As Was

“It was twenty two years ago today…”

To Helstock, the official launch of the festival season and dedicated annually to the titular celebrant - The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley - upon the occasion of her birthday. Usually I get to reform at least one band for the occasion and this year I have also rosined up a new group – Theodore – and we open our set with a song called A Company of Strangers, which contains the couplet “What happened to those bright young things / Did we grow into the people we always wanted to be?” Afterward, co-curator Mr. Wendell pores over news clippings from the last century – actual pieces of paper marked with highlighter pen, imagine that - in which he, in his guise as rock and pop reporter for the local paper, discusses the prospects for the bright young things that Our Glorious Leader and I once were. In black and white pictures we are preserved, all big hair and billowing shirts earnestly looking to take on the world with our chorused guitars and our tasselled scarves. The past is a different country; even Cactus World News had a record deal back then.

As it happens, it also happens to be my actual birthday, which prompts me to recall that it is exactly twenty two years since the then bass player with As Is (and currently appearing at a punk festival near you with The Stupids) Ross Geraghty played his official last gig with the band at the end of a short tour we had organised ourselves and which climaxed with a show in a small cinema in South Wales. Singer James and I recall the highs and lows of the transitory life of the jobbing (i.e. broke) musician – sleeping six to a van on a lovingly-assembled pile of amplifiers and PA speakers beside the Manchester ship canal, where he was awoken both by condensation created by the band’s combined breath dripping from the van’s roof in a steady metronomic stream onto his face and the sound of something he felt only able to describe as ‘thwacking’ from outside. Having lustily thrown open the back doors of the van to greet the new morn (imagine that post-Judith scene with Graham Chapman in The Life of Brian) he recoiled slightly from the scene of an early morning fisherman beating his catch to death by repeatedly slamming it by the tail against the concrete canal wall.

“It wasn’t all bad though”, he reminds us. “There was that time in Leicester…” (the sadly lamented Princess Charlotte – along with The George Robey and The Powerhaus as much a fixture for the ascendant indie band as the Fillmore West was for a generation of peace and love-toting hippy bands from The Bay Area) “…where we were selling records on the pavement outside afterwards and that guy invited us back to his house, got us really stoned and then played the stereo version of Magical Mystery Tour while we looked through kaleidoscopes”. “You were leaning against the wardrobe”, I said. “That was the one that had the speaker with the bass mix on it” sighs James wistfully. “That really opened my eyes to what an amazing bass player Paul McCartney is” - this from a man who once performed a gig in a Dadaist prank billed as Thebeatles. “Then Ross got really paranoid and convinced everyone that the guy must be a serial killer and wouldn’t go into the kitchen” I recalled. As it happened, he took us all to the local greasy spoon the next morning and bought us breakfast, which was very kind considering he hadn’t even been to the gig.

We get up to perform a set comprised of songs from back in the day. When we get to the last number James prepares to open his throat to sing out the first line, which displays a remarkable prescience. “When this whole thing falls apart on us…” it runs “…looking back, it won’t seem real”.

Why The Long Face?

On a fortnightly basis, I go into the glowering neo-thirties edifice which houses Ipswich Community Radio and I speak on the air as nation unto nation - quite literally so in some cases, as through the joy of the internet we have received responses to the studio from America, Spain, and New Zealand - not all places that I have relatives in.

The two hour show is called "Why The Long Face?" and, as our trail proudly announces at the top of the hour (of ten o'clock at night) it involves two long-faced men talking about whatever strikes them as worthy of comment in that particular instance - imagine, if you will, a podcast which outstays welcome by (say) about an hour and a half. Sandwiched as we are in between Cosmic Jazz and Urban Beats, we don't really have a station demographic that stays with us for the evening, although Neil from CJ says he often listens to us from his hotel in China when he's away on business - he'll have especially enjoyed this week's programme, starting as it did with some jazz and then a fragment of dead air, as during the show handover his mate Derek had taken the wrong CD out of the player and nearly walked off with a copy of the new Dawes album.

We have a number of precepts regarding the subject matter of our discussions - Bond films, any update in the holder of the title of world's shortest man, car troubles - over time our listeners will know thus hath the candle singd the moath on a fairly regular basis. Here's a fairly typical edition of the show then, during which we discuss plans for a three hundred foot statue of Lee Brilleaux, congratulate Kiss on the opening of their new miniature golf course in Las Vegas, reflect on the changing nature of Disney cartoons ("I find it deeply ironic that a duck - Donald - should end up being tarred and feathered..."), wonder about the ingredients of Pope Benedict's aftershave, mourn the ear-less rabbit stepped on by a German cameraman, I take co-curator Neale through my weird dream set in a mall where eating the burgers makes the muzak sound better and which climaxes in a horrifying finale involving Andy Trill out of Picturehouse, there is a Van-based quiz, and we play Inside the Why The Long Face? Studio, wherein Neale takes the James Lipton role and begins by asking me what my favourite word is. You'll never guess what my ideal job would be...

http://www.icrfm.co.uk/index2.php?option=com_joomradio&page=show_radio&id=8789

The book of the series;

http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-bryer/why-the-long-face%3F-the-paper-trail/paperback/product-14954100.html

Do Some Old!

It is nearly Helstock time again, and so The Artist Formerly Known as The Singer and I have been painstakingly putting together a hand-picked band to perform the best in early 70’s (1973, specifically) vintage-style rock, rework prior songwriting triumphs and to play covers of things that we think best exemplify the genre we’ve been inspired by. Or, to put it another way, we’ve phoned up a couple of mates to see if they can get their domestic pass stamped in order to allow them to come out on a week night and make a racket in a rehearsal studio with us.
Having recorded last week’s get together and listened back for A&R purposes, Mr. Wendell and I got together this week for a quick acoustic strum/executive brainstorming session and to fine tune a couple of the guitar solos so that they didn't sound quite so much like someone kicking a banjo down a fire escape. We also played through another old number of ours which marks among its pedigree the combined virtues of being quite short (there’s no middle eight) and having very few chords. We considered that if things went well during the next (and final) rehearsal session we might devote some time to seeing if we could nail this one too, thus enabling us to take our set triumphantly over the magic twenty minute mark. Sadly we haven’t been able to track down our original demo version in the archive*, but the version we did once have was recorded in the back room upstairs at a pub that closed in 1997 and is now a listed building, which gives you some idea of its epoch.
There was a space in the second verse where neither of us could for the life of us remember the missing couplet so we were forced to write a new one, much in the fashion of those guys who go back and remaster their old albums and take the opportunity to fix that bit they never really liked but were forced to include at the time because they’d run out of multitracks/money/bugle or had a tour to be getting on with. At one point we started messing about with a couple of chords that sounded nice together. “Hang on – I’ll record that” said Wendellsteve. He placed a mobile phone on the coffee table. “Off you go” he said.

*Big bag of cassettes under the bed in Steve’s spare room.

The Perfectly Good Guitarist

I am not now, and it must be said, I never have been Ipswich’s go-to guitarist when it comes to dep and session work - this, you may be surprised to learn, is in the manner of a massive understatement. Very early in my career I took to heart the mantra that one note played with feeling was worth a hundred rattled off at speed, and the knowledge that I probably couldn’t play a hundred notes in a row at any speed without stopping for a cup of tea and a breather half way through then, and I certainly can’t now, has certainly helped me to maintain this conviction over the course of the years. Drummers, usually the last refuge of the guitarist who has run out of banjo jokes but who still needs a fall guy, have been heard to hum along with solos of mine in real time, not because they are so memorable and catchy, but because they are always the same. It isn’t that I’ve not tried. I could probably quote you chapter and verse from Ralph Denyer’s seminal The Guitar Handbook, although it’d probably be the chapters containing pictures of Jimmy Page wearing a dangerously low-slung Les Paul and some gemstone en-Zoso’ed flares rather than the one explaining the modern diatonic scale and where to locate it on the neck of a serviceable electric. The Guitar Workout for the Interminably Busy* is rarely far from hand, however in terms of graduating from the paperwork to the fret work I remain, like E.L.Wisty’s High Court Judge, tantalizingly short of the Latin.

