The Importance of being Gibbon

In 1981 my friend Joey and I were in need of a third in order to complete the line up of Joey and The Juggernauts (previously Brute Force and Ignorance) and we called on a friend of ours who was pretty handy with all sorts of things musical. For a start he played the solo on Santana’s Samba Pa Ti with a group, had dabbled with keyboards, was part of the Woodbridge Excelsior Brass Band and thus clearly knew his way around the dots and squiggles (which is more than we did) and so, we reasoned, he was almost certainly able to pick up the rudiments of drumming without too much practise - which of course he managed admirably expediently. His enthusiastic snare rattling through our version of Status Quo’s What You’re Proposing remains an oft-recalled and fond memory for me to this day. That and the boiler suit he habitually wore on stage which gave him the air of a mildly absent roadie who’d wandered in from a Hawkwind gig.

 

Musical polymath that he is, I’ve pretty much had Gib’s name down first on the team sheet for anything I’ve been involved in subsequently, especially since he’s settled down on the bass guitar as his principal form of expression. Since those halcyon days of denim jackets and the twenty four minute version of Albatross we enjoyed one Christmas he’s also contributed keyboards to The Picturehouse Big Band (see popular musical memoir Do You Do Any Wings for details), harmony vocals to Gods Kitchen and a trombone solo to the first Songs from The Blue House album, for which he also scored a string part on the big closing number.

 

I’ve really only ever seen him out of his depth on one occasion when, after unrehearsedly stepping in for The Star Club – a Beatles specialist band doing a favour for our mate Paul - our host wandered in to breakfast in the pub the day after the gig and cheerily greeted him with a “Well, you were shit last night, weren’t you?” Generally though, he just needs a key and a count and you can confidently leave him to his own devices.

Having commenced rehearsals for Gods Kitchen’s 22nd Coming** at the end of this month it was enervating to find the usually reliably assured Gib peering at the set list with an air of confusion. “I have absolutely no idea what some of these are” he announced. “To be fair, some of them haven’t actually been aired this century” contributed drummer Stephen Dean*. Nevertheless we agreed that if I started playing the chords it might ignite some spark of recognition and he could join in at his own pace. After nineteen songs, to which he had played along perfectly, added harmony vocals and reminded me of a couple of lyrics mid-lapse, we agreed that we could probably pull this off after all.

On the way home he wondered out loud whether I recalled the title of a song we used to play with Picturehouse and who it was originally by? After a few bars of humming I identified it as The Circle by Ocean Colour Scene. Did he want a copy, I enquired. “Oh Christ no – I thought it was awful. Well, it certainly was when we played it”. He turned on the radio. “Oh fuck me, it’s The Beatles”. He switched it off. We drove on in silence.

 

* Just back from a holiday in Turkey, where they had marvelled at the light glinting off the river he also had a splendid Radio 4 panel show-worthy quip about the phosphorus on the Bosphorus, but that needn’t detain us now.
 

** Gods Kitchen, everyman peddlers of bespoke guitar-based confessional beat music since 1992 will be celebrating our twenty-second consecutive year of gigging with a performance at The Grinning Rat, St. Helen’s Street, Ipswich on Sunday the 28^th of October.

In line with received medical advice regarding our increasingly fragile hips, lights dimmed will be shortly before nine and carriages should be ordered for just after ten, meaning that everyone has time to have a nice nap after their Sunday dinner, wander down to the show, get home in good time afterwards, relieve the babysitter and still be in bed with a nice warm cocoa by the time Match of the Day 2 comes on. Entrance is free, however any long-time supporters of the band who are thinking of bringing their children should be prepared to provide proof of age (for them).

As well as playing material from the now digitally-available compilation South of Somewhere, the band (consisting of Shane ‘Ted Bidits’ Kirk on guitar and vocals, Stephen ‘Seamus Hussey’ Dean on drums, Richard ‘Gibbon’ Hammond on bass and long-time collaborator Steve ‘Wendell Gee’Constable on guitars) will be performing new, unreleased and never-before performed songs and welcoming some familiar faces on stage to guest with the group over the course of the evening.

 

 

My Andrew Mitchell Moment.

Before we start I should stress that the whole situation I am about to describe was resolved perfectly amicably, with apologies on both sides and with the band having been given permission to play one more song – we closed with a stirring version of I Fought the Law which, as you will see, was the perfect choice to defuse any lingering resentment regarding the presence of the filth. I mean respected members of Her Majesty’s Constabulary. We were young. And it was in no way as confrontational as that time Steve got stopped on his bike and had to answer truthfully when the officer got out his notebook, licked his pencil and asked for his name. “Umm…Constable”.

How we found ourselves setting up the band’s equipment on the lawn outside the nurses’ flats in the first place is a little unclear from this distance. If I recall correctly it wasn’t terribly apparent the morning after either. All we can know for certain is that it seemed a terribly good idea to perform for the good people of the nursing profession and, hey, if a few punks from the pub turned up too, what was the harm? Bearing in mind that this was in the days when closing time really meant closing time I have no idea how we gathered either all the gear or all those people and managed to rendezvous about two miles from the town centre where we’d been drinking until eleven o’clock, but we did.

After a few spirited renditions of popular classics of the day it became apparent that not everyone shared our enthusiasm for al fresco beat pop, especially not at that time of night, as the familiar silhouette of a police Transit van hove into view across the street. Emerging from the bowels of the machine came a slight figure - prodded, it seemed, by some other, visibly burlier figures, who continued to remain seated. It was maybe a trick of the light that made it look as if their shoulders were shaking slightly in the moonlight.

