"Just gimme some of that rock n' roll muzak!"

 I have a fear of corporate gigs. It’s not just that the idea of being the background to a bunch of company drones trying desperately to neck as much expense account vodka and feel up the girl (or boy) from HR as is conceivable in as short a time as is humanly possible, no, it’s based on pure, true, human experience. 

Back in the day when I was in a Beatles specialist band called The Star Club we generally had a whale of a time. I recorded at the BBC’s studio in Maida Vale, doing the same songs the Fabs had done, and eating in the same canteen that Jimi Hendrix had presumably got a similarly poor full English fry up after his session, and I’d met the original bass player from The Quarrymen who told us we had the spirit of the band. We also had a couple of stalkers, and a matching set of polo neck sweaters (to each other, not the stalkers). We were, however, a working band and as such were once booked as company entertainment at a corporate do in Ipswich for a firm I’d worked for previously, wherein was promised fun, frolics, a disco, and a little surprise cabaret turn. 

Once we’d got over the astonishment and indignation involved with the caretaker putting out the chairs being Ipswich Town F.A.Cup-winning goalscorer Roger Osborne, we settled into our role for the evening, that being to provide two sets of rollicking early-era Beatles music and not being too obvious in hoovering up the buffet. At our first break, we realised quite early on during the cabaret interlude that this was to be a home-grown affair. Three lads from production lined up on stage and the telltale strains of Tom Jones’s version of “You Can Keep Your Hat On” powered from the PA like a doom-laden harbinger of excess and, sure enough, half way through the first chorus, the climactic scene from The Full Monty was being replayed before our very eyes. 

The thing is, Randy Newman writes a good song, and he takes time to get there, and so having peaked (as it were) quite early in the number the lads were desperately looking for somewhere to go to take their performance higher. Stage left, the one who looked like a slightly out of condition Frank Carson (hello Jamie!) took to the idea of grabbing one of our guitars and miming along to the song with it. Backstageleft, our John shuddered visibly and looked around for a towel (later to be discarded for ever) with which to wipe it down before he had to strap it on to play the second set. I took a break from proceedings to visit the toilet and was intrigued by the dozen-strong queue outside the disabled toilet. “ has promised blow jobs as long as her knees don’t give out!” announced one chirpy temp, happily sinking another gratis Stella.

 When I came back from the Gents I noticed that the queue had gone down by three. As it were. Fun, fun, fun you might think as, indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, I do. But when you’re completely straight-down-the-line sober on lime and soda, and wondering whose cock has been wiped up and down the back of your 335, it’s no party, I can tell you. And at this point I’d already been told that my mic had been up Max Splodge’s bottom at a previous engagement by the sound crew. Still, we’d seen Backbeat, and somehow this seemed just a validation of our quest for authenticity - drugs, hookers, seedy characters, cup-winning goalscorers.... Still, we were all grinning during the first chorus of “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” after the break. But that ain’t unnecessarily so.

"I think you'll find one drops 'in' to reception, not 'along'...”

It as become apparent to James and Myself over the past few gigs that the original concept of a nice little acoustic band has morphed slightly, specifically at the point where we are engaged in setting up the third of three onstage monitoring systems in addition to the front of house PA. 

Well, 'stage' and 'house' are terms which don't really apply so much as 'gazebo' for we are at another al fresco lunchtime engagement, this time for the Mid Suffolk District Council's open day, where the good tax payers of Needham Market can enjoy face painting, live music and tours of the Chief Executive's office, chair-sitting included. It's a nice little fete-like occasion which is enlivened by the presence of a police car which periodically emits siren howls and a fire engine, which doesn't. The boys (and girls) in the smart blue overalls of the fire service are wont to occasionally set fire to a chip pan, resulting in a vast plume of flame and smoke, before demonstrating their party trick of extinguishing it which on a non-smoking site seems a little gauche. 

Still, it gives us something to watch as we embark on a marathon hour and a half set in the overcast morning, the prework on the gear resulting in a lovely clear sound both engazebo and across the site. We have TT with us on piano today and his trills and flourishes lend a splendid extra musical palette to our performance and we are enjoying the day, the company and, as we play Then There Was Sunshine, the sun itself breakng through the clouds. Gibbon, on bass, is struggling with the concept of a non-mid set fag break, and so when Shelagh, Fiddly's wife, presents the band with a piece of cake each from the stall, he is keen to enjoy it immediately, emboldened perhaps by the sight of TT playing sparkly arpreggios with one hand and eating a burger with the other. And they say men can't multitask. 