Phlegmatically, I’ve come to figure that since in any room containing three or more other musicians there’s statistically likely to be someone better than me, one of them may as well get on with the business of taking care of, um, business. Although I might have the ego for the lengthy guitar duel I certainly don’t have the chops, and I’m generally happy to fulfill the gurning for the cameras and keeping an eye out for the ladies part of the on stage equation. Apart from that one time, of course.

Since I was already involved with the raiding party being dispatched to help Ippo’s twin town celebrate France’s national music day (as one seventh of The Perfectly Good Guitars**) I suppose it made sense, when one of the other bands' guitarist pulled out, to ask if I would fill in. After checking twice that they’d got the right phone number I agreed, and then immediately went into the sort of bowel-loosening cold sweat that usually involves the prospect of a hospital appointment or a driving test. The Frisky set itself was a mix of originals from singer Jules’s past, a few things from keyboard player TT’s solo album*** and a couple of covers - one of which, Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed, even if not wholly dependent for its success on the guitar solo per se, would certainly be deflated in its impact if I fluffed the whole thing up during my time in the spotlight. There began a series of rather intense CD listening sessions during which I spent an awful lot of time hovering over the pause and rewind buttons, and which also involved a certain degree of deciding to pack away the guitar at the end of an evening and heading off to bed with a mild headache before switching the lights back on and trying to run through the whole set without making a mistake just one more time.

At the single rehearsal we had time for I managed to bluff my way through without persuading anyone else in the group that simply drawing a discreet veil over proceedings and withdrawing gracefully from the engagement would be in the best interests of everybody, and I think I even added an extra part into one of the songs through judicious use of finger-tapping during one of the intros where there had been an atmospheric keyboard overdub on the recorded version. Thus emboldened, I hopped in the van determined to give it my best shot. That the gig itself was reasonably uneventful was cause enough for celebration on my part – no-one fell off the stage, we managed to play all of the songs all the way through without having to stare accusingly at a recalcitrant amplifier in order to cover up momentary brain freeze, and my climactic solo went unremarked, which I was more than happy to accept as validation of its authenticity.

Afterwards we all piled off to the nearest Irish pub where party leader Shev had blagged an impromptu gig for “…beers only for the guys in the band” to celebrate, whereupon he invited so many members of the touring party up in succession, like a jam session Gandalf inveigling Thorin’s dwarves into a Joycean Rivendell, that it would have been cheaper for the bar owner to give free beer to the audience members instead. I was, and remain, profoundly grateful for the faith they showed in me that weekend and, as I often think regarding whatever has befallen or may come between us in the intervening near-decade, we’ll always have Arras.

*It’s a real title.

**It’s fair to say that there was already a fairly generous cross-fertilisation going on between the nominal groups that made the trip. At one point Shev swears he heard one of the promoters exclaim “Eet is the same guitar player - burt zees time ‘e is wearing a ‘at!”

***This received the best review I’ve ever read, from The Blackpool Courier, which concluded "The influences of Rick Wakeman, Tony Banks and Jools Holland can be heard without a trace of plagiarism... Tony's playing deserves credit. More's the pity then that I can't find any tracks on the album that I like"

Here are me, Andy, TT and Frisky Pat reunited some years later, backing Steve ‘Kilbey’ Mears on a version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Unlike during our time in Arras, I stood on my guitar lead half way through this song, hence my nervous glance toward the amplifier before I check all four controls on the guitar and finally wiggle the lead around until it starts making noise again. You don’t really notice because of the tremendous racket the other three are making, which was also of great comfort during some of the trickier sections of Summer in the City in France.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5rWU_Hua9I

"This song was number one...

....on the set list earlier, but we changed it"

It’s always interesting to watch a band from the other side of the monitors from a musician’s (or at least band member’s) POV. This week I went to Live At The Institute in Kelvedon, a lovely little monthly club night with no bar and a bring your own policy regarding both food and drink, which means that the turns are blissfully uninterrupted by the rattle of the till and the clank of change on palm during their sets, and that the audience is one prone to listening rather than discussing whose round it is and whether they require salt and vinegar crisps with their pickled egg, although I will say that I momentarily misread the enquiry “Chilli nuts?” from one of our party given that it was minus eight in darkest Essex that night and I’d just been out for a fag.

We were there to watch a band called Moses touring their ten year old The Swimming Zoo album (almost) in its entirety and to marvel at both their song and their stagecraft - both of which were depressingly still on top of their game after a decade of baffling obscurity for this superb collection of singers, musicians and potty-mouthed betwixt song raconteurs. Before that then, the supporting artistes. First up were a four piece acoustic band called One Sixth of Tommy which, before we go any further, I have no hesitation in damning as a terrible name for a group, even given that ours (Songs from The Blue House) is as eminently memorable as that of the band who hit number three in the Billboard chart with Jackie Blue in 1975 by comparison.

Forever the fate of the support act is to go through the middle-aged musician’s filter. How old are they? What are they wearing? Can they play? Can they sing? Do they insist on explaining how they came to write their songs? Who do they sound like? Where can I file them away in in my internal rolodex of genres? And, finally, what are the songs up to? OSoT, as I expect no-one outside their Google Calendar stenographers refer to them, were through all of these hoops like an otter through the country of the two rivers as my jaundiced forty-something eyes took in their schtick, cast about for a suitable pigeonhole in which to place them, and ate some more chilli nuts.

I liked ‘em. At one point they advised that their next song was available as a free download from their website. But that’s not what I want. When I’m in the room, the sound of digital reverb still echoing off the rafters, and wondering if I’ve got time to nip to the toilet before the proprietors have rearranged the onstage furniture for the next act, I want to go to the merch stand, proffer a round sum in currency, and have something in my pocket that I can listen to in the car. Hence today’s tweet - Buying a band's CD at the gig is like leaving a tip, or writing a thank you note. It also means they can afford a Ginster's on the way home. I bought One Sixth of Tommy’s CD because it was shorthand for explaining that I thought they had a lot of promise and I hoped they’d do well, that they wouldn’t split up and go off to separate universities and split the band, and that I really appreciated them coming out to a large village in Essex in the middle of winter for third on the bill expenses, and because I’ve been on the unwilling receiving end of so many post-gig lectures about what I should be doing to further my career in music that I wrote a book about it.

This isn’t so much about my night out. It’s about how a tangible product is always going to be a better calling card than, say, a calling card. How folk faced with a merchandise table and a queue will pay a tenner for an album and get to their next appointment rather than wait around for the person in front to have their one pound and a penny in change counted out (whoever’s manning the table will appreciate it too, incidentally) and how the critical process is generally merely a number of box ticking exercises undertaken by middle-aged men with chilli nuts.

There was one more thing. I hope I managed it.

This is One Sixth of Tommy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxFxkCM-4xQ

The Swimming Zoo by Moses is available at CDBaby http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mosesuk

"You! Book Sarm West for Tuesday...

...and get me The Ladybirds on the phone!"

