"So, who do you sound like..?"

At certain points over the course of my variegated musical career I’ve been lucky enough to be approached by folks who need a band for their charity event and who know that I strum a bit; to be contacted by people who need ale for a beer festival and have approached a man who coincidentally both works at a brewery and is in a band with me (the two birds/one stone approach) and have sat with a telephone handset in one paw and a printout of venues from the back of the 1989 Music Industry Yearbook in the other trying to see which back room or bar would be prepared to have us – tired and poor - pitch up for the evening and perform for their huddled masses.

Success in these endeavours mostly comes down to being able to answer the question “So what do you do?” and this in turn usually involves handing over a shiny silver disc in a cheap case and saying “That’s us”. In days gone by the agonising decision about what to put first on the cassette frequently took up more time than actually recording the thing, and so it was a blessed relief when the availability of cheap, home-made CDs meant that the pressure was off slightly, as people would now probably flick forward through the ones they didn’t like, so all you needed was a good strong intro or four.

We in Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs have got by so far on a combination of couple of old reference recordings by a group Helen and I used to be in and a rough YouTube video of us playing one song live, the full version of which essentially comprises documentary footage of one guy getting slowly pissed in a thunderstorm while a band plays in the background behind him. With this dearth of demonstrability in mind we decided that it was time to burn some wax, cut some tracks and get hip to the hep groove Daddio or, more succinctly, drop round to Producer Andy’s house where he’d start putting together some demos so we could give them away to people when they asked whether we’d done anything they might like. Also, many festivals these days insist on you filling in a web-based  application wherein you have to link to three examples of your work online and your website, neither of which we currently have (we did, however, get on to last year’s Ipswich Music Day with a Soundcloud demo of one of my songs performed by Shev on vocals, a picture of the four of us at a beer festival Wendell took on his phone, and a link to Helen’s Twitter account, so it can be done).
 
On the nicest day of the year so far Mr Wendell, Helen and Myself gathered at Trillstar Studios to begin committing our oeuvre to posterity, which involved us drinking tea, plugging in our guitars, and Andy recording them onto a hard drive thereby being able go about correcting our mistakes through the medium of digital technology at his leisure once we'd stopped cluttering the place up. Thankfully our unyielding adherence to the strictures imposed by modern timekeeping meant that after a couple of brace of run-throughs all parties decided that there was no point leaving the metronome on beyond the count-in as after the first two verses it became a distraction when we inevitably veered off-piste and lost where we were. In a spirit of compromise Helen kept time with hand gestures while Andy pointed out that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is all over the place in terms of timekeeping and look what happened to that.

We have decided to go with a fairly representative five-song collection, at least three of which are newly-hewn, which means that we’re looking forward, not back (one of the others dates back to about 1986, which has tended to balance things out). The idea is to give a fairly representative idea of what we sound like when we perform - we want to record our performance rather than perform our recordings - so although the vocals might be done a number of times until we’re happy with a take, there shouldn’t be more than four of them; and although the bouzouki part will be pretty much as it is live, this time it’ll be in tune.

And, once we’ve done that…then we’ll add the pedal steel, 10CC vocal effects,  and Welsh Male Voice Choir.  

"...and for those of you watching in black and white..."

Like swans, we musical Narcisseae generally glide serenely across the waters of this business we call show whilst underneath our little legs scurry away in a frenzy, forever reaping and posting, commenting and colluding, and trying to ensure that the machine is adequately fed and watered at all times. So many platforms to fill, so much media to refresh – and all for the fear that if we don’t keep buoyant, our online presence will sink to the bottom of a watery grave, our career floating in the starry firmament in exactly the same way that bricks don’t. Honestly – if I’m not dropping the latest Rare Candy remix on Tidal I’m generally up to here issuing Cease and Desist writs to the paps. It’s never-ending.

I’m swamped.
  
As it happens, there’s not a lot to report at the moment, but I like hanging out with you guys, so in a spirit of “Well, and what have you been up to recently..?” let me take you through my virtual week, since it’s mainly involved the subject of visuals and video and they’re quite fun to look through. At the last Neighbourhood Dogs get-together we were going to collaborate on a song. I came in with a couple of verses and a couple of chords and looked forward to a pleasant evening wrangling over middle eights and taking things to the bridge, but on the first run through La Mulley conjured a melody out of the ether, Mr. Wendell found a few inversions he could play with, Turny wandered up to the dusty end of the banjo, we all threw in some 10CC-esque “Aaaaahhh”s in the turnaround and Producer Andy pronounced himself satisfied with the outcome to the point where he suggested that adding any more chords in would unnecessarily complicate the whole thing. I suspect that this would have pleased the shade of Our Former Glorious Leader, who was forever trying to edit things down - preferably to the point where a song consisted of one verse (possibly repeated twice) and one chord, and that being without a major tonic*.