We go for Song V, where Gib doesn't come in until half way through the first verse and he accepts the challenge of finishing a large wedge of chocolate cake before resuming playing and, like a pro, manages the timing perfectly, although I do have to dep on the backing vocals, what with him having adopted a hamster-like aspect with regard to his cake-storingly large cheeks. A great set, a lovely day, and nice to see our friend songwriter David Stevenson who has made his way down the A14 from Cambridge to see us, calling in at Felixstowe on the way, If you know anything about East Anglian geography you will realise that this is quite a serious overshoot, matched only by Tony Winn's effort one year on the way to Farnsfield where he was enjoying both the open topped sports car he was in and Bob Dylan on the stereo so much that it was around twenty miles on before he realised he should have turned off some twenty five miles ago. 

Gibbon and I then relocate to our separate  homes for a quick nap before setting up in the evening to play with Picturehouse - the rest of SftBH are reconvening at TT's for a Big Pink-like evening of merriment and jammery, but The Bass Player and I have our regular gig at The John Bull to go to. As comparisons go, these are considerable - PHBB have a set of doughty covers to perform although, as ever, you can't please all the people all the time. At the break one individual regards our set phlegmatically. "Do you just do the ones on this list?" he asks. "Pretty much" I reply, although since we're all in a good mood there may be room for negotiation. "What did you have in mind?" I offer. "Just, well, something nice" he replies sadly. "I've just got to go and talk to some of those people over there" I say. 

Nice is as nice does really, for we have ended the first set with Kilbey's son Liam and a friend joiningh us onstage for a splendid version of Razorlight's Vice. If there were any nerves, they weren't showing and the lad's insouciant teenage demeanour must surely contain as much pride as his father's openly beaming one does. It's a proud and happy moment, and cameras are well in evidence. I duck out of the way so that proud mother Clara doesn't have to keep explaining who the old guy in the Hawaiian shirt is to her neighbours. 

On with the second set and another guest pops up in the form of birthday-celebrating chum Andy Trill, who will be standing in for me later in the year while I'm away. A disturbingly good guitar solo later and he's back off to nurse his post-party hangover once more. Mind you, if he thinks he's suffering, it's nothing to what the audience have to put up with during the end of the set encore. Weighty rock tomes may well postulate at length on the liberating influence of atonal jazz mavericks like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman on popular rock music, but there's no place for it in the solo to My Sharona. Then it just sounds like someone improvising badly. 

Or perhaps just playing the wrong string. Or, as I prefer to maintain, in the words of the great Eric Morecambe "I am playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order....". It's a shame - that was the only song on the list that the guy in the break thought was 'nice'.

“Lookin’ out at the road rushin’ under my wheels”

One of the issues in forming “a nice little acoustic band – we’ll just roll up and play” is actually getting some places to play in the first place. Back in the early days of Songs from The Blue House, when James, Gibbon and I staged a series of pre-emptive raids on beer festivals and acoustic/songwriters nights this wasn’t so much of an issue, as since we only had half an hour’s material anyway, we were able to either get up and do our thang and get out of the way before anyone noticed it was the same six songs we’d played last time or drag up whatever other stuff we could remember which meant that the set became mainly covers anyway, and besides, who doesn’t love a rip-roaring acoustic version of I Wanna Be Your Dog to close the evening? 

These days, now that the line up has grown to the point where there are around half a dozen of us on a quiet day, such guerilla tactics aren’t always so possible or indeed permissible, and so we find ourselves settling into whatever surroundings we can and then settling back to enjoy the ride, wherever it may take us. Hence, only recently, we’ve played a birthday party in a village hall in Northamptonshire where we turned up early and then drove for five miles in each direction trying to find a pub that was open before realizing that there was one next to the venue, albeit one that didn’t open until seven and for which you had to book in advance if you wanted a burger making up. 

We have also been on the back of an open-sided trailer in a park attempting to communicate with a sound engineer who is a good hundred yards away and who has no direct means of contacting the group other than an odd sort of pidgin sign language (a carrier pigeon with sign language would have been handier) and who has to come out of his mixing tent to actual see where we’re pointing to things that we can’t hear (I know – “a nice little acoustic band”, we said) . Being a park, and with a parkie’s responsibilities being what they are, they locked the toilets at bang on half five. The lads who’d spent all afternoon in the beer tent weren’t best pleased, apparently. 

There was the beer festival in Little Totham where it had been raining torrentially all morning. When we turned up there was a boat in the back garden, which indicated a level of preparation of Noah-esque proportions on somebody’s part at least. Having decided against risking it with elements by setting up in the garden we managed to cram two guitarists, a banjo player, a small p.a. system, and a bass player into the area next to the restaurant, a space about eight feet square and from which we’d had to move the spare cutlery and the salad for the barbecue before we could fit the mic stands in. “Right” said James “So where shall we put the piano….?” 

