The End of The Rainbow

I made a video once. Well, I say made – was in. As it was explained to me all I had to do was meet up beforehand in order to expound on a few of the more flowery metaphors in the song over a couple of roll ups and a nice cup of tea, and then turn up and wait in my trailer until called for my close up before the light went. It certainly sounded like a good deal to me – a couple of friends at Suffolk College got a piece for their year-end art and media coursework and we got granted all rights in perpetuity to a promo that we could send to MTV, always assuming we had a friend who could link two VCRs together for long enough to run us off a few copies.

Meeting done, storyboard cut and pasted*, backdrop decorated, televisions procured and raw videotape sourced we assembled at an old airbase somewhere in the middle of Cambridgeshire which was enjoying a new lease of life as an arts and media hub, by which I mean it was no longer used for storing mustard gas or nuclear weapons, but had had a brazier dragged into the middle of the largest bunker and a few plywood walls half-heartedly nailed together in order to partition off a few of the less draughty corners for the use of the likes of us and, as we were to discover later, a band who were absolutely determined to get the intro to The Doobie Brothers’ China Grove bang on, no matter how many times this meant them starting over.

The shooting schedule seemed reasonable enough and so we got on with looking moodily off camera while miming our parts, hitting various marks and cheerfully faking a conversation while ensconced on a sofa which was intended to portray us as louche, detached observers of the scene. D.P. Hammond, our moodily-lit bass player, took the detachment bit to method acting levels by actually getting so involved in reading the paper that he missed his cue – although his cue, fortuitously, was to 'start reading a paper'. He, it should be said, was generally laid back to the point of the metaphorically horizontal anyway, and was once late for a rehearsal at his own house. We honoured him with an instrumental called “Donald Finally Wakes Up but Then Falls Asleep on His Way to The Bass Amp”. 

Drummer Gary meanwhile manfully stomped on a kick drum pedal for about twenty minutes while it was lit and shot, and then enthusiastically joined in with dropping three televisions off a balcony in order to capture the best angle on tape before tossing the resultant detritus into a skip outside, only to be rewarded with a further cathode ray tube explosion which launched either a screwdriver or a chisel (reports vary) whistling past his ear in the dark.

 Singer Steve donned a coat and scarf and channelled his inner Jim Kerr whilst being arranged carefully around a discarded toy tank, had newsreel footage projected on to his face, and rushed to catch the last of the light as a deeply significant metaphor burst into flames before our collective fret frottaging gurns. Pretty much the last shot to be completed was the alarm clock ticking down the sixteenth beat hi-hat intro from a deliberately significant two minutes to twelve. Listen, it was the eighties. Have you not heard Two Tribes..!?  

After two (freezing) days on location we were done, the crew (who’d stayed over in the bunker while we fled to the sanctuary of central heating and hot baths at home) finally went back to their digs to thaw out, to edit in the newsreel footage in in post-production, sync the video footage to the ghetto blaster-based playback and approve the final cut.

Here it is… 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhuuoKLuXPM&feature=share&list=UUqxkoPLBKrc-yfxPc4gszEA

*literally

Thanks to Lord Tilkey for archiving and posting on YouTube. Turns out we didn't need MTV after all. Just an awful lot of patience and Tim Berners-Lee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing Adventures in Time and Spaceward.

There’s been a gratifying response to my last post regarding The World Service and our adventures in The Big Music, to the extent that some folk have expressed an interest in uncovering the actual sound recordings that we made at the time. From a dusty corner of his digital archive, my good friend James Partridge has been kind enough to retrieve and host delicately preserved copies of these artefacts, wrapped carefully in old newspaper and bubble wrap, and I am pleased to be able to offer you, dear reader, the opportunity to hear these things and make your mind up regarding our merits (or otherwise) first hand.

First, a bit of background. The World Service had been in existence for a couple of years by the point we made these demos, although principally in a slightly different aggregation to that on the recording, the former line up’s career having concluded when the self same James had invited our then bass player to join his band and he, Steven ‘Kilbey’ Mears, had agreed. Singer Stephen ‘Wendell’ Constable and I split the band, reformed without telling the drummer and started looking around for suitable replacements, which led us to recruiting one Donald Hammond on bass, his brother Gibbon (later to become a pivotal bass-playing tri-corner of Songs from The Blue House) on keyboards while Gary Forbes, second cousin of Simple Minds’ bass player Derek, became our drummer. Eagle-eyed SftBH completists will have already spotted that this is the line up referred to in the lyrics of Start One of Your Own (still available for digital download http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/youre-so-vain). 

