"It Breaks My Heart..."

 

I am in receipt of a slew of mails and tweets from The New Wolsey Theatre regarding their revival of the so-called ‘jukebox musical’ Our House, which takes the back catalogue of eighties pop funstrels Madness* as a starting point and then weaves a compelling narrative throughout in order to produce a compelling, evocative and fun evening out for all the family. Or, if you’re Ben Elton, involves you dashing off a bewildering load of old tosh on the back of a fag packet in crayon before trousering eye-watering amounts of cash and hanging out at parties with Robert De Niro.

This minds me to recall my own time in musical theatre, playing the part of Hank Jr. Jr. in the stage production of The Perfectly Good Guitars, which played at The New Wolsey, at Ipswich Music Day and the Place des Héros in Arras as part of a cultural exchange. The narrative explored the story of what was originally the Guitare family and followed their fortunes throughout generations of Guitars as they journeyed from their original home in France to Nova Scotia, Maine and finally Louisiana, each new step of the journey prompted by the then-current patriarch of the family becoming involved in an unfortunate “…bit of trouble with a local girl”.

In reality this was simply a scheme cooked up between myself and one Tony James Shevlin after some time idly speculating whether we should form a band simply for the express purpose of being able to put every guitar we owned on stage at the same time – I only had the four to bring to the party but he had half a dozen at least and was able to throw in a couple of basses for good measure. After we’d come up with the name, Shev fleshed out the concept and made a few calls until we had a cast of actor/musicians – Wendell G, TT, Billy-Bob, and the Mandolin sisters (and cousins) Ophelia and Emmylou – with small back stories which meant that we could drop a bunch of our favourite bits of Americana into the mix and have a ball at the same time. 

Once we had arranged the set list we allocated showcase numbers to each of the group so that numbers like Steve Earle’s Only When I’m Blue, Tompall Glaser’s Streets of Baltimore, Love Hurts, and Bruce Springsteen’s From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come) fitted snugly into the narrative, each monologue ending with a resigned “…with a local girl” before we kicked into the song proper. It was the latter which gave us the biggest surprise at our first rehearsal when Tony ‘TT’ Turrell, (operating under his regular nickname) burst note-perfect into the rollicking key-change boogie woogie piano solo which closes Dave Edmunds’ version and which we’d previously agreed might be a bit much to drop into someone’s lap given the deadline we were operating under, which was to get the show on at The Wolsey as part of the Ip Art festival that year. After that we all upped our game a bit.

Shev based the show around the concept that we as a group had come to Ipswich to see where Daddy was stationed during the war (he’d been asked to leave after a bit of trouble with…well, you get the picture**) which we affected to be mightily impressed by. He wrote lines based around the gifted happenstance that a few town centre buildings had been recently converted into licensed premises (“They had a theatre, and they turned it into a bar….even the job centre is now a pub!”) and that “They even have a Route 66!” “It’s a bus route Wendell – it goes to Martlesham…”

By making it a show rather than a gig we managed to fill most of the venue on the night and many happy theatre-goers congratulated us on our American accents in the bar afterward – a couple even going so far as to ask us how long we were over for. The trip to France may have slightly confused the non-Anglophone audience, not least because many of the line up were also playing gigs with their regular bands at the same festival (“Eet is ze same singer as yesterday…but zis time ‘e ‘as got a ‘at!”) but probably the finest compliment to our thespian integrity came when we performed at Ipswich Music Day. As we compared notes in The Milestone - about five minutes walk away from the park down the hill - afterwards (“A triumph darling – you were wonderful! Mwah! Mwah!”) the landlord approached us with a mischievous grin playing about his features. “I had one of the people who saw your act in here earlier” he twinkled. “Saw the first two numbers, stomped out of the park, down here, ordered a pint and addressed us all in part and no-one in particular. ‘I can’t stand those fucking Yanks’ he said”.

*Other descriptions are available. 

**Allegedly based on why Geno Washington skipped town. Possibly. Yes, that one.

“He asked to see my door, but I wouldn't show it to him…”

I am pleased to announce that after a long period of simply going up to people and asking if I can play at their pub, showcase, campfire, party and/or Christening, I now have representation.  Henceforth my musical affairs will be handled by James at Blue House Music, who has offered very reasonable terms under which, basing a projection of next year’s earnings on my turnover for the fiscal year to date, he already owes me thirty five quid.

