Footprints in the Sand.

I’m not one to obsessively go around putting my own name into internet search engines just in order to reassure myself that I do actually exist on some sort of spiritual plane (even though I am pleased to be able to report that the first three Google searches for the phrase “All These Little Pieces” do in fact reference my book) but it is nice to occasionally settle down with a fresh cup of tea and a bourbon, drop the band’s name, Songs from the Blue House, into the little box, hit enter, and to see just where we are referenced – a magazine mention mayhap, an eBay review copy of ‘Tree’ still sealed and available for a pittance perhaps, or a link to the Red House Painters’ “Songs for a Blue Guitar” album on Amazon, which is what most frequently occurs. 

As of today, for instance, I can tell you that there have been 5369 views of our song “Little No One” on YouTube, which even if you take out the number of times I’ve been on to check that my bald spot isn’t too apparent under the stage lights is still a pretty reasonable return for a song that you can’t actually buy anywhere. Until quite recently this was a performance mentioned obliquely on Wikipedia, as well as being referred to unsentimentally on YouTube’s comments section as resembling nothing so much as a schoolteacher fronting a bunch of off-duty brickies (which in retrospect I can’t help feel unjustly reflects on the contribution to the performing arts made by many skilled manual labourers).

I had a bit of time during my lunch break today, so I thought I’d do a bit of a virtual catch up, and, upon checking the Wiki entry where we usually are, there we were, gone. I must admit, I felt a tiny twinge of regret. Still, we had our own whole entry once - for about a day, until some officious bastard deleted it over it not being referenced properly. Ah well, some days you’re the spaniel, some days the stick. 

https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/Songsfromthebluehouse.com

Excerpts from "Hold on Tight to Your Dreams - The Songs from The Blue House Story" by Simon Talbot with Lester Bangs, Paul Morley, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Tony Parsons, Johnny Rogan & Steven Wells, and with a foreword by Andi Peters. *

"...Songs from The Blue House were brought together in 1991 by Coggeshall Town Council, who wanted a boy band to tour local primary schools teaching children the importance of washing their hands after going to the lavatory. 

At first things went well - debut single "Candy Coated Snuggles" entered the top 50 at a respectable 50, but the follow up, an ill advised stomp through Deep Purple's "Knocking at Your Back Door" reached a disappointing number 375 and the band were dropped. His music career in ruins, bass player Gibbon was bemoaning his luck over a pint of Old Scabby Tramp at the Chantry Beer Festival when he found to his surprise that the hop-flavoured vagrant who had broken out of the cask and was making a run for it was none other than Fun House presenter Pat Sharpe, who just had time to splutter "Why don't you write your own songs!?" before Gib forced his head back down under the dark brown syrupy liquid. 

The use of real instruments was a turning point for the band, and the succeeding fluctuating line up included 25ft circus giant James Partridge, erotic wax sculptor Tony Winn, King of Pop Michael Jackson and cyborg flute assassin Helen Mulley. Skag Rock, Bubble Pop, Tight Arsed Brazilian Loon Jazz, Skippy Dippy, Welsh Urban Shouting, Fringe Drone and Shatner were all mere passing fads to be used up and discarded in the quest for fame. 

On the way Tony Turrell joined - "I am like the sunshine, a butterfly's wings or the laugh of a small child" was all he would say - "Don't try and hold me for I will slip through your fingers". During the 'Keep Music Acoustic' riots of 1999 the band had themselves fired from a huge brass cannon. As they hurtled overhead they whipped the frenzied mob below into hysterics with their high speed rendition of James Taylor's "You've Got a Friend". 

Despite their best efforts however, certain members of the band still feel frustrated. "We've been going ten years now and there is still pain and suffering in the world" sobbed 103 year-old fiddle player Richard Lockwood yesterday; "Sweet merciful Jesus" he cried, his voice twisted with anguish, "Where's the love?". 

A couple of hours ago I asked Shane about the future. "By the year 2850 our enormous bald heads will be pulsating with ideas which will make the people of today look like monkeys" he replied. When I asked him about the band he paused; "I dunno - carry on playing gigs? We're doing the god yoghurt Christian dairy products festival at Copdock next month, so that should be good. To tell you the truth I just wanna make love in a hot air balloon".

*As originally stolen from Simon Talbot.

It's a life of surprises.

Driving five up in a Vauxhall Zafira with three amplifiers, four mics, a bundle of leads and three guitars in the boot doesn’t make any real sense in terms of propagating a career, however we in Songs from the Blue House didn’t get where we are today by following our base commercial instincts. So for all the strategy and street teamery that you can get tangled up in, when it comes down to it, someone asks us if we want to perform in front of some people, the default answer is always “yes”. That it may not always be the best facilitation of the long-term vision of the collective often comes into play, but then no-one ever broke a thousand hearts by singing about the withered rose of a relationship on their own in their bedroom, although I can think of many turns I’ve seen in the past who would have been well advised to take that course in preference to coming out and insisting on doing precisely that in front of me. I am sufficiently of an age where I already know that life is nasty, brutish and short, as are a few of the subjects of some of our more vituperative numbers, but I digress.