It was a good gig actually – the closeness and intimacy of the thing made it so that we were all playing together and off each other rather than performing our parts by rote, as being on the back of flat-bed trucks unable to hear what anyone is playing is wont to encourage. I was so into it by the last song that I didn’t notice that the rest of the band had retired to the restaurant and were accompanying my vocal from there, including a game TT, of whom only an extended forearm and hand could be seen playing a few low chords on the black notes. It was like being accompanied on keyboards by Thing from The Addams Family. They were very good about dropping into an unannounced Bob Dylan number mid-chorus and even a departure into some Buffalo Springfield didn’t throw them. Shaney let me follow you down, as it were. 

And last week we got a plum gig with the rather marvellous Derrin Nauendorf at a club in Chelmsford. Wendell came down for the trip and we were pleased to be able to greet Derrin’s drummer Mark outside the venue with an East Angularly drawled “Yew wanna git yower hair cut boiy!” (Marky sports an impressively perky Mohican at all times). “What the f*** are you doing here?” he responded, not unreasonably not expecting a couple of homeboys from the ‘hood (or pasture, in Ipswichian terms) to be pulling up at his gig. “We’ll be your support act for the evening!” we chirruped. 

Another fun night – a promoter working tirelessly to put on some good music in his town, bringing in veterans of Radio 2 and Glastonbury, American touring bands and up-and-coming singer songwriters just starting to make an impact on the scene, organizing the promotion, sound and lights himself and spending his evenings organizing flyers and promotion. There must have been fifteen people there. It’s not all Shea Stadium, ligging with Sting and all back to the hotel with two birds each for these guys, you know. Someone asked if the promoters had made sure that these gigs were worth our while. Oh yes, every single one. 

This week, a charity barbecue in the shadows of a nuclear power station. You can’t buy this sort of exposure.

It was forty years ago today….

Sometime in 1967, a strange and wondrous sound descended on the Stowmarket Recreation ground – an unearthly psychedelic occurrence, wrapped up in smoke and lights and gift wrapped in long hair and cheesecloth. Give it forty years and the Songs from The Blue House cavalcade is parked up in pretty much the same place as the Pink Floyd’s van (for it was they) must have been all those years ago, ready to gently sway the inaugural Stowfest, a one day celebration of live music, beer tentery and mobile burger vans, populated by gently grazing grown ups, and rammed with teenagers wearing jeans that seem to be either two sizes too large or one size to small for them, and who are delighted that for once they haven’t had to catch a train anywhere to hang out, do a bit of gentle emo-ing and drink breezers with their chums.

A day out for us players, too - a chance to check out the other bands, see who’s about, meet up with old friends and complain about the stage monitors to each other – a sort of bassman’s holiday, if you will. Some of the hair in our party is just as long as when Syd, Roger and the boys rolled up with their odd songs and crushed velvet trousers back in the day, but James’s Slovan Liberec football shirt is unlikely to have been de rigeur for the times which, as surely as ever, are a changin’. He isn’t going to though, as he likes it, he’s going to keep it on for the gig. Chanteuse and flautist Helen has turned up in Lily Allen chic, the rest of us are pretty much in regular Keith Allen chic – a selection of shorts and t-shirts, sandals and socks (aside from the immaculately-outfitted and coiffed Tony Winn in all white) which don’t quite challenge the black leather and spandex-clad combo setting up on stage two in terms of wardrobe exploitation. It is pointed out that if we had bottoms like that lady with the guitar, we’d probably wear a bit more spandex too, which I feel is a moot point at best, frankly. Still, no harm in checking, is there? 

The weather’s fine, the crowd is in expansive mood, the beer is on draught, and the organizers have very sensibly left a good deal of set up time between turns, given the double staged-ness of the event. We are looking forward to using this to the full as the advantage of being a nominally acoustic band and not having to lug heavy amplifiers and suchlike around is generally outweighed by the fact that at events such as these, harassed soundmen are usually momentarily stymied by not having heavy amplifiers and suchlike to simply stick microphones in front of and have to locate DI boxes to plug guitars into, once they’ve sorted out the four vocal mics we need first, of course. Add in a fiddle player and a banjo that needs a channel of its own and that’s usually enough to tip them over the edge into wanton despair. The upshot of all this is that, over time, the banjo player and the fiddle player have taken to lugging their own amplifiers around anyway as the monitors can rarely be trusted. Oh, and did I mention we’d brought along a drummer and a keyboard player for this one too? You can see the fear in the crew’s eyes already.