Obviously we haven’t actually signed anything legally binding as we’re not the sort of people who rely on such things, preferring as we do a manly handshake, an almost imperceptible inclination of the head and a knowing tap of the nose. We had a pretty similar arrangement with High Barn Records around the time of the release of Songs from The Blue House’s album Tree, when we were advised that they would rather not be involved with the sort of people who insisted on ephemera like contracts. Nevertheless they got us on to Amazon, iTunes, the HMV website and into a movie soundtrack and so in the long term I’m not complaining that I haven’t been able to research my royalty rate at Companies House, and the £4.86 I got from the PRS came in pretty handy that time I was on my way to Subway and was out of loose change.

 

I’m no stranger to contractual wrangles, of course. My nascent career with Heavy Big Popsters As Is didn’t necessarily founder on our insistence on haggling with a big-shot American agent over a clause regarding image rights, but it didn’t seem to help seal the deal at all. I guess when your day job had been producing Winkler-centric sitcom Happy Days, dealing with the contractual minutæ raised by a bunch of mulletheads over in Blighty must have seemed like pretty small potatoes by comparison. Our heroic manager, who’d secured the offer in the first place, was informed in fairly short order that we’d better sign up as it stood or forget it, and consign our chances of getting our leather jackets placed in The Smithsonian* to the trash. And he'd had to pay a lawyer to explain what image rights were in the first place.

 

In the end, aside from the legalities which bound us to our manager (and he to us) one contract I did manage to sign during my time in the self-professed purveyors of Loud Love Songs was for the publishing rights for a single song in the territories of French-speaking Benelux and Switzerland, which sounds like a pretty market-specific sort of deal until you realise that these were the only parts of Europe a friend of his who'd agreed to drop off some copies of our single at whatever radio stations he passed during the course of the trip was going to be visiting. I’m not sure we had that much of an impact on the Swiss charts at the time, and I’m certainly not aware of any residual royalties having built up over the intervening years but of course if you’d like me to come to your pub/showcase night/campfire/party/Christening  and play “(I Want to) Move (In With You)” – double parentheses please – then I’d be only too pleased to.

 

Speak to my agent.

 

*The original jacket worn by The Fonz in the TV series is now in a museum.

“My hand to God, she's gonna be at Carnegie Hall. But you - I'll let you have her now at the old price, OK?

Word reaches me (over a nice Marlborough Sauvignon blanc in my back garden actually) that Our Glorious Leader has expanded his portfolio of obligation into the Agency business. In short, as well as booking turns into his own www.liveattheinstitute.co.uk evenings, arranging intimate soirees live in The Oak Room at The Sun in Dedham, doing sound at Little Rabbit Barn and popping the odd passing singer-songwriter into a bistro in Coggeshall on the off-chance of a hat tip and a plate of free hors d’oeuvres, he is adopting a stable of thoroughbred performers of Top Quality Americana and Modern Folk and trying to persuade other people to book them too. I think I’ve got that right. It sounds like an awful lot of hard work to me - sort of like an A&R role, but without the mounds of cocaine and lavish after-BRITs parties.

When bands get bored with each other, the set list, the venues they’re playing on a Sisyphean loop or even the charm of the miss-teatime-get-back-late-eat-a-Ginsters-on-the-way-home lifestyle, or they simply outgrow the childish things that first led them into being in a band in the first place (like the chance to miss tea, stay up late and eat Ginsters on the way home, ironically) it’s often the singer who diversifies into alternate arenas of expression first. Since drummers spend a lot of awful time hitting things and adjusting cymbal stands prior to gigs, guitarists like to warm up by playing all the licks they’re not allowed to include in the set proper and bass players can’t usually be trusted with electricity, singers also tend to know which end to plug in the microphones, which gives them an extra edge in the utility stakes après group hiatus. A friend of mine ended up doing the sound for a Saturday morning kids TV pop show from just such a career start point (learning in the process just how high the number of incidences of sore throats occurring between Friday’s rehearsal and Saturday’s broadcast can be, which is why for all his faults I retain a soft spot for Housewives Mum’s favourite Ronan Keating, who makes a point of delivering the goods live every time).