With a rather overweening sense of ambition we then booked ourselves into Spaceward Studio in darkest Cambridgeshire for a couple of nights to do some recording. As we rolled up in a pair of cars overloaded with guitars and amplifiers the freshly-signed The Bible, featuring Boo Hewerdine, were having their gear loaded out into a considerably larger van. We nodded cheerily at him in the pub while we waited for their crew to finish vacating the premises at which he looked a tad startled and disappeared a bit further into his greatcoat. It probably would have been relevant to mention that Steve and I, in our capacity as fellow employees of Andy’s Records, had spoken to him on the phone on a hundred occasions, but we didn’t think to bring that up at the time.

Here are just a couple of vignettes from the sessions, which were perfectly curated by in-house engineer and recording producer Owen Morris. “I hate doing guitars” he remarked at one point as he nonchalantly swept a palms-width spread of extremely expensive faders up to ten so that Steve could put his coffee down on the end of the mixing desk. Posterity does not record if this is how he then introduced himself to Noel Gallagher prior to mixing Definitely Maybe.

I mentioned in my previous blog that there were shiny prizes on offer in the Rock & Pop Competition and I ended up taking one home in the shape of the ‘Best Song’ award for I’m Sorry. I don’t remember saxophone player Jane Leighton (as was) doing any more than two takes on anything and so that double tracked end solo with the third harmony and grace notes added was in all probability recorded in pretty much the time it takes to listen to it, a feat which I still find astonishing.

The End of The Rainbow is a snapshot of what was happening politically in the mid to late eighties from the viewpoint of a twenty-something singer-songwriter and one which I’m not at all embarrassed to stand behind today although as I point out to myself toward the end there, “You don’t get a medal for watching the news, reading the paper, or singing the blues”. In hindsight, Eric Clapton CBE may beg to differ.

The last song on the session – Danny Whitten’s Legacy - involved Gibbon playing the grand piano in the studio’s live room while we monitored his performance from around the corner in the gallery. After a few fluffed takes, tension was rising perceptibly as we were all well aware we were on a fixed budget in terms of both time and money. It also hadn’t worked in our favour so far that someone had pointed out that the rolling chords he was attempting to string together most closely resembled the theme from popular Sunday night vet-centric family entertainment All Creatures Great and Small. These were the days of rewinding tapes and possibly compiling a serviceable final version from a number of performances, not digitally click-and-pasting them to where they should be on the visual laser display unit, and so we were literally running out of space in which to store his work so far. As another take succumbed to the combined pressures of expectation and performance-related anxiety there was a significant pause, an intake of breath, an exhalation. Finally a voice floated ethereally through the monitors from the other side of the wall. “Don’t shoot me” he began phlegmatically. “I’m only the piano player”.

You can listen to The World Service here; http://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/album/world-service
(Tracks 1-6 recorded at Spaceward by Owen Morris - the Constable Mix of "Far Away" is because Steve didn't like the effect Owen put on his acoustic guitar at the start of the song and so he (Owen) asked him if he (Steve) thought he could do any better. It had been a long night. Tracks 7-10 recorded with the Neale Foulger/Steve 'Kilbey' Mears rhythm section on Tascam 4-track at at The Portaloo, Clarkson Street, Ipswich by James Partridge). 

There is a splendid Spaceward Studios archive online from which I stole the photo of the desk above, and which includes some pictures of Owen, a story about how Iron Maiden’s first demo got wiped, a shot of Julian Cope recording Fried and a list of bands who recorded there which as well as us (“demo”) includes Stiff Little Fingers. They recorded Alternative Ulster, which I’m not sure Mr Wendell realised at the time.
http://www.spaceward.co.uk/spaceward-studios/index.htm

Empire Song

It was what, eighty-six, eighty-seven? Mr Wendell and I were in the fullest flush of our baggy shirts and pixie boots period – he more so than I, as I was still coming off the back of a serious Neil Young phase (still am, always will be) and so I trended toward the checked shirt and tasselled scarf rather than the suede that he favoured, shielded behind Blues Brothers shades but both of us in thrall to The Big Music. It was the fag end of the Thatcher years and so we had more than enough to keep us going in terms of targets for our lyrical barbs - Rod Stewart and Sun City, the French and Greenpeace, sexual politics which I barely understood (and am still working on) and politicians who were “…scanning the map for an island to defend”. The big beat of Mel Gaynor and the fierce Celtic hotwired soul of The Waterboys were our touchstones. Spitting Image was on the television, John Hegley was on at Glastonbury and Billy Bragg was putting out singles about The Diggers. These were heady times indeed.

