Chasing the Green Pound

Settle down everybody, pay attention. Anyone know what's significant about March 17th? Come on, it happens every year...no-one? That's right, it's the day of St Patrick, well done MacGowan, take a gold star. The day when otherwise sane and rational English folk decide that they really do enjoy a pint of Guinness, they always liked that Jack Charlton and that, well, any excuse to wear a silly hat, eh? Some of them may even be vaguely aware of who St Patrick , a catholic saint, was, although it's generally likely to extend no further than something about snakes on an island. A sort of mediaeval Samuel L. Jackson, if you will. What do they know of St. Patrick, who only St. Patrick know? 

Nevertheless, where there's a pub full of drunk culture tourists, there's a bunch of people who'll want to sing The Wild Rover very loudly and bang on tables (admittedly they tend to mumble through most of the verses - a bit like Rio Ferdinand in the national anthem - but when you only sing something once a year it's tricky to pick up the lyrics) and that's where we come in. When I turn up at the pub, Shev is already setting up the PA amongst a tumble of wires and leads, and a few guest musicians are standing in the middle of the confusion awaiting instructions. 

These are generally one or other of our natural states, and so is nothing to be alarmed by. I stand in the middle of the room and await further instructions, not having any setting up to do. I survey the decorations - a few Guinness promotional balloons, a huge Guinness banner, and a jauntily hung tricolour - and that's just family on the table to the left of the stage, sitting by the chalkboard that promises "Saturday night diddly diddly". If nothing else, the cartoon aspects prove that we've come a long way in terms of all getting along together. This wouldn't have happened under Thatch. 

The show gets underway and before long I'm summoned to my post and am playing the haunting traditional air of Thin Lizzy's "Don't Believe A Word" accompanied by Frisky Pat on gaffa-taped cardoard box, snare and assorted percussion, and TT on piano. We appear to have all indulged in the same degree of rehearsal. The theme of the evening is toyed with as I move to bass for a version of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams", included on the grounds that The Corrs once did a version of it, and after a few more singalongs we take a break for a band called Cara Cleibh to set up an run through their set of 'diddly diddly'. 

The group includes both Fiddly from SftBH and Seamus Hussey, who plays in an original band with me, and this gives me the opportunity to both see from the audience's perspective for once how much Fiddly enjoys his job, and how unhappy a drummer can look when confronted with the prospect of playing a cardboard box instead of a full kit. Both are enormously entertaining, as is The Cleibh's rumbustious set. They only play the Jack Charlton card once (there is, literally, a Jack Charlton card on stage for such a purpose) in deviating from their set of Irish songs, and so when we retake the stage (or, more accurately, corner of the pub by the dartboard) we are pressed to go further down the trad route, for it is by now approaching the 18th of March, and so we naturally kick off with James's "Sit Down". 

Somewhere in the crowd, an ex-captain of the Northern Irish football team is spotted enjoying a refreshing pint of the black stuff and grinning broadly. Odd - he was always known as a spectacularly right-footed player.... Shev is working the crowd like a craftsman, the jokes are getting longer, and after reinviting the band back on for a spirited "Brown Eyed Girl", complicated somewhat by the fact that we've tuned down a semitone and all six of them haven't, he invites us to leave while he and TT perform a quiet version of "Danny Boy". 

By now there are spontaneous tears and hugs in the audience, topped only when he invites his sister on stage to sing a Gaelic version of the national anthem. A clue for you all, it's not God Save The Queen. It's quite exhausting. Shev, who is only one generation away from actual Irishness (the Burton accent belies his roots), looks and sounds pleased, tired, and emotional. I've got the car, so I'm pleased, awake, and want to get the PA speakers past a throng of tired and emotional ex pats. As it were.

I get back home and idle away some gig-coming-down time on YouTube where somebody has been quite amusing, but not terribly kind, about SftBH. "Like inviting a bunch of brickies to sing with their Mum" is one comment. Since the internet generally is all about either accessing porn or being gratuitously and anonymously rude about people you don't know, I take the second option and decide to call him a c***.

Play One More for My Radio Sweetheart.

 I’ve been abroad the airwaves quite a bit recently. The first few times this happens it’s tremendously exciting, and there is a palpable air of hushed reverence as you are guided down labyrinthine corridors by a welcoming PA, gifted with coffee and asked to wait in The Green Room before being summoned through to the studio, issued with headphones and asked to comment for posterity’s sake on whatever it is you were invited in for in the first place. After a while, especially in a town the size of ours, you tend to get buzzed in at reception by the DJ currently working in the studio on his own, make your way to the water cooler and hang out there for a bit until he’s had a chance to set off the prerecorded interview from earlier on and nip out to ask if you’ve brought in copies of the CDs you want to play. It’s not all ordering stuff up from the library and flirting with the girl doing the traffic in the world of radio, you know. 

We in Songs From The Blue House have been grateful recipients of a number of interviews and sessions during our short but productive time together, mainly based on years of hard work beforehand in a number of bands and projects where individually and collectively we garnered a reputation for ourselves of being able to turn up on time, being broadly capable of stringing three or more sentences together in a row and being able to be relied upon not to say ‘fuck’ live on air. Hence the three main prerequisites of being interviewees are fulfilled and we get put on the roster of people to call in on a periodic basis. 

The last time I was in was to talk about my role as an “influential local musician”, which I believe broadly translated as maintaining the above mentioned requirements whilst in addition not being so bitter about my palpable lack of chart success as to spend half an hour laying waste to the talents of every other musician I can recall from the nineties. I believe the official term for this sort of behaviour is “A safe pair of hands”. 

As I say, demonstrating these sorts of characteristics can be terribly handy as before we’d even played live or hit the recording studio it meant that we were in the live lounge at Radio Suffolk performing the only three songs we had at the time, and Drivetime’s Stephen Foster was introducing us with the moniker we bear to this day (purely on the basis that we’d described the process of songwriting at James’s house, mentioning in passing that he’d painted it Ipswich Town blue) as Foz had nothing else to call us after he’d already invested in the phrase “…and now, performing live….”. Tragically, the best and most interesting vignette of the afternoon – the apocryphal story of how one Charlie Simpson used to come to our gigs and stand at the back comparing notes with his drummer friend and hence how I was therefore directly responsible for the career of Busted – passed off-mic in the middle of the roadworks update, and somehow the subject didn’t come up again during the remaining ten minutes of the interview. 

We were also on a community station which verged on the boundaries of piracy during our early days – I believe it was the first time I met our mandolin player incidentally - which was not such an enervating experience, as one of the enduring tenets of the live radio experience is not to say “Um” before every answer. To say it before every question betrayed the fracturing of concentration that can occur in a DJ when they’ve trapped their trouser leg in their bike chain on the way to the studio and are ten minutes late opening up as a result. The poor bloke had to put on a twenty minute psychedelic wig-out on first up just to give him time to get his breath back, and there was a growing realization that we’d been invited on to a show where research was perhaps not top of the “to do” list when our answers to questions like “How many in the band?” and “What do you play?” were greeted not so much with seamless links to the next subject but genuine surprise. “Really!? A flute, you say!?” I don’t think the engineer was expecting a six piece acoustic band to turn up either, but did a manful job, and one of the songs from the resulting session was released as on a free CD by the station, complete with the DJ describing what we looked like on the station’s internal CCTV cameras on the outro.

Not great radio, but endearing. 

Hence James and I approach our next venture with the all propriety as we have been deemed such a safe pair of hands that we have been invited to compile our own twenty minutes of recorded history to be, ahem, Podcast to the world. We’ve got twenty minutes of ‘air’ time to fill with three songs and our reflections upon them, which is a marvelous opportunity to plug our own forthcoming album. Being the altruistic old bears we are, we are of course digging out a couple of forthcoming things that we’ve heard in the studio while we’ve been working on, or taking a break from, banjo overdubs and we’re going to enthuse about them instead. Well, what goes around and all that. 

Hopefully we’ll be able to call on the expertise of Simon Talbot, out of The Urban Sofa Beat Collective, with whom I recently shared an interesting couple of on-air hours reflecting on the role of seventeenth century optometry in the folk ballad tradition, and whose professional experience extends as far as being ‘Producer Simon’ on the short-lived Picturehouse ICR radio show “Your New Favourite Record”, as well as ‘Doctor Pop’ on Oman Airways’ in-flight entertainment package, where he also rejoiced in the rather distressing sobriquet ‘Gaz Bender’, renowned presenter of “What’s Up Kids?”.Under his guidance and tutelage we feel sure that we can present an egg-suckingly good show, and with his bespoke editing software we can certainly rid ourselves of the occasional “Um” and repetitive “err…” we’re bound to drop in to the first draft. 