Frequently it’s their PA anyway, since they’ve grown tired of flirting with acute pharyngitis by trying to make themselves heard over the throaty roar of the guitarist’s backline and they’ve bought some decent gear to replace the cobbled-together collection of stands and wedges that have accumulated over time. They also tend to build up an informal network of people who similarly need such a capability but who gig so infrequently that it’s not worth them buying their own. They sometimes flirt with them, too. After that it's all “Are there any other good places to play around here?” or simply “Are there any places to play around here?” and the mid set “You should learn…” turns into the after show “You should book…” and before you know it you’re paying the hire fee on a church hall out of your own pocket, panicking about the late walk-up, trying to find the one duff channel on the multicore which has wiped out the stereo monitor feed, isolating the earth buzz that’s threatening to derail the whole sound check and wondering where on earth you’re going to get quail’s eggs for Boo Hewerdine’s backstage rider.

There’s also a down side.

By the way, you can see what he’s up to at http://bhmusic.co.uk/

I Don't Get Around Much Any More

I received a telephone call from Our Glorious Leader on Saturday, welcome not least because any call from him usually presages larks and adventures to some degree, but especially on this occasion because it turned out that he had about a hundred CDs for me to sign as part of the successful Kickstarter-led release of the fifth Songs from The Blue House album, ‘Live’. We had always intended the fifth of our releases to be recorded in front of an audience as this would mean that we could give it a suitably packaged title to follow our sophomore* effort Too, which was in turn followed by Tree and then IV. At one point we discussed presenting the CD in a small fruit container to emphasise that the title was a small play on words, or ‘punnet’. Why my career in marketing hasn’t blazed like a comet across the firmament is a mystery to me, it really is.  

I listened to it in the car this morning, and it really is a thing of wonder. I’m as much a fan of the band as I am a member and although I’m not suggesting this is our Rock of Ages (the last time we made a reference to The Band a kindly reviewer helpfully pointed out that we were ‘deluded’) there are real moments of clarity when the realisation that we didn’t just write these songs, but that we lived them cuts like a knife. Breaking These Rocks is a genuine commentary on (then) current affairs which goes where hard science can’t, Song V is a true story set in root-fifth Cinemascope, counterpart Song III is a three act Linklater screenplay performed in four and a half minutes. Of course there is shade at the heart of the performance in that although we’re not quite at the stage of being "Hilton Valentine’s Animals", over the course of a decade there will inevitably be some comings and goings – of the original line up Jimmy quit for one, and then Jody got married – and that the performance we recorded was actually the launch gig for our previous album gives some clue as to the recent slackening off in our work rate.

 

As fascinating to me as its parent album is the associated outtakes and rarities collection** put together as one of the packages we hoped to entice our online benefactors with. There is our very first demo version of Bike – sounding pretty much the same as the version that kicks off the live album. There’s the version of Fairport Convention’s Rosie which we put together for Ces, that brace of psych-folk Beatles reworkings, Gibbon’s close harmony-led gospel version of When God Created Angels, the instrumental from our Steely Dan period that we never got round to finding lyrics for, the one that, conversely, we had two fully formed sets of words to decide between, the Judas Priest cover.

 

As I say, we didn’t just record this music, we lived it, and there’s a side to me which is gets more melancholy by each day that it looks increasingly like we won’t be living it again any time soon. Mind you, one guy did pick up the House Concert option on Kickstarter. He’s asked if we can do it at his place in the South of France…                      

You can find our music at http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/  

  

*Annoying, isn’t it?