 

In the middle of all of this we (were) entered into what was officially termed The Celestion Suffolk Rock and Pop Competition. Due to enforced line-up changes we only had five songs rehearsed at this point, which we played in every round. The biggest, most epic one of these was called ‘Empire Song’. “Stand straight, stand tall you can fight them all” ran the chorus “...it’s an attitude of mind. But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for, you won’t find”. We were non-com observers – grandiose, bellicose, living in a world of faux-grandeur that allowed no compromise between the new gold dream and the tumble on the sea – I, the lyricist, Wendell my willing accomplice mouthpiece. Take that, Bono! The song also had a lovely D-C-G chord progression in the verse that lent itself to a arpeggiated part on the electric guitar which I very much enjoyed phasing and chorusing in that 80’s way, over a majestic backdrop of big snare, twelve string guitar and sustained Hammond organ chords.

We made it as far as the final of the competition and, knowing that we were up against the finest that Suffolk could produce (or at least the finest that had entered, had hit the various judging panels’ buttons and who had all turned up in time for each round) we knew we had to exert a bit of what we referred to in our off-message moments as stage presence if we were going to take home any of the various trophies on offer. We had, after all (spoiler alert) beaten our main competition all hands down in the semi-final and were looking to repeat the experience (it’s complicated – I think a precursor to the Duckworth-Lewis method may have been involved). They, similarly, knew they were going to have to up their game.

Settling into our not-at-all rehearsed routine Wendell and I threw shapes, postured, jumped on and off monitors and, during one contemplative post-middle eight section, spontaneously sat together on the edge of the drum riser. I picked out harmonics, he faux-wearily addressed the state of the nation in song. The verse built, the chords achieved a certain stridency…I felt a hand in the small of my back. It gently urged me forward. “Up” it said. “Up, and let’s take these fuckers on”. To the casual observer we probably looked like a couple of hectoring students caught mid-SU bar debate (neither of us were students – the hectoring part is still open to what I suspect would be a very short discussion) sharing a microphone stand picked out in the stage centre spotlight. In our heads we were Jagger and Richards, Strummer and Jones, Tom Robinson, Mike Scott, Paul Weller in all his badly-fringed red wedge fury. “Stand straight, stand tall, you can fight them all, it’s an attitude of mind!” we shouted in unison. “But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for you won’t find”. I’ll remember the moment of that proprietal hand pushing me forward, reassuring me that we were in this together and that here was someone who really, truly believed in me until death or dementia take me.

We came second.                 

"No, It's spelled 'Nosmo King'..."

As an increasing number of these entries seem to do, this one broadly kicks off “Of course, back in the day…” You could probably Google that phrase and find this blog coming up top of the list. I’m not going to though; I refuse to read any further than the first occurrence of the phrase “If you Google…” in any article ever, as that gives me a pretty good idea of where the research for it was done. Mind you, some people refuse to read beyond the first instance of a semi colon, especially in the opening paragraph.

Back in the day, when I toiled unceasingly behind a number of counters of an award-winning chain of record shops, there were label catalogues to check through in order to ensure that we had the right selection of top-selling platters (and a few staff favourites) available to the casual browser at any time. I used to love doing checklists as it meant I could spend an awful lot of time reading sleeve notes, memorising catalogue numbers - Kiss’s Love Gun was PRICE 69, as it happens – and at one point I could rattle off the entire Black Sabbath discography in order, including the NEMS stuff, and give you the Judie Tzuke back catalogue in ILPS number order as a result of my time delving through the racks. Not a great party trick, I’ll admit, and subsequently I spent a great deal of the early eighties single - principally, I suspect, because that was my party trick.
 

These were the times when coming back from the shop floor with a list of browser dividers which needed replacing with the legend “M’Head” scrawled carelessly upon it would garner you a withering look and the enquiry as to whether you were referring to Medicine Head, Motorhead or Murray Head? The sleeves in our TV advertised section bore the legend ‘625’ as that was the number of lines broadcast on an analogue television. It was that kind of atmosphere – look, you’ve seen ‘High Fidelity’, right? But then, if it hadn’t been for browser ordering and poor transcription, I would never have had the opportunity to live through the chucklesome but perfectly factually accurate receipt of the one intended for the jazz section headed “THE LONELIEST MONK”.

In order to locate those hard-to-find or even impossible-to-imagine customer requests however, one needed to employ a combination of low cunning, a genuine sleuthing instinct and to not be too proud to call on fellow staff members’ arcane knowledge of (say) the solo works of ex-members of Trip. You also needed a voluminous tome called The Music Master. Once you had identified the album being requested, the artist, or even the label you could refer to the listings within before attempting to track down a current distributor with whom you (a) had an account and (b) weren’t on stop with because their bill hadn’t been settled for a couple of months due to some administrative oversight. Even in the case of scenario (b) you’d probably still take payment and issue a receipt (basically an IOU if truth be told) as that might help bump up the outstanding balance to the point where they would accept an order from you since it would actually be worth sending out a box of stock by Securicor. Amazon, their one-click ordering and everyone’s opinion on their tax affairs was still some way off at this point, as you may have guessed.
 