Like me, I’m sure you’ve spent many an hour idly wondering how guest musicians end up on each other’s albums – what the process is by which the massive over-extended super-ego of fame is subsumed for long enough to make a meaningful contribution to another’s work, and how they then hold off from suing the recipients for withheld songwriting royalties for as long as most of them do. Most of the time, it’s as easy as just asking. There are a host of guests on the forthcoming Songs from The Blue House album whose session fees (to my knowledge) range from a huffer* and several pints of delicious Brewers Gold to some remedial maintenance work on a laptop (and several pints of Brewers Gold) - yes, Bellowhead fans, it is entirely possible that many of those songs from the bus updates you were enjoying during that last tour would have only been made possible through the diligent application of Our Glorious Leader’s technical knowledge and his ability to turn things off and then turn them on again.

Singers don’t generally mind popping in and donning the headphones of notoriety as long as they get a lift there and back, and in my experience as long as there’s a curry in it you’re pretty much guaranteed a pedal steel player’s best attention for the day. Where banjo players are concerned you mainly need to have the civility to hold off on the jokes for as long as they’re within earshot or they do tend to get quite defensive and you have to let them sit in the engineer’s big swivel chair and swing themselves around for a bit until they’ve forgotten whatever perceived slight they were cross about**. I once did some recording where I wanted an old colleague to contribute some backing vocals and, thanks to the online archive that is http://www.james.partridge.com/ I was able to re-read our correspondence regarding the matter.

"My Drearest Rossquo,
The offer to contribute to what I'm confident will be a millstone in pop history is completely genuine. You should temper your excitement though, as I let you in on its chequered history so far...
Having decided that with the imminent retirement of Clive Davis from Arista it was unlikely that 'The new Whitney Houston' (as I had been billing myself) was going to be signed this side of the next millennium - yes, the next one - I wandered round to Gibbon's house one evening and recorded half a dozen songs that I'd made up out of my very own brain using an acoustical guitar and a voice out of my very own head.
The idea was that Gibbon would then take these and overlay some keyboards of such exquisite beauty that grown men would weep, and bass guitar parts such that women would in all likelihood offer us their first born to use as fridge ornaments (or as we preferred) upon hearing them. I started to get very excited. Then Gibbon decided to do it properly; and digitally. As it turned out, I had time to go back and redo a couple of songs, then record a couple more, then get married, go on honeymoon and have a lodger move in and then out of the house in the time it took Gib to do his bits. There were dark rumours of Cubase-sequencing-to-hard-drive-and-beat-realignment-download problems. There seemed to be an awful lot of manual reading going on. One night he stayed up til half past four in the morning sequencing a particularly bass part (and made himself quite ill the next day). Finally, some four months after the first deadline I had given he announced that we were ready to do some overdubs-hence Sunday's thrill of confusion/space cadet glow interface scenario.
This will involve a couple of guitar solos (one major, one minor - i.e. the same one only three frets up), Helen doing some flutework (it's a sort of decorative trellis used to disguise chimney sores) and some singing. Either come down for the day and lob constructive comments at the engineer (Gib should probably have connected his output port to his infile flange by about, ooh, Tuesday at the rate he's been working) or park yourself in the pub and we'll issue mobile phone calls when your specialised subject comes up. Don't ask me what it sounds like because I haven't heard anything since about March, and that was some rubbish keyboard drums we'd put in as a click track.
I'll put you down for some BVs, (no chance you've still got a mandolin I suppose - we've done a song that's crying out for it) and there'll be an acoustic kicking about in case you get inspired (bear in mind we've only got a day, so don't get too inspired) and it's all very laissez faire around the album (if you can hear it in your head, let's put it on the track). Plus, if you play on the album you can go and look yourself up on the website, which always impresses the ladies. Then when we've all got thoroughly pissed off at losing that vital middle eight due to bastard technology we can all go to the pub and play 'Mustang Sally' at the acoustic jam. There'll be a bass there, incidentally.
What time are you coming?
Love, Shane xx"

His reply read;

“All sounds fun to me, though I will have to go back on my previous musings that we "shan't work together again". I would be delighted to utterly destroy your hopes of producing anything sounding remotely usable, with backing vocals that once led a female Cornish Minstrel to dub them "interesting Jazz harmonies".
Yours in loud love, B.H. Emoth"

Incidentally, you’ll be pleased to hear that the resulting CD was favourably reviewed locally, as the following testimonials attest;

Great songs from a well established local muso who's not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve - BBC Radio Suffolk's Stephen Foster writing in The Grapevine
One of the finest purveyors of wry, acerbic pop....Songs that are imbued with pathos and humour.....A gifted wordsmith with a wonderful turn of phrase....-East Anglian Daily Times
Will inspire those who have lost enthusiasm to pick up their forgotten instruments - Ipswich Evening Star
He's a great musician Dad, but he can't sing, can he ? - Emily Broadley
* http://www.compasseslittleygreen.co.uk/Compassess%20Website%20food.html
** It usually involves reference to a skip somewhere in the equation.

In The Company of Strangers

A while ago I wrote here about doing some recording I’d been curating with That Nice David Booth at his studio – The Pigpen – in darkest North Essex. I recently wrote up another piece inspired by the experience and the good folk at The Rocking Vicar published it on their website - I’ve included directions below - which was terribly exciting, not least because their blogs have a slightly wider circulation than mine, but also because they know how to write properly and had duly sprinkled some fairy dust on the piece on its way through. One of the many gratifying things about seeing your own work filtered through the grammar check of another and then displayed in grey and white for all the world to see is the improvement that a good solid bit of sub-editing can do for it. I’m consistently prone, for example, to add in as many commas as I can get away with, I’m an adjective junkie, and I have a terrible habit of putting in a multiplicity of asides until the finished article contains more footnotes than a chiropodist’s to-do list. Here’s the opening of the piece as I submitted it;

I’d say I have been recording for about thirty years now*, but it’s not always been a matter of free coffee and biscuits in the private lounge while a highly trained engineer listens back to the most recent take of that tricky middle eight looking for stray plectrum clicks on my behalf**.

Look at that – that’s two in the very first sentence!

So anyway, to summarize, I recently went up to TNDB’s new place, The Recording Booth (now satisfactorily relocated on the civilized side of the Suffolk border) with one Tony James Shevlin in order to finish off the track. Mr. Shevlin has a wealth of writing, performing and recording experience to draw on and I was hoping to use his nous in these areas to complement my insistence that it would be possible to deliver a certain number of lyrics in a row without taking a breath. After many years as a professional musician, Shev is one of the most creative people I know***, not least in the disciplines of composing expenses claims and in negotiating the elasticity of the opening hours of licensed premises, and so I felt confident that he would be a good foil in the recording studio. In addition, he was also in a position to persuade his unreasonably talented sister Jules to give up one of her perfectly good evenings at home in front of a roaring fire in order to add a third and a fifth harmony and then double track them in the time it would have taken me to work out which end of the mic to sing into. I was enormously pleased that she was happy to perform the function of diva at beck for the evening, partially because of her amazing vocal range and partly because of her amazing cheekbones, which are only two of the many reasons I’ve also had a bit of a crush on her for the last decade and a bit.

And so we spent a lovely evening dubbing and bouncing, drinking tea and eating cake, oohing and aahing, and here – I have attached a handy copy-and-paste link below - for your entertainment…(imagine Leonard Sachs doing the rest of this intro)… it is. As before, I tender over-and-above the call of duty credit and thanks to Andy Trill for his instinctively appropriate bass and lead guitar, and to David Booth for recording, mixing and playing drums on the track - he also came up with a little bouzouki riff that we slipped in at the end. We left my original guide vocal out of the finished version and so all of that singing and harmonizing is the solely work of Shev and Jules, who created a positively Fleetwood Mackian chorus under the guiding hand of TNDB at the controls. When they’re not helping me out, they take care of business at http://serenityzest.com/aboutus.cfm

I’m also indebted to Steve Constable (Mr. Wendell Gee) who prompted me to come up with the song in the first place after lending me the excellent Dawes album Nothing Is Wrong and whose band The Company of Strangers inspired the working title, which phrase I am pleased to say occurs nowhere in the final version of the lyrics. I played the rest of the guitars, and eight bars on the pianner.