**I’m fully aware that in terms of our commercial profile, pretty much everything we’ve ever released is a rarity.

Songs from The Blue House 'Live' out 26/8/13

 

 

You know what it’s like at parties. Some people pop their heads round the door just to be polite and say hello before moving on to another engagement, some arrive fashionably late, flirt outrageously with the other guests and depart leaving cigarette burns in the carpet that you don’t spot until three weeks later. A few turn up uninvited, stash their booze in the washing machine and then stay up all night talking until the only things left to drink are those brightly-coloured bottles you got in for that fancy-dress themed cocktail party a couple of years ago. Some people you get introduced to for the first time in the queue for the bathroom and hit it off so well that you wonder why you haven’t already been best friends for years. The Blue House party has been going on for a decade now, so it is time to thank everyone who RSVP’d the invite, brought a bottle, made a dessert or just popped in for a time while they waited for a cab. We are Songs from The Blue House, and this is what we do.   

http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/

"From Finborough to Fingringhoe..."

It’s tempting, I know, to consider me sitting back in my leather-bound armchair, puffing contentedly on a pipe and taking the occasional quaff on a stiff scotch as I dictate my memoir to a liveried flunky who then goes off to the British Library and uploads my latest reminiscence to an eager waiting public. Something about how the toilets in the Newt and Cucumber had a great reverb, or that bar whose gimmick was that all the tables had telephones on them, and the time that someone called the one nearest the stage to ask us to turn it down a bit as they couldn’t carry on their conversation without shouting, that sort of thing. Enquiring minds need to know - in fact only the other day I was parking the car when a gentleman stopped me to enquire whether I still get out and play and what the rest of The Star Club were up to. I informed him that our front man Shev was still writing and performing with his new band. “Ah” he shook his head wearily “But it’s not The Beatles, is it?”

I bumped into Frisky Pat, a drummer friend of mine the other day (at a child’s birthday party, where our respective scions were eating crisps and hitting each other with balloons – not unfamiliar behaviour from our time on the road together, as it happens) and talk got around to how the idea of being in a band is great, whereas the practicalities of missing tea and getting home at four in the morning so that a drunk person can shout “Sex on Fire!” at you repeatedly in between times for three hours gets a trifle wearing after a certain number of repetitions.

Nevertheless, I think it’s important to at least maintain the semblance of being in a band, even if that just means doing the occasional bit of writing and demoing at home just to keep your hand in, and so last week I foreswore the opportunity to go out and watch some of my friends playing music in order to stay in and make some of my own. Besides, once I start shouting for Kings of Leon songs after my third pint I tend to get on their nerves.

I had a simple little song which had previously been demoed and performed acoustically a couple of times, but I also had great dreams of swirling cinematic soundscapes of the sort McAlmont and Butler might hire Abbey Road to produce, or that Tom Scholz might dream up in his basement. I also had a nice bottle of Rioja, the riff from Love Will Tear Us Apart and a lyric which contained both the place name Fingringhoe and employed the term allopatric to describe a relationship. Here’s what happened...

soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywing…

So, having clocked in, I feel I have re-established my still-a-musician time-served credentials and can now get on with the business at hand. Perkins, plump up the cushions, bring me a fresh glass and let me tell you about the time one of our audience cornered my wife at a gig at The Manor Ballroom to ask if our first child would be named ‘John’ or ‘Paul’…      

      

Customers who bought this title also bought...

I did an interview over the phone a little while ago, which was quite the event for me, having not done one for many years. I think the last time before this was probably when a local fanzine - named Tiger Rag, I believe - took the trouble to invite me out for coffee and utilised the power of technology in the form of one of those new-fangled Walkmen (Walkmans?) in order to record my sage utterances for posterity. As it turned out either the batteries weren't up to it or the hubbub of the Took's Bakery & Cafe overtook the moment and my hapless interviewer had to ring me a few days later to see if I could remember anything I'd said, which I couldn't. I did mention that I'd been terribly earnest and was probably wearing an army surplus jacket.

 

This time around I was asked if and when it would be convenient to call me at home and was able to properly prepare myself with a pre-arranged list of questions, the answers to which were to be lovingly compiled and included in a book called The Semi-Pro Sixties. I've not read it myself, since the author declined to provide any of us interviewees with a free copy on the grounds that he was a bit skint having gone to all the trouble of getting the thing properly bound and published, but it has garnered a number of excellent reviews both on Amazon and the Waterstones sites, so it clearly turned out to be very good in the end. Obviously when I say 'a number' I mean they pretty much look like the same reviews in both places, but five stars is five stars, whatever their provenance.