After eight years of not trying, we have been invited to perform in That There London (TTL), and although in the past this would typically have involved hiring a coach and transporting the same forty people who would have come to see you in (say) Ipswich down to TTL and charging them a fiver to watch the same set at (say) The Powerhaus, in these days of instant mass communication all it takes are a couple of well-composed Facebook posts and you have an instant throng at the doors of the venue, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. In theory.

We are hurtling through the badlands of East London, bass player Gibbon driving, and Our Glorious Leader both navigating and advising on the morals and ethics of negotiating TTL by car. “Don’t show them the fear”, he advises sagely, “Otherwise they’ll have you all ways up”. This doesn’t sound like a good thing, frankly. OGL has taken route advice from one of his delivery drivers and confidently guides us to the wrong side of the river, whereupon Gibbon takes matters into his own hands and negotiates a manoeuvre which not only reinforces his alpha-driver status but, judging by the look in his eyes, clearly instils The Fear into an oncoming cabbie, and those guys aren’t easily spooked. I shouldn’t really comment on anyone’s map reading skills as I am notoriously the band, if not the world’s, worst navigator, Geography A-level or no. In the same way that your keys are always in the last place you look, my destination is always the last place that I arrive at, which sounds innocuous enough, but bear this in mind the next time you’re turning your house upside down in order to locate your keys, eh?

Fashionably late, we arrive at the venue to find that our cyber-messaging has indeed gathered the brightest and best of our hardcore travelling support, including Serious Keith, Gorgeous Mari, Dooog the Banter Hunter and one Philip Bryer, who I’ve never actually met in true life before, but who has been contributing weekly to the Why The Long Face? radio show for a couple of years now. The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley introduces herself to him – “I was going to ask who you were, and then I heard you speak” she says brightly. I imagine Alastair Cook used to get that all the time. We are a lean, stripped-down SftBH this evening, with only Fiddly of the auxiliary stringed instrumentalists able to make it, and fortunately so, as upstairs at Milfords is a compact and bijou venue with a performance area which would put many envelopes to shame. Indeed the entire pub has more people relaxing outside on the pavement enjoying the balmy summer evening than it does inside, which the landlord genially acknowledges. “You should have seen this place before the ban” he reminisces fondly, waving a be-cigaretted hand at an imaginary horizon ”a smoke haze as thick as you like”. Gibbon and I nod nostalgically.

In order to maximise the marketing potential of our foray into the cross-platform performance arena, and because we don’t have a banjo, pedal steel or piano player tonight, we have front-loaded the set with some of our more familiar works before veering off into unknown territory later in the set and debuting a couple of things that OGL and I have been buffing up in the fine-tuning lab of the Blue House song factory. Oh, and because the house PA only has four inputs, I’m putting my acoustic guitar through my Laney pub rock amp and OGL is rocking the Marshall valve combo. It does, he remarks glintingly later, give an edge to those harder-strummed chords. There are no monitors, natch. Having settled into the groove and the slightly unusual sound, by mid way through the set we’re having a good time and our new song “My Boy” brings a gratifying hush to the chatter at the back of the room.

We manage to crowbar Fiddly’s usual “…all the way from Thorndon” stage dedication into the set as well as a few pertinent remarks on our finding ourselves under the bright lights of London’s glittering Strand. Afterward, a gratifying number of bar staff, friends and pretty girls in vintage tea dresses remark upon how much they enjoyed the set. We’re feeling pretty damned pleased with ourselves, I can tell you - shortly after which, a couple of said girls strap on some instruments of their own and in the company of a double bassist, a fiddle player and the sort of drummer who sits coolly with a battered trilby on the back of his head and looks like he could get a nice brushes sound out of his stubble in a snare-snapping emergency perform the sort of down-home old-time set that makes grown men weep with joy, profess their deep, real and undying devotion and realise that there’s always someone around the next corner who can effortlessly put the ‘U’ in Hubris. On the way back we let Big Jan, who’s sailed across the The Pacific and The Atlantic in a thirty foot yacht therefore knows a bit about storage space, dictate loading the car, which she does with clinical professionalism. With fond farewells and hearty hugs we wend our way back through the city, and the country roads take us home.

My dear and long-suffering wife took our baby son round to my parents' for a visit, and during the general chit chat and conversation about sleeping, waking and feeding also mentioned that I'd taken a couple of days off work to go and write songs with Our Glorious Leader James at The Blue House. My mother sighed. "He never gives up, does he...?"

“Is it rolling, James?”

