Here be Dragonnes...

“The good news is…” Shev greets us at his front door “…at least there’ll be a bit more room in the car”. The season of promotion for his album Songs from the Last Chance Saloon which began in the bright spring sunshine of the acoustic stage at The International Workers' Day Festival in May, has wend and wound its way through the Felixstowe Carnival Fringe, The Secret Garden Party, the Grandma’s Porch Sessions, the BBC, Ipswich Music Day, FolkEast, not to mention TJS’s impromptu appearance at The Grand Old Opry* during his fortnight sojourn around the open mics and showcase nights of Nashville, and is now gathering its autumn skirts closer and wrapping a cosy muffler around her neck with a concluding performance at Acorn Fayre, a boutique festival in the wild Northampton heartlands. Tiny Diva, our vocal co-pilot, percussionist and latterly stunt bassist has had to call off with an unspecified condition, but one with which we are advised that close proximity within a moving vehicle would be inadvisable. Fortunately, along for the ride on this occasion is album-complementing flautist and singer La Mulley, ready to add a couple of harmonies when required but principally to add her haunting aerophonics as per the CD.   

We are approaching Cambridge Services (when the story of the beat scene of the early twenty first century is written, this will be our mythic Blue Boar) as Shev is telling me how he came to sell one of his albums in Minnesota, of all places. “We’re playlisted on Radio Heartland” he begins. “Some guy is driving down Interstate 94, he’s coming through the Twin Cities, it's night time, he’s got the radio on and he hears Nobody. ‘I like that’ he thinks to himself, and so he gets home – he’s not from St. Paul, he’s just passing through – and he gets on the internet, he looks me up, he finds out where the label is and he mails us, wants a CD. By the time we’ve put on the postage and the customs stuff it’s pretty expensive, but he wants the thing, the physical object. We asked him where he heard the album and that’s what he told us”. We are both impressed by the tenacity of the man who heard something on the radio and was so very determined to track it down. We pull into the services. I fill up with diesel. “I’ll get this” he says.

As we travel further on up the road we have a quick recap of the situation. Helen was due to pick a third harmony to complement Jules’s vocal but since we are currently deprived of her talents generally and Clare Torry-esque signature feature in Faith in Myself specifically, Shev suggests that this might create the opportunity for a flute solo instead. “Oh, and since she isn’t going to be taking the main harmonies you might as well do those as well. Think of it as having been down in the programme to play spear carrier and turning up to the theatre to find that you’re now principal boy". There is the slightest of pauses from the back seat. “Do you think we could listen to the album through one more time?” Helen says. 

Upon arrival Tony is quickly appraised of what I meant by ‘a boutique festival’. I had sold it to him on the premise that although a bijou affair, the audience would be principally comprise bloggers and forumistas, and so what they lacked in numbers they would more than be making up for in terms of vociferousness. Maybe using the word ‘festival’ had been mildly misleading. Perhaps ‘showcase’ might have been a better word. “I’m beginning to think I may have oversold this to you” I confess. “Ya think?” he replies, Gobi-dry. “Did you keep the receipt for the diesel?” I ask. There is the subtlest gesture of assent, his visage a picture worth a good half dozen choice words. “It’s not a big college town” I reassure him. Come show time however, buoyed by the free bar, the company and the prospect of a complimentary barbecue to follow, game faces are on. Badinage is batted forth, the obligatory promotional plugs are delivered and (I shouldn’t be surprised) La Mulley plays a blinder – emoting and purring her way through the set like she’d been singing these songs her whole summer. “It’s amazing how you all fit together” remarks a post-gig admirer. “It is. It really is” I agree.

Heading south again after supper we review the day’s doings. “I’d estimate that one in ten of those people there today bought a CD” Tony says to me. “Extrapolating from those numbers, imagine if we’d played Glastonbury!” 

                    

*To be fair, he was on a tourist tour, but he did get to play Your Cheatin’ Heart onstage during a photo opportunity.  

Ten Albums by White, Male, Singer-Songwriters.

I was included in one of those Name Your Top Albums things on social media this week and, being not only a bloke, but a huge record spod to boot, I was unable to resist the siren call of compiling a list. Similarly, as a victim of terminal verbosity, I was unable to keep my comments down to what I’d consider to be reasonable limits in terms of expecting folk to skip across pictures of anthropomorphic dogs and amusing pub signs on their Facebook feeds and dig into the equivalent of one of those buyer’s guides you get at the back of Uncut magazine, so I’ve put it here. All of these records have moved me (frequently to tears) have expressed emotions I couldn’t otherwise articulate and have inspired me to aspire to their lofty heights of artistic achievement – principally, I have to admit, by playing bad versions of their songs in pubs with my eyes closed. That’s a given. The individual addenda are merely mansplaining on my part. There are not a great number of what you’d call recent albums on the list – I mean, I work with people who are younger than most of these records - but to me it calls to mind the possibly apocryphal story of when Joseph Heller was buttonholed at a party by someone who pointed out that he hadn’t written anything comparable since the publication of Catch-22 many years earlier. “Neither” replied Heller drily “Has anyone else”. 

1; Richard Thompson – Mock Tudor.

Picking only one album by Thompy was the biggest challenge for me. Henry The Human Fly is inspiring in terms of a man (barely in his early twenties) finding his post-Fairport feet and melding trad folk and raga rock, Hokey Pokey has some of the most joyful music of his career (as well as the most doleful), Hand of Kindness is the break up album’s break up album but, significantly, when he (or at least Capitol Records) brought in a couple of left-field outside producers in the shape of Tom Rothrock (Foo Fighters, Beck, Moby, Motorhead) and Rob Schnapf he was able to really buff the formula until it gleamed. The notes on Dave Mattacks’ website regarding recording the drums are so boggling in their attention to detail that you wonder how they ever dragged him away from the recording booth in the first place. Key Track: Hard on Me.  

2; Neil Young – Time Fades Away.  