 

David, the author, was kind enough to email me my bits to proof read, and I found his transcript of our conversation the other day. So in case you haven't got £11.99 to spare, let me guide you through some of the highlights contained within... 

 

Early influences

Shane Kirk; “We had a Dansette record player and we got given some records by a neighbour. There were records by Elvis, Cliff Richard and even Frankie Vaughan.”

Absolutely true, despite me being born in 1964. I am of the generation whose first frisson of excitement over an album sleeve came not while concentrating really hard (as it were) on Debbie Harry's dress on the front of Parallel Lines, but by looking through the extensive packaging of the South Pacific soundtrack. I also owned Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock EP and Frank Sinatra's version of Chicago (My Home Town) on 78. Still my favourite from this era is the timeless version of Wilhemina (is Plump and Round) which may be the first song I ever learned all the way through.    

 

Transport

 

Shane Kirk; “We’d hired this van to go to a gig on New Years Eve. It wasn’t from a very reputable company and we soon found out it didn’t have working wipers or washers. It started to snow and one of the band had to lean out of the window spraying water onto the windscreen in front of me so I could see where I was going.”

Obviously if you're in a van which is hurtling up the A14 and it's snowing you don't want to be the one hanging out of the window trying to splash water (which will then freeze into a fine, opaque layer) over the windscreen. Driving wasn't much more fun.  

Embarrassing Situations

Shane Kirk; “We were booked to play in a huge club in Oxford. I’d written all the songs for the band and we were looking forward to the gig. We arrived and set up. There were loads of bar staff and several doormen all prepared for a busy night. Unfortunately nobody showed up, nobody at all. The Manager eventually told us to forget it, so we packed the gear away in the van ready to drive back home. We were just about to drive off when the Manager came out and paid us the full fee. Fair play to him.”

I still carry with me the look of despair on the club manager's face as we rolled round yet another few bars of the false ending of what turned out to be our closing number. He approached the stage, we carried on playing, he backed away, we built to a faux-climax, he approached again, we carried on playing...

Dangerous Situations

Shane Kirk; “We were doing a few gigs as a 'Beatles specialist' band and got booked into a rather rough type pub on an estate somewhere in Essex. After a rather nervous couple of sets and a few complaints about the noise we got re-booked with the proviso that we did an 'unplugged' type set. We weren't confident about the wisdom of this, but were assured that this was exactly what would be a winner with the clientele. Upon our return the landlord had gone on holiday and left his son in charge, who clearly did not quite have the gravitas and, frankly, bull neck to keep his regulars house trained, with the result that a few of them had basically gone feral and taken the place over - hence whatever casual passing trade there was had deserted the place until it was safe to return. It was a long and extremely lonely evening and at some point the toilets got smashed up - possibly after one fellow tried to join in by singing "Yesterday" and insisted rather forcefully that I was "...playing it wrong" for the sole purpose of making him look stupid. We tried to lighten the atmosphere at one point by explaining away the semi-acoustic nature of the gig by saying that the drummer had forgotten to pack his kit. Tumbleweedery ensued.

The postscript to this is that when the real landlord returned from holiday he angrily rang us up, outraged that we'd been so unprofessional as to forget to bring drums, said that we were the worst band he'd ever had to deal with and suggested that we might like to come back and do a free gig in order to make it up to him. 

Best Remembered Gigs

Shane Kirk; “We played at the British Legion Club in Felixstowe. I remember it well because the support band’s guitarist wore a kilt. When we finished playing at the end of the night, the audience called out for the support band to do an encore rather than us. It was a bit deflating.”

"They were still booing them when we came on..."

“Ted Bidits!”

Another year, another Maverick. From the Stygian gloom of the original Barn Stage, where we had to brush the cobwebs from our hair, shake them loose and let them fall before starting our set to the bright new world of queue-less bars and brightly-painted drag acts, what a long strange trip it’s been over the six years of the festival’s existence.

From such humble beginnings I have at least attended, if not played, every year since the festival's inception; nevertheless it was with no little trepidation that I found myself with a clipboard, a wristband and the title of Stage Manager at this year’s event, charged with the holy mission of administering the smooth running of The Barn Stage, the myriad duties of which included ensuring that those with camping chairs stayed exclusively on the left-hand side of the central divide. This, I’ll state for the record now, was the most stressful part of the weekend. I’ve been heckled on stage before, but never during someone else’s set and by someone waving a banjo and gesturing angrily at the space around their travel rug.