As the young officer approached us The Singer sidled over to me and raised an issue of concern. “I know this guy – I was at school with him”. It’s endearing, I think, that in the time of Thatcher’s Britain - Orgreave, anti-nuclear rallies and all - our principal concern in coming into the orbit of our local mob-handed police force was one of social embarrassment. We stopped the performance, he approached closer, the outer tendrils of our audience circled behind him, murmuring oaths in stage whispers. Tension prickled on the backs of our cut-off t-shirts. It was clear that he had also recognised his old playground chum and was not relishing the stand off. Vague hoots from the van drifted across the greensward. “I don’t want to seem like a wanker, Steve…” he began.

“That’s odd” replied his erstwhile confrère, “Because you look like one”.

                

Everybody Else is Doing It So Why Can’t We?

You know what it’s like with these groups. A new audio format comes out and suddenly they’re back on the reunion trail plugging some old material that they’ve been dining out off ever since they put it out on eight track cartridge in the seventies. CD, Laserdisc, Betamax, 5:1 Surround Sound Remix, 180 gram vinyl mono remaster, Earworm, 28-BIT reverse-processed graphite Phonautograph – it’s just a ruse to get us to part with our hard-earned cash one more time. As Agent K. remarks wryly in Men in Black as he toys with hitherto unknown alien sound reproduction technology – “…guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again”.

Then again, if you never made any money in the first place and you find yourself with time on your hands, well, why not? Thanks to the kind auspices and good grace of Blue House Records impresario James B. Partridge, who also supplied the sleeve notes (“Gods Kitchen is a most peculiar band, having been around for probably more years than they’ve played gigs…”) our back catalogue is once again available for your listening pleasure at a literally giveaway price.

Even as I write, wheels are in motion, plans are afoot, eddies in the time-stream continuum (“Oh, er, is he..?”), yellowing set lists are being retrieved from the bottom of drum cases and guitars dusted off in order to bring you the whole Gods Kitchen live experience in all its faded grandeur and glory. I tell you – if Led Zeppelin hadn’t been doing that countdown thing on their Facebook timeline this’d have been front page news this week. 

Gods Kitchen on Bandcamp - http://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/album/south-of-somewhere 

 

(When asked “What sort of music do you do?” I usually refer people to the gig intro once presented by BBC Radio Suffolk’s Simon Talbot, which included the phrase “Skag Rock, Bubble Pop, Tight Arsed Brazilian Loon Jazz, Skippy Dippy, Welsh Urban Shouting, Fringe Drone and Shatner”. I’d like to be able to categorise/pigeonhole us, as that would make it so much easier to get gigs, but so far I’ve not been able to. Still, as Shev out of The Bandicoots used to say in one of his stage announcements, “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time. Or you can be in The Cranberries”).   

Start One of Your Own

"Back when I was someone, I used to write these songs[1] – they used to start in G or F, and they were all four minutes long. There was Gaz on drums, Don on bass and another guy on lead[2]. They’ve all grown up and got proper jobs – they’ve got cats and kids to feed. Now I’m playing in a covers band[3], we do Taxman and I’m Down and the money pours to a superstore on the outskirts of town. When the landlord shouts at ten past time “Hey, play some Rolling Stones!”[4]  Well, if you want a band to play Brown Sugar, start one of your own[5].

They pulled down The Roberts[6] and The Mills[7], they put car parks where they stood. The Milestone[8] changed its name again and now it’s gone for good. But when we used to jam at Duke’s, no-one really cared who used to own the amps or drums, we all used to share. Now I’m playing in a covers band, we do Taxman and I’m Down and the money pours to a superstore on the outskirts of town. When the drunkard shouts “Hey - play one more before you all go home!” Well, if you want a band to play all night, go on, start one of your own.

You can play in a covers band, do country, blues, or swing; Northern Soul, rock n’ roll, whatever is your thing. But I get on stage now and them and I sing these songs alone[9]. I just wanted to be on an MP3 with something of my own."  

In my experience there's nothing quite so likely to nark a non-paying audience as the sight of a pub band putting their guitars back on their stands, switching off their amplifiers and coiling up some leads at the end of a performance, for this usually means that the evening is nearly over. Encouraging as it is that the good people wish to enjoy your company further, an entreaty to continue the performance can sometimes be expressed in less than gracious terms - for instance the spittle and cigarette breath demand that Picturehouse "...earn your fucking money" which once followed a lengthy third encore extemporisation on the theme of All Day and All of the Night in Stowmarket didn't really engender a warm feeling and a desire to resume the performance in any of our hearts. 

As you will probably have surmised, the above entry is my (slightly weary) response to this sort of regular experience, set to music and which the Songs from The Blue House band very kindly indulged me in to the point where That Nice David Booth fired up Spotify to familiarise himself with Neil Young’s Out on the Weekend and even agreed to drape a tea towel over his snare in order to edge closer toward the requisite early seventies getting it together in the country drum feel I was insisting upon.

Stephen Constable later came in to the studio and helped multi track the backing vocals and John Bennett (The High Llamas) dropped a suitably spiky guitar part in that helped tie the whole thing together with Nick Zala’s ever-sympathetic pedal steel reading on his part. It didn’t really fit with the rest of the IV album and so has been addended to our version of You’re So Vain (largely vocally performed by the sparky and delightful Canadian folk chanteuse Cara Luft) as the b-side, b/w or c/w, depending on your point of reference, of what would have been referred to in the olden days as ‘a single’. Ironically, one of the charges regularly levelled against us in our Star Club days was that we were a bit too full of ourselves.       