The Song - http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/the-company-of-strangers
The Blog - http://www.therockingvicar.co.uk/just-for-the-record/4559792769

The Studio - http://www.therecordingbooth.co.uk/the_recording_Booth/Home.html

*”Blimey – you must be tired!”

**During the recording of the first Songs from The Blue House album Our Glorious Leader and our engineer Steve Tsoi became so frustrated at the incidence of random clicks and scratches on one take that we ended up gaffa tapping a duster onto the body of the guitar underneath the strings in order to try and muffle them.

***Shev and I once formed a band specifically for the purposes of allowing us to have every one of our collectively owned guitars on stage at once, and he wrote and scripted an entire back story for the group and all of its individual members, one of whom - Jules – performed as one of The Mandolin Sisters. Thanks to songwriting royalties accrued from The Troggs’ Athens to Andover LP he has been retired these fifteen years and living like a King in Patagonia.

"They say you play High Barn twice in your career - Once on the way up and once on the way down. It's good to be back..."

Two men, seated around a central table, read books quietly. A trio plays improvised jazz in the corner of the room, the low throb of the double bass offered counterpoint by the acrobatic scales dispatched by nimble-fingered men with seriously cultivated beards. A tank-topped actor reflects on his circumstance, and with overly serious intent another man, of indeterminate age, but with distinguished salt and pepper-flecked hair betraying his world-weary mien, explains his predicament. “Honestly, if I see a demo with a fucking Cajon on it, it goes straight in the bin. That or a ukulele. Imagine the two together!” he continues. “I tell you, if anyone created a power duo featuring a cajon and a ukulele, I’d go round to their house and kill them, just to save everyone else the trouble later on”. 

Welcome to backstage at The High Barn, premier purveyors of musical theatre and entertainment to the barboured masses of North Essex, and home of Our Beloved Record Company. We are here as part of the monthly acoustic showcase night, which essentially involves a half past five soundcheck, four hours of sitting around and then a twenty minute set (by which time settings on the desk will have irrevocably changed, thus bringing the whole five-thirty soundcheck thing into some sort of perspective from a having tea at home POV) - hence the time-filling manoeuvres described above employed by some of the turns.

There’s always drinking and smoking, of course, and those who have renounced the latter reflect fondly on the smoky dampness that is part of the shared experience. After a period of the former, conversations strike up betwixt journeyman and jobber, percussionist and perfectionist, soundman and shaman; be nice to everyone you meet, runs the mantra, for you never know who they might turn out to be. A guitar case by the kitchen area bears the legend ‘Matt Cardle’. Literally, if you believe Our Glorious Leader, who claims that the erstwhile X-Factor winner now exists in such reduced circumstance that he is forced to live in a guitar case in his parents’ garage. 

“I can’t believe”, says bass player Gibbon “That it was over a year a go you told me that knock-knock joke”. “Guess which nationality I am” says the blond guitar player with the impressively groomed goatee. No one can. “Austrian!” he says after many guesses working their way up and down the Scandiwegian map have come from the group. We suspect he has played, and won, this game often. I try to perk up OGL by mentioning a very lovely uke player Mike Scott out of The Waterboys (his official title according to Debretts) has tweeted*. That takes up a few more minutes as we try to guess her name. I would say ‘remember’, but I didn’t know it in the first place.

Time waddles by. Eventually we are beckoned stageward – for the purposes of the business of show we walk out of the side door, round the side of the venue and back in through the stage door – luckily it’s stopped raining. Twenty minutes later and we’re off again travelling the reverse route. “Language, Timothy” OGL mutters at one point during a lengthy stage introduction on my part. Actually, the set may have lasted twenty five or thirty minutes, now I think about it. On the way home Gib and I listen to ELO’s first album in the car. I reflect on the artistic endeavour that took Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan out of Sixties psychedelic hit makers The Move and into the realms of massed overdubbed cellos and flugelhorn solos. “It’s mental” I say.

*http://www.youtube.com/user/SydneyLeighB

George Clooney in Reverse

There is a reasonably well known story regarding Union Station mandoleer Dan Tyminski, who dubbed the vocal parts for George Clooney’s scenes as the singer of The Soggy Bottom Boys in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? Upon seeing the film Mrs. Tyminski reportedly remarked “George Clooney’s face and your voice – that’s my fantasy!”

I am reminded of this anecdote during a telephone conversation with Our Glorious Leader, who calls to discuss track listing and the resultant potential album length and mentions in passing that due to the combination of a fortuitous set of circumstances and some not inconsiderable personal charm, he has been able to procure the vocal abilities of one Boo Hewerdine to overdub a backing vocal previously performed by me on the new Songs from The Blue House* album. This is exciting news as I am a huge admirer of the 1994 Ivor Novello Award runner-up’s work, and also a fillip for Mrs. K, who will henceforth be able to bask in the knowledge that Mr. Hewerdine is performing a lyric written specifically about her, and in a considerably more mellifluous manner than the previous rough mixes might have suggested would be the case. I’m rather hoping we get to make a video so that I can mime his part in the same way that the former Doctor Ross out of ER so diligently took on Dan Tyminski’s parts (as it were).

Not that I am in any way suggesting that Boo is not a fine figure of manliness in his own right. Indeed, a less than sympathetic suggestion on Twitter (I was in the pub) that the guitarist of the band I was watching bore more than a passing resemblance to the Honey Be Good hitmaker prompted a rather reproachful response through the social networking site from Boo himself. That’s the trouble with these things – you can’t be rude on the internet about just anyone these days. Only last week, a Tweeted suggestion that children’s television’s monkey costume-based beat combo Zingzillas were possibly not producing their best work recently (“Second album syndrome”, I called it) drew an indignant reply from Banks and Wag, the partnership behind such established Kirk Central toe tappers as “Do You Didgeridoo?”, “Playing a Solo” and “Rocking in a Rock Band”. To be fair, I’d only seen the rock n’ roll-based one, and Tang seemed to be wearing The Edge’s hat, so I may well have been premature in writing off the new series.

 On the other hand, since he was online and self-confessedly at a loose end the other night I was actually able, in a manner not unreminiscent of Flight of the Conchords’ manager Murray, to ask Neil Finn’s advice as to whether he thought thirty six minutes was too short for an album, which is what prompted OGL’s call in the first place. “That’s long these days” he replied.


In case you wanted to keep up with any more pub band-based lookalikes or comments on the quality of children’s television programmes I’m on Twitter as @doyoudoanywings

*It’s not a great name, admittedly. But only fate and fortune’s intervention stopped us going with our first choice, which was The Soggy Front Bottom Boys, for which I think we can all be thankful.

Things you never thought you'd hear (pt.94)

I check my phone to see that there is a new voicemail message from Our Glorious Leader. "The saxaphone player from Van der Graaf Generator likes 'Tree'", I hear. "He says it reminds him of The Grateful Dead".

Things we learned about sound checks from this weekend's (splendid) pop show/birthday party at The High Barn.

(Right) The author soundchecking yesterday

(1) Do not eat coconut prior to soundcheck - even if it is presented in lovingly bite-sized shapes as part of your pre-match refreshment. It will get caught between your teeth, and dessicate into tiny flakes which will catch at the back of your throat, making any other action than coughing, spluttering or retching almost impossible. Sound engineers hate this as a way of getting a level on the vocals. Much safer to stick with the three bean wrap, the strawberries, the jaffa cakes, pineapple slices or individual party-sized trifles. Not a typical rider, by any means.