The thing is, with so many independent labels having sprung up over the years, the publishers of the Music Master couldn’t possibly monitor every operation and their release schedules to ensure that they were genuine, let alone update deletion dates, which is why there is a cassette-only release by a band called gods kitchen on House of God Records, catalogue number GK29 in the 1991 version, and in all subsequent editions, called The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes. Today, if you want, you can look it up on the worldwide web and have it downloaded to your computer like *clicks fingers* that. Of course, back in the day...   

After everything, now this.

Rumour and speculation have been building on social media over the weekend that the BBC or, more prosaically, long-standing musical adept Stephen Foster will not be curating a stage at this year’s Ipswich Music Day (Music in the Park to us local veterans of the pub rock wars). If true, this is a sad reflection of the current climes in a number of ways. Firstly – personally - I feel for Foz, who was instrumental (hah!) in getting the festival rolling in the first place and has subsequently made the day a high point not only of his live music year but certainly for the many who get a good spot in front of the stage early on and camp out for the day safe in the knowledge that this bastion of the public service broadcaster will provide a balanced days’ entertainment, even if on occasion some of the individual courses aren’t to one’s taste.

The live broadcast (I’ve been on one or two, and the temptation toward profanity is almost unbearable) used to fill a big chunk of the Sunday radio schedule and then bits of the rest of it were filleted to provide more music to be put out at a latter date. Blues, soul, rock, reggae, cover bands and, importantly, home-grown original material all went to make up the mix. For every fifteen minute version of Sweet Home Chicago there were a clutch of singer-songwriters trying out their stuff on a big stage for the first time (even if slotted conveniently in at the start of the day where they wouldn’t frighten the picnickers)  

With the increasing hiving off of local content across all aspects of the BBC I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later someone would pick up on the cost and inconvenience of using publicly subscribed funds to support a day involving musicians expressing themselves at the BBC’s expense (although lord knows none of that expense ever made it our way). I think that’s a little sad, unfortunate and wrong. As a public service broadcaster I believe that the BBC should not only educate, entertain and inform, but reflect their constituency, and having (literally) a platform to once a year throw a party to which we’re all invited is the right and proper thing to do.

I hope that these stories turn out to be without foundation, as it would be a bitter pill to swallow to see the broadcast media represented on the day by sub-karaoke commercial interests whose presenters’ main raison d’etre in attending seems to be having someone to shout at. Farewell, Soul Kitchen, we hardly knew you…   

(pic - Matt White and The Emulsions. Matt White pictured)    

 

Addenda, 24/5/13 - the line up for the BBC Stage has just been announced. As ever, it finishes with Soul Kitchen...  

Note to Self...

When you put a capo on the neck of your guitar at the first fret it alters the relative inversions of all of the chords in the song, not just the first two. Having to start the same number four times because you keep remembering that just after you’ve hit the next successive chord after the one you got right the last time will endear you to neither audience nor long-suffering vocalist, although the former will probably find the expression offered toward you by the latter during this process very amusing indeed.  

I mean, when you've loved and lost the way Frank has, then you, uh, you know what life's about.

In a move that has shocked, shocked and stunned the close-knit world of East Angliacana it has been revealed that benevolent dictator, de facto Doge of the organisation and otherwise styled Glorious Leader James Partridge will not be appearing with popular beat combo Songs from The Blue House at this weekend’s Helstock Festival at The Sun Inn, Dedham as a result of not handing in a presentation, as requested by the coaching staff, detailing his contribution to the group’s performance.

"We pride ourselves on attitude," said manager Ron Decline, who took over after their appearance at Fiddly Richard’s garden party in the summer. "We have given the musicians a huge amount of latitude to get culture and attitude right. We believe those behaviours are not consistent with what we want to do with this group, how we want to take this band to be the best in the Posh North Essex / Suffolk borders area.

"I believe that unfortunately he has not met my requirements so he is not available for selection for this performance.'

"I asked the band at the end of the gig [followed by an enjoyable barbecue and buffet supper] to give me an individual presentation, I wanted three points from each of them technically, mentally and team, as to how we were going to get back over the next couple of shows.

"This has been the toughest decision I have ever had to make” added co-manager Bobbi Flekman. “It's a tough, tough decision, but the ramifications for that within the group's structure and the message that it sends to all involved in Songs from The Blue House is that we are serious about where we want to take this group", adding “Money talks, and bullshit walks”.

Upon hearing the announcement guitar player and occasional vocalist Shane Kirk commented “Can you play a bass line like James used to on "Ophelia"? Can you double that? You might recall the line's in fifths”, to which Banjo player Tony Winn replied “I've got two hands here”.