You can buy it here.

http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/youre-so-vain

---

[1] At the Celestion Suffolk Rock and Pop competition in 1986 I won a lovely trophy in the ‘Best Song’ category.

[2] The ‘other guy’ was Gibbon – now, of course, playing bass on this particular track.  

[3] Written at the time when my main going concern was The Star Club, a Beatles specialist band. You wouldn’t believe the amount of opprobrium that can be directed at four mates who like to get out of the house at the weekends, hang out together and maybe play a few Beatles tunes for money both online and in person.  

[4] Many of these sorts of anecdotes and adventures are captured in “Do You Do Any Wings?”

[5] Not as snarky as it sounds. Many’s the occasion we’ve been entreated to strike up a stirring version of something or another so that an audience member can sing it for us, only to be berated for not knowing how the song goes. I always used to think that if someone was that desperate to perform in public then there was an obvious solution…

[6] The Earl Roberts hosted many, many of the most notorious evenings enjoyed by Ipswich’s glittering musiciarati, from our live Beatles Karaoke night (we pinned our set list behind the bar and invited guest vocalists up to front the band) to jam nights and indie gigs, a tradition now maintained by former landlady Val at her new home at The Steamboat Tavern. They really did pave paradise and put up a parking lot.  

[7] I did my first public band show and second ever solo gig at The Albion Mills. It was my local, my lock-in, my proving ground and, one particular evening, the location of a very late night game of strip spoof which put many of our royal family’s antics in perspective. All that remains now is a bus stop named after the pub that used to stand there.  

[8] The Milestone hosted our first faltering steps as Songs from The Blue House, was a home game for The Star Club and nurtured Picturehouse beyond all reasonable expectations, hosting many gigs including our series of fancy dress concerts, at one of which – the pyjama party – only one, subsequently rather self-conscious, audience member made the effort.   

[9] Obviously this is a bit of a misnomer at this point, but you get the idea.

Why The Long Face?

Community Radio is a marvellous thing - it gives a voice to those who would otherwise be reduced to, say, muttering things at the bus stop, sending Spotify playlists to their friends or writing stories about their children on blogs. Here's a good example of all of the above, taken from a recent performance on ICRFM, wherein three long-faced gentlemen extemporise at length on subjects close to their hearts, including that time Martyn found a bloke asleep in his driveway after a heavy evening out, my night with The Levellers, Neale's 'Why The Long Quiz?' and Phil Bryer's 'None of Your Business'. Come on in, the water's lovely.

http://soundcloud.com/neale-foulger/why-the-long-face-23-8-12

"...and *he* is very far away..."

 
We took our little boy to his first camping festival this weekend - The Levellers' Beautiful Days, where I saw The Waterboys, Public Image Limited, Midlake, Richard Thompson, The Travelling Band, Bellowhead and Three Daft Monkeys (all of whom were absolutely on top form) among others, and Lord Barchester saw two theatre group soundchecks before deciding at one minute to showtime that he was bored and wanted some pasta. Same group two days running, I should add. At two and a half he was also fairly distracted by things like trees with eyes, the bus which doubled as a tea room and a giant metal sculpture of a dragon (which he named Blackie), was intrigued by Bellowhead, and very much enjoyed banging a couple of plastic pails along to Alabama 3 in company with a host of other small people behind the sound tower. 

From the top of the field the stage is rather far away in terms of his perspective, and we did have a bit of a Father Ted-esque conversation regarding the relative size of the performers on stage compared to him. At about a quarter to Levellers at the climax of the festival on Sunday evening he announced that he'd quite like to go back to the tent, brush his teeth and go to sleep, which did at least leave his mother free to unleash her inner fifteen year old detached from the pressures of trying to keep tabs on a small boy in the dark, glowsticks attached to his trouser pockets or no. "Mummy is staying to watch the little singing man" he proposed. "She is, that's right" I said.  

As I got him ready for bed he chatted away, making sense of the world as only small boys can. "I have got feet" he announced. I agreed that all the evidence pointed to him indeed having feet. "Do you have feet?" he enquired. I confirmed that I did, demonstrably, have feet. Blackie has got feet" he further asserted before checking "...and has the little singing man got feet?". I posited that The Little Singing Man almost certainly had feet. As undressing continued he further confirmed that, anatomically, he had very much in common with me, Blackie, and The Levellers' front man, barring the obvious absence of a tail in myself, himself, and the man whose stirring rendition of One Way drifted across the clear Devon night even as we spoke.

This conversation continued at all stages throughout the changing and pyjama donning process and took in a wide range of aspects of anatomy along the way which is why, now, forever in my head I shall always think fondly of Mark Chadwick as "The Little Singing Man With The Winkie".         

So...

 

…the new Songs from The Blue House album is out. If Derek Taylor were alive today and we had the budget he’d probably have composed some chin-strokingly erudite sleeve notes over which one could pore late into the night, searching for that elusive hidden meaning, the fin de siècle, that certain je ne sais quoi for us. But he isn’t, so we’ve had to do it ourselves. One thing that has become plain over the past few years is that while I’m quite prepared to explain at length what my songs are about, even going so far as to point out the hitherto overlooked (or overwrought) metaphor-ridden middle eight that I think you should pay particular attention to, La Mulley hardly ever does - hence her songs remain elusive whispers on the ether - quite literally ethereal. For example it’s been five years now and I still don’t know what Her, from ‘Tree’, is about.       