To “Er” is, after all, human.

"Okay, Songs From The Blue House, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hurry you..."

Our kind and munificent record company have finally started looking at their watches, tapping them meaningfully and making raised eyebrow gestures toward the clock whenever we turn up to add another cello, bass trombone, vocal or mandolin to the masterwork in progress, and have faced us down with the sort of offer that James is increasingly negotiating with his children - "Okay, one more, and then we really have to go to bed". In our case it's not "one more" story, rotation of Thomas The Tank Engine on his track or YouTube viewing of monster tractor racing, but one more day of easy-going studio work before they start asking us for money every time we turn up. Which is fair enough - at market rates we've already spent about twelve grand's worth of their money (or, as we like to think of it, they've invested that much faith in our ability to produce a half-decent album while not bumping into the furniture) and we are over our agreed deadline. Four weeks may seem like a long time to put together sixteen songs, but we've not had the luxury of gathering everyone together for a couple of weeks pre-work and rehearsals and then decamping to the studio en masse for the duration of the sessions and then calling people in from the chill-out lounge when we need them to do a bit more work on their bit. A keyboard part has been put down btween prog-rock tours of Scandinavia and The Netherlands, a pedal steel solo between moving house and working on the new McFly album, a cello part because Liz was in the studio working on one of the other albums being recorded there, and a fairly integral acoustic guitar part after our protagonist managed to wrap up a training course in double quick time and scoot off to see us in the afternoon. We are moving air here, and so merely plugging things into a home PC isn't going to cut it once the thing is mixed, mastered, laser etched and delivered (or downloaded) - hence the airy studio and expansive (and expensive) selection of studio gadgetry involved, however now the pressure is on to not compromise all the hard work we've done (and cajoled people into doing on our behalf) so far just because the meter's very audibly running. The album itself is a medley of an affair. Some folky, some country, some acoustic pop and some confessional singer-songwriter, and so how it all hangs together is a peculiarly irksome nut that we're still no nearer to cracking than we were when we arranged all the songs in alphabetical order after the very first rough mix. There are a multiplicity of singers (and a dearth of the second album's big selling point - our female vocalist) and so the murky water of the stylistic content is further muddied by the changes in who you're listening to delivering it. Nevertheless, the material is strong, and so once everyone's downloaded it onto their computer and hence to their iPod where they'll listen to it on shuffle, that's really not going to matter too much. I think I may be the last man in England who listens to albums all the way through. The clue's in the title though - these are songs from The Blue House, and so whatever's best for their delivery is what makes the cut.
And so, heads down, ears open and let's get ready with those pursed lips and thoughful, furrowed expressions as we attempt to guide these steers into the corrall and brand 'em with the SftBH iron. It's tempting to try and rush this part of the process, but in the same way that you can't hurry love, in our game we long ago discovered that it's not over until The Fat Controller sings....

The Snow Came Down on This Ol’ Town

 

Another day in the studio, and another chance to sit in a comfy swivel chair and stare at lines on a screen. Back in the old days, you see, folks got together and played a song over and over in a recording studio until at least two of the band got it pretty much right, and then a young person who’d expressed an interest in getting into music would sit poised over a rewind button for the next three days while everyone else watched the tape rewinding over and over again as the guitarist tried to nail ‘the one’ take that would be committed for posterity and the singer fretted that there wouldn’t be enough time left at the end of the sessions to do more than three takes on the harmonies.

Occasionally the Tape Op would be despatched for coffees, sandwiches or to wake up the singer to see what he thought of the latest solo, or to drag him away from the pool table/Spinal Tap video/ pub, depending on the salubriousness of the facilities. Once, I came back from a refreshing lunch to find that the engineer had locked the rest of the band out of the studio while his Mum cooked tea for him (we were working on decidedly different timescales). I think it’s fair to say that this studio was at the lower end of the range facilities-wise. 

George Harrison once notably responded to George Martin’s “Tell me if there’s anything you don’t like” with the legendary riposte “Well, I don’t like that tie”. On this occasion the singer responded to a similar enquiry from our bass player simply, “I don’t like him. Or his collection of porn which he insists we go and watch while we’re trying to do those guitar overdubs”. They were simpler times. The studio was in a converted stable. After the sessions were over we made a bolt for the door. These days, we stare intently at a screen on which our notes are displayed and endlessly analyse whether things are in time, in tune and of the correct amplitude. I’m not entirely sure what that means, which is probably why our engineer turned the displays off at one point and insisted that we simply listen to the track. And we had to go and get our own coffees. 

The luxury of digital editing is that no-one is too concerned about having to rewind the tape to the right point as “…that bit just before the middle eight” is clearly visible onscreen, as are the bits where the horns come in and that section where we put down a vocal just in case we’d need it later. The bits of paper with “gtr – left” written on have been replaced with drop-down menus and digital interfaces which mean that the spectres of the tape becoming see-through, stretched, stuck together or simply dropped have gone with the wind. Imagine though, the first Boston album with even more overdubs… 

As it turns out, the instant rewind is as much of a curse as a blessing, as I listen to the twenty-fourth take on the simple phrase “When I look back!” I am intent on making sure that this, the first line of the song, is as intense, visceral and moving as I remember it from the demo. The Singer is having trouble getting a reservation to ‘that place’, let alone a ticket, and The Engineer is laying his head restfully on the recording console, from which there emanates a slight thudding noise. 

My production technique is starting to look decidedly flaky. The phrase “Concentrate on the N” is received with blank looks from both, and justifiable mild irritation from the man wearing the rather fetching headphone ensemble. We decide to “get back to that one” and to play with Pro Tools instead. As any fule kno, Pro Tools is a system whereby you can pick up bits of digital information (recorded sound in this case) and move them. Back, forward, up, down – whether or not there’s something going on here and we’d like to keep it hidden, we’ll try almost anything once, and no move is forbidden. Naturally we rely on the integrity of our performance, and so there is absolutely, and I want to get this straight, no manipulation of harmonies going on at all. Oh no. At one point I drift off and am woken by a conversation involving E flat (it’s not all glamour in the music biz you know). 

There are manipulations of red lines on the screen, mouse clicks, and a cutting and pasting frenzy to put all but the most active of pre-school playgroups to shame. In the end though, as in the days of tape, the result will be the same. A small boy holds out his work and says “Look. Look what I did today!”

As an adjunct, this is one of the tracks we were working on that day. 

https://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/incredible

Street Teams are made of this....

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the ‘Street Team’, it’s a promotional tool. Record companies realized some time ago that employing guys in satin tour bomber jackets (cf. Smashie and Nicey) to go around and give free singles to record shops and free drugs to Radio DJ’s wasn’t a really cost-effective way of bumping their records into the charts and, what with that interweb thingie taking over, could frankly be seen as a downright waste of money. A bit of a shame that, as when I worked in record shops I managed to snaffle a good few freebies, including being able to see Richard Thompson and Crowded House play live at The Borderline while I took advantage of the free bar, and also getting to see del Amitri on the second date of their tour to promote ‘Waking Hours’, which is one of my favourite albums ever. Anyhoo, the wheels came off the gravy train around the time that someone up in the eyries of the music biz (probably Simon Cowell or Louis Walsh) realized that it was going to be a lot cheaper and more effective to plant a few sleepers in amongst ver kids and let them get on with it themselves than to keep signing all those reps’ expense accounts. Hence a few net-savvy children got hauled aboard the promo express with the promise of exclusive access to the band, special signed posters, badges and a card on their birthday as long as they kept pimping the merch to their friends and peers on behalf of the industry. Not bad, eh, and let’s face it, who doesn’t like to be first on their block with the skinny? Some folk to this day are such unofficial founts of knowledge that their mates in bands know they don’t have to update their website as with a word to the wise their latest news’ll get round anyway – it’s the equivalent of that bit in Crocodile Dundee where they explain that if anyone’s got a problem they simply tell Wally and before too long everybody knows, hence it’s no longer a problem. It’s a win-win all round, ain’t it? Certainly back in the old days I had to send off a postal order and wait six weeks before the Status Quo Fan Club sent me anything like a badge, and then most of the time after that they just used to write to me and nag me to buy stuff anyway, so clearly this was a step forward for everyone. These days everyone’s got a Street Team. You know that nice Seth Lakeman - you’ve probably heard him on radio two or in the background on a trailer for something on the BBC – well he’s got a bunch of people casually dropping his name into conversations and (ahem) casually bigging him up on internet forums, and good luck to ‘im. I don’t generally really agree with this sort of malarkey – I’d prefer my recommendations to come from people who are genuinely interested in music of all forms and are delighted to highlight a gem they’ve found (that’s why we have critics) rather than someone pursuing their calling with almost religious zeal, shoehorning their subject in at every opportunity and wherever (in)appropriate (imagine the web forum equivalent of Jehovah’s Witnesses at your door or, as we refer to them, Marillion fans). But there we go – it's win/win, like I said earlier. One should be subtle though - no-one should suspect the neuro-linguistic programming what’s going on in their heads, and BUY THE SONGS FROM THE BLUE HOUSE CD ‘TOO’ ONLINE FROM OUR WEBSITE AT WWW.SONGSFROMTHEBLUEHOUSE.COM. Remember now, when it comes to Street Teams – easy does it…..