In practise my job, as I explained to the talent, was to introduce them at the start of their set, gesture at them to get off at the end, and repeat any requests addressed to me regarding technical matters in a slightly louder voice and at someone who actually knew what they were doing. As long as I held up my end of the bargain, I expected them to fulfil theirs. All of the line up turned out to be fantastically talented, most of them agreeably accepting of our extraordinarily tight ten minute turnarounds between acts, and a few of them so selflessly accommodating that I found myself making a quiet note to send them flowers.

I think we did pretty well – I mean we lost twenty minutes to a lengthy sound check on Saturday evening which we never made back, but taking the compression off the bass, losing the gate on the vocals and poking up the mids at 160hZ is going to take time, there’s no disputing that, and if you want to get it right you want to get it right. A similar principle was behind my checking the name of The Goat Roper Rodeo Band four times to ensure I didn’t get any of it in the wrong order. Obviously ideally I wouldn’t have been introducing them on stage at the time, but we got through it.

It would be unfair to single out anyone’s performance on stage, but off it I certainly developed a soft spot for Eileen Rose (“How do you want me to signal that time’s nearly up for the set?” “A bunch of flowers?”) Trevor Moss (“If we dropped a number from the set that’d give you a chance to make some time up, yeah?”) and Hannah Lou (“It’s from Debenhams”) and the extraordinarily delightful Rainbow Girls, who patiently drew me a stage plan helpfully indicating where the tap board should be miked up, and when asked if they needed anything, asked simply for a higher drum stool and wondered if they might have kittens delivered to the backstage area.

At one point I found myself guiding the perfectly gentlemanly Neil Innes from Artist’s Reception to the backstage area. “What do you call a banjo at the bottom of the ocean?” he asked.

“A start”.

Ain't nobody get the better of you-know-who

Further to my posting of a Picturehouse-based Spotify playlist (it's the blog entry before this one - do have a browse) I realised with horror that I'd inadvertently left out one of my favourite songs - The Tom Robinson Band's 2-4-6-8 Motorway - as well as one by The Jags (you can probably guess which one - we were always pleased when people said afterwards "I love that song, but I haven't heard it for years...") and another couple of things from later on in the set. Obviously I've now redeemed these omissions, but the radio interview with Tom himself which prompted me to update the list reminded me of the greatness of Danny Kustow on guitar and led me to go and check one of the unforseen consequences of this blog. My profile once mentioned that we did 2-4-6-8 Motorway and as a result what (I'm assuming) is a fan page lifted one of the pictures from my page and so there it (still) is. I am the MySpace face of the guitar player from TRB.

https://myspace.com/dannykustow   

No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones...

 
"It's like going to the pub with your mates" - that was our combined USP, mantra and mission statement. When I regularly ventured out with The Picturehouse Big Band (so named to disinguish it from Mr Wendell and Kilbey's acoustic duo, Picturehouse and partially in tribute to Thompy's live outfit around the time of Hand of Kindness) it really was the best play date ever. I got to hang out with some of my best friends, threw a few shapes, hit a few power chords and occasionally mugged shamelessly to a live audience while shaking a tambourine, playing my guitar behind my head or just doing my best impersonation of Toddler, erstwhile frontman of the first band I covered a great many of the songs in our set with. He had the moves like Jagger long before Maroon 5 ever came up with the concept. It certainly beat hanging out at home with a tennis racquet and a mirror and besides, with the headphones on you were always likely to be surprised by someone bringing up a cup of tea.

Everyone got to sing - even Gibbon, who switched between bass and keyboards, occasionally handing over the Precision copy to me when Kilbey wanted to play guitar and I wanted to do that Derek Smalls thing with one hand playing the root notes while the other punched the air (and on one occasion, accidentally, a waitress who'd got too close while I wasn't looking but still managed to impart the information that the buffet was ready).