IV Sleeve Notes - http://tinyurl.com/c88wyvd

SftBH Bandcamp - http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/

“No-one wants to hear about your kids…”

I was listening to the equivalent of the extra disc from a Songs from The Blue House box set this morning as, while looking for something else on the CDR shelf, I had stumbled across a copy of some early mixes for ‘Tree’, which included the songs that didn’t make it onto the final album. We whittled our initial selection of around fifteen or sixteen numbers down to the final running order after a lengthy process of deliberation and reference to outside panels of the great, good and discerning of taste (Mark Ellen, then editor of The Word magazine, gamely took part and expressed his concern on a later podcast that he may have mortally offended “Boggins the bass player” by marking an entry down. He hadn’t).

The main thing that the excluded items share - in common with a couple of things recorded for, but due to be left off our forthcoming album - is a lyrical theme based around children - their care, maintenance and/or lack of presence in the room. It seems that although we as listeners are prepared to make time to hear about loves lost, life on the road and the increasing difficulty in procuring quality pharmaceuticals whilst on tour, nothing stubs the metaphorical toe of the sombre artist’s listener than a not so subtly-nuanced reference to the pram in the hall. Even semi-carnally. For example who among us hasn’t reached for the skip button when John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy delays the arrival of Watching the Wheels by a full four minutes on Double Fantasy? Don’t answer that, by the way - there’s always one. The pram in someone else’s hall, on the other hand - that’s fair game – I mean who doesn’t love Hey Jude? (this question is posed on the same rhetorical basis as the above, by the way).         

Obviously there are clear reasons why a couple of the other songs I listened to this morning didn’t make the cut which are completely unconnected to their lyrical direction – quite why we were so enamoured of the concept of kicking a shed down a flight of stairs that we persuaded drummer Paul Read to unleash his inner Keith Moon in order to enhance the coda to a sensitive little acoustic ballad of Helen’s called Move is lost to posterity. That the session occurred on the same day as we had already spent fruitless hours getting him to overdub the sound of cutlery-as-percussion* may not be entirely unconnected. In the meantime, I’d forgotten we had even ever written a song called Move, let alone recorded and mixed it.

That we would dispatch a car to deepest Oxon. in order to collect Dame Judy Dyble, late of Fairport Convention and Trader Horne, so that she could deliver a beautiful reading of a nursery-baroque song called Little No-One and then leave it off the finished product seems an act of willful perversity. Playing it in the car, the string arrangement alone had me welling up, and that was even before I remembered that I’d had one exegesis of the lyric delivered to me with such blinding clarity** that I physically reeled at not having spotted the obvious before.

My Twinkly Lights was an early and obvious candidate for the cut, even before its twee and clunky sub-Springsteen blue collar narrative became bedecked with the sound of sleigh bells and a festive flute and fiddle part as a result of the banjo player identifying at an early run-through that the descending chord progression lent itself perfectly to the overlaying of the melody*** of the carol Good King Wenceslas, which was funny the first four times or so, but which we all agreed would pall over repeated listens – that and because we weren’t sure if Jingle Bells is out of copyright yet. We occasionally dig it out for downloads in December on the website however, and it is the first thing we offer to donate to festive charity compilations.             

The real pearl in the out-take oyster though, is When Mama Sings, wherein Our (ostensibly gruff and unsentimental) Glorious Leader fires up the ringing open chords and delivers a quite, quite moving paean to the smalls, featuring a remarkable intertwined violin and cello arrangement trumping even that of Little No-One. And a bouzouki. I think in the end we already had a slow ballad, possibly based around the pursuits of loves lost, life on the road and the increasing difficulty in procuring quality pharmaceuticals whilst on tour, and so it missed the final cut, or it may, of course, have been the bouzouki all along. Perhaps we should put them all on a special compilation for new parents to give to one another when they hit the three month mark and are so coincidentally full of love and bereft of sleep that they’ll listen to any old thing at three in the morning. We could call it “No-One Wants to Hear About Your Kids”.

 ps; ...and, as if by magic
http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/tree-out-takes
Thank you, James.

*”More fork, more fork!” I remember being one of the instructions being bellowed over the talkback from the control room, which is not something anyone particularly needs in their headphones, let alone a drummer who’s taken the day off to help some mates out.       

** By one Keith Farnish by the bar at The Cropredy Festival in 1997.     

***"Tempus adest floridum" ("The time is near for flowering") first published in a 1582 song collection, if my Wiki cut and paste does not deceive me.

Old Friends, Bookends.

I spent a rather splendid evening rehearsing last night for one of my occasional forays into the live performance arena with gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe), the group I formed with Stephen Dean and Gibbon after the largely unheralded demise of heavy big pop standard bearers As Is in 1991. That’s right, nineteen ninety one.

At the time we had a regular weekly routine of getting together every Thursday at Stephen’s house, where he had had the good taste and foresight, with the judicious application of a number of mattresses and some gaffa tape, to convert his cellar into a rudimentary rehearsal space. This meant both that we saved ourselves the unnecessary expense of renting out one of those proper air-conditioned soundproofed places with coffee making facilities and nice-looking rugs on the walls and that when we turned up we were already set up and good to get started. It also meant that during the week (in the days before cable TV and The West Wing box sets) it was possible to relax with one of those new-fangled discman CD players, a set of headphones, a full drum kit and The Best of The Band for an hour or so, until the next-door neighbour politely suggested that it was time for Coronation Street and while she was here, could she possibly have this month's rent?  

When he moved out I was only too pleased to take on the lease and the drum kit and occasionally extended the opportunity to rehearse in (literally) homely surroundings to a few friends having asked for contributions to the larder in lieu of something quite so vulgar as money. Hence the discovery on one occasion upon my return to the bachelor pile, having made myself scarce for the evening while a group made up of vegetarians practiced downstairs, of a box of PG Tips, two cans of ratatouille and a packet of runner beans. Some other times I'd get sausages. Occasionally there would be lewd notes referring to my girlfriend.