Here We Go, Here We Go, Here We Go….

Ah, 2007, welcome! A hint of fresh hope in the air, a farewell to withered ambition, a bright-eyed greeting through frost-cracked lips to a whole new gamut of possibilities. I love the smell of lip balm in the morning. It smells like victory. At any one time in the United Kingdom, there are approximately 2,042,677 so-called ‘unsigned’ bands either writing, recording, mixing, designing or promoting their new demo, or talking about really-seriously-getting-some-stuff-together-this-year; chances are you haven’t heard of any of them, and nor will you. Hello, I’m in one of those bands.

This year should see the release of our magnum opus, which is to be entitled ‘Tree’ (the first one was untitled, the second one was called ‘Too’, the next one will be called ‘Fore’ – do you see what we’ve done there?) and which has been in gestation for some months now, mainly due to the fractured nature of its recording. For a start, most of the members of the group have respectable day jobs, some have children, and a couple of others simply aren’t inclined to invest their allocated holiday days in fulfilling the grand vision of a couple of gentlemen of advanced years (in pop terms) who are just rude about them onstage when they turn up to gigs anyway. It gets especially tricky coaxing the guys into the studio about the time those Centre Parcs adverts start coming on the telly, for example. 

Coupled with the fact that we are only recording at all due to the good grace and munificence of a recording studio and venue owner who has rather taken to us for some reason and is hence not demanding that we mortgage the farm to pay for the whole thing, we are in no real position to demand that the studio be block booked for the summer and Jerry Douglas be summoned from whichever enormodome he is currently sound checking at in order to do that tricky solo in “Song V” for us, and hang the expense, let alone compensate most of the regulars for time in lieu, and so we are very much subsisting on the goodwill and wholehearted participation of all our musicians, engineers and friends who have been summoned down (or up tiddley up up) to darkest Essex on a blustery night because (say) the studio’s free and we need to get in and get someone to hit a wooden frog with a three inch length of dowel for three minutes to get a rhythm track going. 

Fortunately, the above roles have proved to be largely interchangeable and so it has been a happy process, if distributed rather over an unnecessarily ample breadth of time. By now, even I’m getting a bit antsy about how long it’s taking, even though in real terms we’re only just coming up to the second fortnight of actual recording work. This is a shame, as we were supposed to get it finished in three weeks. Still, you can’t rush genius (or hurry love apparently) and since this is a labour of certainly one or the other, depending on who you talk to, we have studiously been touching up bits here, dabbling in things there, and slowly crossing things off our big ‘To Do’ list one at a time until we have reached the point where these days you don’t have to squint so hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course once it’s finished, mastered, pressed, shrinkwrapped, signed, sealed and delivered, I’m yours. 

Seriously – we have to go out and play the bloody thing live, otherwise we’re going to end up with an awful lot less space under the bed, on top of the wardrobe or in the shed than we all had beforehand. Some of these people have kids, you know – they don’t actually have a spare room to store unsold copies in any more. Up until now we have polished our performing chops on the grazing afforded by a few “Acoustic Showcase” nights (typically twenty minutes if you’re lucky, tucked in between the set by the angstified young lady whose parents could afford piano lessons and the grizzled bloke from down the pub who took up guitar to fill in time when the ex finally got his access to the kids reduced to every third weekend), Beer Festivals (“Could you do three hour long sets, keep it down because people are talking and play something we know to finish off with?”) and the odd outdoor gig in the summer (“ I’m afraid there won’t be time for a soundcheck – tell you what, we’ll sort it out in the first number, oh, and we’re over running a bit so could you possibly drop a couple of numbers. The monitors aren’t working, by the way…”) all of which, naturally, we have begged to be able to play and most of which we have thoroughly enjoyed.

At them we’ve made friends, at a few we’ve been offered other gigs as a result, and at some we’ve even picked up band members. At one point we even won an award. It’s on the wall in my office. We’ve also done a few radio sessions, a couple of interviews and a photo shoot here and there, and so we’re not total strangers to reaping the promotional whirlwind. The days of spending a few weeks driving a few hundred miles or so in a Transit van to sleep on someone’s floor on the off chance of selling a couple of copies of our single or possibly picking up a contact here or there are pretty much beyond most of us these days though, physically if not financially. 

With great freedom comes great responsibility, but with a mortgage and Nursery fees to pay comes the need to be back in the office on Monday morning. Hence we have spent many, many hours already over the past couple of months trying to persuade promoters across the country that a non-too-pigeonholeable band that they’ve never heard of and who are determined to play their own songs are exactly what they need to open their weekend festival - on one occasion this involved the offer of half a dozen free tickets to a showcase gig, a DVD, three CDs and physically tracking down of the guy who picked the bands at another gig who quite reasonably responded that getting him to see us play was “our problem”. 

We have also been assuring enthusiastic volunteers (many of whom are players in exactly the same position as us vis-à-vis pursuing the grail of being able to give up the day job in order to spend their days accepting free instruments as part of their sponsorship deal with one hand while turning down offers to duet with Ronan Keating with the other) that miking up a six piece band with four vocalists is exactly what the sort of complication they need at their ‘acoustic’ night. In the final analysis and at heart though, we simply want to make the best music we can, anywhere we can, get it heard by as many people as possible, and if retiring to a Sussex farmhouse with state of the art recording studio in the converted stables on the proceeds is a result of same, then so be it. 

Luckily, and supportively, Mrs. Skirky enjoys the band’s music, recognizes that it’s good for a chap to have a hobby as it keeps his mind off the price of hair-thickening shampoo, and is also very keen herself on the idea of retiring to Sussex, notwithstanding that if there were a recording studio in the grounds she’d probably prefer to convert it back to being a stable. At times of artistic ennui, sighs of stress and contemplation on the machinations of intra-band politics, she is always there with a soothing word, a calming observation, and the phrase “When are you going to get your finger out and get round to writing that bloody Christmas novelty hit?”. 

This time next year, we’ll be millionaires.

“Another year over, and what have you done?"

The final lap of this year's journey through the pub rock underworld arrives with a gig in our home town on New Year's Eve Eve, and an opportunity to celebrate with friends, each other and people we don't know. The John Bull has us dripping with sweat after three songs and wondering where to go after five since a young lady has taken it upon herself to read the setlist at The Singer's feet and announce each song as it comes up. 

For some reason I take umbrage at this and we decide to skip one just to throw her off the scent. There wll be quite a lot of skipping going on during the course of the evening, both by us, who are having the time of our lives, and by a large and enthusiastic circle of Billy Bunters, who are determinedly also doing so. Everything is good natured, however, and after a few shouts and a good few Guinesses, The Singer and I decide that maybe a run through a Take That song really is just what the situation demands?

Fortunately the rest of the band are also game and, as ever, a cobbled together non-song gets the biggest cheer of the night. Still, it's not often that 'Back For Good' gets an outing, and doubtless theirs will be added to the list of CDs that an attentive fan has been collecting based entirely on our set list, which is a tribute of sorts and helps us feel that perhaps we really are putting something back, although how REO Speedwagon sits next to Graham Coxon in her collection is perhaps a matter for the more Gambaccini-minded amongst us. 