TT on pianner, a veteran of grander festivals than this (he’s what we like to call a ‘proper’ musician) has brought along his own in-ear monitoring system which means that he can hear himself perfectly, and also has the amusing side effect of making it look like he’s listening to his iPod throughout the set rather than concentrating on the job in hand. JP and I wait patiently, guitar leads forlornly in hands, as the time slips away. The breakfast DJ from local radio is filling in desperately in his role as compere. “Anyone got anything they want to say?” he asks. “Why don’t you play a record?” suggests Reado from behind the kit before making the poor man repeat his joke about two parrots sitting on a perch. The sheen of perspiration is now clearly visible to the naked eye. 

Come show time plus ten we are assured through complicated hand gestures and mimes that the out front sound is fine, although up on the trailer there is a palpable lack of guitars in the mix and, pleased as I am to be playing live in front of so many people and grateful that I know the songs well enough that a lack of foldback means that I can pretty much mime convincingly along with the best of them (a happy legacy of all those years spent in my bedroom with a tennis racket and a cassette of AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood” – I knew it’d come in handy one day. 

It’s never reassuring to be invited to start the set and be told that “We’ll sort out the mix as we go along” - we quite like the first song – it’d be nice if everyone was on it, but you don’t like to spend too long talking to the guy on the sound desk mid set, it’s terribly distracting for the crowd, who probably aren’t quite sure what “That terrible hum in the wedges” actually is supposed to be and you don’t like to come across as too much of a Prima Donna, especially James, who has officially been accorded the rank of Tertiary Donna so far, and hasn’t got all his badges yet in advance of an upgrade. 

Finally, during the last song, what appears to be the roar of a passing jet from nearby RAF Wattisham, but upon investigation turns out to be his errant guitar, emanates forcefully from the speakers at his feet. “They found it, then” he remarks in passing. We have become concerned over time that our departure from the stage is generally greeted by someone enthusiastically remarking that our set was “really funny”. We are spared this reflection today. “Wow” begins the DJ from the local radio station “You were really on time!” I wonder if Pink Floyd managed that ?

"You should do some Neil Young...."

The sweet, sweet joy of the music biz. It's been a busy week at Skirky Central - rushing up to Northants with SftBH for a party, then back down to Essex, where we narrowly missed the Asparagus Monks of Coggeshall before doing another set in a field and then off to sunny Felixstowe with Picturehouse, to play an extremely sweaty (and I never sweat onstage) set of covers with loud guitars and thumpy drums. In between, Songs from The Blue House got an airing on the radio and a mention in the Word podcast, we had a meeting with the record company and Wendell announced that his hard drive is on the mend and he's formatted the text for the book and just needs an acknowledgements list and some credits before putting the whole thing to bed. And then at the end of the Picturehouse gig, this bloke came up with a suggestion for the set....
Thumbs up to the bloke who wrote my horoscope this week, you got it bang on. It has been a good week. Now, about those lottery numbers....

"Do you do any Buffalo Springfield?"

I read an interesting diversion on the electric interweb recently, wherein a newbie to all this going out and playing a full two sets in public malarkey was buttonholed after a recent show and informed that his band hadn’t played enough songs that his audience member knew. 

His query was intended to ascertain what the correct ratio of covers to originals in a set should be and the forum responses varied from a wholly reasonable explanation that some people are never happy with songs they don’t know to an explanation of how another group member divides up his set list to provide reasonable periods of known and loved covers before sliding in a couple of their own, stealthily under the cover of contented familiarity. 

a bit more music and then perhaps they’d broaden their horizons a little. This, however, would only contribute more to the eternal battle between those on the stage, who are sure that they know best what an audience should be listening to, and those in the stalls, who are equally but almost always skewiffedly convinced of the same. You’d think they weren’t all there for the same reason sometimes. 

So when the call came through to The Blue House at three fifty nine from The High Barn to participate in their monthly acoustic showcase, by four we were on our way. To a lengthy discussion about what we should play. The first job was to round up the usual suspects – a band-wide group email revealed that some were busy, some were free, (some of them were angry at the way the earth was abused, by the men who learned to forge beauty into power, but that’s a different story) and some didn’t respond as the word ‘barn’ somehow set off their over-sensitive spam filter and they didn’t get the message in the first place. They didn’t get the mail that included the word ‘document’ either, because if you knock out the first two letters and the last three….you see? Well, it’s political correctness gone mad. Either that or health and safety, I can never remember which one I’m supposed to be cross about. 

The victim of all this de-spammery was our esteemed bass player and so he was excluded from the discussions about what to play, which took place between myself, singer-guitarist James, fragrant chanteuse and flute-monkey Helen and our wild card for the ride, Picturehouse frontman Wendell, who’d been thrown into the mix because he’s a both chum and because every so often we like to mix it up a bit and see what happens.