The deal with gods kitchen rehearsals was that we would warm up with a couple of things that we already knew (possibly last week’s homework) before moving on to polishing up some new material that I probably would have written during the week. At ten o’clock we’d finish off with another couple of songs from the repertoire or we’d busk a cover version someone had heard on the radio to see how far we could get through it before the momentum of the whole thing either overtook us and it collapsed in an ungainly heap in the middle of the floor or we miraculously made it through to the end. We’d then go to The Spread Eagle just around the corner to discuss the session over a couple of cool pints of Guinness. Regular as clockwork, every week at eight o'clock. 

The consistency of this routine meant that I had to come up with a regular stream of new material, if only to keep the rhythm section interested from one session to the next, which certainly helped keep my songwriting muscles supple and toned (the only things that were at this point) and also meant that we were pretty much in a constant state of readiness in case anything came up in terms of live opportunities. I’m not necessarily saying that we put our 10,000 Outliers hours in, but it did (and does) mean that even without having played together for a couple of years now we can pretty much get together at the drop of a party invitation, do a count in and rattle out half a dozen numbers straight off the bat without pausing for breath as, gratifyingly, we did last night.

One of the things I was most pleased about was that none of the stuff we went through sounded out of time (chronologically at least, if not tempo-rhythmically). With so much guitar music under the metaphorical bridge these days it’s hard for anything to not sound like it is tipping a nod and a wink to what has gone before anyway, but I know that our Muswell Hill still beat Oasis’s Kinktastic She’s Electric out of the gate by a good four years (“This is about that bloke who twatted you one in The Old Times that once, isn’t it?” enquired Mr. Wendell on second guitar) and the recorded version of The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes still has an expressive grandeur that speaks volumes beyond its humble four track origins*.

By twenty past ten we have worked through the set we are going to play at the weekend. “Ted Bidits!” calls Stephen cheerily, the traditional The Big Wheel-inspired count down to curfew. I start a chugging rhythm with muted chords on the guitar. “When I said…” I begin singing “…that I loved you, I told a white lie, don’t you know?” It is an old song of the drummer’s, a twelve bar in E and we rattle it off with what passes for panache in a converted woodshed in the middle of the Suffolk countryside. “And that…” he chuckles at the song’s conclusion “…is what happens when you let twenty one year olds listen to George Jones”. Wendell and I consider the implications. “Wouldn’t it have been great at the jubilee concert if they’d booked the wrong G. Jones?” he posits. “George Jones, rocking a hula hoop and singing She Thinks I Still Care” I tender. “Now that…” he assents “…I would pay to see”.

*I like to think that the early work producer Owen Morris put in on some demos for me a few years earlier paid off in spades for him when called in later to work on Champagne Supernova.

How Mark Ellen made me a Rock Dad.

It’s been a bad month for those of us who like our popular culture expertly deconstructed and served up with picture caption jokes, as monthly compendium of aperçus The Word draws a discreet veil over its operations and ceases publication. The wailing and gnashing of cappuccino cups has been heard far and wide across the net – at one point the website turned into a virtual Kensington Palace – and among the tributes to the monthly’s wit and erudition and consensus that they really couldn’t have done any more in terms of positioning themselves in the new marketplace whilst determinedly fulfilling their manifesto to the last, there emerged smaller, more personal stories of how the magazine literally changed people’s lives. I have one such reflection, which even if the events therein didn’t move my life on to a different course, then certainly caused me to sail a bit closer to the wind than I otherwise would have done. In fact one could argue that the whole interactive Word weekend was a barrel of luffs*. It began with the July 2006 issue – number 41 – which contained a small article and jokey quiz about the rise of the Rock Dad. Tucked away at the end was a brief paragraph. “Are you a Rock Dad in a band?” it enquired, going on to suggest that if there were a collection of Rock Dads who had a demo MP3 and a decent photograph to hand then sending it in to the mailbox pretty sharpish might mean that such a group could find themselves opening The Cornbury Festival a few weeks later. As it happened, we did have a demo – a version of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper that we had recorded at High Barn Studio in darkest Posh North Essex a few weeks earlier in lieu of a fee for performing at their beer festival. The rise of the electronic communication age meant that we didn’t even have to find a jiffy bag and a clean C-90 in order to send it off. 

I still have the email I received from Our Glorious Leader in which the earthly representatives of Development Hell communicated their pleasure with our submission and invited us to apply for wristbands forthwith. By lucky happenstance we had picked a song that David Hepworth used to have as his mobile phone ringtone, and so announcing our version with a banjo riff had apparently tickled the adjudicating panel and bumped us to the top of the queue. There followed a flurry of communications between (among others) a production manager now faced not only with Robert Plant’s backline demands but also some bunch from Suffolk who intended to bring a banjo, a mandolin and a fiddle player, but who remained the soul of affable helpfulness throughout both this period and the festival itself. A request for a publishing-spec photograph meant a hasty call to one James Kindred (@sketchybear) – now CEO of his own agency but back then the only guy we knew with a top-end camera and a Mac to edit on. His off the cuff art direction was of such quality that we ended up using shots from the session for the centerfold of our album Tree, and he got a call shortly afterward from the magazine asking if he was available to go and take some shots of Peter, Bjorn and John at Latitude in exchange for a weekend press pass. His portrait of them appeared in the next issue and he got a weekend out into the deal, so I think we all kicked a goal on that one.