The party atmosphere takes over and we delve into singalong mode, to the point where we eschew traditional entertainment mores, take the Robbie route and simply let the crowd sing for us - they particularly enjoy an ad hoc 'All You Need Is Love' medleyed into 'Cum on Feel The Noize' which was certainly not on the set list I had. The New Drummer is bayed at to play his triangle, which he solos on admirably at one point before our chum Andy Trill takes the stage and simply rips through 'My Sharona' while I look on simultaneously awed and nervous - I have to go on again after him, after all and it's all I can do to handicap him with a long guitar strap, an unfamiliar amp and a guitar he doesn't like just to keep him in some sort of check. 

At last we close with an Undertones song and are let go. We don't really want to, but we've never been keen to outstay our welcome at the best of times. And this is the best of times. Five blokes, making a loud noise with bits of wood and wire and of skins and hearts. That's all we are, but at times like this it feels good. It feels better than good, it feels like home. We pack up the gear, we wish each other a happy new year. And we go home.

"What's That Coming Over The Hill...!?"

It's christmas - hence there has been jollity, there has been consumption of fizzy drinks, there has been football in ill-fitting footwear at a party and, consequently, there has been a guitarist-related head/brick wall interface scenario resulting in the sort of look that says to a casting director "Yes, this guy could play Phantom, and what's more, we could save a bundle on make up". Consequently I have been spending a lot of time on the sofa worrying whether an aneurism is on it's way, or whether I'm just going to have a lot of explaining to do at tonight's gig in Stow. Hence when I roll up to the show I'm still waiting for blackouts, spots before they eyes, sudden memory loss involving that tricky solo in 'My Sharona' or a good excuse as to why I have a rapidly developing black eye. As it happens, only the third example manifests itself and that turns out to be confirmation that everything is, indeed, completely normal this evening. We haven't played for a couple of weeks and so we ease our way into the set, a couple of safety standards leading our way, and the vagaries of the room highlighting the lack of a soundcheck that is the hallmark of a veteran pub band. There are marker pen reference points against all the knobs on my amplifier, and that's the usual starting point at all shows - that the 'lead' channel usually ends up a couple of turns to the right bears less relation to any fondness for 'The Time Warp' than it does The Singer's enthusiasm for the latter, more guitar-centric part of the set, where his rhythm parts take on behemothtastic levels of indulgence. Still, the look on his face and that I can embark on tasteful little sweeps and arpreggios with absolutely no possibility of anyone hearing them well make up for it. As I canter through the set I am pleased that my position stage left means that I am principally hiding my weeping cheek from the audience while concentrating on frettery and frottery - the usual posing has given way to my default posture of sub-Frankenstenian Neil Young lumbering with a side order of beer gut, and I am momentarily discomfited to notice that it looks like my sons are fronting the band, youthful and well-dressed as The Singer and The Other Guitarist are. Or at least look. Something else that has come to my attention is that my return to active service, or at least uprightness, has prompted a healing sudden rush of blood to the head which, although welcome in terms of putting to bed those feelings that The Pickerel may be about to witness a dramatic on stage collapse, also means that my nascent black eye is swelling alarmingly, and starting to edge up into my field of vision. At this rate of not having peripheral (ie fretwards) vision I'll be playing by memory alone, which has happened a couple of times - and a couple of times too many. I resolve to take in more fluids and hope for the best. And the best is what it turns out to be. The second set kicks off full bloodedly and we start to get into the zone - that special feeling where everything is locking together, everything's kicking in and all the stuff is coming off. It's not about packing up the car in the rain, the dodgy leads or the odd covers, or the knowledge that someone, somewhere out there is playing this solo a lot better than you ever could, it's about being out with your mates in a pub full of whooping people having a great time. Time flies. There's an encore, then another, then another, and we're having such a good time that we don't want to stop. Alright then, we will play that thing we haven't done for ages, just for a laugh. I tilt my head a bit further back just to keep an eye on any errant notes that may have hidden away below my eyeline and get cigarette smoke in said eye as a result. When we finally finish we realise that for a band that subscribes to the "two forty five minute sets" school of pub bandery we have just played the second 'half' for an hour and a thirty minutes and are still being asked for more. I have seen rock and roll future, and it's five blokes in a pub. It's a shame we don't still do 'Born To Run' - that'd have been a good punchline.

Heathen Chemistry

It was the best of times, the worst of times. Well, not quite that bad as to be literally ‘worst’, to be honest. Not as bad, for example, as the time we decided to do a gig in Stowmarket with our Beatles specialist band and precede each song with a recitation of the relevant entry from Ian McDonald’s seminal ‘Revolution In The Head’.

It may have been that which pushed them over the edge, or the first-set closing version of the (I believe) 1967 fan club-only flexidisc song “Christmas Time Is Here Again” (not one of their better known or artistically satisfying works, to be honest) but we were certainly let know in no uncertain terms that our outré approach to presenting the works of the mop tops was not appreciated. That and the “play some more, you fuckers” at the closing of the second set indicated that both the levity and brevity of our stagecraft left something to be desired. Everyone’s a critic, eh? 

So when we were contacted at a couple of days notice to fill in for a cancellation at a private party only for The Bass Player to reluctantly decline the opportunity to sit around toying with vol au vents for three hours waiting to go on for the second weekend in a row we probably should have thought again about the wisdom of approaching the evening as an exciting challenge. 

As it happened, The Singer and The Other Guitarists were posed mutely in a hotel room in Stoke and a charity fundraising dinner in Ipswich respectively, fingers hovering over the speed dial buttons on their mobiles, wondering if I had finally lost the plot by suggesting we could 'busk it'. Fate however intervened and those calls were never made. On such throws of the dice do the gods (possibly played by Larry Olivier) toy with our fates. 

On the surface, it should be a relatively easy task to accomplish – we’ve got three guitar players in the band and so one of them just shuffles across and fills the vacant space on stage and plays simply two fewer strings than he does ordinarily. How difficult can it be? That The Other Guitarist was originally a bassist of no little repute anyway (one early comment on our line up was that having him on guitar was like Ipswich Town putting Richard Wright up front instead of in goal, although subsequent developments in his career now suggest that that may not have been as silly a concept as it sounded at the time). A few set list conference calls later and we’d settled on a respectable run of numbers and although we had bowed to circumstance and included a few Beatles numbers (sans prologue essays) we stick firmly and proudly to our No Mustang Sally rule. 

We have been warned that there may be a few musicians in the crowd, always the toughest of people to play to, and at the sight of one legendary local entertainer I am both anxious that he may see through our hastily constructed facade and relieved that at least we can get him up for a good twenty minutes' worth of "Come Together" if things tail off later. It transpires that he is merely dropping party guests off in his current role as a cab driver. I am not sure whether this constitutes a lucky escape for him or for us. 

And then the wait begins for showtime. This, it transpires, is a tenth anniversary and Christmas party for a local firm run, it turns out, by a very nice man who also plays in a local band, and who is grateful for our turning up at short notice if nothing else. We have a few friends in common and he’s extraordinarily reasonable about the lack of a few numbers in the set, we chat about gigs, bands and all the minutae of musical life that occupies musos when they get together and he invites us to help ourselves to the buffet and call him if there’s anything we need. So far, so good. 

This particular ilk of office party is where you go to chat to colleagues, off-piste as it were, meet up with family members, talk to friends you haven't seen for a while and enjoy the sumptuous buffet at length. It is emphatically not where you go to drink booze and jump around to the band, especially one with as cobbled-together a repertoire as this, sounding as it does like the preliminary mixes of a particularly eclectic covers album that someone has forgotten to put the overdubs on. 

We are not exactly on a post gig high when a woman passes on her way to leave with her clearly embarrassed daughter in tow. “I loved your Haircut 100” she beams. “Bloody kids!” she adds, and is gone. Which brightens the mood a little. And so it is with almost religious fervour that we greet The Prodigal Bass (and keyboard) Player the next night at a compact and bijou (and scheduled) gig within hiking distance of at least two of the band members’ homes. 

The first order of the night hence goes out for two lagers, a Guinness, a JD & coke* and a lime and soda. Stalker Bertie, back from a trek around Europe following proper bands is in attendance and is sequestered into guitar roadieing duties - just as soon as he’s back from the bar - and there is a healthy assortment of WAGs, friends and people who’ve seen us before building up an anticipatory air to proceedings. 