Michael Vaughan, the former England captain who has turned into a regular Folk/Rock/Country/Blues/Americana baiter on Twitter, summed up the general incredulity when he tweeted: "What is going on with Songs from The Blue House? Didn't realise you had to do an essay to get selection these days!" The former Australia batsman Mark Waugh said he had ''never heard anything so stupid in all my life''.

 

Picturehouse Publishing Quarterly Report.

Alright - who's been at the credit card when they should have gone to bed on time? Come on, I've got all day.

 

 

Es tan evidente como la nariz en la cara

The Theotrio spent a very pleasant evening’s rehearsal this week working through some new material that we intend to debut at this year’s Helstock – the annual gathering convened in order to celebrate each passing year of The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley, at which we gather solemnly together to drink delicious Brewers Gold, play music at each other, and occasionally ceremonially throw a donkey from the toppermost of a nearby mediaeval fastness.

As we played the things over we tweaked and smoothed bits and bobs as they stood out - a verse here, a bridge there, a stray passing chord thither – using the vernacular of the musician who’s done a lot of listening and is keen to conform to the accepted scruples and standards of the form. “Make it a bit Crosby* here”, “I’m going to do the descending Gregson at the start” and “It’s like ‘Forever’ all over again” were all shorthand phrases employed in the interests of brevity of clarification. You’d probably wait for a very long time for this particular congregation to produce our Trout Mask Replica, and we’d need to borrow an awfully large number of typewriters beforehand.

At one point I suggested that we counterpoint a middle eight with what we refer to as 'A Mike Mills BV' – that is, while Helen was singing the main melody, Mr Wendell and I would entertain a counterpoint theme involving some different words behind it. He then suggested that we do it as a round (think Freres Jacques or London’s Burning**) rather than in unison, and so the creative process tumbled on.

We found and filleted a handy phrase from elsewhere in the song and ran through it a couple of times to see how it sat. Helen looked unhappy.
“While I’m singing a line that ends with '…face', you can’t be singing '…knows'”.
“Why not?” I asked.
"Isn't it obvious?" she replied.

*Just for clarification, here I mean David, not Bing.  

**The children’s nursery rhyme, not that one by The Clash.

    

The Return of Theodore.

It’s been a standing joke between me and whichever beat combo he’s just left that Mr Wendell - the artist formerly known as The Singer (see blogs passim) - is terribly good at starting bands, but not so capable at actually being in them. I think generally it’s the hours you have to put in, although having said that, very many of the actual minutes have been a joy in themselves. He once left my group Gods Kitchen after missing a rehearsal because he’d rather go kart racing, for example, but to be honest the worst thing you could accuse him of is being slightly ahead of the curve, in that these days I think we all would.

Nevertheless, we’re at it again. After last year’s excursion into West Coast territory with Dawes-inspired electric combo Theodore, we’ve decided to carry on the experiment and diversify into the acoustic arena in a similar fashion to that as would be experienced by a newly-signed electric combo whose record company can’t afford the Travelodge bills for the whole outfit and so have sent the two guitarists out on a promo tour of radio stations instead.

Thus, after many years’ delicate shuffling around the subject Mr Wendell can finally relax into the role of David Crosby and I can once again fully unleash my inner Neil Young (I don’t need much of an excuse really, the injudicious dropping of a hat is usually enough to set me off). Students of West Coast musicology will probably note that this is not a combination that has previously met with unalloyed success, however we do not necessarily see this as a barrier to exploring the possibilities offered by such a pairing, given our prior attempts to capitalise on the musical chemistry which has brought together such titans as John and George, Don and Kootch, Dave Dee and Tich, Brian and Michael, and Willson-Piper, Keppel and Betty* both on stage and in the studio. 

We’ve written some new songs, we’ve raided our back catalogue for suitable items for refurbishment, and most importantly we’ve invited some eye candy along for the ride on vocals and made sure that our first gig is at her birthday party. It’s not an original trick – in fact it’s exactly the same principle that we used for our first live performance around this time last year, but as the old saw says – if it ain’t broke, it’s clearly never been owned by a drummer**

I fondly recall the first time Mr Wendell and I sat in a room discussing our possible future musical direction - me hunched over a record player trying to decide which Peter Gabriel track would be most likely to entice him into a lifetime of collaborative musical experiments and him sat in an armchair, trying to keep his dinner down. To this day he’s still never heard the other three and a half sides of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and I know that for a fact. In contrast, when we got together last week, rather than try to drop the stylus down on the right song on the album and grab an acoustic guitar in order to be able to start playing along before the track kicked in I processed an electric guitar sound through some modelling software on an iPad and read the lyrics to a cover version we were thinking of doing off his phone. How times have changed. What a long strange trip it’s been. Whatever happened to the west?

