know) and many of its pubs are charming rural affairs with great ales and fine dining opportunities, it’s just that if all you ever see of the Essex clay is the bit which is either side of the A12 then you are likely to get a bit of a singular impression of the place. So, we drive down the A12 and set up in the bar where we are due to play, right under the humorous Gaelic-scripted shop sign and opposite the blurry black and white print of stereotypes of a different stripe wielding fiddles, bodhrans, bouzoukis and the like. I’m always cheered up at times like this when I recall reading that the popularity of the bouzouki in Irish music is due in part to a combination of its modal tuning, which lends itself ideally to the playing of traditional jigs and reels, and the increase in availability and lowering in price of cheap flights to the Greek Islands in the late sixties and early seventies, which meant that the Gaelic sun seeker of the day could bring a few back as souvenirs of their balmy evenings spent relaxing outside the Taverna trying not to think of Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch and wondering if they’d ever develop a taste for olives. I find it intriguing to wonder at the benign influence of Freddie Laker on the modern folk-rock scene.

All of this is far away from the theme of this evening’s adventure, which is based principally around getting ourselves into the allotted stage area contained within reassuringly sturdy wooden surrounds and ensuring that we have allocated a line out from the PA mixer so that they can plug us in to their in house speaker system and thus, theoretically, beam our performance all around the venue for the benefit of those who’d rather hang out at the bar than crane their necks to see what we’re up to over in the corner. That we only ever put vocals through the front of house speakers means that they are likely to experience some slightly off-key close harmony barbershop during the choruses and a bit of shouting during the verses, especially since we’ve had to give them the line out to our onstage monitors, meaning that we can’t really hear what we’re singing anyway and so we jury-rig a couple of mics onstage to point vaguely at the band (not unlike some of the audience will later do) and at least give some semblance of the fact that there’s a whole band there albeit one which sounds like it’s in another room to the singer (as many of the audience similarly will be later).

The gig itself is another surprisingly well-frugged event, with the cirque and pompenstance of our performance bringing out the soft shoe shufflers in a goodly number of our audience, not all of whom disappear at precisely eleven twenty five to take advantage of the half price admission to the club next door, which has a half eleven deadline. Singing along with the choruses is enthusiastically entertained by the punters, and the wiring of the vocal mics to several different points around the pub mean that a few of the ‘tween song announcements’ nuances that are usually lost in the flood of bar-room banter come through loud and clear. Bass player Kilbey’s brand new Jazz bass, a possession of his for all of, ooh, six or seven hours now, is living well up to expectations although his enjoyment of the subtle nuances of the Fender sound are reduced somewhat since I have my amp perched neatly on top of his at approximately ear level and am wholeheartedly enjoying a combination of the two main benefits of not driving to a gig for the second week in a row – those of being able to play extraordinarily loud electric guitar and also being able to be very slightly drunk (apologies to anyone who was especially looking forward to the solo in the Scissor Sisters song by the way, but that’s probably the way it would sound if BabyDaddy tied on a few Amstels during the gig too).

We don’t usually get to play town centre pubs which serve as a warming-up venue for the night’s entertainment – we’re usually the main event somewhere out of town, and so it was interesting to note what folk wear when they’re frocking up for a night on the tiles. A nice fifties-style prom dress here, a gothic-looking black lace number there, a Bond-girl style oriental halter-neck thither, but whither the provenance that persuaded the very pretty dark-haired girl and her friend to pop out for the evening in the shortest dresses ever noted in the annals of England’s oldest recorded town? Still, they liked a dance, and with a figure like mine you can’t really be going around commenting on hemline/cellulite ratios or Essex girl stereotypes and it wasn’t like they were actually sporting white stilettos or anything.

They were red.