We rounded up Simon Allen from High Barn to provide a friendly ear behind the mixing desk, and corralled James Munson to perform a similar task on monitors. They packed tents and gumboots and joined the parade. With our set to be shoehorned into the section immediately after Robert Plant’s crew’s sanctioning of the stage for his headline set and before the festival’s official start time he carefully line checked us all in the face of rising pressure, including our drummer’s rendition of ‘Moby Dick’ and appropriation of Rocco Deluca and The Burden’s cowbell, and then did such a sterling job on us that he was invited to stay up there for the rest of the day. I believe he may have had a hand in refereeing Hayseed Dixie’s sound – again, a case of good deeds not only being their own reward, but offering a little bonus on the side.

At one point a film crew came backstage to interview us. I answered the “What’s a Rock Dad?” question at length, a combination of nerves and bravado, for what seemed like fifteen minutes. The interviewer turned to vocalist Helen. “And what’s a Rock Mum?” they ventured. “Pretty much that…with stretch marks” she deadpanned. When, shortly afterwards, we were introduced to our host and sponsor - one Mark Ellen - he immediately pounced on the remark, which he’d heard relayed anecdotally by one of the film crew,  and guffawed his appreciation while making us all feel immediately at ease with his story of the crushed lavender sprigs in the VIP restaurant area and a good-naturedly dismissive Rock Stars today shake of the head as he compared and contrasted the catering at great festivals past – he may have mentioned Weeley, or Bickershaw. He complimented us on the photo we’d submitted and that they’d published in the magazine’s follow up story (“Oh, which cover did it reminded me of? The Allmans! That’s it - The Allmans – what’s the album that’s from…? ‘Brothers and Sisters’!”) and good naturedly denied being The Rocking Vicar (“No-one knows…”). To be honest we’d probably have spent the next twenty minutes quite happily chatting with him rather than lurking behind the stage checking our watches. Having carefully made a note on a card so as not to inadvertently introduce us as Songs from the Blue Room (“We get that a lot…”) he made a short and funny announcement about what was coming next and let us loose on a big stage in front of a field capable of holding twenty thousand people.

I’ve mentioned in past blogs how the next day I bumped into him, sans pass, and got him back past security (“This is the editor of Word Magazine, one of the festival’s biggest sponsors…”) on condition that I could meet Peter Buck (He made a point of ensuring that he got my wife’s name right so that when he did the introductions he didn’t confuse her with someone else), and there’s a whole chapter in All These Little Pieces devoted to our weekend out at the festival, but none of this would have been possible without someone at The Word coming up with the idea of the Rock Dad, green lighting the idea of an article and then throwing the idea that they might get an actual band of Rock Dads onstage at the festival itself into the ring to top off the cake (I believe that the next year Ellen himself took to the stage with his band The Love Trousers). For that alone, notwithstanding nine years of entertainment for lively minds, thank you The Word. I shall miss you.        

 *Other puns are available.

There is a video of us performing Reaper and a song called Not That Kind of Girl at Cornbury here - http://www.myspace.com/songsfromthebluehouse

It's MySpace, so mind the cobwebs and try not to disturb the dust too much.  

"Right, I've sawn all four legs off the piano..."

It’s a conversation which I imagine takes place between stage managers and artistes the world over all the time. “I’ve got you a piano”. I tapped the flight case propped against the back wall of The Maverick Festival’s Peacock Café reassuringly.
Rose Cousins, Canadian singer, songwriter, and woman who had flown in from Cork that morning, caught a number of trains and then been delivered slightly bleary-eyed to a farm in the middle of rural Suffolk bearing a guitar and a battered suitcase gestured toward the stage. “What about that one?” she enquired, not wishing to disturb the audience enjoying the country blues stylings of Brooks Williams, currently performing on stage.
“That one” I replied, with one eye on the sound desk and one attempting to convey an air of calm authority and professionalism “…belongs to Gretchen Peters”.
“And we can’t use it?”
“I don’t think so”
“Have you asked?”
“No”.
“Why not?”
“Because I am afraid of her tour manager, who is bigger than I am”.
“You’re scared of her tour manager?”
“Very slightly, yes”.
“Oh”.
“We could probably use her stool though?”
She brightened. “Well, there’s something at least”.

To be fair, she had every right to maintain a number of reservations regarding the stage management of The Peacock Café, as I had been the one who’d collected her from the railway station earlier that day and had been making small talk on the way back to the festival site principally along the lines of what I hoped would be a typically self-deprecating English description of my own shortcomings as a sound engineer, general factotum and stage hand, a triad of opportunities that I had been performing since the previous evening when Simon, the proper grown-up sound man off the main stage, had pointed out the Aux sends feeding the stage left and right monitors, the three phantom powered DI boxes sub-grouped on channels one and two, and the microphones on seven and eight with the gain up at two o’clock and the mid cut rolled off at around 250 hZ. I know. Me too. I’d just got to the bit where I described my main function as mainly ensuring that no-one fell off the stage when I remembered that Rose was due to perform under my benevolent supervision later that evening after she’d conducted a songwriting workshop in the Tack Room over past the main stage. I explained how a falling tree had missed me and Jason Ringenberg by minutes on my previous trip to collect The Talent. “The thing is, this isn’t my vehicle, and the last thing I got told was to not damage it. I’m almost sorry I didn’t get the chance to go back and say ‘You’ll never guess what happened to your car!’” I chortled. She settled back in her seat, tired, hungry, and apparently in the care of someone who was prepared to finish Farmer Jason’s career and total a perfectly good Skoda into the bargain for the sake of a cheap anecdote. It’s a wonder she didn’t bail out at that point right there.       