As we begin a more familiar set that on the previous evening there is a palpable sense of relief that guitar parts are being filled, errant harmonies are back in place, and that all is well within the camp. The newly relaxed atmosphere leads to showboating, mucking about and further calls for lubrication from the bar, and we are back again as a tight and groovy little team, playing to our strengths and enjoying the vibe, as are our mutually appreciative audience. 

At the start of the second set our good friend Andy Trill gets up to lead the rhythm section (including The Other Guitarist back on his original bass playing duties) through a spirited Snow Patrol rocker to marvellous effect. Mr Trill is also a bassist of enormous ability and at one point comments on my efforts with the four string that he fears that it seems apparent that I may have been attacked by a bass as a child. I also perform the patented Dave Pegg plectrum on the forehead manoeuvre mid song, which makes me smile to myself, if no one else. 

We are in a noisy mood tonight, and so the punk stuff is to the fore – ironically, this would have been a much better approach to take last night, as our host had told us he was due out to support the UK Subs next year with his band but, oh, that special component, that whole, and it’s missing part. We won’t be trying that again. Tonight however the sound’s great, everyone is in good voice, the solos are coming off a treat, and all is well with the world again. I could have danced all night, and still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings and, hang on…

 *A post gig conversation runs thus - "I've only had five JD and cokes and I feel fine". "You do realise Pat got you a treble, don't you?"."I've only had eight JD and cokes and I feel fine..."

“It was a very good year...”

“Who’s in charge here?” A question like that this early in the evening can only mean one of two things – either we’re about to be handed an inordinate amount of money or we are to be informed of some restriction on our activities – either a line we have to stay behind, a sound level we must not breach or, as on this occasion, a dire warning about the state of ‘the electrics’. “We’ve got trouble with the electrics” a man informs us succinctly. We enquire further as to the nature of the ‘trouble’, mindful that we will be holding electric guitars for a period of time later, plugged into electric amplifiers and very possibly singing into microphones which are routed into a PA amplifier which, in turn, will be connected to the ‘electrics’ with which there are, apparently, ‘trouble’. “We’ve had problems with the supply, so if you could just plug in the bare minimum of stuff you need, that’d probably help”. We consider what the ‘bare minimum’ entails and reflect that the laser show spelling out the name of the band in fourteen foot high letter against the night sky will probably have to remain in the van. ”You should see our fuse board” he carries on mournfully, “charred black, it is”. The Singer and I exchange glances. “If the lights go down, who should we ask for?” he says, mindful of the need for calm heads in the event of a crisis. “If I were you I’d ask for an electrician” is the guileless reply.

We are in a good old-fashioned social club on the outskirts of our home town at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and setting up the gear in front of the regulation sparkly gold curtain and stashing instrument cases in a box room behind the stage which is festooned with stern notices concerning band running times and dark warnings about the abuse of the ‘one free drink for the band’ rule on Saturday nights in order to play at a birthday party for The Old Drummer’s Mum, an irony not lost on those of us who nodded sympathetically as he explained his reasons for leaving the band some weeks ago and are to share the stage with a conjuror, a choir, and The Old Drummer, who will guest behind the kit before closing the show with a bit of Frank Sinatra to a backing track, for which he needs simply a microphone and a stand to perform – a long way away from all that setting up of drums and stands and cymbals that he used to have to put up with on these sorts of occasions. I ask where he is. The Singer replies that he’s gone home as he forgot to bring a microphone and a stand with him. Any old irony? Any, any, any, old irony?

Later, as the room fills with the young and the old, the long and the short and the tall, The New Drummer, resplendent in his “Uzi does it” t-shirt, is setting up his drums and stands and cymbals in the midst of a swarm of ‘tweenagers, all variously helpfully tapping, crashing or tightening things around him. It’s like a post-My Chemical Romance ‘Lord of The Flies’ up there and he mouths “Help me!” silently toward the rest of us, now happily set up and recumbent (as all mindful bands at this sort of function should be) at a table conveniently close to where the queue for the buffet will start. We wave brightly back and reflect that it’s lucky he’s not wearing his glasses as surely by now there’d be one of the kids trying to use them to magnify one of the stage lights we’ve (recklessly, in view of the parlous state of the electrics) left shining brightly stage left (and which will later give one of the Choir a frankly demonic hue throughout her performance) before smashing them and leaving him crawling around, a pitiful mewling wreck in a circle of baying children, their faces painted with scary, primal patterns. Well, they start wearing mascara so early these days, don’t they?

A member of The Choir wafts past, resplendent in their purple stage robes. “I do wish you wouldn’t smoke” she sniffs at our Bass Player “It makes me feel sick!” Clearly she is of an age where you don’t have to introduce yourself to someone before being rude to them. At the bar, another member is polite enough to introduce herself first before asking someone what they think of the stage gear. “Er…very nice” replies the interogee, not sure what to say. “Really?” she replies “I think I look like Aladdin….”. The spectre of The Good Life’s Miss Mountshaft hangs eerily in the air. After the extensive buffet - we are back in our seats and chowing down on chicken drumsticks and nibbles and dips before The Choir has made its way half way across the dance floor toward the paper plates, although to be fair a good number of them are walking with the aid of sticks – we are treated to a selection of show tunes, a couple of pop numbers and some beat poetry of the Pam Ayres variety. Clearly the smoke inhalation has done Rude Lady no good at all, judging by her solo number, but you can always learn from a fellow musician, if only if it’s what not to do. Attempt a three octave song with a two octave range being the obvious example on display here. 

There is also a solo piano number featuring the overture from “Kiss Me Kate” which is an object lesson in how to put songs together, and is terribly well played. From our vantage point behind the charming and friendly young lady on the keyboard we can see the chords being played out with the right hand and the alternating bass notes and fills courtesy of the left. It’s fascinating and, being an overture, you get all the songs packed into one handy five minute package which in my own humble personal opinion is, frankly, the best way to ingest your musicals. It’s always a pleasure to be able to appreciate a talent first hand and see the magic which can be weaved with what (I believe) Fats Waller once referred to as ‘a handful of keys’. Our own, dear, Bass Player, who doubles as onboard keyboard monkey and whom I strongly suspect is several grades behind her in terms of exams is looking slightly less enthralled as he has to follow her by opening our set with a pop song in ‘E’ which he still hasn’t quite mastered satisfactorily. This, it will transpire, will be one of the three songs he is required to play this evening, thus making it one of the highest pound-per-chord evenings out he’s ever experienced, and if he can avoid the choristers now circling the room armed with charity collection buckets, he could be quids in on this one.

Once the chairs that the ladies have been resting on between exertions have been cleared from the stage (by us) it seems that the funky beat rhythms of The Scissor Sisters are not strictly to the tastes of the majority of our support act and they gather together their bags, shawls, fleeces and sheet music to their persons and sweep out majestically into the night, a squadron of song, an armada of Andrew Lloyd Webber. To be fair “Take Your Mama Out”, a deliberate choice to mark the occasion, isn’t strictly to the tastes of the band either, as The Old Drummer declines the opportunity to sing it on the grounds that it’s “fucking rubbish”. The things you find out about that you never knew about someone, really. He contents himself with some absent-minded percussion tapping, and some tambourine waving in the distracted style of someone who’s popped into the office where he used to work only to find someone else at his old desk and his workmates a bit too busy to sit and chat about how he’s getting on these days.

After a couple of numbers TND is however ejected affably from the stool and TOD takes his place behind the kit. Thus, similarly, The New Drummer seems to have spent more time as an unofficial children’s entertainer than he has as a drummer (and was not only more enthralling to the kids than the actual conjuror, but in his bow tie and dinner jacket combo, actually looked more like one too). The show closes with The Old Drummer’s big Sinatra number – mic in one hand, whisky and cigarette in the other, he croons like a good ‘un, living the dream, dinner jacket secured with a single button, the glittery curtain a suitably Vegas backdrop. We’ve been here five hours, for around twenty minutes of actual onstage playing time. Still, like the man says, that’s life.

"All back to the hotel, two birds each....."