And so, just before we return to the electric arena with the full band, we will take a moment to expose ourselves willingly to the lingering scrutiny afforded by the two acoustic set up, brave the slingbats and arrows*** of outrageous fortune and grasp the opportunity to perform minor key reflections on our own mortality and morality. Or, as we say in the mournful singer-songwriter world, Carpe Dm.    

               

*note to sub-ed – please check some of these sources.   

**Hello subs – me again. One more thing – this may be a mis-quotation. Pls check Oxford Dikker of Quotaggers to verify.     

***Again, this one might need looking up online.

Following in Sheeran's Footsteps

Music in the Park, as we veteran Suffolk fans still call it (despite the relatively recent abrogation of the term in favour of Ipswich Music Day's absorption into the new, exciting - and presumably grant-laden – Ip-Art Festival) kicked off in 1991 as part of a national celebration of music with a show from local band The Caution Horses, probably performing on the very spot in Christchurch Park where frontman Andy “Andy’s Ball!” Heasman used to play footy with a varied collection of us Ippo musicians and other assorted ne’er-do-wells on Sunday afternoons in the post-Italia ’90 surge in gentrification of the beautiful game - it certainly looks like the same area from the photos I’ve seen of great white hopefuls and recently reformed country rockers Buffalo Road who appear to have performed on a couple of wooden pallets serving as a stage and with a borrowed home hi fi shipped in as an afterthought for amplification purposes.

Unlike the rest of the country we in Suffolk persevered with the form in 1992, and the year after, and then the year after that, until the festival became a major fixture in the East Anglian cultural calendar. Last year’s attendance was estimated at over 40,000 people, who were entertained by a veritable smorgasbord of bands on over half a dozen bespoke girder and lighting rig-composed stages, a far cry from the Venue for Ipswich Campaign-inspired trailer upon which I had the good fortune to be able to perform a lengthy extemporisation upon The Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It?” with As Is, one of several appearances I’ve put in over the years*. 

With God’s Kitchen I tried to follow The Dawn Parade’s feather boa-heavy performance of Brit glam pop. On Star Club duties I loaded the gear straight off the stage into a van so that we could re-set up at The Milestone just at the bottom of Woodbridge Road and carry on where we’d left off, in The Picturehouse Big Band we inspired a frugging teenage moshpit frenzy (I know, at our ages), The Perfectly Good Guitars’ cod-American hillbilly accents so incensed one punter that he stomped, not just away from our stage, but all the way out of the park and off to the pub, and under my own name one year I even compered the early Singer-Songwriter session on the BBC stage.

Throughout all of this I have gleaned a modicum (a quantum, one might say) of experience about what goes on in terms of the organisation and the logistical effort involved. Firstly, since no-one gets paid and everyone volunteers, the bands themselves tend to be on the receiving end of the old saw that some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. I have had stage managers order us off on the dot of the scheduled closing time, mid-song (even though it was them who had spent twenty minutes trying to work out which of their shoddily-maintained cables was at fault before we could start).

I’ve had sound engineers give me the thumbs-up and bid me start playing while I was still holding an unplugged guitar lead forlornly toward them, I’ve had stage monitors so distorted and badly-mixed that we’ve asked them to be turned off rather than try and fight against them, and I’ve hauled a fifty watt amplifier half way across the biggest park in town by hand because of an unfortunate arse/elbow interface which meant that I’d already lapped the circumference of the grounds by road three times looking for someone who may have actually attended a steward’s briefing before putting on his orange fluorescent jacket.

The requested detailed stage plan and DI box diagrams we sent weeks in advance to bestay some of these issues may as well have been blueprints for the directions to Neverland. Once Songs from The Blue House invited the twenty hardy souls who’d stayed to watch us in the pouring rain into the backstage tent where they could at least have a cup of tea in the dry and suggested that we might play acoustically, only for them to be chased out again by an over zealous FOH manager. 

Throughout this, the audience experience has been almost universally positive so, y’know, it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of the vocal mix in the foldback occasionally being a little too heavy on the reverb doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. At least I’ve never been phoned at three in the morning by a stage hire company to be told they’re not coming in the morning after all, as happened to BBC Radio Suffolk’s Stephen Foster one year. 

Applications for the 2013 event are now open, and our local media advises that performers successfully applying to be included in the line up could forseeably follow in the footsteps of Ed Sheeran (tempting, however in my case I’d probably have to take much shorter strides in order to do so) although to be honest you only have to walk out of your front door in Suffolk to be following in Ed Sheeran’s footsteps – the oft-repeated dig that you could find any number of similarly talented young singer-songwriters at open mic nights the length and breadth of the country simply by throwing a stick may well be true but you’d have to go a long way to find many as willing to get off their fat behinds and put in the hard yards that Sheeran has, which may well be what’s made the difference betwixt his career trajectory and mine.