As Brooks finished his set I bounded on to the stage, thanked him, asked the audience to continue showing their appreciation and then mentioned that if a few folk could move their camping chairs slightly to the side that would be a great help as I had a piano to move. A mild wave of amusement swept the floor. “No, really” I said.

By the time I got back to the sound desk Rose had the situation in hand – “I’ll clear a path, you bring the piano” she said striding determinedly off. Ten minutes later we were set up, ready to go, I’d done the stage intro and she was half way to performing “Go First” a truly heart-rending break up ballad that I had to tear myself away from in order to get an update from Simon, who’d popped in to make sure that none of the red lights on the desk were flashing warnings at me. “It sounds pretty good!” he marveled. “Well, I’m not a complete idiot you know” I replied, mock-indignantly. “You will be here by the time Gretchen goes on though, won’t you?” The trace of nerves in my voice must have come through. “Of course” he said reassuringly. He slipped away, replaced almost immediately by Scary Tour Manager. “We are running on time, aren’t we?” The significance of the question was hinted at with undertones of consequence.

“How long do I have?” Rose invited from the stage.
“Fifteen minutes – make ‘em good ones!” I hollered back, cheerily.
“Oh, they’re all good!” she replied, ever the trouper.
“I’d have said twelve minutes” said STM, flashing a wolfish grin and melting back into the crowd.

Next up, Otis Gibbs. “I just need a vocal mic, I have my own DI box, and what time do you want me off?” he said.
“Otis, you are a stage manager’s dream” I gushed.
“Well, you haven’t heard me play yet…”.

Back at the desk I tweaked the onstage mix as directed, trying hard to read the expression of a man in a baseball cap, wearing glasses and with a foot-long frontiersman’s beard standing forty feet away. “Aw heck” he said affably after a while “We’ll split the difference”.  
By the time Gretchen Peters was in the building (right on time, right on cue) the cavalry had arrived and I was grateful for the opportunity to revert to my preferred role of moving things from one place to another without dropping them. The professional sound engineer cast a benevolent, but critical eye over the mixing desk, alighting on a recalcitrant red fader hovering somewhere around the halfway mark. “Why have you got that there?” he enquired.

“Simon…I have absolutely no idea”.

Despatched to check the monitors (“Your ears are of considerably less value than hers”) I forwent the traditional roadie’s “One-Two, One-Two” and borne on wings of combined adrenalin release and post-responsibility Brewers Gold, launched into a spirited verse of Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me”. Came from behind the sound desk a thumbs up, and from the audience a good-natured round of applause. I turned to find Grammy-nominated, CMA Award-winning, Isle of Wight Festival-playing singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters, the woman who wrote ‘On a Bus to St. Cloud’, ‘Independence Day’ and ‘This Uncivil War’ regarding me wryly.

“...and how are we supposed to follow that?” she twinkled.   

Being for the benefit of Mr. McCartney

I love an international football championship, I do. They are like misty watercoloured milestones for me - not necessarily who won the things, but where I was at key moments, who I was with, and what we were doing. When David Platt scored the equaliser against Belgium at Italia 90, for example, I was in the bar  at The George Robey hoping that This Side of Summer wouldn't finish before the game was up so that I and the rest of the coach party who'd come down from Ipswich wouldn't feel like we'd let the guys down by not seeing the gig.

Gareth Southgate's penalty miss meant we had to go and start The Star Club gig at The Earl Roberts (bear in mind that the game had already gone to extra time, so to say we were a bit on the drag may be understating somewhat) whereas the 1991 5-1 drubbing of Germany in the World Cup qualifiers meant that we did that night's show with an extra spring in our step amid a rarely-equalled atmosphere of  bonhomie. I think even the bride got into it that night.

       
1996, and Stuart Pearce's redemptive penalty against Spain however, was the year that my band gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) recorded a five track demo called North of Nowhere at Gemini Studios under the watchful eye of engineer & de facto producer Pat Gruber and under the generous patronage of bass player Gibbon, who stumped up for the cost of the sessions in a fit of unaccountable enthusiasm. Stephen Dean played his Pete Thomas drum kit, Steve 'Kilbey' Mears played guitar and sang backing vocals. There's no whammy bar on that guitar at the end there by the way - it's all neck bend.

 It's a simple song structurally, which means that it has resurfaced at times when (say) you need something a bit lively to encore with and you are able to shout the chords in short order at your accompanists and then get on with having a bit of a bounce at the front without having to do that thing where you hold up your guitar in what looks like a triumphal Springsteen-esque pose, whereas you are in reality just making sure the bass player can see what root notes you're playing on the chords. 

On occasion it has been employed in exactly this capacity by Songs from The Blue House possessing as it does both of those vital qualities of having an easily pick-upable singalong chorus (SftBH chanteuse The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley is responsible for an early revision of one of the lyrics from "...sadness' hell" to "...Sadler's Wells") and, perhaps more importantly in a band which prominently features a banjo and a fiddle player, being in the key of G. This may not mean much to you or me, but believe me, it makes a world of difference to them. 

 I was reminded of the song last week when Sir Paul McCartney celebrated what I understand to be his 70th birthday by dusting off his Hofner bass, bucking up a few young tyros and performing a few old hits for The Queen, a large crowd, and an impressively sized television audience all at the same time. The middle eight* of  North of Nowhere refers directly to Sir Paul, and was prompted in part by a documentary I'd watched wherein he seemed to be playing a whole bunch of those silly love songs he's so famous for curating - checking the dates I'd guess it was probably around the time of the release of Off The Ground (go on, name the singles from that album without recourse to wikipedia) - and I felt moved to comment on his output, believing that he was past his best in terms of putting forth a performance. Of course back then he would have only been in his early fifties so it was an easy mistake to make. Umm, sorry Macca.