Part of the celebrated so-called Ditch Trilogy, this is the album so ragged, on the edge and painful to listen to that Young has never been able to satisfactorily revisit the original tapes in order to get it out on CD - and he remastered Everybody’s Rockin’ . It is the soundtrack to a man falling apart on stage, aided and abetted by Crosby, Nash, a shitload of tequila and bizarrely, a Gibson Flying V. That it was recorded principally on the tour scheduled to support the release of Harvest only adds to its wayward charm in that the befuddled audiences on these dates must have wondered if they'd come on the wrong night. I would also hazard a guess that the yawling Yonder Stands the Sinner is never going to turn up on a Seventies Gold station on heavy rotation. This is careering, in the same way that my snowboarding would probably be. Key Track: Love in Mind.   

3; Clive Gregson – Strange Persuasions.

So clean, so compressed, so beautifully studio-bound (aside from the piano, which sounds like it was recorded in the pub next door after closing time), these are the songs that Gregson still had in his locker after the demise of the sadly underrated Any Trouble. Decamping to a demo studio in Oldham, he enlisted his old rhythm section (sparingly) and a young folk singer he’d come across by the name of Christine Collister to record what looked like it might be his farewell note to the business of show. Following the mantra of dour lyric/happy tune, I Still See Her Face is as jaunty a breakup song as you could hope to hear – the overdubbed guitar interplay presaging that which he’d enjoy with Richard Thompson on a couple of live promotional OGWT performances preserved in the digital aspic of YouTube. Thankfully the Gregson/Collister partnership blossomed and although their subsequent live shows didn’t feature the haunting French horn included in this version of signature song Home is Where the Heart Is they didn’t run to the Springsteen tribute bombast of American Car either.  Key Track: I Fall Apart.   

4; Jackson Browne – Running on Empty

“Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels” the album begins, “Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields”. This is a record about yearning, the songs linked by the unlikely bedfellows of hope and ennui – almost a suite. Largely co-written, and recorded live this is (literally) the sound of backstage, the bus and the hotel room writ large. Overwhelmingly, everyone sounds tired. Danny Kortchmar’s Shaky Town is a postcard from somewhere in the mid-west, Lowell George and Valerie Carter’s Love Needs a Heart could have been written in the condensation on the inside of the tour bus window, in Rosie the guy on the sound desk comforts himself with, well let’s not dwell on that. Only in the joyous closing cover Stay do the band celebrate their incarceration together and even then there’s the sense that these moments, too, will be lost in time. Key Track: The Load Out.

5; Bruce Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I know – I couldn’t believe it either. I first encountered Springsteen in his Eighties, bulked-up, MTV, Arthur Baker Remix-fuelled pomp, and so it was understandable that I didn’t really take to him at the time. We all know what gated reverb did to a generation of drummers, some of whom are still not entirely over it to this day.  It wasn’t until he’d got all that (and Outlaw Pete) out of his system that I found myself in Hyde Park watching the tangled Terence Malick narrative of Racing in the Street play out in front of me as the sun set over Hyde Park. All that stuff that The Boss bores tell you about the live experience? It’s all true. Better still is having the entire back catalogue waiting and ready for you to work through at your leisure. I was tempted to stop at Darkness, where the carefree street jokers of Asbury Park have aged and withered to become the enervated protagonists of songs like Factory and Prove It All Night. Even more astonishing, as revealed by the release of outtakes compilation The Promise, is what he left off it. Key Track: The Promised Land

6; del Amitri – Waking Hours,

I listened to this album every single day on my way to work for three months solid. Anyone who is familiar with the lyrical content of the ten songs contained within will be aware that this is not necessarily a healthy state of mind to find yourself in. “I’m watching the fumes foul up the sunrise / I’m watching the light fade away” is never going to be a couplet likely to get your endorphins racing in the morning, and so it turned out. Eventually I moved away, before my small, small town turned around and swallowed me. I’d been entranced from the moment I first heard the opening track – I’d argue that it starts with one of the all-time great “Ah-one, two, three, four…” count ins - and from the off it was pretty clear that this wasn’t going to be a re-tread of their prior jangly buckskin fringed Sticks and Stones Girl period. I bought all the singles too – “Don’t I look Like the Kind of Guy You Used to Hate?” sounds as lemon-juice-on-a-paper cut as it reads on the page. Key Track: Empty

7: The Waterboys – A Pagan Place

Another Damacsene conversion for me was when Mike Scott turned the UEA into a swirling pit of heart, soul, twelve string guitars and tasselled scarves while I watched on unbelieving, the music like a massive wave simultaneously sucking the shingle from under my feet and pummelling me in the chest as it swept over and around and through me. This is the album where The Waterboys – then at least nominally a band – first successfully combined Van Morrison’s Woodstock Celt vibrations with the Chelsea Hotel attitude of New York’s CBGBs scene and produced the first great Big Music. Two albums later, they’d moved on - which is where we first met. Scott’s modus operandi is principally to set up a revolving door of four or five chords and then declaim across them, and that technique serves him beautifully here, notably on the epic Kazakh-referencing Red Army Blues. Don’t get the remastered re-issue, by the way. This album doesn’t need an extra verse, an extended outro or a bunch of extra tracks added on the end, no matter what the limitations of vinyl album running length might have you believe. Fun fact – the “What have I got to lose, somebody might wave back?” hook in track five is lifted directly from a line of dialogue in the Elvis movie G.I. Blues. Key Track: Rags        

8; Warren Zevon – Transverse City

Ah Warren – none more West Coast; you with your floppy-haired, plaid-shirted, harmony-contributing Californian pals and your breezy songs about werewolves and Chines menus and headless Thompson gunners. Who better to produce a late-career claustrophobic concept album about paranoia, alienation and chemophobia with added Dave Gilmour? Acoustic-led Neil Young-athon Splendid Isolation and familiarly-styled ballad Nobody’s In Love This Year aside, the rest of the record is synth-driven and intense – there aren’t any jokes on this one. Key Track: Run Straight Down