I was out with Mr Wendell this week in a social capacity and we got to a-jawin' about what songs we could remember and whether, if someone dropped a hat, we could reasonably be expected to perform them. These days I have trouble remembering whether I've left the bath running, let alone how many bars there are in that rundown in Born to Run.

Some of you, very kindly, have bought the book - Do You Do Any Wings? - which I self published regarding these halcyon days but it occurred to me that very many of the folk enjoying ribald tales of Kiss t-shirts and mains power-cancelling noise monitors may not have had the opportunity to experience the PHBB, um, experience first hand. With the advent of Spotify however, we can go some way to bringing you up to speed. Simply scatter a small amount of wood glue on your carpet, let a nice pint of lager warm gently for a few hours before pouring it over your shoes, get a friend or neighbour to blow cigarette smoke in your ear for a while, click on the link, sit back, and enjoy the meat n' potatoes pub rock grandstanding that comprised the set list of the Picturehouse Big Band.

Don't look for us, we're not there any more.        


Do You Do Any Wings?

“Blimey – at Glastonbury we just get an orange and a cup of tea!”

 

Regular correspondents will be well aware of my foray into stage management at last year’s Maverick Festival during which I successfully got a keyboard on and off stage without dropping it, asked if Alejandro Escovedo’s bass player could be turned down a bit, prevented Jason Ringenberg from being crushed by a tree  and introduced Amelia Curran as “…probably the best Canadian singer-songwriter in this room right now!” after I had fallen very slightly for her, a flame I maintain to this day despite the fact that she never writes, she never calls, she never phones.   

Due to my less than exacting schedule, ‘tween stage time wasn’t terribly trying, to be honest. I wandered around the festival site vaguely offering help to anyone who looked particularly stressed, and as a result at one point spent thirty minutes queuing for a latte for That Nice David Booth, who probably knows what a lighting truss is and why you shouldn’t plug the input/output parametric EQ through the reverse foldback loop while the PFL’s being deployed - mine was very much the Sergeant Wilson role in all of this which is why I was in the coffee tent and he was standing next to a man with a black t-shirt and a maglite. Nevertheless I have been invited back, in much the same way as I was invited back for the Orwell High School First XV when I was thirteen and a half, which is to say although not necessarily of any great use aside from making up the numbers, I am willing, available and have my own transport.

 

This year, having not broken anything or been photographed in a compromising position over by the Tipis by the gutter press I have been promoted to The Barn, which to all intents and purposes is the main stage for much of the weekend and from where I shall have dominion over such folk as Hallelulah Trails (I’ve met them, they’re lovely, and they do a great version of ‘Jackson’), Feral Mouth (Norfolk newgrass and not, as one might suspect, Grindcore) and one Leeroy Stagger, who I’m assuming wouldn’t be taking such an ambivalent approach to receiving an introduction along the lines of Amelia’s should I improvise in such fashion again.

Having been on the receiving end of some pretty injurious stage management myself over the years, I’m quietly confident of being able to respond politely but firmly to most of the ad hoc requests that are likely to come my way, all the while employing a Pirsigian approach to The Talent but being aware that however much the band in possession would like to maintain their presence on stage (musicians tend to be one of the few sub-group of employees to regard knocking off early with a disdainful curl of the lip and/or eyebrow) any over-runs necessarily impact on the next domino in the chain, and with eleven turns and ten minute changeovers being the norm then time becomes a valuable commodity, virtually to the point of being currency. I once watched Neil Innes tune up a twelve string guitar for fifteen minutes before going on at a festival (to be fair these were pre-electronic tuner days and Keith Allen was on stage at the time) and to tell you the truth I’m not looking forward to having to pull him off halfway through “I’m The Urban Spaceman”.

 

The Maverick Festival is at Easton Farm Park from the 5^th – 7^th July 2013. http://www.maverickfestival.co.uk/   

       

Kickstarter target achieved, world exhales involuntary sigh of relief.

With no little fanfare (and more than an element of regret regarding the Epiphone Sheraton I threw in at the last minute, just in case) it would appear that we have reached our target and that the Songs from The Blue House live album will be going ahead as planned.