What with us being freed from the constraints of arguing about diminished fourths for the rest of the evening we decided to lark about with some guerrilla promo-making. Ordinarily when doing something for the interweb one would ensure that the lighting, camera angles, shooting script and sound source were all in tip-top condition and ready to be tweaked in post-production. Even Zoella makes sure not to fall over the scenery, I'm told. What we did was prop my iPad up on the breakfast bar and point it at the sofa. It’s on Facebook, which tends to annoy some people but then again, so are we.

Here it is.  

In the same week that we did that, a far more professional editing job appeared over on the YouTube courtesy of Tony James Shevlin, who I did a session for the BBC with a few weeks ago. Those nice people from Unity in Music turned up with a couple of cameras, thus obviating the need for any of us to casually approach and fill the screen (an action which is a lot easier for me than it used to be these days) when we needed to cut between shots. My main job in this one was to sit quietly to the side and not fuck things up, which I think I achieved with commendable aplomb – my model for this role being Bill Bruford, who once received a writing credit on a King Crimson track for not playing anything, the reasoning being that although he was there in the studio, this was exactly what the song needed. What I will say is that that third harmony was my idea and in the absence of Dirk the Drummer on backing vocals, I was pleased to be able to dep in and perform it.

 

 

Last, but by no means peremptorily, was the astonishing discovery that MySpace is still a thing! Going back to my opening remarks, back in the day that’s all we had. I think Justin Timberlake owns it now, in which case he has the rights to this performance from The Cornbury Festival of ten years ago, wherein the single camera edit is skilfully utilised by our friend Nick Cooper who was already rather conveniently out on the weekend doing something or another with Spiers and Boden. See how crowd cutaways allow him to switch between angles. You’d probably never have known unless you were the sort of person who could instantly distinguish between a banjo and a mandolin** - keep an eye on Russ Barnes to the left of your screen. He's the, er, one in the hat - not the one in the frock.        

  

*The notable exception to this would have been that time he set out to write a song with a central riff containing all twelve notes in the scale. He did it, as well.  

** Unlike the guy on the desk out front doing our sound check.

Nashville State of Mind

Further to that update from a couple of weeks ago, a video from the BBC Radio session I did with Tony James Shevlin is now available for your delectation on the YouTube. It's a nice little performance, although half way through the second verse one nervous onlooker did ask "...but what are you doing with your hands..?"

  

Carry On Up The Helstock

 
A pleasure and a privilege to be able to stage manage/MC the annual Helstock, wherein folk of all stripes gather in order to celebrate another year in La Mulley's impressive ongoing accumulation of uninterrupted years of existence. This year she also claimed credit for a quarter century's worth of sole bragging rights on our erstwhile Glorious Leader's attentions, and so Yakima Gold had been procured, a venue booked and donations of cheese encouraged. There was also the small matter of half a dozen turns to get on and off the stage in good order but, hardened by a triumvirate of succesful stage wrangling weekends at Maverick*, I felt that this was the least of my concerns.  Indeed it was. Thanks to the provision of a late Easter Cracker I was able to both read a suitably awful joke for my first onstage announcement and to have the opportunity to sport a paper hat in order to establish whether I were appearing as compere (wearing) or, when bereft of headgear, as an artiste - Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs also making a brief but perfectly performed intrusion as part of the evening's proceedings. I thought I'd made a suitably positive statement by taking off my hat to perform, whereas Helen upped the stakes considerably by removing her entire skirt.  

"That hat" someone asked "Is it crepe?" "It does the job perfectly well for what it is" I replied.

After many hugely talented turns, including debut performances by Joe and Tev Partridge**, who have been listening to their mother perform since they were in utero, it was time for putative headliners The Black Feathers, who were in turn mesmerising, beguiling, extraordinary moving, and funny. Having pretty much exhausted my stock of amusing off-the-cuff intros I suggested that I should just do a "Ladies and Gentlemen..." then run up to the top and back of the multi-tiered stage and bang the massive gong which resides there for the use of the Ipswich Hospital Band. I would then announce them in a vaguely hysterical Hugh Dennis The Now Show fashion. That seemed to work quite well. I made my way out of the performance area and sat down next to Becky, innamorata of our own, dear Turny Winn. She turned, measuredly toward me and addressed me with perfect Gerald Thomas-inspired timing. "Rank stupidity".  


*I'll say. We once got a thank you letter from Mary Gaulthier. "All festivals should be run this way" she wrote.  

**Also an opportunity to use the old Mike and Bernie Winters story - "Oh god, there's two of 'em". 

When they were up, they were up.

So, for those who have been kind enough to ask, yes it all went very well for The Neighbourhood Dogs at our Bank Holiday soiree. We had a good turnout, the convoluted story structure of the set didn’t particularly interfere with anyone’s enjoyment of the afternoon’s entertainment (despite my lengthy introduction of new song Well as being from “…the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie that doesn’t exist yet”). Helen and Mr. Wendell combined beautifully with a number of soaring harmonious interjections while Andy put in a solid shift on fretless bass and Turny filled in all the gaps - occasionally stepping forward to take centre stage, as on his vaguely calypso-inflected What’s a Rainbow - my son Lord Barchester’s second-favourite song of the performance. He also managed to draw an entire doodle pad’s worth of progressively more frightening monsters during the course of the performance. Barch, that is – not Tony.