 I imagine that the organising committee are hoping to garner some of the cachet that having hosted the The A-Team hitmaker at a previous Music Day brings. Similarly, last year The Maverick Festival put up some footage of Ed Sheeran performing at their song writing competition slot the previous Summer (he came third). Having submitted an online application this year on behalf of Theodore, the band that Mr. Wendell and I performed with a couple of times last year with Mr. Mickey Trenter, late of Lovejunk and currently of Ippo punk veterans Red Flag 77 on bass and with Mike Summers from the self-same 1991 Music Day performers Buffalo Road on drums. 

A far cry from the early days of when simply knowing who to know was a passport to inclusion, the entry criteria has tightened up considerably to the point where cassettes - even CDs - are surplus to application requirements. To get in these days you need three songs on Soundcloud and your own website. We don’t actually have the latter, but I did include this blog in one of the required fields and so if you’re still reading, designated committee member, we’d love to play, we really would, notwithstanding all that stuff about the organisation in past years I mentioned earlier.

 

*Having subsequently checked the invaluable online resource provided by James Partridge regarding As Is chronology, I see that this wasn't actually an Ipswich Music Day performance, nevertheless, it was in the park.

Advertorial

‎Hello Readers - now, I know how much we all enjoyed the publication of (and subsequent critical acclaim afforded) my musical memoirs 'Do You Do Any Wings?' and 'All These Little Pieces', but sometimes an actual physical book can be a hindrance - when traveling say, or relaxing in an airport, or even sound checking! With this in mind I have lovingly compiled* the most popular entries over the past couple of years into this snug and handy eBook, which you can furnish to your electronic devices at very, very little cost - (mind those Kindles though - I don't think you can load to them due to the ongoing intercenine e-reading technology turf wars. There were always going to be victims). 
Among the celebrity cameos within are such luminaries as Gretchen Peters, Boo Hewerdine, Peter Buck, Neil Finn, Brooks Williams, Mark Ellen, Rose Cousins, Otis Gibbs and BBC Radio Suffolk's Dave Butcher. He's in it quite a bit.  
Please come this way, and prepare to enjoy the highlights of the past couple of years' bloggery.
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/i-didnt-know-i-was-waiting-for-you/13579681

*cut & pasted. There were some formatting issues yesterday, but they should have been sorted out by now.

"Hope you like our new direction..."

To lose one group member may be regarded as a misfortune, however when we in Britain’s finest East Angliacana beat combo Songs from The Blue House decided to regroup, refresh and start warming up for our scheduled date at The High Barn in April with a series of limb-stretching casual get-togethers, two of our constituents decided that they would rather not be considered for selection for the forthcoming series.  The disaffected duo, Fiddly Richard and Gibbon, have been with us since our very first tentative moves into recording – Gib as founder member and de facto contributing editor of the original triumvirate and Fiddly, among his many other treasured contributions, as fellow musical bodhisattva, somehow trying to join the dots between Bobby Valentino and Bob Mould.

To try to encapsulate the joy that they have brought me between them would be pointless and unworthy – a glance back over prior blogs will reveal innumerable mentions of both their names in connection with some dry observation, a baffling non-sequitur, or an unexpected pleasure connected with some in-transit musical treat delivered between chocolate bars and smoking in cars. Gib’s remains one of the few collections which will swoop between the Scylla of King Crimson and the Charybdis of Plan B without necessarily pausing for breath, and Fiddly remains a host of unrivalled generosity whether by dint of sharing his shed-based rehearsal facility or the comforts of his table. Musically, of course, their contributions remain unrivalled. Gibbon, for whom rehearsal was generally anathema, is capable of pulling breath taking improvisations out of nowhere and Richard (for so long the polar opposite, wedded on stage to his faithfully transcribed arrangements) composed the most beautiful parts for our recordings and then learned to bluff solos for a bewildering number of outré requests thrown carelessly his way by us at the front. He also remains beloved of sound engineers across several counties for his bespoke stage amplification and monitoring system based, it is rumoured, on the original blueprints for the CERN Large Hadron Collider, not least in terms of its scale and complexity.      

With SftBH, of course, no door becomes irredeemably closed – as an institution we have more in common with the Hotel California than we do The Sugababes, on many levels - however this latest opening of the shutters and beating of the carpets gives us a wonderful opportunity to explore some of those other ideas we’ve had. At The Luton Palace we were talking about a musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper, for example. People should envy us. I envy us… 

  

You can hear Fiddly doing the solo in the middle of our version of (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, which also features Gibbon on harmony vocals (it’s essentially a duet) here - http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/dont-fear-the-reaper

"It's all quiet, especially on the trains".