9; Spirit of the West – Go Figure

Another genre-hopping release was the 1991 effort by former trad-punksters Spirit of the West, who I’d been in the same room as in what must have been around 1987 and who I hadn’t heard a lot of since, independent releases by Canadian folk bands not being as easy to casually acquire in the latter part of the twentieth century as they were to become in the post-Amazon world. I seriously thought I’d put on the wrong CD in the shop, as what started the first track contained not the cheeky prod in the ribs of the bodhran I’d been expecting, but some sort of Pink Floyd power chordage underpinning the sound of a heavily amplified slide mandolin (and who came up with that idea!?) combined in turn with the tom-tom heavy percussive assault of somebody building a particularly impressive shed in the background. I fell instantly for it, a bit like the way in which Danny does for Sandy at the end of Grease. I’m generally a lyrics man, and so when further investigation reaped a limpid pool of intricate construction and shaded detail I fell in love with it all over again. Once you knew that they are about a children’s hospital, listening carefully to the words of Goodbye Grace had the tendency to prompt a whole new wave of Kleenex-heavy blubbery. And that was before I had any of my own. Key Track: D for Democracy (Scour the House).

10; Loudon Wainwright – History

Bleak, introspective, heavy on the sarcasm, generous helpings of self-loathing and brutal as a kids’ party at Katie Hopkins’ house. Also does tit jokes. Either you buy into Loud’s schtick or you don’t, and I do. He edges past Randy Newman in the irony stakes while puncturing his own ego and that of every family member he can line up a bead on. Talk about solipsistic. Also, as I say, does tit jokes. The one-note riff which is the talking blues of Talking New Bob Dylan aside, the songs on this album are breath taking – usually a quick intake of breath followed by a long, reflective exhalation as you inwardly digest what someone who isn’t even a close friend of yours has just told you about their behaviour – see When I’m At Your House for example, or Hitting You. That this album edged out close contenders More Love Songs and Here Come the Choppers is probably down to his heart breaking performance on the Key Track:  Sometimes I Forget.

The Show-Off Must Go On.

I’ve been doing a bit of stage managing and MCing recently – it helps keep the old chops in order when there are gaps between gigs - and an interesting discussion came up the other night during the post-performance cable winding when one of the crew remarked that he had enjoyed one of that evening’s performers a great deal, but was concerned that there was a point where their ‘tween song banter had threatened to be more entertaining than the songs. Having introduced said turn with a rather splendid quip I’d harvested* from Twitter, which sailed blissfully over the heads of many of the assembled, I'd been happy to hear someone engaging with the audience to such a degree that this might be an issue in the first place.

Meanwhile, a knowing sigh issued from The Soundman Formerly Known as Our Glorious Leader (TSFKaOGL), who has endured many introductions on my part which have been in danger of lasting slightly longer than the songs they presage. Upon our return from a short tour of Denmark with Heavy Big Pop funsters As Is** some years ago we were in possession of two souvenirs, one being a live recording of a performance which had been recorded from a very expensive looking and immaculately maintained sound desk directly to stereo, and the other an only very slightly shorter cassette of all the on stage chat we’d edited out from between numbers in order to fit the gig on to a single C-90 in the first place. Many’s the time Songs from the Blue House emerged refreshed from a beer festival set to be enthused at by a passing tegestologist with a hearty – “You were great!” [beat] “Really funny!” “Not heartfelt, or moving..?” sighed TSFKaOGL ruminantly, back here in the present. A sympathetic assent came from latter day drummer TNDB, busy unravelling a monitor lead over by the power amps. "That guitarist..."  

The thing is, we didn’t really do any outright comedy songs – certainly a couple of wry observations on the human condition, and one light-hearted skiffle through my romantic past, and yeah, maybe the hick yokel faux-country rendition of Fat Bottomed Girls was played for laughs, but most of our set was definitively bedsit confessional Americana. Certainly the one about killing burglars had a neat pay-off and couldn’t really be described as a romp (it was also the one which usually got the biggest cheer with theatre audiences in the Essex/Suffolk borders region). I just couldn’t help chatting away between numbers, especially if someone was busy tuning, retuning, changing instruments or trying to decipher the set list – all of which can conspire to create an uncomfortable silence, especially if you’re in that first date frame of mind which so many performers and audiences find themselves in during their inceptive experience of each other. This is how Peter Gabriel got started, you know. One minute you're explaining who came up with the chorus that time in the dressing room in Sudbury, the next thing you know you're dressing in an evening gown, wearing a fox head and hanging your balls round your neck in a burlap bag*** for effect. However, just as nature abhors a vacuum, I can’t stand a stage full of people busily going about their business whilst fortifying the fourth wall and so I feel compelled to fill the gap with chunter. I know. It’s a knack.

Since my role with my current employer is to mainly stand at the side, play the twiddly bits from the album and occasionally do some Pat Donaldson-esque harmonies I’m not called upon to speak. Regular accomplices may be astonished to learn that I am blissfully happy with this arrangement. It’s not my circus, after all. Besides, I don’t want him to ask me pointedly to work up a version of  Talk Too Much…  


*Or 'stolen', if you will. Thanks and kudos to whoever came up with that 'Miss Marple' gag. It may have misfired slightly with the audience but two of the band who had yet to make an entrance remarked that "...that was hilarious!"

**I found a copy of our twelve inch single in a second hand record shop last weekend. Ooh it took me right back, it did.

***We never quite went that far.

Repeat Offender.