There were a couple of minor opportunities – we were plagued by feedback at one point early on in the performance, the source of which our de facto Sound Engineer (sitting at the bar with a tablet rather than encircled by leads and XLRs at a table somewhere over by the toilets) swiftly identified and dealt with by the simple expedient of leaping over to the performance area and shutting the curtains behind us, thus preventing the specific frequency bouncing back off the window pane into the Behringer in front of Tony. “Also, I couldn’t see a bloody thing with that sun coming through like that” he added.

We’d done our sums regarding how many songs added up to what sort of duration on the back of a fag packet, and so were relieved to find that our two sets just about filled out the contractually-obliged hour and twenty minute run time. My agent approached*. “Very nice” he said. “Very pleasant. You’ve got the makings of a really good forty minute set there”.**

 

 *Yes, I do actually.   

**To be fair, later on at home my wife confessed her enormous sense of relief that (a) “It was really good – perfectly suited to a lazy afternoon’s relaxing in the sun” and (b) more importantly, that it “…wasn’t shit”.

"First Night Nerves Every One Night Stand..."

The countdown’s seriously begun now – two more rehearsals before we go through the whole thing from soup to nuts for real and find out whether we can successfully extend the Helen and the Neighbourhood Dogs experience beyond the rarified realm of a showcase delivery with a stage, lights and a backstage rider comprising exotic cheeses and imported prosciutto into what can often be the brusque charm of a Bank Holiday afternoon session in the local boozer. We’re trying to wean ourselves off chord sheets and lyric prompts, I’m practising my middle-distance focussed, audience-friendly, not-staring-at-the-fretboard onstage expression, and there is no little discussion around the partition of the sixteen song repertoire into two unequal sections, the first of which concludes with not one, but two mournful ballads in succession. Upon checking, it turns out that the second one does too, and there are also a couple more settled plumply in the middle of the set. Oh, and there's also one to start with. It is becoming clear that this is not going to be quite so much the freewheelin’ jaunty party such as might bring to mind Grace Jones hula-hooping through a perky version of Slave to the Rhythm in front of The Queen but, on the bright side, may well appeal to the sort of chap who spends Bank Holiday Monday in the pub muttering “She won’t let me see the kids…” into a pint of flat Carlsberg.*

Even as we confront the present, however, we have one ear on the future. “That’ll sound good with a low harmony on the closing section” someone says. “Once we get a bass on it, that’s really going to kick on” adds another. “Where do you think we can find a Welsh Male Voice Choir for that end bit?” ponders a third. “I might know someone…” volunteers La Mulley.

As it happens, I will have the opportunity to advance reconnoiter the venue in the next week or so when I go undercover as part of Tony O’Shevlin’s crack team of acoustic troubadorians. I have been offered the part of first guitar on Whiskey in the Jar and also a supporting role for Restless Celtic Heart, a song which has been wowing the locals during his recent sojourn to the ancient family seat in order to film a promotional short for his forthcoming acoustic E.P, and which he will be bringing to the table as part of an evening celebrating the feast of St. Patrick. We will, I have been advised with a meaningful look, be playing the latter number quite late on in the set. The inference regarding performance-related inebriety hangs pregnant in the air, and so to lighten the mood I tell him that not only have I already refreshed my chops by running through an advance copy of the CD, but that I have also taken the trouble to learn the song on bouzouki, and will be only too pleased to introduce this aspect of performance to the live BBC radio session we’re booked in to do this week.

“Rehearsal at mine on Tuesday” he mutters. “I’ll pick you up at seven. Don’t worry about having to take your gear down to the studio – leave it round here afterwards. I’ll make sure it all gets there…”   



* And let's face it, who's more likely to be in the pub that day, eh?

Tomorrow Never Knows.

I am reminded that in 2016 it will be fifty years since The Beatles released Revolver, twenty five years since the very first National Music Day (now preserved in tradition as part of the Ip-Art Festival in Ipswich), fifteen years since The Star Club were featured on the cover of The Grapevine prior to our 'retirement' and fully five years since our last reunion show at Music in the Park.

Doesn't time fly?

Doghearsal.

With Mr. Wendell safely returned from Iceland, rehearsals for the never-ending tour resume at what is fast becoming home-from-home for the nascent Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. We have a set list sketched out and decide to work backwards through it, all the better to pay attention to the material which generally gets bashed out at the end of a session when we’ve just noticed that it’s gone eleven on a school night and some of us have got homes to go to.