In between days off

A two in a rower for the mighty Picturehouse this week, as we kick off the Bank Holiday weekend by rocking a blustery Felixstowe and then continue our tourette with a trip to uncharted waters in darkest Essex, quite liderally mate, as we are scheduled to play on Mersea Island which is linked to the rest of Essex by causeway, and visitors are advised that during spring tides the place is temporarily cut off. It is, I confess, a first for me in having to check tide tables before embarking on the voyage to the gig but fortunately bass player Kilbey has done his homework and advises that the sea reaches its height at one in the morning, and frankly if we’re not out by then something has gone seriously wrong with our timekeeping. Speaking of timekeeping, an adventure in the land of the forgotten for Frisky Pat yesterday as it temporarily slipped his mind that one of his duties for Thursday’s gig was to collect the PA speakers from my house on his way. Oh, and also Stalker Bertie, who was joining us for the trip, what with him having some shady social connections in The ‘Stowe. It wasn’t until Pat was happily setting up his drum kit at the venue that Kilbey, with that razor-sharp mind for which he is so justly renowned, noticed that the big black boxes we use to sing through weren’t anywhere to be seen. As an afterthought, he also remembered something about Bertie – no offence should be implied that he was an afterthought, but then we don’t take him to every gig, whereas the PA is a fairly integral component in the performance. With a sigh and a shrug, our drummer sped off into the night to collect his passenger and freight, only to be called half way there by our increasingly Holmesian bass player who spotted that he hadn’t got any cymbals either. Poor Bertie, who was just expecting a quick ride to the show, detouring only past the KFC fine fried chicken emporium (other fat food outlets are available) for supper ended up in a real life version of Grand Turismo and although we estimate that he must have been driven past the Colonel’s around five or six times, he never actually got to stop off there. I hid my empty carton carefully away from him, for Neighbour Neil and I had indeed had time to call in on the way – and there was me thinking that I was going to be holding things up.
The show took the recent guitar-centric direction rather well, and with this only being our third or fourth actual full new-line-up outing it was good to feel things slotting together more comfortably, front line banter being more relaxed, Barry The Trill and I finding our levels together (generally one louder…) and, jings! A whole moshpit dancing audience! A new one for us, so perhaps all this testosterone-charge guitar frottage is the way to go after all? Nice to have a report from the front line from returning ex-front man Wendell, whose appraisal of the Foo Fighters number was considerably enhanced by having seen them a week previously at The L.A. Forum – apparently our version measured up reasonably favourably which is a credit to all that hard work slaving over a hot YouTube. In the old days you used to have to work out the chords yourself, you know! Oh yes. These days it’s possible to simply punch in a song title and study the footage to see where the shapes should go. Thus I was able to discern that the distinctive guitar figure in Long Road To Ruin was achieved partially by moving the chord inversion to the fifth fret, and partly by having ex-Germs and Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear just over your shoulder helping you out, a luxury I was sadly unable to employ, although Wendell did mention that I had the guitar tone exactly right. Which is nice, but a pure happy coincidence. And also good to hear that the crowd were indeed responding to our entreaties to “help us out on the chorus” (from the Boys Own Book of Big Rock Cliches, number 34). By the time Neighbour Neil pogoes across the stage and back again like Mr Punch on legs unleashed by a particularly refreshed puppeteer during the last number, we’d acquitted our selves jolly well, notwithstanding the stress undergone by Frisky Pat as a combatant and the almost equal stress experienced by Stalker Bertie as his passenger, which is always nice when you’ve come out on a Thursday night not really in the mood. Ah, the healing power of song.
As we pack up Kilbey relates the exchange he’s had with an enthusiastic punter who is asking on behalf of his friend, who is either too shy, too full of himself or too genuinely apologetic to speak for himself – we are, at this stage, none the wiser. And I quote;
“You see my mate over there?”
“Yes?”
“He’s the UK human beatbox champion – can he get up and do a song with you?”
“No”.
“Can he do one on his own?”
“No”.
“Well, you’ve got to ask, haven’t you?”
“Um, on reflection, no”.
The thing is, I’m sure this is the second time this has happened. So, all round, a good show, a rocking gig, a loud foray into new and guitar-loaded territory. At the end, a girl is haranguing our ex-singer who has been enjoying the show from the other side of the footlights. “That song you used to do, the Five one, what was it called, they don’t know it, you see…?”. You can check out any time you like, it seems, but you can never leave….

Play one more for My Radio Sweeetheart

We at Songs from The Blue House have been being played on the radio this week, which is terribly exciting, since it's a one-a-day procession of things that we recorded last week and as such is simultaneously terribly fresh in the memory an something that we have no idea how it sounds. We were lucky enoughto enjoy the largesse of BBC Radio Suffolk, and more importantly their sound engineer Dave, who is blissfully undiscomfited by the idea of recording a banjo, fiddle and piano as well as two guitars and a bass, and attentive enough to comment that since TT's Korg piano has a stereo output he should take the time to record it in stereo. As TT points out, however, no matter how professional the set up, the engineer always ends up on his knees under a desk trying to patch the right DI through a sub-buss into the appropriate channel (that may not have been his exact phrasing, but you get the idea) and indeed there Dave is, clutching a lead and a pop-shield for the microphone. Since there's a lot of setting up to do, and we're all together, there are diversions into alien territory to be had, including a scrabrous version of Norwegian Wood that singer and guitarist James soundchecks with, and an endless cornucopia of fun to be had with TT's encyclopaedic knowledge of music of the twentieth century - he's as likely to break into Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue as he is the theme from Roobarb and Custard. We try a few new things that we've been working on and Fiddly interjects solemnly. "What is that key?" he asks. "Whatever it was, it's the worst key you've ever come up with - there's nothing for me to work with here!". Tony Winn is settled over his banjo, and finding it underemployed on a new song we're doing, nonchalantly whips out his harmonica (insert your own 'tiny organ joke here) to play along with "Rolling and Tumbling", a song which we are still arranging during the actual recording. Someone finds the light switch, and so the anodyne surroundings of the studio are transformed into a mood-lit approximation of Sun Studios - half a dozen people arranged in a semi-circle, singing and playing live, one take, no mistakes. Whistling in the dark. Dave is a corridor away in the car park, ensconced in the Radio Suffolk live van, taking to us through the foldback but unable to leap in and adjust mics at a moments notice. This is old-school recording, whatever we do now will be what is what will be sent out across the ether. I count in..."One, two, a one two three...uh? Oh, sorry , I'm going to do two of those...". Grins, smiles, a band at peace with itself, happy in each other's company and just wanting to play these songs. Just wanting to be on the BBC with something of our own.