At a hastily-convened rehearsal the discussions really picked up pace. “So, what’re we doing?” enquired James, once he’d finished his baked potato with cheese and beans. Nothing fills a vacuum like that like opportunism and so I proferred my CD copy of the first Buffalo Springfield album, which contains a charming little sixties pop song by Neil Young called ‘Burned’ which I’d long hankered to have a go at. I have an advantage in the ways of Neil Young in that having learned to sing and play by strumming along with his Live Rust album I can pretty effortlessly drop into an appropriation of the Young-esque style at the drop of a harmonica. It’s uncanny, chameleon-like shading means that several people are fully convinced that I can’t sing properly* and lead one past band member to informally dub our Beatles specialist band “John, Paul, Ringo and Neil”, which if nothing else would make a great Willy Russell play, let’s face it. 

In the face of overwhelming ennui we were now one down in our quest to fill half an hour’s worth of hotly sought after stage time and moved on to the next selection. With our new album being due out on the HB label, we thought it only right to preview something from it and so started on stripping down the full band version (including pedal steel and banjo) to an arrangement for two acoustic guitars and a couple of singers who hadn’t even been on it. That took another twenty minutes, so by now we were flying. 

After a few more forays into our respective back catalogues of performances and writing credits we ended up with a couple of my old songs that didn’t get an airing often these days (one of which involved La Mulley transposing a three part saxophone part to flute), a song by Helen which was currently going through some discussion as to whether it was going to make the album at all, and a duet between Hel and Wendell on Gram Parsons’ version of ‘Love Hurts’. Oh, and James had decided to play bass. 

This was not a set list devised by a committee of movers and shakers looking to influence and win over an audience eager to soak up the familiar. This, surely, was tomfoolery? So, anyway, on the afternoon of the gig Wendell was spending a lot of time on YouTube instead of working and came up with the idea of doing The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, so we lobbed that into the set too. And why not?

We didn’t see a lot of the evening’s entertainment, spending, as we were a good deal of time in the studio annexe next to the stage running through the set again just to make sure that we hadn’t made a series of catastrophic errors of judgement. It wasn’t that reassuring, to be honest, but we did enjoy the experience of watching several of the other turns walk past the studio window on the way to the stage alternately baffled and amused by our enthusiastic (to them) miming. 

At last our time came. We were to follow the excellent, splendid and thoroughly Blue House-endorsed Al Lindsay, whose John Martyn-esque acoustic stylings were beautifully counterparted by a percussion player and a double bassist and who indeed encored with a marvellous reading of Martyn’s “May You Never”. Uh-oh, an encore….we’d better be good.

So we took the stage, four people in a line up which hadn’t played together before, one of whom was playing an instrument he didn’t usually care for and with a set list comprising at least four songs which no-one outside the sound engineer was likely to have heard in their lives and, d’you know what? We bloody killed out there. In a good way. Helen and Wendell were on superb old-style country weepery harmonising form, James was ebullient, I jumped off a chair and windmilled during The Who song, which raised a cheer if not a faint sense that the audience were about to see a forty-year old man do himself an injury, and that hadn’t happened during “Won’t Get Fooled Again” since that time with the tremelo arm in San Francisco.

You could sense the voyeuristic thrill, and cut the air of anticipation with a chainsaw, or some other very large petrol-driven cutting tool. We retired outside for a post-show cigarette of relief, smoking being banned inside the building (It’s health and correctness gone politically safe, I tells ya) and I considered the question of “what to play”. Nobody knows anything; performers, audiences, critics. It’s all about the shared experience. If it works, it works, there’s no formula “These people do it for financial gain and we’re entitled to pass our opinions however we see fit” a correspondent had said (I’m paraphrasing). Too right. 

Al Lindsay wandered up to the sound man. “Do we, um, get paid for this?” he enquired, not unreasonably.
“No”.

*At least I think it’s the Young impression.

"Leave i', 'E's not wurf i' - Ooh, The Koiser Chiefs!"

We return the The Pickerel in Stowmarket, the residents of which fair hamlet are referred to in some circles in a non-ironic fashion as Slowmartians. Not ours, mind - we know which side our breadwinners are likely to be battered should we subscribe to such a foul calumny - and set up in a positive frame of mind, all the better to try out our 'new' songs, since the Stow Boys (and gels) are a friendly crowd and generally forgiving of our expeditions into the unknown. Some regulars still speak in hushed tones of our foray into 10CC's "Rubber Bullets", and warn their troublesome children that if they don't go to bed and get straight to sleep we'll come round and play it again. It sounded fine at rehearsal, honestly. 