(2) 'Toot Toot, Chugga Chugga' by The Wiggles is a more than adequate song to play when deciding on the appropriate mix for the guitars. Also utilised in this capacity at previous gigs have been 'I Wanna Be Your Dog', 'Brenda's Iron Sledge', 'Before The Deluge' (occasionally supplanted with 'Rosie' in deference to the subject matter - that of the trials and tribulations of being a sound man. Oh, and wanking), 'It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) or, indeed, anything that happens to be on the front of house PA at the time. We prefer not to play songs which will actually be in the set, which can lead to some confusion with sound men and women unfamiliar with our act. In Beatles specialist outfit The Star Club we used to occasionally run through a spirited version of Radiohead's 'Creep' before they opened the doors (conversely in Picturehouse we used to do a creepy version of 'Street Spirit').

(3) For the sake of the front of house engineer's frame of mind it's probably best not to rewire the desk on the afternoon of the gig. This can lead to industrially-couched expressions of disbelief when the talent (i.e. us) points out that the vocal mix which should be coming from the monitors at the front of the stage is actually engulfing the drummer with warm swathes of close harmony. Sounds great in principle, but what the he invariably wants is "Kick, snare, bit of bass, touch of lead vocal". Whatever the sound on stage, your FOH engineer will be the one who presents your sound to the audience, and so it's best to keep him as stress-free as possible. You don't need any unnecessary complications weighing a sound man - not when, as we do, your line up features a banjo anyway.

(4) Within split seconds of the on stage check being completed, Nick Zala will have gone for a curry.

The very touchstone of the artiste's relationship with the help is probably best summarised by the (possibly apocryphal) tale of Ry Cooder who, when asked by the festival engineer how he wanted his sound out front, allegedly handed the unfortunate fader monkey a single jack lead. "Plug that in" he said "And try not to fuck it up".

My Dear Correspondent,
Thanks to the multi-platform interface of modern multitasking digital media you can now not only read this blog for free here but you can also have it delivered directly to your Kindle, for a very reasonable consideration, from those people at Amazon - http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-These-Little-Pieces
The physical hard copy books, the downloads and the iTunes versions are all, of course, also still available to purchase from the blog front page.

The Pretender...

More indulgence, as I decamp once again to Pigpen Studio in darkest Essex (http://pigpenstudio.net/Pig_Pen_Studio_Essex/Home.html) for an evening in the company of That Nice David Booth and of Andy Trill in order to scratch another recurrent musical itch, attempting to record something in the style of long-time musical touchstone Jackson Browne, who I have to thank not only for many years of musical pleasure, but also for gaining me that extra advantage when his name came up in the interview for a job at Andy’s Records many years ago. I correctly identified him as the co-author of ‘Take It Easy’ and the progenitor of the more recent (at the time) ‘Lawyers in Love’ (“Good!” squawked one Billy Gray, who was asking the questions, “Everyone thinks he’s a soul singer”. He then went on to ask me if I had a criminal record, to which I replied that I didn’t realize I needed one, but I digress)*. Having written some lyrics couched in suitably Canyonesque form** I first needed to explain to my willing collaborators the sort of thing that was expected of them and rather than talk them through the heady haze of the 1974 LA singer-songwriter scene with all its multifarious Waddys and Ladanyis, Kortchmars and Sklars (and who doesn’t experience a vicarious thrill at the mere mention of Craig Doerge or Russ Kunkel?) I simply played them a couple of bits from Late for the Sky, asked Trill to concentrate on what Doug Haywood was doing on the bass, and promised him that he could unleash his inner David Lindley once we’d double-tracked the acoustics.

As previously, the combined Booth/Trill axis quickly nailed the feel I was trying to get across with the maximum of empathy and the minimum of fuss (bear in mind that the last thing I’d asked them to do was a six minute prog-metal instrumental, so the very least you can say for them is that they have breadth of scope) fuelled merely by strong tea, and some fruit scones and jam which had been brought along by Andy courtesy of his generous and delightful wife (hi Sally – thanks for the scones!) and which had been the subject of our first and most important discussion of the evening, prior even to whether to tune down to use a dropped D on the acoustics – to whit, whether to pronounce the delicious crumbly bakey goodness as skon or as scoan? They were also a boon to getting Andy to be decisive in deciding which licks to execute during his closing solo, as we said that he couldn’t have his second until he’d completed the part satisfactorily, which he then did in summarily short order and with consummate professionalism – notwithstanding that he wasn’t actually being paid – with no recourse to auto tuning, pitch shifting, patch pasting or dropping , and all completed in a couple of live straight to amp to mic to desk takes.

After many happy hours’ tea drinking, scone eating, guitar overdubbing, and a number of attempts to get a half reasonable guide vocal (that being a consequence of my own atonal honk being the only resource we had to hand and not any technical shortcomings - only a bad workman blames his pro-tools) we managed to drop in not only a piano part carefully arranged, transcribed and performed by myself, (although Dave did operate the pedal for me while I drove in much the same way as Michelle Dotrice and Matthew Garber shared duties in 'The Gnome-mobile') while Andy held the bit of paper I’d drawn the chords of D and G on with big dots on the keys to show me where to put my fingers, but also a counterpoint bouzouki riff crafted by Boothy while idling on the sofa waiting for the kettle to boil.

In the circumstances (it was getting a bit late, I had a cold and besides, the scones were all gone) we decided that the wake of all that activity was probably not a great time to start lovingly multi layering backing vocals and harmonies, and so we will be decamping to Boothy’s new recording space and audio workshop (just as soon as he’s finished building it) to complete and tweak it. After which I’ll probably get Steven Wilson to do a 5.1 surround sound mix for the audiophile market using platinum-coated cables, Zucarelli holophonics and gold-coated eight track cartridge technology. Well, why not? As the platitudes say, there’s only one ‘I’ in "self-indulgent".

*Obviously, the correct answer to the question “Do you have a Police record when posed in an important job interview is “I used to have Outlandos d’Amour on vinyl”, but that’s not what he asked.

** A review of Browne’s The Pretender included the comment "The shallowness of his kitschy doomsaying and sentimental sexism is well-known, but I'm disappointed as well in his depth of craft." which is, coincidentally, as good a clarification of my style as I’ve read anywhere.

The Borrowers

As a personal favour to an old friend we’re resurrecting the tired old corpse of The Star Club for one last lunchtime in Spalding next month, and so last night we thought we’d better freshen up on a few of the chord progressions, just in case anyone was actually going to be paying attention. Times have changed from when we first pored carefully over the badly-transcribed Complete Beatles Songbook in order to put together a set to hawk around the pubs and clubs of Olde Ipswich and its environs and so we found ourselves gathered around a laptop loaded with the entire Beatles back catalogue on one memory stick in order to freshen up the part of the cerebral cortex that deals with lyrics and reinvigorate the part of the muscle memory which handles Aeolian cadence.

We’d been Beatles specialists for some while before we had entered our self-imposed hiatus (interrupted by a couple of reunions, even though we swore “…not a second time”) and so after some initial pursing of lips and knotting of brows regarding enforced key changes the chords rang out from rusty strings with ever more fluency as the familiar box shapes of Beatles songs* made their way out of our memories and into Shev’s kitchen – a place long since abandoned by the need to keep the noise down as it was past the kids’ bedtimes.