Now, most of these blogs have a happy ending - a tiny triumph, an if you will, little victory - but it's not always like that. There are gigs where the highlight of the evening is that the leads haven't had beer spilt all over them, something you tend to only disover once you've coiled them up around your arm at the end of the night. We once had to make our way out of a pub armed with mic stands as makeshift offensive weapons after The Drummer sang a ribald alternative version of the chorus to "Something Stupid" at the wrong guy in the Gents (not as alarming as when our friend DJ Simon happened to walk into the toilet singing "Beautiful Stranger" that one time, but that's a different story). I was in a particularly chipper mood arriving at tonight's gig, having spent the day in a recording studio discovering the wonders that a magical thing called ProTools can perform on an ineptly played harmonica part and listening to a fiddle player weave marvellous parts around some songs that I'd been involved in writing. 

The previous evening I'd been in a pub listening to old timey down home singalongs and had woken up in my friend James's spare room with a cup of tea and a wet lurcher (the dog, not the gait) and this evening I'd partaken both of fried food and a Richard Thompson album on the way to the gig and so things, pretty much, were going as well as could be hoped for.

We were set up and ready to rock when a young lady approached the bandstand. The bete was about to turn noir. "Do you do 'Mustang Sally'?" she enquired. "No", I answered truthfully "We don't". "Why not?". "Because I hate the song and despise everything it implies about the lack of imagination and lazy easy hit attitudes of the worst kind of pub band" I responded. I always find that honesty is the best policy in these situations - it saves an awful lot of misunderstanding later on.

“But you could do it?" she persisted. "Yes. But we choose not to". That pretty much summed up the situation as far as I was concerned and I felt sure we could move on in our relationship - to the first song of the set perhaps, which was patiently waiting to be played at this point. "Well, people say I have a kinda okay voice and I could do it with you". "No". "You're just being a typical male now, aren't you?". She sure had a lot of questions on her mind, and here came another one. "Well what can you play?". I nodded toward The Singer's big book of lyrics cheat folder. "All those songs in there". I was still processing the information that a 'typical male' would be just the kind of churl to deny a girl the chance to sing "Mustang Sally" on a first date, which out of all the accusations I'd ever had levelled against me was way down the list - a long way behind not offering to pay for dinner, for starters (as it were). 

She regarded the ring binder acidly - "What are you, some sort of karaoke act?". I turned slowly to take in the two basses, four guitars, one drumkit, two keyboards and three microphones and complete lack of request slips we'd managed to arrange on the stage and considered that I may well have misinterpreted our role. Nope, I was pretty sure I was in a band. "No", I confirmed, "We're a band, definitely a band". "So, do you do any Beatles?". As it happens, we do sometimes, but I wasn't going to let the tricksy little minx get round me that easily. "No" I said. "Now go away". Typical male.

Three songs into the set, she approached again. No, we still didn't do any Beatles. We tried differing responses. The Singer's "Umm, I'm actually working at the moment" cut no ice. "Please go away" from The Other Guitarist didn't really cut the mustard. "Look, do I come up to you at work and start telling you where to put the gherkins in your burgers?" provoked only a desultory "How did you know what my job was, anyway?". "A lucky guess". From the bar came a pleading "Leave them alone, it's not your show, it's theirs". Now there was someone who wasn't getting extra relish on his hot dog tonight. In the break we were informed that we were quite good but our stagecraft wasn't up to much. It's nights like these you live for. 

And then the people came. It's amazing what a turnaround in fortune can be provided by the bar upstairs at chucking out time (thank you so much Bouncing Off Concrete for being so good that nobody left your gig to check out the group downstairs....). Suddenly, rather than having a good chance at beating the entire audience at a pick up band vs. audience kickabout there were people dancing, and shouting, and clapping, and whooping. You knew the happy ending was coming, didn't you? By the time the second encore came around we were throwing shapes (there's your stagecraft), odd covers (has she gone, great let's do that Beatles song we had up our sleeves all the time) and whacking our way through a double speed Waterboys cover we hadn't previously tried with The New Drummer which provoked whoops, frugging, a free drink from the bar, oh, and a fight.

As I wound up the leads I was happy to discover that no-one had spilled beer on them. We come, we go, we play. We have fun with our friends we play the songs we like and we make a loud noise that makes people drink and dance until the early hours. Is that such a bad way to spend our evenings? We could be more accomodating when it comes to requests, I suppose, but all we really want to do is ride them, sadly, ride.

We definitely ate the bear......

Some nights it all comes together. It's loud, it's hot, the sound of your guitar is exactly what you want it to be at every turn, those little licks you try come off, everybody plays out of their skin, there's a girl dancing at the front like nobody's watching, someone hands you a beer, the audience are singing and clapping and grinning, the set flows like a river, suddenly the skinny fit jeans and Converse don't feel like an affectation and every shape you throw feels like you were born to it. Last year I was in London watching Keane when the singer announced that there was no better feeling than playing 'Bend or Break' in Hyde Park to a girl on her boyfriend's shoulders with her tits out, and at the time I believed him. Tonight Tom, I'm not so sure you were right. Or as The Other Guitarist said after the gig, grinning like a darned fool. "Where the fuck did that come from?!?!?"

"Back in the garage...”

There’s nothing more likely to bring a smile to the attention-starved musician’s lips than the word ‘rehearsal’. This, it should be said, isn’t strictly true in some cases. It’s a broad-faced lie, in fact, especially when it comes to me. I can’t see the point, I mean it’s not like you’re going to get a round of applause or anything, is it? And isn’t that the idea? The show-off must, after all, go on. And you have to pay for the privilege. 

Although there are bands who like nothing more than the regular routine of the Thursday night run through the set followed by a quick couple of goes at a new song and then knocking off in time for last orders (I used to be in one myself and it was marvelous fun at the time, and I believe James Brown follows a similar routine when not on the road) we are not a group renowned for our rehearsive habits. Folk in Stowmarket, for example, still talk in hushed, awed tones of the version of ‘Rubber Bullets’ we attempted on the back of two quick acoustic run-throughs at which no more than sixty per cent of the band were present at any one time.

This was an unfortunate aberration as usually this tried and trusted method allows new songs to at least limp in to the set before being fine-tuned over subsequent performances until by about the fourth or fifth time we play them, they have gained magnificent lives of their own. Or they are discreetly dropped to the bottom of the list, whichever seems more appropriate. Suffice to say, our 10CC repertoire has a separate piece of paper to itself these days. 

That method also explains why it is very rare to hear of any band member actually listening to any of the songs we perform live for their personal pleasure. On one occasion The Singer was so frightened by listening to ‘Band On The Run’ at home, and the hideous shape we’d twisted it into, that he took fear and threw it as far away as possible. What with The New Drummer having done his homework and rather confusingly having decided to play what’s actually on the original recordings rather than what ought to be, it has been decided that we should convene properly to thrash a few of these things out, figuratively if not literally, and it’s a three line whip – with one exception. 

We will not be joined by The Other Guitarist who, having methodically checked everyone’s availability, sourced a rehearsal room and negotiated a deal for its hire, finally put the phone down on the last transaction only to remember that he was supposed to be in Stoke that night. This is another reason why the regular weekly practice session has fallen out of fashion. Our real, grown up lives intervene, and we find ourselves taking kids to piano lessons, escorting them to quasi-military religious rallies (Boys Brigade, I believe they call it), stock checking electrical components in Brighton, being on planning business in Milan or, in this case, being called to Stoke. 

There are worse things than rehearsal, clearly. We are issued with a closely-typed email detailing what we need to run through. Worryingly, this seems to comprise a large percentage of the set and it seems that we will be enjoying the delights of an ex-carpet workshop long in to the night while our absent friend in the north settles back with the contents of the mini bar and a selection of premium-rate hotel TV movies. Which of us is living the rock n’ roll dream now, eh? Practice commences in time-honoured fashion. Three of us have a fag outside while we wait for The Drummer to turn up. 

He phones from a nearby McDonald’s and kindly takes the time to ask if we need any apple pies before promising to be there shortly. Once he’s in and set up proceedings continue as they have from time immemorial – I sit and play with the presets on the keyboard and try to find silly noises, and play some very bad Depeche Mode riffs. To vary proceedings I then try Axel F, and once this has been completed to everyone’s satisfaction we stretch out by trying The Icicle Works’ ‘Understanding Jane’. Needless to say, this is not part of our homework but it’s a blast, so we play it anyway. Once gathered towards the highlighted set list we diligently work our way through, playing things twice, going back over intros, sorting out some errant chords that have become ingrained through repetition and explaining drum fills in the usual way – “It sort of goes doof-de-doof doof blam” to a clearly perplexed drummer. 