Through a series of circumstance long and complicated, I found myself in the studios of BBC Radio Suffolk at half five this morning, preparing to deputise live on air for regular Breakfast Show traffic and travel guru Simon “If it’s safe and legal to do so” Talbot under his beneficient tutelage and softly gaze. On the surface, this seemed like an easy gig – all I had to do was review the front pages of the daily papers, contribute a couple of quirky sideways sound bites concerning at the news, and then every fifteen minutes pop into the studio and read out some updates on the state of the roads, whilst remembering not to say ‘fuck’ on air (the sanctity of the control room is a different matter – it was like a Yorkshire navvies’ convention in there at times).

That my super-ego was taking it seriously can be inferred from the classic pre-exam anxiety dream from which I woke at three in the morning, the developing scenario having progressed to the point where I had imagined that Breakfast Show host Terry Baxter had not turned up and that Simon had stepped in and was presenting the show in the face of an ever more serious spiral of technical mishaps until, Nero-like, he pulled out a violin and started playing a mournful air amidst the collapsing studio soundproofing, giving the show the aspect of the dinner party scene at the end of Carry On Up The Khyber. It wasn’t until I remembered that Si can’t actually play the violin that I was stirred from my slumber. I know, and you’d think being in the studio naked apart from a dressing gown would have triggered a reaction first, wouldn’t you?

Thanks to astute time management, gentle praise and the generous dispensation of tips and tricks from The I-Spy Presenters’ Book of Making It Look Easy by the regulars I managed to at least give the impression of someone who knew what they were doing, even though I didn’t get to broadcast my pre-prepared introductory shtick regarding the late substitution (“Simon can’t be here as he is currently in lockdown at a Mayan Apocalypse-proof bunker in the West Midlands, which has been stocked almost entirely with Bovril and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies”) and I also didn’t get to throw in his trademark “You know me, Terry – I love a survey” in tribute to my mentor. I remarked on this slight regret as I repeatedly pressed F5 on the keyboard controlling the travel computer monitor, trying for a last update on the burgeoning crisis on the Chelmsford by-pass before close of play. “You should get your own catchphrase” he said, mentally trying one on for size. “Had you considered finishing your reports with ‘…and it’s all quiet on the trains…TADAAAH!’?” I admitted that I hadn’t, but would certainly consider it in case of any future engagements.

 

“Is he being paid for sitting around out there?” queried Terry at one point. I relayed this to a reflective Simon. “My role, you see…” he began “…is very much like that of a fire fighter. There may well be long periods of inactivity, but when the call comes I have to leap instantly into action, keeping pace with the intensity of developments whilst at all times maintaining an untroubled exterior, inspiring confidence in others and providing a beacon of calm amidst the brouhaha. This is how I regard my role, be it ever so humble. That…” he concluded “…or as being like one of the Thunderbird pilots”.     

"...and then Shane went away and wrote about someone who'd annoyed him that day..."

Our Glorious Leader was interviewed on the radio last week. I touched on the subject of our recording experience at the BBC a couple of blogs ago and I was looking forward to the broadcast as, along with the Radio Suffolk drive time listenership, this was when I’d be able to listen to our performance for the first time, the band having eschewed such bourgeois concepts as playbacks and monitors in the studio in favour of the wholesome and robust “Well, that one felt okay” approach so beloved of recording engineers the network over - especially ones who’ve already put in a full shift that day and are required to hang about for an extra few hours in order to preserve these sorts of occasions for posterity due to the unique way in which the BBC is funded. 

Unfettered from the need to defer to the rabbit-mouthed talk show interventionist who usually accompanies him on such occasions (*waves*) James was free to converse in a leisurely fashion with host Stephen ‘Foz’ Foster not only about Songs from The Blue House, but on matters such as the perils of gig promoting, the opportunities that technology affords the modern music archivist (an aside concerning The Who and Little Richard during a diversion regarding the processed nature of modern recordings was particularly apposite) and how much it cost him to pay off Carly Simon over that little matter of the single.   

Obviously all of these recordings remain the property of the BBC, although I’m sure we’re meant to have signed some sort of form in case they want to release them as part of a boxed set or something in future. Not everyone would ‘fess up with such a disclaimer - avuncular recording guru Dave ‘Butch’ Butcher (to whom OGL rightly pays fulsome tribute in the interview itself) noted at the time of our original visit that he only realised that he’d just recorded one band’s next album when he counted back the number of songs they’d crammed into the session and after they insisted on taking a CD copy away with them at its conclusion.

So, here are four acoustic session songs by SftBH and an interview of about a half hour’s duration as originally broadcast, during which Foz also plays our version of Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain;

https://soundcloud.com/songs-from-the-blue-house/sets/bbc-suffolk-session-20-11-12

You can, of course, purchase your very own copy of the single here;

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