I am pleased to be able to report that the second volume of Philip Bryer's contributions to the notorious Sony Award-dodging late night hit ICRFM radio show Why The Long Face? is now available at a reputable online bookshop near you. For almost all of our five year run on air Phil's lugubrious monologue, presaged by an announcement that we were handing over live to the studios of Radio Somerset and heralded by the curtailed intro to Rickie Lee Jones' Chuck E's in Love*,  marked the mid-point of the show, giving us a chance to reflect, regroup and, if nothing else, put the kettle on and relax, say as a couple of PG Tips chimps given the keys to a broadcast suite might do. Bryer's slot soundtracked the consumption of innumerable cakes, a plethora of sweets and many, many cigarettes - these were the days when you could still smoke without fear of one of your lungs exploding, although an early episode cured us of that particular misconception. In written form it presents itself as a series of vignettes, snapshots, selfies even. From Led Zeppelin to Laurel and Hardy, he walks a pith-strewn path in his William Connor gumboots and Keith Waterhouse mackintosh. Why not join him for a stroll?  


http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-bryer/repeat-offender/paperback/product-21773138.html


*Just as you're expecting her to start singing co-curator Neale burst in with a barely-compressed "...Bryyeerrrr!". I heard the intro on the radio the other day and was almost surprised to find that there was still a song following on behind it.         

Part Brent, part Martin.

Some time ago, we recorded some tunes and put them on CDs (remember them?). As I recall, it was frosty and cold outside, I had an hour's drive to and forth the studio and at times we had what we in the post-HR world call 'opportunities' with the session staff. Luckily, Our Glorious Leader was on hand with a recording device in order that future generations should be able to recall what life in a typical noughties recording environment was like. Watch and learn, kids, one day you might have to coax a septugenarean into playing on a track he's only just heard that day...

httpsi://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=D7PE7197t70

In praise of...Simon Nicol.

I have had a piece included in the Fairport's Cropredy Convention programme. They get about twenty thousand folk in on a good year and the 2014 festival was a sell out, so at a conservative estimate I'd say that was the most readers I've ever had in one hit. In case you couldn't make it, or you didn't buy a copy, I've included the full text below. And if you did so, yes, I am 'SK from Ipswich'.

"Simon Nicol is round the back of the bus, parking the Tiger". That was the first time I saw reference to Fairport Convention founder member, singer, guitarist and de facto office administrator, in print. Q magazine, it was. Some time later I was at the bar at the Cropredy Festival (and let's face it, who hasn't?), anxiously awaiting the arrival of the winner of the Talkawhile forum's All Round Good Egg Folkie award, me having been nominated by a quick show of hands of those present to hand the self-style 'Norm' the glittering stained glass plinthette, and say a few words. He ambled up, all bonhomie and beard, and waited patiently as I relayed a story I'd heard from my friend Paul, who had written to Fairport towers expressing his appreciation regarding how the music of a group of chums from Muswell Hill had helped him through a difficult time in his life - a bereavement, as it happened. Simon had written back enclosing a unique mash-up mix of two versions of an old song, mixed on his own time, with a kindly but firm entreaty that this not be shared. As I said in my address, that's the sort of thing that you don't have to do. Simon was generous with his time, gracious, and very kind to a toungestruck fanboy like me. In between times I'd enjoyed his contributions a number of my favourite records, not least those of his friend Richard Thompson. That anecdote about having too loud a guitar strap for Art Garfunkel's sensitive ears tickled me, and his rendition of Rosemary's Sister reduces me to tears to this day. My first Glastonbury was defined by hearing that rock steady rhythm guitar holding down Sloth. When I watched a BBC documentary wherein a pink-faced post-Cropredy Simon confessed that he'd quit Fairport (for the first time) at the age of twenty one I was astonished that he'd packed so much in to that short a life. At twenty one, I was working in a record shop and trying to sell people Expletive Delighted (and explain why there was no lyric sheet...). There is an old saw that you should never meet your heroes. You should. Especially if they are Simon Nicol.

 

 

"Who brings dental floss to a festival!? Um...can I have some..?"

I am, for my sins, a member of the PRS. They’re those annoying people who put stickers on the door of your hairdresser’s or your local artisan-curated coffee shop stating that the music played within will be properly attributed toward the account of whoever you’re listening to while you have your roots retuned, or your decaf skinny mocha frothed and served in a cup with your name on. That’s them. Last year they deposited £3.64 in my account with regard to my work on various works of interest, which at least paid for a latte. In truth, Paul McCartney gets most of it. That’s what writing ‘Yesterday’ gets you.

This weekend I played two engagements with my friend Tony James Shevlin - one at the Felixstowe Carnival and another at The Secret Garden Party. At the first we set up early and, in the way that gig-scarred veterans are prone to then retired to the pub to discuss old war stories. Gibbon related the first gig that he ever did, which climaxed with the guy from upstairs taking exception to the performance going on below and attempting to come to some sort of agreement regarding how it should proceed by laying about all and sundry with a baseball bat. Shev looked around the bar we were in and recalled dark evenings of watching folk getting slowly sozzled. One more chorus of ‘American Pie’. Gib reflected on the parade which passed our temporary home. “The brass band” he recalled fondly – “A bunch of bikers threw fifty pence pieces at us”.

Dirk the Drummer told a story about a student of percussion of his who had claimed that he wouldn’t need to know how to set up a set of drums. “I’ll just use the house kit” he said. We looked around us. If there’s a pub out there who actually has a house kit, we’d love to hear from you.

Today I played at The Secret Garden Party, which as far as I can ascertain seems to be a weekend-long excuse to get as fucked up as possible and dance all night, so the opening slot in The Living Room (anomalous sample menu, pot of tea and two crumpets - £4.50) on a Sunday afternoon would suggest that we were not about to experience any combination of the above approaches. As it happened, we had a lovely time – having had to validate your invitation online, check in with a PIN and provide license-quality ID notwithstanding. We nearly lost Jules at that point.

Once entrenched, the splendidly be-bearded stage manager loomed toward me asking about my monitoring requirements, and then provided them with a stroke of his iPad – no “One two…one two….bit more acoustic in the wedges” for him. We played what could reasonably be described as ‘the hangover slot’. Behind the stage walls, years of signatures paid tribute to the countless bands that had gone before us. A grateful Ed Sheeran had scribed in sharpie. “He was great, Little Ed” said the stage manager. “Came back and did a secret gig for us when he was big”.