This time we are to debut not only something by The Feeling (we feel a particular affinity with these coves as they themselves were a covers band up until just before their big break, although in ski resorts rather than in small pubs near railway stations in unprepossessing East Anglian towns which produce mainly paint, malt and processed chickens) and a piece of goth rock magnificence in The Damned's version of 'Eloise', for which Gibbon has been assiduously programming the sounds of darkness into his 90's-era keyboard and for which Wendell has been throwing impressively dramatic power grabs (cf Meatloaf) in rehearsal, as well as cultivating a moody mic-stand clutching hooded-lid performance persona which cunningly disguises that he is actually reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper gaffa-taped to the monitors. 

The set has a fairly regular feel by now, which can be the curse of the inattentive pub band, as although we might only play it every couple of weeks, if the pub crowd only sees you once every couple of months and you play exactly the same thing every time, they soon cotton on that you're not really paying attention to their needs. After all, The Kaiser Chiefs might only have two albums to pick from, but we've got the whole of rock history to cherry pick, and so there's really no excuse to settle on a set and leave it at that for the duration. We're not The Rolling Stones, after all. Clearly. 

There is an opening section through which we state our case - a bit of new stuff, a bit of eighties, a bit of seventies west coast Californian country rock (at which point my wife inevitably goes to the toilet, as a childhood spent in the back of cars shuttling her between parents to the soundtrack of Glenn Frey has left her emotionally scarred in terms of references to taking it easy and she can't bear the experience to be dragged back up through her psyche. Either that or she's holding out for something from Desperado). A nice run through the first set ensues, and The Feeling goes down well - given our exalted position in the rock hierachy we're never sure whether the common man is listening to the same thing that we are, and it seems unlikely in some cases, and so we are relieved that we've made a good pick. 

We are, after all in the business of show, and although (say) one of Gibbon's favourite albums is by a side project of someone who's played on some of the biggest selling albums of recent years, I don't see anything by The Bears making it as far as (say) The John Bull in Woodbridge Road. Their loss. The break gives us an opportunity to restock, regroup, refuel, sympathise with the ever patient Mrs Skirky, who has had a trampalike spill a glass of house white over her new frock and refuse to countenance getting a replacement in, and who has been drying it off under the hand dryer in the ladies' (always a dignified way to spend ten minutes) and also to respond to the number one mid-set question of our short but glorious career - the answer being, of course, The Jags. 

A quick set rearrangement for the second half means that we start off with one of our taking-a-flyers, set wise - the world may love OK GO's YouTube clips, but their actual songs are generally more of an effort to get into, however the group of Trivium T-shirted youth stage left are pleased at its inclusion. They are clearly in a band together and fills, licks and riffs are greeted with quiet consideration and occasional head-nodding-together memos to selves, which is great. I remember doing the very same at a gig by the Turnham Green Blues Band at The Thrasher in 1980, and it's encouraging to know that in twenty five years or so they too may be raiding their kids' iPods for things to play in pubs after their hopes, dreams and wild eyed ambitions of rock stardom have been cruelly dashed at the altar of fame by a cruel unfeeling public who can't make the distinction between genius and genre-hopping. That might, at a stretch, just be me, mind.... 

The time has come for Eloise, and with a few "good luck"'s and "see you at the end"s we launch hopefully into it. And, d'you know what? It works. The blams come in all the right places, the timing's right, the chords and runs come easily to work-ravaged hands* and at the end of the song the sweet, sweet candy sound of applause and cheering rattles through the air - it's like catnip for fortysomethings, it really is. I'm so pleased I do a guitar solo behind my head two songs later, pretending that I'm being post-ironic. "Ooh" runs my internal monologue "I think I may've put my back out". 

*Alright, so mainly ravaged by tapping computer keyboards all week, but you get the idea...I have to take cod liver oil tablets once a day at my age, you know.

As we know, one of this year's big ambitions is to publish. Sadly, Wendell's hard drive, along with text, photos (see how I didn't put an apostrophe in there?) and notes about my grande folie has crashed and burned, and so the project is delayed even further than it would have been if he hadn't already been concentrating on jobs that actually have a positive and immediate effect on his mortgage repayments. 'Twas ever thus. Being the good sort that he is he had been keeping this from me for as long as possible, but a Picturehouse rehearsal scheduled for his kitchen made it difficult to keep hidden.
Mr Wendell was calm, collected, and reassuring about the prospects of the book coming out this year, and assured me that he had kept Editor Jessica's post-it notes exactly where they were and could recreate the magic that only sub editing by someone with a far greater appreciation of the impact of a sub-colon than we have could bring. You can probably tell that she has no input into this farrago of a blog at all.
And so we sat down with the band to learn some new stuff. Having greeted Mr. Gibbon at my front door with a charming rendition of the solo from Show Some Love by The Feeling, I was surprised to find Kilbey doing the same thing to us when we turned up at Wendell's. Not as surprised as he was to receive a phone call from Frisky Pat calling from the band rehearsal room, mind, but fair play to 'im for fielding the "We're all at Steve's - where are you?" call with such admirable aplomb. As it turns out, Kilbey's up for a bit of guitar playing on this one, and I'm up for a bit of the ol' bass. Unfortunately, the first run through is so capable that the rest of the evening is given over to trying it one more time, drawing tattoo templates (on Pat), smoking in the garden, looking at Pat's mobile phone photos and checking out Kilbey's kids' band's MySpace site.
Don't tell 'em - we're thinking of doing a cover. I mean, A and G - how hard could it be?