A handy mnemonic for one run round the kit (it’s the intro for ‘down under’ as well as many other things) goes “flats in Dagenham”. This was once the subject of a mildly amusing mid-song fill when one batteriste of our acquaintance got as far as the part in question at a gig and then forgot the name of the town. He answered our queries afterwards by explaining that he’d been playing “houses in Chelmsford” in error. Insert your own drummer joke here…. After a while it’s actually fun – it’s a bit raw, a bit loose, and we’re suddenly fourteen year olds again, back in the garage and reveling in the joy of making really loud noises with electrical equipment for our own amusement - so much more fun than power tools and piano lessons. A final run through something a bit more familiar, just to reassure ourselves that we do really know what we’re doing, and a quick check as to what time we need to be at the venue and we’re done. 

These days we don’t need to wait outside for our parents to pick us up – basses are hoiked on to child seats, briefcases shunted aside to make room for amplifiers, and project folders shifted aside so that guitars have room on the back seat. And finally; The Drummer’s apple pie has cooled down enough for him to be able to eat it.

1992 and all that.....

Of course, while I'm out folking about, the business of Picturehouse continues. Here, The Singer explains what goes on behind my back....


While our Picturehouse Big Band colleagues Skirky and Gibbon are plying their trade (their particular trade being better described as a “folky-country-bluegrassy mix of original songs”) at an acoustic evening in Colchester, Kilbey and Wendell, watched by drummer Frisky Pat, are preparing to play as an acoustic duo for the first time in about two years. 

The venue is a country pub on the high street in Bramford, just outside Ipswich, run by good friend Noisy Jane, and attended by locals with a smattering of various band wives and friends.We’re feeling a little nervous. Having not played this set of songs for a while, and being used to having a wall of noise behind which to hide any hesitant chords or backing vocals, this gig seems to present more than the usual set of worries. But on the plus side, neither of us are driving home, and the traditional nerve sweeteners of Guinness and JD / coke are available in abundance.

We start off with a couple of our old faves and before we know it we’re half way through the first set and each song has been greeted with a fair amount of appreciation. Before playing the next song I decide to tell the attentive audience about the time that I, along with Skirky and Gibbon in one of Skirky’s bands called Gods Kitchen (with no apostrophe), supported an up and coming band by the name of Dodgy, whose song ‘Staying Out For the Summer’ we are about to play. 

The crux of the story is that despite a fair amount of publicity, only 5 people turned up to see the show, which left us playing to these 5 plus the main band and them playing to the 5 plus us. As I’m recounting the story, I mention that, I think, this all happened in 1991. “No, it was 1992.” Shouts one of the audience. After I’d asked how he could be so sure, he said “I was one of the five.”What are the chances? 

At the break I go and find this guy to check if he was actually just having a bit of a joke. Charlie, as his name turns out to be, is indeed telling the truth, and we chat for most of the break about other gigs we’d both been to in our home town and he requests that we do a Smiths song in the second set. As we don’t know any, he has to make do with a Starsailor song (no, really!) and seems happy with this.

At the end of the show one of the locals approaches us and asks if one of the guys sitting with the band friends is really the keyboard player for Fish – him out of Marilion. We explain that not only is he the keyboard player, but also co-writer on a lot of Mr Fish’s last couple of long players. “I’d hoped so,” replies the pleased local, “I bought him a drink and got him to sign this bit of paper. Should get something for it on E-Bay.”

As we pack up the gear, Frisky Pat is telling us that we need some percussion (“You won’t even know that I’m there” he explains), and we drain our drinks before being driven home by the very sober Mrs Wendell, who tells me that I should choose any of the other backing vocal lines for one of the songs. Any that is, other than the one I actually sang. Harshest critics and all that… 

P---------------------------------------------------------
http://www.wendellio.blogspot.co 

"Someone's throwing sand at the moon...."

It is one of those periodic fallow times for Picturehouse (frankly, if The Drummer was looking for some time off due to pressures of gigging relentlessly, consensus is he left the wrong group) which enables me to spend time with my other musical interest, Songs from The Blue House, a moveable feast of a collective of mainly acoustic musicians playing a folky-country-bluegrassy mix of original songs and whom some of the members of Picturehouse refer to as my “proper group”. Oddly enough, as members of SftBH do when referring to Picturehouse, as it happens. The combo has been invited to celebrate John Peel Day in the company of a couple of other turns in a converted church – the very same one which saw the departure of The Drummer a few weeks ago - and as we gather under the vaulted ceiling a friend remarks that the last time she was in here she was at a mate’s wedding and it felt very different “with all the tables and stuff”. I mention that the last time I was here it was for a wedding and agree that yes, it did feel very different. As the players slope in, I strike up a conversation with Sound Man Marky – always a good move early on in the proceedings, especially with the number of things we need DI* connections for – and ask him how it’s going so far. “Well…”, he reflects world-wearily “…I set the fackin’ PA up and there was all sorts of fackin’ crackles and shit goin’ on so I switched a few leads round and it still fackin’ crackled like a bastard and then I moved across to switch another couple o’ connections and tripped over the bleedin’ stage box”. “…and!?” I wonder out loud. “That seemed to fix it” he says happily. “You’re gonna need shitloads of DI’s, aren’tcha?” I confirm that yes we are indeed going to need ‘shitloads’ of DI’s, and four vocal mics too. For an ‘acoustic band’, it generally takes an awful lot of wires and electronics to get us heard anywhere beyond the front row. “I was afraid you’d say that”. He finishes off his cigarette with a deep pull and his features take on a steely and yet faraway expression as he reaches a satisfactory conclusion to his ongoing internal debate. “I’ll get some shit out’ the van”.
The turn on before us is a young bass/drums/piano combo called Making Eyes at Elvis who are sparky, spunky, quite, quite brilliant and quite obviously destined for far greater things in life than opening a charity gig on a Thursday night in Ipswich. As our MC for the evening announces that the last time he’d introduced the band he’d been mercilessly heckled by the band’s entourage there are “Ah, that’s where we’ve seen him before!” nods between the band members over his shoulder before they kick robustly into a series of driving, complex and quite possibly lyrically brilliant (it’s hard to tell) songs which should have them recording bad cover versions in the Jo Whiley live lounge before they’ve even had time to decide which support tour to turn down because they’ve got A-levels to revise for. They, clearly, are aware of this already as post-set congratulations are accepted in a shrugged “yeah, and your point is…?” kind of way, seemingly as if they have more important people to listen to. Which I’m sure they probably do. Or maybe I’m just the wrong demographic, or maybe they’re just shy. Still, they seem happy enough to borrow both the drum kit and our bass amp, so perhaps it’s just that they like to travel light and with this in mind, in the way of the young folk these days, once they’ve done their set they’re packed up and on their way. Well, why would you want to bother hanging around to watch anyone else play when you could be home in time to catch the end of ‘Extras’? I feel like I should be compiling a tome on old-fashioned band etiquette. The least they could do is hang around outside and smoke for a bit after all, like we’ll do later with the headline act
One of the diversions of having to smoke outside the venue is that we have been able to listen to the band play inside while watching local salsa clubbers entwine themselves around other of their constituent members’ limbs in the glass-sided atrium nailed to the front of the building, in a sort of oddly coherent pastiche video style. The jumping skittered piano, whip crack drums and rumbling bass riffs of M.E.A.E. post a heady backdrop to the fluid moves and snake-hipped twistery of the dancers, making up what looks like a BBC 1 trailer as edited and mixed by Damon Albarn in one of his more art school moments. It also makes it tremendously entertaining getting through to the toilets. How the smokers during our set felt about the same thing occurring is unrecorded. We, for our part, had fun on stage, having whipped a couple of less-frequently performed things from the repertoire out of our pockets and enjoying our intro from Simon-from-The Urban Sofa** a bit more than the youngsters did (“When I first met this next band they were arguing over which idiot had booked them to play at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. Since then their choice of venue has, if anything been even more inspired. Potters Bar Dog Borstal, the deep-sea research vessel “Albatross”, B&Q and the Millennium Stadium have all played host to their uniquely wonderful style of music…”). The next day reviews were good, everybody played well, and Marky’s gaffa-taped on stage box, stuffed to the gunwales with bouzouki leads, banjo DI’s and cables from mic’d up bass cabinets and fiddle delay pedals held out long enough for us to finish the set with ‘Risk’, singer James’s weary affirmation of hope for the future and celebration of new life. As we hit the last chorus I look up to the far end of the venue, and notice where the neon lights of the insurance building next door are shining through the stained glass window left over from the building’s previous incarnation – “A life that wasn’t yours” I sing to myself from one of our earlier songs. And I think of all these little pieces. Tiny fragments.