We are well into the latter stages of Tuckman’s model of group development now, and songs have been added, taken out and re-arranged according to whether they are perceived to be working or not – a melodica, some maracas, an electric bass, some slide guitar – all of these have been suggested in order to complement some arrangement or another and whilst many have got past the committee stage and been incorporated into the working versions, the only thing that can be guaranteed is that if I’m playing bouzouki, the chords are D, G, A and E minor. There are a couple of covers, some old things from The Blue House days, a few items which previously existed only as rarely-performed demos, and some bespoke new material written to fulfil the Folk Opera remit which we initially sat down to sketch out. We think we’ve pretty much got a collection of songs we can work with and so we get down to work with them.

At a convenient point toward the end of scheduled proceedings a couple of us take the opportunity to step out to take the night air and to replenish our mugs of tea. Upon our return we are greeted by the sight and sound of Turny and La Mulley harmonising through the sweetest-sounding country torch ballad you could imagine. Wendell and I subtly arm ourselves with appropriate instrumentation and ease ourselves into the narrative, delicately conducting ourselves around the spellbinding melody. At its conclusion we are both astounded. “What’s that?” asks someone. “Just something I’ve been messing about with” says Tony. “It’s called The Ruin of Me”. Even the title is perfect.  

“And you only thought to bring this up now?” asks Wendell.   

"One more chorus and I'm gonna kick your ass, buddy"

I learned an instrument by playing along with The Eagles' Desperado album, and for a long time the only cassette I travelled with had Rumours on one side and One of These Nights on the other, and so they really were the band that formed my youthful ideas regarding what music was about. If it weren't for a window that The Eagles opened up for me, my whole life would have been very, very different - for better or worse. With every passing of a figure from one's youth we look around to be re-assured that we're not the only ones who got them. My main disappointment recently is that the deaths of iconic figures in pop and rock history seem to have been rated in terms of their importance. Glenn Frey made the most important records of my gangling, stupid youth, and whether he was hip, cool, *important* or not - whether he was kind to his band mates (he wasn't), whether he made some terrible records (he did) or whether he left us with the best post-mortem joke about the warm smell of Colitis (debatable) Glenn Frey has passed. I can never, never hit a 'G' chord without passing over to a 'C' and a passing 'Am7' and wondering about possibly running down a road tryin' to loosen my load. You might not care. I do. And that's okay.

"Don't you know who I used to be..!?"

To an evening soiree with erstwhile employer Tony James Shevlin, who is in the midst of recording some of the songs he wrote whilst on an extensive traversal of the US of States earlier this year. He is extolling the talent of some of the local musicians who are contributing to the project and suggests that I might be able to help him out with a couple of verses of a thing that he’s not quite been able to finish. Since being schooled in the Nashville co-write method during his stay there he has become quite the evangelist for collaboration, and I figure it’d be nice to sit down with a couple of guitars and shoot the breeze for a bit before adding my name to the credits of what will doubtless eventually become the main theme for a major motion picture or a recurring motif in a hugely popular Netflix-produced  detective series.

He outlines the themes he has so far, and a rough metre, and I ask if he has a pen handy. He produces a fine-tipped fountain pen and a vellum-bound notebook from his expensive-looking man satchel and I scribble a few lines down. Without my glasses, and with three pints of delicious Brewers Gold already past the low tide mark, it seems unlikely that any of these will be decipherable in daylight, but when the muse strikes, needs must.

Already this week I have workshopped a new song with The Neighbourhood Dogs and, anxious that it not sound too much like anything else, I wondered whether it bore too much resemblance to an earlier song, called Risk? Turny – formerly banjo player but now tasked in addition with harmonica and melodeon and anything else it turns out he has lying around in his shed – suggests that it’s more like The Drugs Don’t Work pointing out that there are only so many chords and that I shouldn’t worry unnecessarily. I confess that there may have been some Noel Gallagher on the television around the time of the song’s conception. Mr Wendell wonders if we know any string sections and I suggest that we layer the harmonies on the end section like those on Dr. Robert. By the time we have all chipped in, Helen’s flute is taking the hook, replacing the original Pink Floyd-y guitar riff with a call-and-response interplay with the harmonica.

Given that I have been part of such a massive restructuring of what was originally a simple I-I-V-I-V-I-I-8-outro (as Turny’s contemporaneous notes would have it) bit of acoustic strummery I’m feeling pretty confident that I can find enough words that rhyme with the ones he’s already got to complete Shev’s opus and so by this point in the evening I’m feeling fairly expansive in mood, and pretty pleased with my own abilities and my rightful place in the pantheon of Ipswich music personalities.
A gentleman approaches our table and, spotting Shev, breaks into a broad grin of recognition. “Star Club!” he exclaims enthusiastically, naming the Beatles specialist band Mr. Shevlin and I were once one half of. “You were great! Of course, that’s where they used to play – is that where you got the name from?” Shev confirms that this is indeed the case and indicates to his new friend that I, sitting across from him, was also in the band. Our visitor regards me as levelly as his uncertain state can afford and finally I am addressed directly. “Nope” he says “I don’t remember you. At all”.    