As yet Sir Paul has not felt it necessary to comment on how he feels my contribution to the world of music has panned out. There's still time.

gods kitchen performing North of Nowhere;

http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/north-of-nowhere
 

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/guide/song_middle.shtml          

221B

“Hi, is that Kanye West’s, the furriers?”

I was doing my regular late night slot on the wireless yesterday and conversation came around to album cover-related landmarks. Our studio guest, Ian Wade out of http://mybandtshirt.tumblr.com/ related the story of his visit to Paul’s Boutique in New York, and I mentioned that a plaque had recently been unveiled at the site of the iconic image on the sleeve of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. I suggested that this was only the second such commemoration afforded to a fictional character. Co-curator Neale, perhaps still distracted by the failure of his Cocteau Twins-themed karaoke idea, wondered aloud who the other one was dedicated to. “I’ll give you a clue” I said. “It’s in Baker Street”.

“Ah, of course”. He nodded sagely. “Gerry Rafferty…”     

Journey Through The Past

“The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” – Gil Scott Heron.

 I’ve always liked nostalgia – the idea of looking back to a kinder, gentler time appeals to my sense of a cosy, sepia-tinted, halcyon age that, let’s face it, you and I both know never really existed. When I first worked at Andy's Records we used to play Gil Scott-Heron’s Greatest Hits in the shop all the time. Always a bit embarrassing when somebody wanted to buy it as we had to explain that we kept a stock copy especially for playing in-store which was definitely, no way, not the same one that we had the sleeve for out in the browser and which we unaccountably seemed to have lost. 

Pretty soon we cottoned on the idea that if we really did hold one for playing and a couple for selling then everyone would be a lot happier and no-one would need to get nailed to anything. In later years this would be explained to me as a putative kanban system, however at the time it just meant we had to hide a copy when Andy came round as he didn’t like us holding too much stock.

My absolute favourite Neil Young song (and I have a lot of favourite Neil Young songs) is probably ‘Ambulance Blues’. It’s a rambling acoustic number which closes his masterwork On the Beach. It is chock-full of metaphor and opaque references and one which I laboriously copied out in longhand and blu-tacked to my bedroom wall some years ago before either appropriating or deriving a number of phrases when Ol’ Neil seemed to have put something down so much better than I ever could, which was most of the time. “Picking up tips on the Navajo Trail…” began one such couplet, which later helped win me a songwriting award. It's on my parents' wall, in their office.

The song itself begins with the line “Back in the old folky days / The air was magic when we played” which I consciously appropriated when starting a misty-eyed glance at my own back pages in a thing I wrote called “Start One of Your Own”, which opens its account with the deliberate homage “Back when I was someone / I used to write these songs…”. My version goes on to name check some actual people I used to be in bands with and one (“…and another guy on lead”) that I have fairly consistently been in a group with ever since.

It also references a few pubs that have gone the way of so many of the fondly-remembered venues of our youth, a couple of which may not necessarily have embodied paradise per se, but are indeed now parking lots. The old landlord of one of them is now a bus driver, and I can only imagine the expression he conceals when pulling up at the stop whose sign now bears fading, solitary witness that there was ever a pub there at all, let alone one whose cellar bore witness to countless debut gigs by keen young guitar thrashers, myself included.

I put a live version of my song on a CD I had burned and made available called “This Much Talent” which contained both a two note harmonica solo I attributed to Alanis Morissette and a dedication to one ‘Albert Herring’ who’d penned a (presumably) pseudonymous complaint to the local paper regarding the number of local tribute bands siphoning off the goodwill, interest and money that would clearly otherwise be channeled toward the great number of exponents of producing original, self-financed music there were available to fill our Chelsea boots. Having a foot in both camps, I had to admit that could see his (or her) point somewhere on the horizon, without necessarily agreeing with it, given that around the time the CD came out, my participation in the former was financing my dabbling in the latter. 

In maintaining this dual life, I suspect that I may have helped to sell more Beatles records than those of my own compositions over the course of my performing career, but then I think we’d all agree that they had the better tunes in the first place. I've looked at crowds from both sides now and, sadly, in my experience there is very little to match the indignation of an audience who haven’t paid to get in somewhere at close of play, or their capacity to offer timely advice and instruction on how you can proceed. 

The number of times I’ve heard the phrase “Come on lads - earn your money!” toward the end of an evening’s free entertainment is alluded to in “Do You Do Any Wings?”, as is the once heard, never forgotten imprecation to “Get back on that stage and play some more, you cunts!”. In contrast, you very rarely get that sort of thing at Suffolk Songwriters Night.

My final contribution to the most recent round of Songs from The Blue House recording sessions was in April 2011. One of the things we included was a version of Start One of Your Own, which I sang, and to which Nick Zala, John Bennett, Tony Turrell and Steve Constable notably added frills and flourishes aplenty. My other main contribution during the recording process was to get the drummer put a tea towel on his snare to damp the sound and to invite him to limit fills to a maximum of two throughout the course of the number. 

In my head I was channeling Dave Mattacks’ attempt to get Levon Helm’s drum sound at Liege and Lief rehearsals, Ringo playing Get Back on the roof of the Apple building in Savile Row, and Neil Young’s efforts to get Crosby, Stills, Nash and Dallas Taylor to slow down enough to play Helpless at his pace in the studio. In Helpless, a twenty five year old Young looks back on his schooldays in Ontario. I’m forty eight and I’m nostalgic for last year.   

http://www.lulu.com/shop/shane-kirk/do-you-do-any-wings/paperback/product-1490069.html?showPreview=true