A couple of hours and thirty nine songs later we decided we’d probably got enough material to keep us going through an afternoon set ("There's a tidy twenty minutes right there...") and besides, a couple of house guests had come back after their football training and were doubtless perplexed at what the earthly purpose of four blokes sitting around a kitchen table playing obsolete things like guitars could possibly be. I know. At our ages.

I looked at the list again this morning. If you only learned the first half dozen songs off it you’d already know more than you ever needed to about the textbook construction of a perfect pop song, although of course whether you were then able to put the theory into practice yourself would be entirely dependent on whether you decided to (to paraphrase Picasso) merely borrow a few of their tricks or just barefacedly went ahead and stole them.

In the year that Neil Harrison bows out after thirty one years of pretending to be John Lennon in The Bootleg Beatles, I think we can be excused just one more trip up the memory lane we still call the A16, can’t we? Besides, I need to impress someone with my Spalding trivia. The first barcode in the UK was used in 1979 in Spalding market. I can’t wait for the crowd reaction when I spring that little beauty on ‘em! 

*Tell Me Why is a good example – most of the song takes place within two frets’ reach of the next chord at any one time. All My Loving is another – up two, down two, across one, that sort of thing. The main difficulty with that one is not breaking into Hold My Hand by The Rutles halfway through

"I've always wanted to be like Richard Thompson..." .

So far this year we in Songs from The Blue House have played a number of festivals and they have all, with the exception of one, had the same thing in common - it’s pissed it down. At Maverick however, the sun shone, insects buzzed lazily in the summer haze, children grasped hungrily at melting ice creams proffered by indulgent parents, and strawberry blonde girls fanned themselves waftily below outsize straw hats. The difference here was that this was the only one that I hadn’t travelled to with bass player Gibbon – he’d taken the opportunity to ride the bus out to Easton Farm Park - and so when we were engaged to perform at Felixstowe’s al fresco Art on the Prom festival I thought I might see if the fates were inclined to smile upon us again and decided to let the train take the strain, thus enabling me to avoid having to worry about finding somewhere to park, whether the gear would fit in the boot, whether the traffic lights on Felixstowe Road would hold me up - basically to avoid all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace that inevitably accompanies these things.

The sun shone brightly in the sky as I boarded the railway carriage at Ipswich station, Sunday paper in one hand and guitar case in the other, and I busied myself with minutae of the inkies as the train surged through the glorious East Anglian countryside, unfettered by roadworks, traffic signals, inconsiderate BMW drivers pulled up on double yellows with their hazards flashing, and pedestrians too lazy to make it the next twenty yards up the road to where the pelican crossing is. We pulled into Felixstowe station right on time – sadly no longer the splendid Victorian edifice with a five hundred foot long platform, where Wallis Simpson arrived to ride out the pre-abdication storm, where I caught last orders after my shift waiting tables at The Orwell Moat House Hotel in the station buffet (divided by a piece of tape stuck to the floor into the public and lounge bars, identical but for the extra ten pence on the price of a pint of ale) or where my maternal grandparents rolled up to enjoy the bracing sea air in the roaring twenties, one of the last memories that Gran happily shared with us that day when we visited her in the home.

I walked down the High Street – past the very cinema where Kipper got me tickets to see Hawk the Slayer and then got me the poster and the promo stills afterward, past the supermarket where RB’s Mum used to work, over the road which leads down to The British Legion where I did my first public gig and where they called the support band back on for an encore after we’d finished our set* and past the Wimpy, still serving the Brown Derby for dessert and with a family sat by the window, a tousle-haired child drawing circles in the spilled fizzy drink on the formica-topped table. It was about this point that it started to piss down.

Anyway, the gazebo on the green by the seafront was a washout and the members of the band who’d already shown up had retreated to the Red Cross tea room – officially opened in 1965 and constructed, according to the brass plate on the wall, by one Percy Plant – where it was resolved that we would continue with the day’s programme and so after a short set by Steve Mann’s Exit 13 we adopted the position in front of the twenty or so souls that had either stoically resolved to see the event out or had volunteered to serve tea and cake in the day centre as required and were determined to fulfill their commitments, and we performed a very well received, intimate and almost totally acoustic performance, utilizing the old-school skills of stepping forward to take a solo, dropping down to enhance a vocal and lustily throating a hearty four part harmony when required. As we cased up our instruments the constant patter of raindrops on the windows which had accompanied our performance quietened to lull, the lowering sun glowed dully on the sullen clouds hovering above the choppy grey breakers of the North Sea and I was struck with a profound truth. “Gib” I said. “Can I have a lift home?”


*Believe me, that Spinal Tap line about the audience “Still booing them when we came on” has no little resonance at Kirk Central to this day.

I’ve got a fuzz box and I’m gonna use it…

 

Some time ago my friend Andy Trill, who I know best from being the one who knew how to play all the songs in the Picturehouse set properly and you probably know from past blogs as the grumpy one who originally joined temporarily to substitute for The Singer and then never left, reflected that while on tour once with Mr. Fish - in Zurich as I understand it - he was struck with the name of a progressive rock suite that he would one day produce. It was to be called Mannequins on a Turquoise Beach. When I finally skipped out of the band one of the last things we promised was that we would get together one day and collaborate on making real that concept. Of course, we never got round to it. 

Much later, while reflecting on having recently listened to a Megadeth’s Countdown to Extinction in the car a few times (a purchase made after reading Dave Mustaine’s autobiography) which I very much enjoyed, and a free CD that came with a magazine called Classic Rock presents Prog, which I very much didn’t, it occurred to me that it might be time to dig out the trusty Gibson Les Paul and have a bit of a noodle myself, and so I contacted Andy again to see if he would be interested in coming down to That Nice David Booth’s studio to spend a day faffing about with some guitars, just for a bit of a lark. TNDB agreed to play drums, and I also brought my niece Roanna along, as she was interested to see what went on in a proper studio and had promised that her tea making was exemplary in both form and execution. 

We turned up at nine in the morning, I played through what I had in my head, Booth interpreted my air-drumming as appropriately as he could, Andy sat at the back and worked things out on bass and then when I’d done my guitar bits to as proficient a level as I felt able he embellished them very beautifully with some extra parts before accepting some vague pointers from me about some other bits we needed doing in the mean time. I walked out at five that afternoon with a CD of the roughly mixed article in my hand.

We then sent a copy off to keyboard player Tony ‘TT’ Turrell, who has history with all of us in various ways, forms and combinations and he very kindly worked out what we’d done & where we’d left spaces and then filled in what he perceived as the gaps before Andy and I went back to the studio with TNDB to buff it all up in terms of electronically shaving bits off the edges of notes, chopping sections out and making sure the dB levels stayed sufficiently in the red zone for long enough to keep me happy when I looked at the fuzzy lines on the computer in between making cups of Fairtrade tea. 

Andy, not entirely happy with one of his earlier takes, spent a bit more time dive-bombing the whammy bar at home and then mailed it over to the studio before TNDB tidied the whole thing up once again with the diligent application of digital processes on the reverse flange overphase chorus buss and, in all probability, dobly in between moving house, performing child care duties and maintaining his own proliferation of musical projects. Multitasking I think they call it.

So here it is then - you can listen to it now if you like (see link below). Roanna suggested putting in the bit toward the end where there are two bars of a reverse-effect bass figure before the end section, by the way.

The ‘band’ and the track are both named Future State Map.

http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/future-state-map

Who you gonna call?

An interesting diversion in styles for the mighty Songs from The Blue House at The Fox & Hounds Beer Festival in Heacham this week in that we not only employed almost the full range of artistic expertise available to us but also, controversially, enjoyed a beautiful bright sunny gig day – all the better an occasion to spend two hours in the car on the way to Norfolk, then. 