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs

"So" we thought, "Rather than have our first full band performance together on a massive stage in Papworth, we should probably try our stuff out in slightly more intimate circumstances first" and so, with the help of Blue House Music's PA, and Karen and Ady at The Dove, we pitched up in Ipswich to run through the set in front of a few of our friends, some interested strangers and some accommodating drinkers. Fortunately our friend Jim Horsfield was on hand with his camera to record events for training purposes. So, here's a new, never-before performed song we did that evening. Hope you like our new direction.

"I left my heart in Papworth General..."

“What’s the first rule of song writing?” asks La Mulley, stage front and centre, resplendent in frock coat and boots. Her rhetoric hangs heavy in the air. “No-one wants to hear about your kids” I respond. “And what’s the second rule?” I enquire by way of reply, thereby fulfilling my part in the pantomime. She leaves a beat. “Once you’ve had them, you can’t stop talking about them”.

We are on stage at Papworth Village Hall, a construction roughly comparable in dimension, design and acoustic qualities to St. Pancras Station, at the behest of charitable foundation Play Papworth and about to present Where We Are – one of a couple of numbers lifted wholesale from the repertoire of Songs from The Blue House and here presented with a degree of trepidation by scion combo Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. Our nervousness is not so much generated by the prospect of playing a rarely-performed obscurity from our back pages insomuch as that Tony Winn, whose part in the arrangement of the song is pivotal, had caught his tie in his concertina during sound check and we were concerned it might affect his performance if it happened again.
Of such concerns are the occasional musician’s contemplations made up  - others can be considered as such examples as “Whose turn is it to drive?”, “Do you mind if I come up a tad in the monitors?” and “So where shall we have dinner after the sound check?”

The answer to the latter question turned out to be the magnificently monikered Rocky’s Pavilion one of a number of choices afforded us, and which we approached despite the sage words of my good friend Neil, who once advised me never to sit down to eat in any establishment which is showing the football. Upon entry we were ushered to the restaurant area, which looked as if bedecked for a wedding, and where soft lighting subtly ebbed and flowed in both luminescence and hue. The haunting sound of Dido wafted atop the layer of kitchen mesosphere, and we felt ourselves nodding gently off as we surveyed our menu choices. To enliven ourselves we skipped across diverse conversational subjects – whether a Portobello Mushroom constitutes a vegetarian burger or if it is just simply a big mushroom in a bap, for instance. We considered what music we, or our partners, might have played at our funerals. “Mrs K. wants that Green Day one about having the time of your life at hers” I proffered. “Good Riddance?” enquired bass player Ant. “A happy coincidence”, I concurred.

Our waiter scurried back and forth in the largely empty dining room. One other couple occupied a table further along the French Windows beneath a sepia print of Muhammad Ali towering over a be-canvased Sonny Liston in the first minute of the first round of their 1965 heavyweight title rematch. “You wouldn’t want to have paid for a ticket for that” I proposed, pondering as to whether the rather extended gap betwixt decision and delivery of our supper were somehow down to there just being the one guy on duty and him having to change into chef’s whites to complete our order.

Helen responded to some mansplaining regarding the artist Norman Wilkinson with a consideration on the subject of her legwear, which was decorated with text from the works of Shakespeare. “You do tend to find it attracts people’s attention – you know, they're wondering which play is it, what font are they using - that sort of thing?” indeed, the gentleman beneath the framed photograph by table twelve appeared to have developed a keen interest in deciphering the works of The Bard whenever he thought that either we or his dinner companion weren’t looking. "I swear that was twelve point Verdana when she sat down" his rather flushed expression seemed to say.
  
Attentive tweenagers opened doors upon our return to the venue and solicitously wished us a good evening before we settled in to watch the openers – local band The Komodo Project, pleased to note that one effect of the cathedral-like roof canopy was that applause reverberated in a most satisfactory fashion.

We were up next, our confidence (tie-related shenanigans notwithstanding) having been bolstered by a successful run-through a few days earlier in the considerably more intimate environs of The Dove Street Inn in the heart of swinging downtown Ipswich. We’d decided to rehearse the set in as live a performance scenario as we could envisage, which essentially involved inviting as many people as we knew to the pub and doing a dress rehearsal in public - thereby getting used to the vagaries of monitoring and mic techniques, working out a few introductions, such as our “First rule of songwriting” schtick and, as it happens, staying up until much later than was sensible afterwards eating cheese and crackers with our beneficient hosts, putting the world to rights over pints of lovely Brewers Gold. In the spirit of many American establishments we put out a tips jar and were able, at the end of the evening, to at least contribute toward our pro bono sound engineer’s diesel money, still have a few Euros in loose change and not even have to break into that 100 Yuan note.

To conclude the evening, the magnificently bonkers Vienna Ditto, whose photo of our sound check is at the top of the page. I will merely repost what I wrote online about them. Wow, well that was something! Impossible to categorise, but if you put the guitarist from The Black Keys together with one of The Chemical Brothers, added in the singer from The Sundays and back projected a bunch of old OGWT films behind them while drinking mushroom tea you might be getting somewhere close.