We got the “Five minutes” warning through the monitors. Three minutes later, through the power of mime, Shev asked if we could do one more. “Short?” came back the universal sign language of the crew who have a long day ahead of them and don’t want to start their working day running over time after the first turn. We cut it short. We ensured we thanked the crew, we were grateful for our pot of full English tea, scones, cream and jam afterwards. Jules may even have sprayed the portaloo with Tramp. Or whatever it is she wears. A girl approaches us with a clipboard. “I need to know what songs you played” she says. “I’m from the PRS”.          

Karaofolkie.

To Coggeshall, where the annual cricket and beer festival demands to be entertained on its traditional Thursday droop as the good folk of Essex recover from the Wednesday quiz and look forward to the Friday night live band. La Mulley has assembled a crack squad of top-flight session musicians (or Myself, Mr Wendell and Ant Ragged) by the simple expedient of opening up her address book and texting the first three random names her dialling finger falls upon, and after some earnest discussion and cross-functional market analysis we have assembled a lovingly curated set of numbers based on our shared musical chronology and (crucially) things with not so many chords to remember.

Rehearsals have been entertained – at one, held in The Snug at The Blue House, The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Our-Glorious-Leader (having been ejected from his office for the evening) thoughtfully sends a capitalised document of encouragement to the printer – and we are reasonably sure that our mix of jaunty self-penned fauxgrass and re-imagined pop hits will, if not cement, then certainly temporarily gaffa tape our position in the acoustic pop pantheon.

No little proportion of our practise time has been given over to set pacing, vocal arrangements, capo placing and relative dimensions in time and keys however much of it, admittedly, devoted to discussing the post-fame rehabilitation of the PG Tips chimps (upon hearing that one of the leads is now forty two Ant enquires solicitously if she is “…still hot” and “…has had any work done?”), upon which fonts are acceptable in a post-glyph desktop design landscape, and whether it is ever appropriate for a gentleman to sport Speedos in a family leisure pool. My inherent uncertainty regarding the difference between a font and a typeface remains unexpressed in such blistering company, however I'm pretty certain on my position regarding budgie smugglers. At one point this is our considered nom-de-musé, however upon hearing the howling response to Mr Wendell’s haunting melodica playing we are inspired to settle upon an alternate moniker for the collective. We are The Neighbourhood Dogs.

Taking the stage at nigh-on ten o’clock after a day’s cricket and its attendant refreshment possibilities may be seen as a challenge to some, especially having to follow a rousing marquee-wide singalong of The House of The Rising Sun from the prior turn but the team rise admirably to the challenge with only passing reference to various bits of paper scattered at our feet – Mr Wendell wisely sits for most of the set to make it less obvious that he is squinting at chord sequences, ascending majestically to his feet in time for his flawless rive gauche melodica recital. La Mulley emotes in her signature style (and wedges), Ant slips between double bass, vocal harmonies and heroic levels of Yakima Gold consumption and even former SftBH banjo-slinger Turny Winn chips in with a couple of prime examples of our banjo-as-fried-egg analogy (in that if you pop one sunny side up on top of almost any foodstuff it almost always improves the dish - thus it is invariably so with the banjo in popular song).

We encore with an unscheduled three chord thrash through North of Nowhere, which leads to an impromptu Breaux & Wood-esque routine being performed before us to the delight of the assembled Sunnydonians. “Thanks to the umbrella lady!” cries Mr Wendell at the conclusion of the set. A voice from the audience responds witheringly “It’s a parasol. You dick”.    

       

“Not my circus, not my monkeys…”

You can see how it happens. You’re cooped up in a van or a car or - if you’re really lucky - a bus for hours at a time, and when you finally emerge blinking and yawning at your destination there’s some guy with a clipboard who wants to know if you can drop ten minutes off your set since they’re running “…a bit over”. That’s not your fault – you showed up early, you’ve got your own DI box all ready and you’ve even remembered to put on a clean shirt. What’s this guy’s problem? That’s the third time in a week… It’s no surprise that by the end of (say) three weeks on tour, the barricades are manned, the drawbridge is up and the metaphors are flying thick and fast.
 
For those of us who have taken a glimpse beneath the gilded cage’s security blanket it is obvious that the vicissitudes of a life on the open* road might well drive anybody to distraction - not every singer would respond to the news that no-one in the immediate vicinity has any idea how the (tech spec-promised) guitar amplifier operates with the grace under pressure demonstrated by Marty O’Reilly in The Barn at Maverick this year, who simply hoofed it back to the car park and borrowed one off The Rainbow Girls (they were a hoot and a delight last year, by the way). If you ask a random sample of stage managers what their favourite thing about the band they’ve just had on at their festival was - the music or the lyrics - they are more than likely to answer “their punctuality”. No wonder people employ tour managers. That way you can have someone else remark upon the poor quality of the piano you’ve been given without you having to get involved yourself.** Essentially, the stage manager/artist/tour manager interface runs very much along the lines of that of the late Johns Peel and Walters, whose relationship the lugubrious DJ and National Treasure once described as being “…like a man and his dog, each imagining the other to be the dog.”

So, in between assembling a forty-six piece gazebo from scratch with no instructions (then screwing it to the wall so it didn’t blow away), vacuuming the stage, disposing of untold bottles of half-drunk complimentary water, finding Mick the Electrician to install a lamp backstage (“I’ll be there before it gets dark…”), continually asking people to kindly move their camping chairs out of the way of the main thoroughfare and making subtle winding up gestures to folk who were far more entitled to be on the stage than I was - let’s face it, no-one’s ever spent fifty quid to watch a guy in board shorts make an announcement about the dog in the car park - I was lucky enough to spend time with some very good company, all of whose music I greatly enjoyed, many of whom I announced in terms which clearly left them wondering whether there was someone else due on stage rather than them, and some of whom I salute here;

Sam Lewis was charm personified and greeted my standard artiste enquiry (“Would you like an introduction and how’s your time keeping?”) with an expression of glee that I hardly think it warranted, even at that early stage in proceedings. “Hell yeah” he enthused. “Make sump’n up - tell ‘em I’m the world’s tallest man!” He apologised for having to rush off to do a session for the BBC straight after the show and entrusted his complimentary meal voucher to me to pass on to some worthy or needy soul, which was lucky, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to get mine at this point. So, thanks for the ham and chutney bap, Sam.