I can’t remember which one, but it was definitely a significant birthday. Our Glorious Leader had organised a party during which he would perform with as many musicians from his recent past as possible, in reverse order, and as such my band gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) were on first. Stepping up to the microphone before our first number I did my pre-intro spiel. “When I invited James to join the group” I began “I remember he said to me ‘gods kitchen? That’s the last band I want to play with!’”

At the time it got a big laugh as JP had effectively (as I once spoonerisedly exclaimed over a Chinese meal and a few Tiger beers) ‘…bit the quizness’, although as it turned out this announcement would prove to be dramatically premature. A short time after his (and singer Helen and bass player Gibbon’s) performance we found ourselves perched on stools in his spare bedroom trying to write something together. The first song completed then, as with the forthcoming live CD, was entitled Bike. I’ve still got a copy of the recorded demo, labelled ‘Our Thing’ in marker pen at the time, and it sounds remarkably similar to the version on what will be our fifth album together, which is either an example of our instinctive feel for the right arrangement straight off the bat or a practical demonstration of a worrying lack of improvement in terms of our musical prowess over the ensuing decade.

In between times we have gathered and dispersed any number of combinations of friends, acquaintances and (on the odd occasion) hired help in order to move enough air to make these noises happen both in recording studios and in front of audiences. Prominent amongst these are the good folk at The High Barn who actually released our third album on their own label, meaning it had a barcode and you could buy it in shops and shit. Frequently we have been in the company of accommodating barmen and women and, more recently, increasingly in the company of our children. To all of those people, I extend my warmest thanks for a decade well-lived - the guy who demanded we perform Needles and Pins at that beer festival that one time notwithstanding.

If you’d asked me in 2003, when we started putting our bits and pieces together to make up songs out of our own heads, where I thought this was going I’d have said “Songs from The Blue House?

That’s the last band I want to play with.”  

"...and all the world is football shaped."

I once made a CD all of my own, you know. It was going to be the last thing that I did in terms of music - after all, they'd pretty much called time in The Last Chance Saloon and so I'd finished my pint, settled up my tab and was just doing my coat up ready to leave. I just had time to get a few friends in to do some singing and playing and as I thought it might be a nice thing to look back on in years to come I went the full nine yards in terms of different-cloured jewel cases, printed CDs, a logo, and a website for the project which my friend Wendell Gee and I planned one night over a few beers with a large sheet of paper, a ruler and a couple of pencils. "Congratulations - you've done about two grand's worth of design work there" he said as I departed at the end of the evening with a list of topics to write copy about.

One of the things I delivered was a Pete Frame-type family tree of the bands I'd played with which he very kindly extricated from the primitive Word-based file I had delivered it in and then dropped among some properly formatted text on the webpage. Here's the section that dealt with a band called As Is who I joined in the Summer of 1989 (and was out of again by the time 1991 had had time to catch its breath).

Despite the brevity of our time together the year and a half that I enjoyed behind the second guitar involved a series of truly pivotal points in my so-called career and, more importantly, my life. After As Is, things were never quite the same again, for any number of reasons that may not necessarily detain us here now. During As Is, on the other hand, I enjoyed life as only a generously-mulletted libertine let loose at the fag end of the eighties should have done. We had baggy white shirts and chorus pedals - what else were we supposed to need? You can find a video of us playing live at Colchester Arts Centre in 1990 here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKRyVRH3BtE&list=UUqxkoPLBKrc-yfxPc4gszEA&index=6

In the clip Drummer Malcolm is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of one of his favourite bands - The Replacements, which is a fresh irony to me given that this was the second wholesale line up change behind singer/ guitarist (and online archivist archivist) James. When we'd recorded Away From You in the studio Malcolm's brother (the artist formerly known as The Stupids' Marty Tuff) had added an outro lead guitar break which upon re-listening sounded oddly familiar... Once we'd worked out what it was we had an acknowledgement etched into the run-out groove of the single, which then resolutely failed to break us big in the indie charts. Bass player Ross once found a box of them, sad, lonely and unsold, in a charity shop in Brighton.   

As a postscript, we got together a couple of years ago to play at Ross's birthday party. Someone remarked that we were "...kind of Franz Ferdinandy" and would probably do quite well if we stuck at it.        

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.