My travelling companion – co-guitarist and singer Mr Wendell - and I packed up the car and prepared for the return home. “I think I’m going to change my stage name” he said thoughtfully. “To Papworth Everard”.       

Four Lads Who Changed* the World.

“Still playing?” is a question I get asked more often than not whenever I bump into fellow veterans of the Heavy Big Pop wars, and I am happy to say that - with a few qualifications - I can truthfully answer that yes, I am. Obviously the actual playing element is fairly constant, albeit with the slight qualification that in a public space where anyone can see us doing so is a little more on the recherché side, if truth be told. The hen’s teeth element of my public appearances was one of the drivers behind making our final pre-gig rehearsal this month a public event in a pub just so that we could remind ourselves how to interact with an audience in real time without tripping over the monitors and banging on endlessly about how various instruments were “…in tune when we bought them”.

We’ve also been offered another engagement – Bank Holiday Monday, Easter 2016 since you ask – which gives us another goal to aim at, and also enough time to bulk out the set slightly more with the aim of achieving the two hour obligation we have accepted. Since we're currently up to about forty, forty five minutes, that should give us just about enough wiggle room. It was as a result of a throwaway remark from The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley (“I’ll try anything once”) during a conversation about the gig that I went back to a bunch of songs that hadn’t seen the light of day for a while in order to see if there was anything that fitted in with our Folk Popera concept regarding the themes of deception, betrayal and fairly poor eyesight** that we could dig out, freshen up and include in the set - the phrase "I'll try almost anything once" being one of the hooks in a long-dormant chorus.

I dug out my big book of lyrics, painstakingly hand-written in black ink on good grade paper in bound notebooks*** and started looking for thematically linked opportunities. Fortunately I seemed to have been going through quite a phase of that sort of malarkey at the time and so among the eighty five or so finished songs committed to the page for posterity's benefit a good few seemed fit for purpose. I dug out one of the CDs we’d compiled and got to work trying to work out the chords, riffs and hooks , a few of which I had completely forgotten were in some of these songs in the first place, a couple of which had been subsequently rehomed and many that I was still quietly proud of. At times I could remember exactly where and when we’d come up with some of the parts and they flooded back in to my mind like old friends, James's tightly-compressed out of phase guitar sigils as fresh as the day they were minted. Another of the things that came to mind was how brilliantly presciently our de-facto Benevolent Dictator had come up with song titles which would shortly to be appropriated by platinum-selling acts on major labels. By the time I joined the band he’d already written ‘Big Love’ (not by Fleetwood Mac) and ‘Faith’ (not by George Michael) and during our time together we would go on to curate ‘I Feel for You’ (not by Chaka Khan) and ‘Better than the Rest’ (not by Bruce Springsteen) among others.               

In case you think I’m veering toward the vainglorious with reference to my formerly glittering career, by the way, I should mention that only this week someone came up to me at the bus stop and asked when The Star Club were getting back together again, and that’s a band who haven’t really fired a shot in anger since 2011. Yesterday I was at a kids’ birthday party when one of the other parents started reminiscing about As Is. “Still playing?” he asked. 

 

 

*didn’t.

**There are too many examples of sailor boys disappearing for a couple of years off along the Spanish Main or some suchlike only to return all in disguise and not being recognised by their true loves for this to be anything less than coincidental and actually down to ongoing ophthalmic issues.

***You may laugh, but at least three electronic storing formats have become obsolete in the time since I wrote some of those down.

             

 

 

Four people go into a room…

A return to traditional values this week as for the first time in about three months the lion’s share of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs convened over ale and instruments in order to knock a couple of ideas around with a view to bolstering the running time of our folk/country concept –if you will - Popera prior to our next engagement, in November. This seems like a long time away, but once you’ve factored in school governor’s meetings, a sojourn in California and the banjo player rehearsing for and then appearing in a theatre production as Dracula* the number of your actual available days diminishes alarmingly, and this is even before you’ve dragged the bass played out of a photo session with Kelly Brook**.

The evening went very well – the sketch of an idea that I came in with was subject to rigorous examination and various arrangements attempted, rejected, tweaked and finessed while the subject matter went through a sort of Just a Minute-styled analysis to root out repetition (“You’ve used ‘dress’ in successive verses and ‘reception’ to mean ‘party’ and where you sign the register at a hotel, so…”), hesitation (“Come in on the beat and hold the ‘We’ through the bar”) and deviation (“But why would he say that if he’s already made his intentions clear in verse three?”). A minor chord was placed carefully in the coda, and a valedictory chorus added to the postscript. Then we sat round an iPad and recorded it, as if to one microphone.

One of the issues that arose during its construction was that as time moves on, the familiar idioms of song writing become less and less applicable. No-one waits patiently by the phone any more, or looks through old photographs, or sits down to write a letter, and although these things’ time may come again*** we’ve been trying to move on and avoid too many obvious anachronisms. Hence the protagonist in ‘Harrogate’ – one of a number of songs inspired by traditional English Spa towns – refreshes the browser on his phone. His paramour’s number is withheld. He doesn’t smoke.