Tony “TT” Turrell was my host and navigator, and filling the bucket seats on this expedition were Mr. Gibbon – bass player, James May stunt double and professional Alan Davies lookalike and Turny Winn – banjoista, chartered book-keeper and former child star with the Kelvedon Free Mummers. We enjoyed a pleasant trip up, exchanging tales of what we’d been doing recently (TT’s involved playing prog festivals in the USA with The Reasoning and composing the music for a chocolate commercial, mine a lengthy monologue on the travails of my contracted motor car maintenance facility, principally centred around their work prioritization system and use of the phrase “Hope to see you again soon, Mr. Kirk!”, which took up a large part of the A134) and listening to a random selection from TT’s iPod (Midlake, Genesis, Mr. Fish, Supertramp et al) while consuming a pork pie and some toffees which had handily found their way into his glove box in time for the trip. 

It’s not exactly Dionysian excess, I know, but once you’ve put two guitars, a small amplification system, an electric piano, a banjo and four musicians into an Audi estate there’s not a lot of room left for tour bus-styled high jinks. Frankly we were lucky to get to the toffees. Thankfully the Sandringham Flower Festival wasn’t until the week after and so we were spared the sort of teeth-clenching gridlock that these sorts of blue riband events can provoke. 

Once at Heacham we gratefully decamped and greeted the forward party – Our Glorious Leader James, The Charming and Fragrant Helen Mulley, Fiddly Richard (all the way from Thorndon), and That Nice David Booth, who was to be accompanied on this occasion by his four year old son Finn, here to make his professional debut on additional percussion, for which he received both a round of applause from our appreciative Sunday afternoon crowd and an ice cream from the kiosk on the beach nearby from his Dad. Stick with us, Finn, we'll take you places... 

A lengthy two-setter based on a found set list* had the capacity to incorporate many unreleased gems from the forthcoming Coggeshall Democracy album as well as crowd-pleasers of yore (an early audience request for “…Reaper” was happily acceded to and Mulley took to the tables out front the better to enjoy an extended improvisation on a theme from ‘Not That Kind of Girl’ by TT) and there was both an excursion into new territory for TNDB with the Gods Kitchen song 'North of Nowhere' (“I think I’d like a copy of that before the next gig please”) - which usually only makes an appearance if we’re having a particularly splendid time - and a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to build a man-high tower of empties side stage over the course of the gig by myself. 

The catering was, of course, of the usual exemplary standard and we were most pleased after the show when into the car park pulled both Starsky’s Grand Torino (or at least a reasonable facsimile of same) containing Starsky, Hutch and Huggy Bear (idem) and the Ghostbusters’ ECTO-1. I’ll tell you – if the fire station opposite had released the nee-naw at the same time my day would have been pretty much complete. We further enjoyed a similarly pleasant trip home, delayed only at one point by Mr. Turrell having to pull over to the side of the road due to the incidence of tears of laughter impairing his vision and imperiling us all - this may not have been wholly unconnected to the improvised internal monologue we ascribed to the man glimpsed kicking a dead pigeon around a car park somewhere in Ipswich, to be honest. 

Again, it’s hardly the Algonquin Round Table but, as we have already noted, this afternoon’s rapier retorts had more in common with Ray Parker than with Dorothy. Sadly, due to TT’s imminent geographical relocation it seems that these SftBH soirees with him will now be rarer than ever and so it was good to be able to bid a fond adieu to his sturdy left hand, an au revoir to his dancing right, with a lovely afternoon in the country. And TT, if someone asks you if you are a god, you say ‘yes!’

ps - If you are reading this on Facebook, the punctuation, parentheses and paragraph spacing is/are much better at http://www.skirky.blogspot.com/

* ie we hadn't got round to writing a fresh one, but luckily there was a suitable palimpset in one of the guitar cases.

"Thank you very glad!"

It’s a game of two halves, this festival malarkey, ain’t it? On Sunday the third of July - the day after The Maverick Festival I pulled up at the gates of Christchurch Park in Ipswich having dug out my Beatle boots (mouldy), my Epiphone Sheraton (still in tune) and a pair of black jeans to go with my white shirt and black tie (all quite tight) and was greeted with “You can’t drive that in here – it’s health and safety you see, you’ll have to carry your gear to the stage – mind you, all the trolleys are gone and the vehicles that are provided to move the equipment backstage have all gone to refuel. Is it portable?” 

Welcome to Ipswich Music Day - a celebration of everything great about the Suffolk scene, and a veritable "Where Are They Now?" of the Ipswich music business. Thankfully, everyone appearing on the BBC Radio Suffolk stage had decided to ignore the instructions given at the gate and driven around to the grassy expanse behind the stage anyway, and seemed to have managed not to plough through great hordes of pedestrians on their way. Having got to there in time for the opening act it turned out that there was no power and Buffalo Road, who’d reformed after ten years out of the game especially for the event, were literally twiddling their thumbs on stage for half an hour before they sorted it all out. Still, two years ago the whole actual stage didn't get delivered, so they were already a step ahead of the game, comparatively speaking. 

In the programme there was a photograph of the self-same band playing the 1992 Ipswich Music Day on, basically, three wooden pallets with a blanket thrown over them (the wooden pallets, not the band) which was a reminder of how far we'd come, to the point where forty five thousand people were estimated to have passed through the park on this gloriously sunny Sunday (all the bands played for free, I should point out). Once started they were as great as ever - all Sweetheart of the Rodeo Byrds and Sun Studios attitude. Lead singer Mike Summers (clearly, by the looks of him, with a portrait of David Crosby stashed in his attic) drolly introduced a number - "This is from our current album released in 1995..." 

The Star Club gig itself was a thing of wonder. From that tricky G/A/F/G/C/G opening chord (Hard Day's Night for you Beatlephones out there) to the closing Na-na-na-nas of Hey Jude it was difficult not to drift back over the fifteen years or so of pub gigs, van journeys, balls, halls, weddings, beddings. golf clubs, star clubs, barbecues and breakfasts that playing possibly the greatest pop catalogue in recorded history had brought us. Drummer Reado made an emotional little speech at the end, we linked arms, bowed for the last time, and left the stage.

(thanks to Mike Cooper for the upload)

http://youtu.be/yTr2l7DSHus

Let’s Do It Country.

To Maverick, where in its fourth year the festival has ripened into a splendid day (or weekend) out, certainly not harmed by the bright clear weather and the inclusion on the bill of Songs from The Blue House, our status as early adopters enabling us to compare the site and sounds of this weekend’s occasion with previous years’ events. 

The dank and be-cobwebbed barn of our first performance is now the welcoming and brightly lit cafeteria and children's soft play area and the scuffed-concrete floored and stoat-friendly bar is now the Peacock Café (later to be graced by original 60’s protest singer and Woodstock veteran Melanie, who is probably wondering where all these royalty cheques have started coming from since The Wurzels started appearing on repeats of the 1976 Top of the Pops). The food and merch stalls have subtly improved in breadth and character – not that I don’t miss Andy Pearson’s Funky Dub Bar – but what remains is the genial rustic vibe. 

For now though, an impressively seven-handed* SftBH are tucked away between the face painting stall and the guitar set-up tent, being marshaled into position by Stephen ‘Foz’ Foster of the British Broadcasting Corporation in order that he may broadcast our music over the airwaves to the greater Suffolk and beyond. “They’re going to travel” he mutters to on-the-road side kick Dave Butcher, an unflappable, charming and resourceful engineer with whom we have happily crossed faders before. “They” are back in the studio. Through rough interpretation of the jargon of broadcast terminology we ascertain that this apparently gnomic statement means that someone is going to read out an update on the state of the roads and so we have a few more minutes to sort ourselves out for our big moment on the air.