Hannah Aldridge was very tall (we underestimated the mic stand extension both times she appeared for us) and so impossibly glamorous that we offered to line check her guitar for her so that she could make a big entrance on the first night. She played again on the Saturday and very politely asked if I would “…do that thing again?” Never one to turn down an opportunity to show off, I played the intro to The Who’s Substitute. “I know her Daddy” said Mary Gauthier later “fine songwriter”. It clearly runs in the family.

“You’re going to have to hurry us up” said Tim-out-of-Police Dog Hogan when we were getting close to kick off. “He’ll go on forever if you let him” he added, nodding over at the other Tim on the far side of the stage. For a seven (or was it eight?) piece band they set up darned quickly, with a minimum of fuss about who can hear what in the monitors (but then Rob on FOH did a sterling job all weekend getting mixes together quickly) and were one of the bands who occupied themselves by simply running through a few songs in the paddock backstage prior to their stage time. I didn’t get the chance to ask Other Tim whether people acted more outlandishly around him so that he would write about them in The Guardian. I shall be checking to see if my super hero-referencing introduction makes the cut anyway, even if I didn’t do it with that in mind. We all have our different approaches – for example Giff on the main stage was very much a Bob Harris-band whisperer (he took over on Sunday, much to the relief of anyone who’d already been on over the previous couple of days, I imagine).  

Another chatty and endearing turn was Thom Chacon, who was happy to hang out backstage and made a point of checking out other singers, complimenting them, finding out where they were from and eventually asking if he could watch Mary Gauthier from our snug hidey hole at the side of the stage. “She’s been such an inspiration”. I didn’t buy much over the weekend but I made a point of digging out his (“all analogue”) vinyl album from the company store before I left.    

Sadie Jemmett’s set got switched from The Peacock Café, which I was more than happy about because it meant I got to listen to her beautiful songs. Even though her scheduled appearance had now been swapped, meaning that some people who’d planned on seeing her in the evening and would now find that she’d already performed she remained calm, grounded, and was by quite a long way my biggest crush of the weekend.

Having helped out Hannah Aldridge with a spare guitar after she’d broken a string on hers, The Goat Roper Rodeo Band then went through three of their own themselves. They appeared last year and I was more than pleased to have them back with their close harmonies, big thumpy rhythms and feelgood stage performances. About twenty minutes in I noticed that one of their guitars was lying on the stage with a string hanging off it. Then I noticed one of the guitarists gesturing frantically to the (replacement) guitar he’d also broken one on. By the time we’d raced each other to restring our respective instruments (he was first – I think the combination of adrenalin and terror helped him through) he had just enough time to snap one more during the next song before I handed him back the one I’d now managed to tune. I last spotted them under a tree in the rain, at two in the morning, still singing gloriously together.   

The GRRB been hanging out earlier with The Mae Trio, who appeared a tad bewildered at what an Australian folk band were doing at an Americana festival at what was clearly a petting zoo, in England. Well, when you put it like that, I suppose, yes... They closed with an amazing acapella version of a Kate Rusby song which had me going round for the rest of the day collaring people who’d missed it and making them promise me they’d see them in The Peacock Café on Sunday.

Dan Beaulaurier and The Hallelujah Trails was my band of the festival – all great tunes, Tele lead breaks and backing harmonies over solid grooves. Having warned their extraordinarily affable drummer that Police Dogs Hogan’s guy had fallen off the drum riser the previous night because we’d set the kit up too far toward the rear of the stage he assured us that he would take extra care not endure the same fate. I had made a point of checking the pronunciation of everyone whose name looked like it had potential to trip me up, and so it was mortifying to announce The Hallelujah Trails being fronted by…um…ah... Beautifully, guitarist Jeremy stepped in before I had to suffer the indignity of referring to my programme, squinting like someone who had decided not to bring his reading glasses (I hadn’t) and subtly muttered “Dan Bo-lare-ee-ay” out of the side of his mouth. I trust the audience appreciated the dramatic pause. Good job too, otherwise I may have had to resort to Joey Tribbiani’s notorious smelling farts technique, and nobody wants that.

Finally, a word for the magnificent Mary Gauthier (‘Go-Shay’) who demonstrated unimpeachable decency, dignity, openness, warmth, and not only charmed the crowd (and crew) throughout her time with us but delivered some songs of rare quality with a great performance to boot. Every one of the other artists who made a point of checking out the show clearly adored her, both professionally and personally, and I can thoroughly understand why.

And, for the record, she was very punctual.

 

 

Thanks to Des at www.nearthecoast.com (with whom the copyright remains) for the photo of me at the top. That's how I roll.

*Or, with five minutes to go before a sound check that the sat nav is telling you is in a field about twenty minutes from where you are currently blocked, diverted, rerouted or stuck behind a slow-moving tractor.

**For a tour manager’s point of view, please see http://www.ontourlogistics.com/wp-content/uploads/Maverick-Rebecca-Kemp-Interview.pdf

 

The Boy in the Bubble

It’s called Under The Dome, I believe. The story is that a small town has been cut off from the outside world and in turning in on itself discovers the best and worst, the resourceful and the hurtful within its community. The Simpsons Movie is based on a very similar concept. Maverick is the myth made flesh, especially with the level of phone signal we enjoyed at Easton Farm Park, where the annual festival of Americana - now in its seventh year - played out all the drama and suspense of a disparate group of individuals thrown together and forced to use their basic knowledge, low cunning and improvisational skills to survive together. Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the stage crew.