I was talking about this with m’friend and colleague Tony James Shevlin, who had recently been co-composing in the home of country music with some ‘Mericans and we agreed that although there were certain conventions to be maintained, the times were, indeed, a-changin’. I told him about the song and canvassed his opinion on whether it was acceptable to couple ‘vol-au-vents’ with ‘what she wants’. “That’s nothing” he said. “I was throwing lines back and forth with one of my writing partners and we were working on the old one & three, two & four scansion and he ended a line with ‘Nashville’”.

“Blimey” I replied “How did you write your way out of that one?”

He at least had the good grace to look mildly sheepish. “We ended up with ‘Johnny Cash will…’”               

 

*We don’t think he’s accompanying himself on this occasion. It is a an instrument with a long and noble history, but announcing the entrance of the Prince of Darkness to the haunting strains of the five string banjo is probably a theatrical step too far.   

**True story.

***I’ll bet Paddy McAloon thought he was on pretty safe ground when he committed the line “As obsolete as warships in The Baltic” to paper back in the perestroika-happy mid-eighties (‘Faron Young’).

 

 

 

 

Happenings Ten Years Ago.

There was a reunion of sorts at the weekend, wherein grizzled music veterans - alumni and alumna of the  school of hard folk which was Songs from the Blue House - reassembled at Fiddly's country gaff The Hovell to catch up with what we'd all been up to recently. We had a pretty strong line up, including the two Steve's from Too's "Then There Was Sunshine" guitar chorus and TT, who'd travelled from distant climes in order to barbecue things and get gently sun-pinked. Freed from all that having to tune guitars and play chords in the right order malarkey, there was a relaxed vibe amidst the wafting aroma of sizzling sausages and gently toasting halloumi. A couple of us couldn't resist taking the beaters to Fiddly's home-built vibraphone and improvising gently in the hazy summer heat, and besides, there were many fewer wasps inside the shed than out. 

It wasn't always as relaxed as this though, you know. We once had albums to launch, benefit gigs to play, EPs to release, message boards to moderate...if only there were some sort of time capsule we could...oh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060822045026/http://www.songsfromthebluehouse.com/arch0905.htm
      

Crikey, it's six years since I left The Picturehouse Big Band.

 

 http://skirky.blogspot.nl/2009/08/farewell-to-things-great-picturehouse.html

 

.

"You, dancing..."

Pleased, proud and privileged to be able to drop into The Steamboat this weekend for a short set in charitable support of Krissy and Friends with a bare-bones Neighbourhood Dogs line-up, of which I was the sole canine on this occasion. "You're on after the rain gutter regatta" announced Krissy. I quietly pondered a name change, or at least the possibility of that being the title of our first album.

It was here, on this very stage, that The Present Mrs. Kirk and I opened proceedings just over fifteen years ago at our marriage after-party with a sterling rendition of The Beautiful South's Don't Marry Her... (album version), the bride radiant and resplendent in the previous day's big white dress. The party ended some eight or so hours of continuous music later with our friend Zippy having assembled three drummers to back him on a version of Route 66 which involved them dividing the single kit up into easily transferable sections, taking a solo each and then shuffling around one place so that the guy who had formerly been on bass drum and snare now had responsibility for the ride cymbal and floor tom, and so on, while we danced deliriously in front of them.

Today the audience comprised friends, family, bystanders & onlookers and, in the centre of the dance floor, four-year-old Lucy, who had already expressed a fierce determination in respect of her future ambition. "That's going to be me one day" she announced firmly. "Standing on that stage, singing my own songs". Next to her, my boy Lord Barchester, all of five years old and swinging his friend around with all the enthusiasm a couple of small souls lost in the moment could garner. Pictures of the dance later sparked a flash of recognition back at Kirk Towers. Mrs. K dug through her files and folders and pulled out a snap of us in exactly the same place, the same expressions of joy in the moment on our faces.

"Daddy, Daddy! Look at what I'm doing!" yelled my little gig newbie toward the stage, all red faced and rapturous. "That's not how it works, son" I laughed. "You're supposed to look at what I'm doing..!"          

     

“Like an evening at Russell Brand’s house, this set has been building inexorably toward a climax…”

 “I’m really sorry guys, I can’t make it” reads the email from Ant, bass player and part of the vocal quintet who make up Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - shortly to make our second appearance, at Ipswich Music Day, the largest free festival in the UK with an estimated forty thousand folks’ footfall expected over the course of the day. The rain is teeming down and social media reflects gloomily on the prospects for the afternoon. La Mulley, Mr Wendell, Turny Winn and I have gathered at Kirk Towers to have a quick run through the set in advance of our performance but complications and prevarication mean that we’re essentially just biding time until one of us can make a decision about what to do next. Helen takes another look out of the window and goes to put a jumper on. “I won’t feel the benefit otherwise” she explains. Wendell and I confer on appropriate headgear. “Not that one” he says. “Too Maverick”.