*direct input from an internal pickup, ie you don’t stick a microphone in front of it and hope for the best.
** www.theurbansofa.co.uk

"The King is dead! Long live The King!"

 

I roll up at saturday  to the works open day, where we have been employed to provide a musical backdrop to the raffle, a selection of stalls, some tours of the factory and a surprising number of scouts, some of whom are desultoraly wandering around having accessorised their uniforms with sneakers, skinny fit jeans and long keychains and have doubtless already achieved their 'emo' badges, very probably with distinctions. 

The Suffolk School of Samba are occupied drumming, dancing and generally enhancing the hangover experience under the bright sunshine and not one, but two trailers have been lined up side by side to provide our stage. Another band have provided PA and are also to play and are soon battling with the other attractions, not least a display by the company fire officers, who are regularly setting alight a pan of chemicals and then demonstrating how best to extinguish it, which on a site which expressly forbids the use of cigarette lighters and mobile phones for fear of igniting an explosion seems cavalier at best. Luckily there are also some members of both the Territorial and The Salvation Armies at hand, so all bases seem pretty well covered in terms of providing extra assistance in case things do go awry. 

Marvista, for it is they, play a punchy set of rock classics punctuated at every tween-song break by the dulcet tones of the site announcer urging folk to take the tour, buy some raffle tickets or visit the site waste disposal area over the PA before reminding them that they are being entertained by the band who are playing "in a pub style". The New Drummer suggests that we all go and have our faces painted and perform our set as tigers, an idea which is given serious consideration before being politely declined, as is his second suggestion that we engage in some Greco-Roman wrestling prior to the gig to stir things up a bit. At least he's contributing. 

The band finish and clear the stage of their equipment including, unfortuntely, the mics for the drum kit and guitar amps and also the vocal mics, however we have our own bag o' leads to hand and jury-rig a quick backline sound. This does rather leave The New Drummer having to make himself heard acoustically over the noise of the PA through which everyone else is playing, but he seems unfazed and approaches the task at hand with gusto. 

It's a nice day, we're on a trailer, we're having fun, and so who really cares if the car park audience are mainly transient? The lure of the waste disposal area has clearly become too much for a few people, and the lure of afternoon tea too much for a few stallholders who, some tired of handing out leaflets for free gym sessions (we weren't sure if we were being deliberately targeted but the exchange "Are you fit, then?" - "No, Tracy's the fit one" - "I beg to differ my dear..." was another of TND's contributions to the afternoon's entertainment) start packing up. 

The Scouts, to a be-woggled girl, boy and man, bravely hang on to the finish. As we prepare for our final big crescendo the announcer, who has been AWOL throughout our set, reappears, elegantly coiffed and resplendent in pastel green slacks, matching socks and wearing sandals to announce that it is time for the raffle to be drawn. 

Our stint, apparently, is over. Well, it's been a nice day out, I've earned more in an afternoon from the company than I have from the previous six years' performance-related bonuses (whether that says more about me than about the firm is a moot point) and so we pack up, up and away, content that for once we'll be home in time for tea and Final Score. The TA have loaded up their lorry, the winner of their own personal competition gets to ride the Steve McQueen-esque camouflage green motorcycle home, the last of the balloons in the balloon race are released to the skies and the afternoon has one, final, glorious postscript. The winning raffle tickets are announced over the public address speakers and prize recipients come forward to claim their booty from the stand. "....and on the yellow, winning ticket number 173. Has anyone seen Mike Hunt....?"

"...and on that bombshell....."

We have another wedding reception to play. As per normal we have strongly advised both bride and groom to come and see us in a pub environment prior to the big day and warned them that, possibly minus a bit of Radiohead and plus a bit of Beatles, that's what they'll be getting. We're not a cabaret band, we don't do requests and we don't turn the PA back on after we've finished so that the chief bridesmaid can make an announcement. Not since that time one of them slurred "But i's very important - jes' wanna tell evryone tha' I splept with th' groom las' week...." although, believe me, we were tempted. Especially after The Bass Player said "Did she say 'the groom' or 'the bride and groom'?". These details can be important. So we turn up at the appointed (and anointed) venue, a decommissioned church, still used for spiritual matters but doubling as a conference, exhibition and meeting centre, although according to the sign outside "Revelations is cancelled on saturdays for further notice". The Bass Player is comforted by the inference that tonight's gig will be mercifully undisturbed by any apocalyptic horsemen, not least because I imagine they'd leave a terrible mess on the carpet. We have arrived bright and early to set up but find that the stage is already occupied by the pub rocker's sworn enemy and only natural predator - The Dixieland Jazz Combo. The Drummer is freaked out enough by clowns, so you can imagine what the sight of half a dozen MU members in blazers and toting such things as banjos does to him. They affably explain that they didn't know that there was another band playing tonight, but they'll be off at eight, which will give us plenty of time to set up before we start at nine, and there's still time to catch the second half of the England game at the nearest pub. This all sounds terribly reasonable and so we retire for coffees and cigarettes and a discourse on Peter Crouch's scoring record, at The Plough. The Drummer also has something on his mind. He has a beautiful gifted and attentive partner* and is charged with the care of three beautiful children, all of whom he hardly ever sees, has a way stressful day job to which he has to devote many hours of his own time, and on top of that goes out several thursday, friday and saturday nights a month with a bunch of guys who make him play 'American Idiot' and then 'I Fought The Law' in quick succession without a fag break in between. And at his age? Something's got to give, not least because it's rumoured that his golf handicap is also suffering. It's been building for a while and so we are not entirely surprised when he announces that this will be his last performance with the band for the forseeable future. And he might be losing his hair, but he's got great eyesight. Coffee cups are clinked. We go back to the venue and set up. The Drummer points out that this place "sucks the bass out of things". It's not a metaphor, the sound is odd. Three songs in we play a John Lennon song we've learned especially for the occasion at the Groom's behest and I shudder quietly to myself at how easily a "no requests" principle can be quickly neutralised by the application of ready cash. Perhaps it's the venue (although the huge organ** intro to one song sounds especially dramatic given the surroundings), perhaps it's occasion, perhaps it's the sunshine the starlight or even the boogie, but I keep drifting off. Regular viewers will be aware of my penchant for shape-throwing at pertinent points of shows, but there really is something especially wonderful about windmilling a chord in a Who song and having a wild drum fill punched into the crowd by The Drummer at the same time. We don't do any Free, but sometimes when I've been hitting a hanging barre chord on the Les Paul (roots ad fifths only, no thirds) leaning close up to the hi hat and locking in with the bass drum I really have thought "Were Kossoff and Kirke like this on Top of the Pops in the seventies?" - that we were probably playing 'The Bends' at the time needn't impinge on my reality, any more than the stuffed moose's head hanging from the ceiling over my head had to. During a slow Coldplay number I remember that when I did my first ever stand up solo singer-songwriter gig it was supporting The Drummer's band*** and when we finish I'm sorry that it wasn't in a frenzy of thrashing guitars, bass drones and Moonist fills around the kit, just that we had served our purpose for the evening and foks had mostly either disappeared for a cigarette outside or gone on to a club. And so this is how it ends. Not with a bang, but with a wedding. We are in the town centre, and rowdy crowds pass us by on their way to club land as we are packing up, many seasonally underdressed. Two girls dressed as Playboy bunnies totter past unsteadily. A man in a wedding suit nudges The Other Guitarist. "You can see their tails from here.....". Back in the venue, a very small boy clambers on to the stage, unsure of himself and looking for reassurance from his father, who urges him forward. The Drummer hands him a set of beaters, settles him on the stool, and watches happily as the child swooshes a few cymbals, delighted at the noise. I can see him thinking to himself - "My art will go on".



*Hi Trudes. x
**Oh stop it.
***It's alright, he doesn't die in the end, this is all just flashbacks. He's fine.