“Do You Do Any Wings..?”

For some time now, Frisky Pat has been confused that The Singer and I have been taking photographs at gigs. Not of ourselves, or audiences, but of mic stands, leads, effects pedals, and he is concerned that perhaps our interests are a little, shall we say, niche. The Singer explains. We are self-publishing last year's accounts of life on the road, and these are for frontispieces to each chapter. "Am I in it?" he asks. Yes, The New Drummer, you are. 

Having pretty much run the gamut of experiences there seems little more to say about the pub band experience, and yet it goes on, and here we are setting up again in one of our favourite venues, ready to debut a couple of new songs and in my case suffering from the after effects of an evening out at an eighties night. The eighties, it seems, are back and judging by the legwarmers, footless tights and off the shoulder jumpers on display, not just at themed evenings. Which is nice, for the eighties are where we learned our trade. 

The Singer points out that he spent most of them listening to The Waterboys and so with a new DVD of theirs to watch he had in fact had had his own theme night, only with slighty less obviously deleterious resuts. This is clear during London Calling, where the strident tones of the Joe Strummer original are replaced with my less than forceful honkings, still, one woman claimed it was her highlight of the gig, so what do I know? 

One new song is Stacey's Mom, which we got together and rehearsed earlier in the week and which presents me with a splendid opportunity to shine during the simple but effective guitar solo. Darn that tricky key change though - after completing the song through the stifled guffawing of the rest of the group I insist that we go back and play the solo section again, just to prove that I did really know it, honestly! "You're about a minute and a half late with that" reflects The Drummer. Quite. 

A brief conversation ensues regarding the possibility of re-enacting the video on stage with one of our actual mothers taking the Rachel Hunter role. Since mine will be seventy this year I suggest that it may not have the same effect and the plan is put on the back burner for the moment. Our second revisiting of new material is The Teardrop Explodes' Reward, which bounces along splendidly and receives a huge cheer. The eighties, it seems, are the new noughties. a request goes up for some Tenacious D so we do the 'one note, bent' skit - well, it's only fair to try and give the people what they want. 

Fortunately no-one shouts for Mustang Sally which, given that I am wearing my Commitments T-shirt (a gift from a grateful record industry in 1991) would be a justifiable shout, however the intro to Sweet Home Alabama does get an airing after a muted shout from the crowd. It's all going terribly well, everyone's locked in, loud and playing a storm and by the end of the show even I'm feeling perkier. It's a bit late now though - like my retreaded solo. As an encore we respond to another request from the bouncing crowd, who have been demonstrating some impromptu and impressively co-ordinated line dancing during the last number for some reason.

 

The cry goes up in a Russell Crowesque manner - "At my signal, unleash Wings!". We are a band on a particularly good run. Tomorrow, no sleep till Needham Market!

"Not you, you're one of the five per cent...."

To Oxford, home of numerable colleges, many, many bicycles, and The Oxford Folk Festival, where Songs From The Blue House have been engaged to open the main stage in support of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. After a lengthy negotiation of the roadways of Oxford culminating in a submission and retreat back out to the park and ride, Fiddly Richard and I arrive at the splendid venue laden with various acoutrements of our trade and gratefully accept a beer from the bar while our drummer du jour sets up in front of the impressive pipe organ which will provide our backdrop for the evening. The Ukes are nowhere to be seen and so we unpack and set up around the seven chairs lining the front of the stage and wait. As the support band, we will not be able to do anything meaningful with sound until after they're done, as it turns out with an impressive run through the Ying Tong Song. The Drummer decides to dip a toe in the water by playing a bit of Walk This Way, Guitarist James's level test is Anarchy In The UK and the organisers seem relieved when we settle down to play something of a more traditional nature. Mind you, Anarchy sounds great with fiddle, mandolin and banjo - we'll have to store that one for future use. 