As Stage Manager for The Barn, my job was to make sure The Talent were on site, on time and to not get in the way of the guys from the PA company, who were doing the actual plugging in and switching on, and who conducted mysterious conversations over their walkie-talkies involving things called XLRs, DIs and SKGs. Across the festival similar ragged bands of folk were engaged in the same rituals – announcing the next turn, hoping we’d got the pronunciation of their name right and then, counterintuitively, given the astonishing level of talent that passed through our cobwebby portals, hoping they didn’t run over and were off in time for us to repeat the whole process again for the next act.

The crackle of the radio brought forth a fresh challenge with each new transmission and assistant stage managers were dispatched across site to beg, borrow, steal or otherwise rustle up amplifiers, drum kits, mic stands, drum keys, gaffa tape… Conversations between us took on a Masonic tone as we compared stories from the front line in hastily-taken breaks for coffee and food from whichever vendor had the shortest queue*.

“Seven minutes over earlier, but we pulled it back after Hannah finished early”.

“Do you have an SM-58? Not on the entire site? No - not the beta!”

 “We need a spile at the Moonshine Bar. And bring a mallet”

“There’s a pig loose in the artists’ hospitality area”

I don’t know what it is with me, tour managers and pianos, but I had another chance to shine this year. I mean, I don’t mind taking down an entire drum kit and replacing it on the riser with a piano whilst also clearing away the previous band’s equipment and all in a ten minute window of opportunity before your scheduled start time, but you could at least then get your employer to play it. Still, we should be grateful she didn’t set fire to it, as one washboard player did at the climax of their set, brandishing it above her head** in a Hendrix-esque fashion to the delight of the crowd. If only it had been a banjo.***

There were so many fine and talented people performing over the weekend that I couldn’t hope to do them all justice by summarising their skills in so small a space, but Mary Gauthier notably drew several of the day’s prior attractions back to the stage on Saturday night – part mother hen, part eccentric aunt, full-time inspiration, she was so down home and folksy I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tapped out a corn cob pipe before taking to the stage. I asked her if I could line check her guitar for her. “Oh, don’t worry about that honey, I’ll just get on up there and get started”. I pointed out lights and monitor tech Max and she made a point of checking who the guy on the front of house desk was. Sometime into the set she tuned her guitar down to a low, ominous D which rattled the fillings. “Push it hard, Young Rob, make ‘em rumble” she chuckled over the PA. I swear she winked at him. In the wings next to me Thom Chacon whooped with delight.        

I had to leave early on the Sunday of the festival in order to be available to perform on The Grapevine Stage at Ipswich Music Day as part of Tony James Shevlin’s backing band The Chancers. Here, the roper boot was comfortably on the other foot, so I made sure that I got my gear on stage as quickly as I could, turned the volume down on my guitar so as not to interfere with the acoustic guitar tweaking while I tuned up, and waited patiently as the sound engineer asked us to give him a line check on each of our instruments and on our vocal mics in turn. I also remembered to thank the stage manager for his attention after the show, said that I really appreciated the onstage monitor mix and hoped that we’d given a good account of ourselves. The MC gestured, palms down, to the audience who were generously showing their appreciation in a spirited way. Then came the line I’d been missing all weekend. “There’ll be more” he assured the crowd. “…just not from them”.     

 

*When refuelling, time is of the essence. At one point I saw the production manager eating a full English breakfast off a paper plate without breaking stride as he stomped purposefully over to sort some issue with the bar.  

**The washboard, not the piano.

***I know. Open goal, I couldn’t resist.

"...and Lady Mondegreen"

For many, many years folk have disagreed with each other about when music finally went wrong. When skiffle first came out of the coffee bars, electrified itself and started hanging out in smoky clubs and beat-group cellars there were furious letters to The Jazz, Ragtime and Blue Note Gazette fulminating against the beatniks’ employment of massive fifteen watt electric amplifiers and wanton use of the spurious bongo*. Some say (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) that coming in out of the fields was a bad idea in the first place - indeed Samuel Pepys makes reference in his diary for September the 2^nd 1666 to ‘…an unholy rackette caused bye the minstrelry of severalle unkempt youths who did so sully the middle eight of ‘Merry Down, Dilly Down, Alle the Longe Daye’ with their raucous assaulte upon thee mandoline that I was barelye able to sit through the succeeding version of ‘Wonderwalle’ without recourse to blockinge of mine ears. At climaxe of thee performance, during ‘My Lady Thy Displayeth the Attributes of Ye Vixen’ saide youths perforce did set their lutes aflayme!’ Pepys did not return to an open session ever again, and the fate of the Pudding Lane Folk, Jazz and Blues Club remains unclear.

There is a whiff of irony that these days the largest celebrations of the people’s music are once again held in the rolling fields and meadows where our forebears once sang lustily of feasting and wenching whilst gazing enviously at the Manor House to whose plumped and primped luxuriance they could only aspire. Or Download, as it is known these days and so it was with a pleasingly retrogressive air that I pitched up at a local coffee house (one of the ones that apparently paid its corporation tax, according to the charming barista of whom I enquired) in the company of the Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley, with whom I was to perform a handful of songs at an acoustic showcase night** before we both pitched in with Tony Shevlin, event curator and Master of Ceremonies on a few things from his current Songs from The Last Chance Saloon album.

It was interesting to hang out and watch a few other performers, which I do shamefully infrequently these days, to see which way the wind is blowin’ in terms of what’s hot in the singer-songwriter scene. A few years ago you couldn’t move for be-capo’d scallies in John Lennon caps, then there was a wave of gamine faux-Cockneys slipstreaming Kate Nash. Last time I looked it was all echo pedals and loops and I was wondering whether there would be a number of Sheeran-lites in ginger wigs beat boxing and interspersing their plaintive choruses with some of that rapping that they have now. You’ve seen them, down the town hall, the rappers..? As it happened, there weren’t, but the current thing seems to be tapping out a rhythm on your guitar’s body. There’s a lot of it. It was two songs in before I stopped going to answer the door. “Do I have to do that?” I asked Helen. “No, you don’t” she reassured me. “In fact, I’d much rather you didn’t. If you ask me it’s this season’s Cajon”.