 By the time we’ve loaded up into Tony’s people carrier for the short journey into town the sun has emerged from behind the clouds and Helen has taken off her scarf. The Grapevine Stage is a tented arena in front of the historic Christchurch Mansion and having based our hopes of a good attendance for our sophomore set on the weather reports which predicted showers at around four o’clock we are instead greeted by a stream of people escaping the stifling heat and humidity within, lured by the big stages and the open blue skies across the rest of the park. We announce our arrival to the appropriate authorities, unpack, and fall upon the free water backstage.

 A quick line check and we’re good to go. The prospect of there being a bass player in the audience who knows our set and has rehearsed the appropriate harmonies seems remote but we enquire anyway. In the absence of volunteers we embark on our first song. Everyone comes in at the right, same time, and Helen is in fine, strong voice. Wendell steps up to contribute to the chorus and then veers away from the microphone. He looks over his shoulder, concerned. “I can’t pitch!” he hisses. As we will confirm later in conversation with Ray out of The Black Feathers, rehearsing acoustically in a nice, warm, woody environment is a whole different ball game to that of approaching a microphone which will amplify and project your sounds before feeding back the results through wires and boxes on the stage (if you’re lucky). Wendell and I are a long way from the Picturehouse days when we used to rock up at a pub, plug everything in, grab a drink from the bar and then nonchalantly kick into The Bends with nary a second thought.

 We manage to recover the measure of singing into microphones before too long though, and by the time we are half way through the set everyone is palpably more relaxed about proceedings and we are actually starting to enjoy ourselves. Judging by the reception the songs are getting, so are the audience and one feeds continually off the other until at set’s close we are buzzing. Snappers have taken the opportunity throughout the set to capture various moments (mainly involving our photogenic frontwoman, to be honest) for posterity and we are invited to pose in front of the sponsors’ backdrop for a souvenir of the day. “And maybe one without shades?” suggests the photographer.  

 Over post-match cocktails back at the ranch later that evening I receive a text from Helen It contains a picture of Ant's hospital wristband. “He really was ill” she writes.     

Run Until We Drop.

It's a bit of a call back compendium this week, as many threads from previous blogs start weaving themselves together into a whole. First up, those nice people at Unity in Music have posted an excerpt from my performance in a supporting role at Arlington’s Brasserie with the redoubtable Tony James Shevlin and the small-but-perfectly-formed Jules Shevlin. This was the occasion when I missed Fern Teather’s set and our host was contractually obligated to mention that a forthcoming showcase night would be attended by minions from the Karaoke Sauron’s empire hoping to spot victims for the next series of X-Factor. I’m not sure if anyone got the nod at that circus, but in the mean time Shev’s playing shows in the States and Fern’s organising her own album through Kickstarter. Do, or do not, as the phrase goes – there is no try.

They have uploaded/presented* Run Until We Drop, from Tony’s album Songs from The Last Chance Saloon, cleverly editing in his opening remarks (you can see me seated at the back ready to play some sterling bottleneck on Nashville State of Mind) and then skipping the lengthy intro wherein he explains the real-life scenario which inspired the song. Picture yourself in a classic American diner, maybe having a good coffee and a piece of pie. A motorcycle pulls up in the lot** outside (“I remember thinking that’s unusual – a British bike…”). The rider enters and takes seat at the counter...

I know it's considered vulgar to talk about money, but I received a PRS statement this week, which unaccountably veered into double figures for the first time - courtesy, I suspect, of the munificence of the Brazilian Songs from The Blue House audience. Dame Judy Dyble, who included one of our songs on her recent anthology, sold out the entire first run of the collection and there are reports of at least a couple of radio stations pulling our Little No-One out of the pile and playing that, which isn’t bad considering the forty or so years of collaborations which bookend it. It is a matter of some pride that La Mulley and I take our place on the sleeve notes beside such luminaries as Fripp, Thompson, and our friend Steve Mears, especially now that a second run means that they were able to clear up a couple of typo omissions...   

Speaking of La Mulley, Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs continue to rummage around under the bonnet*** of our prior compositions to see what we can fine tune, soup up or discard, with the result that as well as some new material we are able to present subtly different versions of previously well-beloved favourites based on the different approaches of our new collaborators. So far we have managed to rein in the urge to take our muse south of the border, down Mexico way, but if Mr. Wendell had had some castanets handy at that last rehearsal things might have veered away on a whole different curve. Someone at the day job asked me how things were progressing. “Artistically, we’re looking through sun-dappled leaves, warmth on our faces, bare feet in the loam our forbears trod, in union with…” “No” he said “Who do you sound like?” “Oh – probably Fairground Attraction”.    

 
 

* Or ‘dropped’ if you’re that way inclined.

** ‘Car Park’

***Or ‘hood’ if you’re reading this in Canada, the USA or somewhere where the argot of movies and TV series has overtaken everyday vernacular. I got a bit carried away myself earlier.