This is proving to be mildly problematic in that since we were originally going to be a slimmed down, totally acoustic line up (in line with the founding tenets of the band), the delay in transmission means that we now have a whole group to include within the audio spectrum including a keyboard player ('TT') and Gibbon on bass, both of whom require the modern devilry of electrickery in order to make themselves heard. “Can we get some power round here?” someone asks. “Not easily” replies Butch. So that’s not a ‘no’ then? A stallholder appears from somewhere nearby offering power and Dave soon appears with an extension lead.

Our Glorious Leader emerges from the musical instrument stall next door with a ten watt bass amplifier, Foz is bending into position in order to transform the microphone he will be using for his live links to the studio into the ambient mic picking up the banjo and James’s acoustic guitar. He fiddles with a headphone. Nods. “I’m here at The Maverick Festival with Songs from The Blue House…” Later, opening the main stage, we are ushered into position, line checked and able to kick off with a song from our second album with everything already in the monitors. 

We announce that Turny Winn is going to do a song and reflect that here, of all places, we don’t really need to marvel at the incidence of a singing banjo player (we will in fact be followed by a man who plays one behind his head, while clog-dancing) and when the result of the songwriting competition is announced with the judges’ entreaty that “…as with most things in life, three and a half minutes is just about perfect” Gibbon sonorously adds from the back of the stage “…aside, perhaps, from very life itself?”.

The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley misses a cue for a flute solo – “I’ve been in the studio - there it just appears in your headphones at just the right moment” she explains. We have a great, rousing, good-sounding gig. Later James confirms a conversation with a breathless audience member. “I’m from the south of The States” she explains “And I miss it so much. Your music just reminded me of home and I’m going to go to the CD stall and buy your albums!” Lady and Gentlemen, our work here is done.

*yeah, yeah, yeah, not literally - I mean that there are one over the half dozen of us.

A Good Day for the Slaves

First of the festivals this weekend, and bass player Gibbon picks me up in Hawaiian shirt, shorts, flip flops - oh, and a Vauxhall. He, clearly, had not read the same weather forecast as I had. Not that Vauxhalls aren't good in wet weather, mind. You could say the same about us. It's always nice to turn up to find an on stage kit, a bass rig, a Fender Twin, a five way monitor split and the sort of guys who have clearly done this sort of thing before stoically manning the desks and avoiding the subject of the weather as only festival-hardened veterans do. 

There was backstage catering, a tent for keeping gear out of the rain, crates of bottles of water, artist-only portaloos but, as Mrs. Skirky - who spent an hour driving around the town looking for the roadside banners indicating where the festival was being held - only one sign, which as she pointedly mentioned to the friendly steward at the gate, she was now looking at. A pretty topping show for us – Our Glorious Leader started off proceedings by simply announcing “It's a good day for the slaves!” which is both the title of one of our new songs and a mildly disturbing declaration of a manifesto, depending on whether you are aware of the former or choose to believe the latter. 

There's an element of both, but it's certainly an emotive choice of language, used cleverly to explore some complex contextual themes and deconstruct modern mores and political language within the constraints of a three minute pop song. And, as I say, more to the point I got to play through a Fender Twin. After that it started raining pretty hard, but you know what they say about a hard rain.

All in all, it was a pretty good start to the summer season – the new songs sounded punchy, the old ones reliably catchy, everybody played all of the right notes (you can fill in the rest, can't you?). Most of the requisite on stage banter got an airing and was gently warmed up, including Fiddly Richard being all the way from Thorndon, a banjo reference, and that one about the bass player looking like Alan Davies. Sorry about the twins joke everybody by the way. As OGL said - “I really didn't know that was coming”.

Why The Long Face?

Regular readers of the Skirky blogspot, gripped and entranced by both the published versions of these accounts and the regular updates here, will doubtless have pored over the minutae of the sidebar just over there to the right and often wondered what this radio show malarkey is all about. Well, to summarise, the joy of Community Radio is that by its very definition anyone can have a go at it and so my friend Neale and I get together every Thursday at ten o'clock at night to curate two hours of chat, music and filleted highlights from the week's media in what is best described as a loosely-scripted fashion. The genesis of the whole thing can be read about in the introduction to Philip Bryer's book http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/why-the-long-face-the-paper-trail/14954100 which is a compendium of pieces he's contributed to the show over the past couple of years in his weekly feature None of Your Business. We also have a regular section entitled Celebrity Death Watch, Neale usually reports some important Chinese News, we conduct Why The Long Quiz? (one week we played "Arr or Narrr?" - wherein I attempted to cleave truth from fiction in working out whether he was naming actual Pirates from history or mere figments of his imagination - we've done similar things with Barbara Cartland novels and James Last album titles in the past) and for a while http://mybandtshirt.tumblr.com/ progenitor Wadey Wade did a weekly soup review for us. We have regular input from and share badinage with correspondents such as Lord Tilkey, The Mystery Txtr, Daron - The King of South East Minnesota and My Wife Kelly Brook, and we play some of our favourite music to listeners in as far flung places as Barcelona, New Zealand, North Wales and Framlingham. There's even a Facebook group. It really is what community broadcasting was designed for, and the very existence of ICRFM is a continuing tribute to the hard work and long hours put in by countless volunteers from it's very inception as part of the Venue for Ipswich Campaign in the nineteen eighties. It's also jolly handy indeed for me personally, as it gives me a convenient global platform to explain why I think a bloke called Dave, who sent me a message earlier this week calling me "a ***t", is a fucking wanker.

Chris Jarvis

Was it really seven years ago? We were in the middle of recording a bunch of songs which eventually emerged as Songs from The Blue House's 'Too' and amongst the fiddles, banjoleles, dobros and a Fisher Price activity set included on the overdubs we had decided that what we really needed for one song was a Parisian-sounding accordian. As you do. La Mulley recalled an old folk club friend of her Dad's and calls were made, directions given, and vague “We want a sort of Parisian-sounding accordian” noises were made in his direction. To the studio came one Chris Jarvis (in the company of his very jolly partner) who unpacked a massive squeezy thing that had lots of keys and buttons which he strapped himself into before settling down in the recording booth surrounded by mics of various elevations and patiently bellowing back and forth while engineer Steve Tsoi tweaked various buttons and faders, grimaced at flashing lights, and grunted in the way that only studio boffins in advanced states of concentration can. After about twenty minutes of puzzlement and eyebrow raising on our side of the glass Chris helpfully pointed out that accordians are prone to be very slightly off key over the course of three octaves and we should probably stop worrying about the fine tuning we striving to achieve at our end.
With the barest explanation of what we were after he then listened carefully to what we'd already done and rattled off a couple of takes. We made some more suggestions, he nodded patiently, and tried to make happen with his fingers what we were trying to hum, sing and, in lieu of any real knowledge about the mechanics of this fiendish (and rather cumbersome) instrument, mime. The procedure was repeated, we got three songs down, he seemed very happy to have helped and toddled off into the wan and unseasonal Essex sunshine. That was the only time I met him and, until today, I must confess that he'd pretty much dropped off my radar. He didn't, as a number of our sessioneer waifs and strays do, join up full time or come out to gig with us on special occasions, and he became a virtual footnote in the accounts of our musical (folk) odyssey. Sadly, Chris passed on recently after a long illness, and so, belatedly - far too belatedly - I'd like to say thanks for one fun day, and to ask anyone who has enjoyed that swirling, fairground sound on “Forever” to raise a glass and toast Chris, who played for the fun of it, shared his talent without reservation, and who still brings a little unseasonal sunshine into the room whenever that musical snapshot of one afternoon in Essex moves some air through speakers around the world.