Once that's all over we have just enough time to run through a couple of numbers before doors at eight - we will be on at ten past - and so Reado and I have just enough time to negotiate our way against the tide of the incoming audience to get outside for a cigarette before show time, me with nerves, he with a cheery "I've seen this lot, they're rubbish" and a stage whispered "I told you reggae night was on Thursday...!" We kick into the set and luckily his timekeeping keeps us all together, what with us being spread across the full width of the stage to the point where the assorted stringed things being played stage right are virtually inaudible to those of us gathered on the left. Things are going terribly well and to celebrate I get him to play the big drum fill from In The Air Tonight which gets a sizeable cheer from the sell out crowd. Set done, we get off within thirty seconds of our deadline. Tim the booker is very pleased with this, and we go to check out how the merch stall is doing.

Post gig relaxation is being ordered, drunk and eaten in the bar so I decide to get some of my travelling gear from the dressing room, which is accessible either from the stage, natch, or by following a wending trail from behind the front of house, through the side chambers, up along the balcony, through some fire doors, down the spiral stairs and through a couple of doors - long time viewers of a certain, if you will, Rockumentary will at this point appreciate that I am muttering "Rock and Roll!" and "Hello Cleveland" to myself as I follow this circuitous route to find myself gathering bags, guitars, stands and leads, loading myself up and retracing my steps, all the while repeating the mantra. 

Right up to the point where I realise that the fire doors allow access one way, but have no handle on the stage-ward side, meaning that aside from busting open the fire doors at the bottom of the stairs and very probably setting off all sorts of alarms, the only way back out to where my pint is waiting for me is through the middle of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, who I strongly suspect would not appreciate my unannounced appearance during the middle of their splendid version of Slave To The Rhythm. After a couple of unsuccessful calls on the mobile I decide that either I'm going to be trapped here for the evening or I should brazen it out. Waiting for an appropriately large round of applause, and looking as roadie-like as I can, I shuffle on to the stage behind the group and exit stage left.

Several beers later and after a marvellous gig, we the band are milling around the streets of Oxford, several of which we recognise from earlier on trying to locate the porter's lodge from which we are to secure the keys to our accommodation. Some of the band have wangled upgrades to a nearby Travelodge, but having secured the promise of the one bed in the shared room from Gib, our bass player, we're staying in recently vacted student rooms in town. The gentleman behind the glass looks dourly at us and announces that only one, not two rooms have been reserved for this evening in the satisfied way that only those who spend long nights in front of a bank of CCTV monitors in a navy blue pullover truly can. I can feel another Tap-ist moment coming on, however after dire warnings as to what will occur if there are any more than two of these unkempt strangers who have appeared before him found in a room he relents and hands over two keys, and gives us directions - left, left, left again, straight on and third door on the right. The whole party snakes around to the appropriate door and a volunteer tries the key. It doesn't work.

The other key is tried. This doesn't work either. At this point I suggest that if the key doesn't work perhaps I should go back to the desk and try and locate some keys that do, however due to an unfortunate combination of lack of solid food and an abundance of post-gig refreshment this is delivered very much in the style of Steve Martin in that scene from Planes, Trains and Automobiles where he's trying to hire a car. There is a palpable hush while I demand the keys and set stomping back up the road in high dudgeon. I am, however, halted by shouts from back outside the digs where Mr Security Benn has appeared from a gate directly opposite where we are trying to gain access to point out that we are in fact trying the wrong door. Ah. He has both a direct route through the building and CCTV. I imagine his nights simply fly by.
 
After some more socialising with our hosts back at their place Gib and I retire to the room and crash. Some hours later I need to negotiate my way to the bathroom and return only to find him propped up in a chair like some sort of sepulchral Norma Desmond as his back hurts, what with him having to sleep on the floor and very probably do it during my snoring, nevertheless this is a bit of a shock. At this point I remember that I have brought my toothbrush, but no toothpaste. I wouldn't want to share a mic with me at the lunchtime show. 

The lunchtime show itself - this time sans drummer and after a relaxing full breakfast over the papers - is just as good as the big show last night, with a lovely sound mix and our closer proximity to one another making it easy to have fun. We play a completely different set, bar one song, to the early risers and the one repeat brings a triumphant shouted "Yeessss!" from the front row. I think we've hit a nerve there.

Again we get off on time and are packed away with Me, Fiddly and Gib ready to get the bus back out to the park and ride as we have prior engagements to get back to in the evening. James and Helen are ready to lig, Russ is already planning a tour of the many sessions going on in pubs around town and Tony is looking urbane and unflappable as ever, considering his options. I explain to one of the stewards, who I lost spectacularly to at golf once, that I have a comedy gig to go to that evening back in Ippo and tell him who I'm going to see. "He...", considers Big Stu carefully, "...looks like he needs a good slap. In fact ninety five per cent of the people I meet need a good slap, frankly". Clearly I'm looking a little discomfited by this information, but considering my behaviour the previous evening I'm thinking that he might have a point. "Oh", he says, "Not you...."

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.