Helen and I were introduced as Songs from The Blue House which, strictly speaking, we and they were, although as she did her part I was rather left to fill in the space formerly occupied by two guitars, a fiddle, some keyboards, a banjo, a bit of pedal steel and a bass. Oh, and the other three vocalists. In the circumstances I thought I did rather well. Certainly well enough that we sold a couple of the CDs I’d stuffed into my bag before leaving the house. (Note to SftBH ‘Too’ purchasers – Ophelia goes D – G – D – A in that instrumental section, not D – A – D – D – A – G – G – D as performed on the evening. Ahem).

Next up, TJS and The Chancers took to the cleared floor area in front of the disabled toilet, whereupon Helen stepped up again to add some ethereal flute to Heart and The High Moral Ground, we did a couple more and then finished up with the album’s closer, Run Until We Drop – a gorgeous big-screen chunk of Americana with a Sam Shepard script just waiting to burst out of it. Hel’s sister Moj was taking photos – “Did you get one of us?” I asked. “There’s one of you at the end” she replied “I’ll send it to you”. There seemed to some confusion about one of the lyrics. “I’m afraid” she continued “I will, from now on, always think of that song you did earlier about having expensive tastes as ‘Champagne Tits on a Lemonade Pay’”.       

 

 

*TMFTL    

**Apparently there are a series of arcane but weapons-grade conditions which delineate the Acoustic Showcase from the Open Mic and, furthermore, from the Come All Ye. I’m not sure where the boundaries lie, but you don’t seem to get paid for any of them.   

"Let me ride on the wall of death, one more time..."

My grandparents went to Felixstowe on holiday. I've seen the photos, faded black and white echoes of an era of charabancs and bonnets. They may even have promenaded past Wallis Simpson, holed up on the East Coast, taking in the sea air whilst waiting for her divorce to be finalised at Ipswich Magistrates Court. I went there as a child many times - on one occasion, when I was not much older than my son is now, losing my parents by the pier and resolving to find them, as you do, with the impenetrable logic of simply walking to one end of the prom and then retracing my steps back again, and back again, and back, knowing that sooner or later I'd be bound to bump into them, which I eventually did. Naturally, just where I'd left them. I'm not sure how long it took me, but for them it must have seemed an awful lot longer.

 Charlie Manning's was the epicentre of the Felixstowe holiday experience in the seventies - funfair, arcade and fish & chip dispensary all in one - soundtracked by Glam Rock and heady with the smell of hot dogs, fried onions and brylcreem. By the time I went to secondary school local folk were still calling it Butlin's, as the avuncular holiday camp magnate of that name had built the faux-art deco edifice in the thirties before surrendering it to the Manning family in 1946 after which they took the carousel, the ghost train, the cakewalk, the roller coaster and the hall of mirrors and created an empire of fun.

Tony James Shevlin called me last week and asked if I'd come along to provide support for his continuing attempt at world domination through the power of key change-friendly acoustic roots pop by playing guitar and singing on a number of songs he has just had released in the form of Songs from The Last Chance Saloon and, after checking the weather forecast, I said that I would be delighted to revisit an old stomping ground and so I duly packed the family and a guitar into the car and headed East. 

 The walls remain, but the interior of Manning's is very different today. Where you used to be able to get candy floss and a kiss me quick hat and still have change from a ha'penny and six before living out the fairground scene (in your head, at least) from Mary Poppins you can today get a replacement cover for your phone or a discounted tub of Febreze. A lone carousel pony, rampant like a riderless Milanese statue of Garibaldi, is mounted upon the Doric-supported canopy and watches forlornly over the market stalls, the second-hand book shop, the CD emporium and our home for the afternoon, Grandma's Porch where for some unfathomable reason some benighted soul has decided to put on Sunday afternoon music just next to the vintage guitar shop. Oh, did I not mention the vintage guitar shop? They have sofas, twin-necked six and twelve strings, pre-lawsuit Les Paul copies, a Hofner bass, a Rickenbacker copy and a four-string cigar box guitar which looks like it fell into a case of components and barely escaped with its tailpiece intact. It's awesome.    

On this occasion it would be me, TJS and Jules-off-the-album spending some time together and while he and she do the heavy lifting, I bask in the June sunshine and fill in the gaps. I am terribly fortunate in that while Shev and Jules harmonise beautifully on vocals all I have to do is find something (a) within my range and (b) that doesn't spook the horses and it all sounds lovely and full. I get to riff a bit, pick a bit, arpeggiate even, and since we are blessed with the kind of sound guy who makes sure we can hear everything in the monitors and who rides the faders sensitively and with due care and attention* we can get on with the job in hand to the best of our abilities. Their consummate abilities mean that I get to reimagine myself once again in terms of great sidemen in the rock/folk/pop pantheon. On this occasion I am Simon Nicol in Hokey Pokey.  

 Early on Jules gets a burst of spontaneous applause for her vocal extrapolation in Faith in Myself, I manage to remember most of the licks which Tony has painstakingly tracked in the studio and which I'm now improvising on (at one point, when I've only just remembered to include one signature riff he sidles over and mutters "Nice you could join us" with an amused lift of the eyebrow). After too short a time, it's done, we're off, and I have to go and find my family, who have decamped to the beach. 

As I walk past the dodgems, fresh fish and chips wafting on the sea breeze, they're still playing The Sweet's Blockbuster.  
   


*It's a little thing, but someone who bothers to mute the faders so you can plug and unplug your guitar, points out the water bottles before you start and doesn't spend your set looking at his phone is likely to be on the receiving end of some effusive thanks, whether they like it or not. 
While I'm here, many thanks to Gerry in the guitar shop, who lent me a shiny new G7 capo with nary a raised eyebrow regarding someone who would turn up at a gig without a vital piece of equipment. Reader, I bought it.