No, I meant the other SSW...

It is ten years since we started Suffolk Songwriter’s Night in blustery downtown Ippo, Tony James Shevlin and me. Well, strictly speaking, it was him who had the idea to showcase some of the songs that he’d written and that weren’t getting played anywhere due to both of our preoccupations with the Beatles specialist band we were in at the time, and I went along with half a dozen tunes of my own to play in case nobody else showed up, which of course they didn’t. 

Happy days they were – most music pubs are usually inclined to give away their midweek-dip Thursdays for original nights, jam sessions, acoustic clubs and the like, and so the idea of having an evening where you could play pretty much whatever you wanted as long as you’d written it yourself was no great stretch of the imagination for Landlord Ady at a little pub called The Olive Leaf (don’t look for it, it’s not there any more), however he did also come up with the genius idea of rewarding whoever got up and played with free beer, and so the monthly sessions became not only a proving ground for whatever new material Shev and I were generating between us, but also a pretty cheap night out, especially when you threw in the lock-in afterwards. 

In my experience, if there’s one thing musicians like more than the freedom and opportunity to express themselves through the medium of song, it’s the chance to get wankered for nothing. I generally enjoyed Songwriter’s Nights – it was a good chance to try out new stuff, and if I didn’t have any new stuff it was a good prompt to write something in order to have something to play – the regular audience were generally pretty au fait with the default numbers we were doing by about week three, so it was good having a constant challenge to do something fresh. 

When the night became established enough to start attracting other players, Shev became very adept at putting together an entertaining running order for the evening along the lines of a batting order, and would often ask if I could slip in behind someone that he knew was going to be mournful and serious with the edict that I was to play “some of the funny stuff” or “keep it upbeat”, and it was always instructive to sit back and watch other singers and writers, whether they be folk who’d never played outside their bedrooms before, or more experienced local figures who occasionally gave the distinct impression that this was somehow beneath them and that they were doing us a favour by deigning to turn up in the first place.

I frequently felt more empathy with the former, but probably learned more from the latter, even if it were sometimes principally what not to do, for with an audience of musicians, at least one of whom I know for a fact owned a rhyming dictionary, there was always someone willing to pull someone up on their lazy key change, or the coupling of ‘remember’ with ‘November’, or one of any number of the arcane unwritten rules of songwriting, passed down sagely from generation to generation over a pint of mild and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps with a pickled egg in it. 

Going back was fun. It was pretty much the same sort of line up – some people who thought they were better than they were, some people who were much better than they gave themselves credit for, and some people who had a coterie of friends around them who gave them much more applause than they deserved. There were a couple of really good turns, and a jazz singer who I met at the bar and to whom I opened a conversation with the immortal line “It was nice, but it went on too long”. 

Fortunately she was of a patient disposition and by the time I’d complimented her on her frock I think we’d decided to get on politely. Naturally by the end of the evening I was roister doistered enough to get back up after my earlier set and do two or four numbers with my old chum Shev, and had had enough Guinness to perform both a blues-inflected guitar solo in one of his songs and emote sufficiently to carry off one of mine. The ghosts of the past were lurking in the corners of the bar, illuminated occasionally by the candles on the chocolate birthday cake.

Shaking hands and complimenting people on their songs, vocals, guitars and mixing techniques, we wandered off into the night, safe in the knowledge than in some far flung bar, there will always be a part of this country that will be standing up with a guitar and saying “This is a song about a crap indie night I went to”. That was a good one. That's how I started. 

Sold an album , by the way. One CD in exchange for a pocketful of change and a handful of compliments. Best deal in the world.

"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....