 

It occurs to Our Glorious Leader and I that the ‘new’ songs in the SftBH set are coming up for their second birthdays, and as such we should either start buying them some nice presents or, in the great tradition of parents whose toddlers have outgrown the first flush of adorability, get some news ones in to replace them. Thus we convene at The Blue House on a bright Spring Sunday afternoon and cloister ourselves away in The Snug on Lord Tilkey's estate with two guitars, a couple of chairs, some pencils and paper, oh, and enough PC processing capacity to have powered a series of NASA’s most ambitious seventies excursions (and then some). We sit opposite each other, nervously wondering what we’re going to say to each other for the next two and a half days if we don’t come up with any ideas, and contemplate our situation – part odd couple, part evangelical idealists, very much the modern Lemmon and McCarthy.

I had been mucking about the previous evening and came up with a simple repeating guitar figure and idly strummed through it. OGL’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “You haven’t pre-prepared this, have you?” he asks off handedly, almost too casually. I confirm that this is not something I’ve been working on, and he relaxes, almost imperceptibly, back into his seat. “Don’t Fence Me In” reads the legend on the cushion (by which I mean the slogan, not that James has had a tattoo). It's a homily and a mantra. Following the rules of what sounds good, we find the next chord to go to, then a third, a fourth, a bridge (as in “Take me to the…”), a chorus, and before too long the song has taken shape, it has bare bones and merely needs clothing in words, for a couple of people to have a look and decide whether the outfit suits it, and to be offered up to Canens for her approval. 

There is a settling down of guitar and a gathering of pad and pencil, some scritching and scratching (both on the page and betwixt the hambones), a nod to indicate that I should either continue or desist playing the verse through. Eventually, a furrowing of brows and a final decisive, “Let’s cut it”. When we started demo’ing tunes for Songs from The Blue House, at this point in proceedings it was time to rig up a couple of microphones, fire up the Tascam, find a cassette that didn’t already have stuff on both sides, demagnetise the recording heads, try a few levels, listen back to make sure it was recording satisfactorily and then capture the full, immediate intimacy of the moment. Younger readers may be astonished to discover that this was how we accomplished things way back in the Noughties. 

Now, James has merely to plug in a lead, flick a switch, hit the space bar on his PC keyboard and we’re away. Three and a half minutes of bewitching digital vapour trails appearing on the screen, a ‘normalisation’ process, factory-issue reverb and we almost immediately have a demo that some Seventies singer-songwriters would have rejected as being over-produced, and hence the modern disease - just because it sounds good enough to share, doesn't necessarily mean it actually is. We leave that to prove, and start the whole process again.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river...

Now visualise an American. If you're English, I'm guessing you've got an image of a slightly chubby guy in t-shirt and jeans, big walrush moustache, possibly shaking you warmly by the paw and saying things like "Real pleased to be here!". Reader, I met him. Mark Elliot is a typical American, in that he is warm, self-deprecating, polite, hard working, and desperately good at what he does. What he does do (hang on, I might need to check the grammar on that one) is stand up in front of people and sing simple songs in a rich, warm come-on-into-the-parlour-and-shake-the-dust-off-your-boots fashion which is both enormously endearing, and incredibly difficult to make look as easy as he does. Do.
The easiest and best way to form an opinion about any darned fool who's willing to get on stage with an acoustic guitar is to wonder what they'd be like at your local pub's songwriters night. This is all too frequently easy to visualise, as that's where you generally bump into them. Bedsit poets, protest evangelists, political flag wavers - I should know, I've played all these roles, and more. What isn't easy - in fact what is astonishingly difficult to do - is to make that singer-songwriter role still relevant in these days of the minimal attention span, loop technology and instant gratificatory downloads: to stand up and perform in front of people and draw them into your world, to tell them stories, to make them populate your songs with their characters - Mark Elliot can do this - I know, because I saw him do it tonight.
If I hadn't been in the other band playing, I would have missed it. Because of flight restrictions preventing him from flying in earlier this week, many people across the country did miss out on the chance to make their own minds up. I liked him. You should go and see him play, I think you'll like him too, and I say this about a man who lives at the foot of a mountain outside Nashville, writes songs for a living and who has therefore clearly got the job that was reserved for me...

http://www.myspace.com/cubcreekrecords

Take two drummers into the shower...?

Many, many, many years ago, The Star Club, a Beatles specialist band I was in, got booked to do a gig at a pub in Ipswich called Harley's. The landlord had inherited the booking and so wasn't expecting much, but he fell in love with the group. Heavily, deeply, seriously in love. And so when he went back up to his old stomping ground in Lincolnshire he invited us up for a gig. We demurred on the grounds that a one-off wasn't really worth the trip, and so he booked us into another couple of places and we went up for a few days, just to show willing really and basically, we let our hair down. A long way down. Every few months, or a couple of years, we'd get a call from wherever he'd pitched up and we'd go along and whoever had joined the band would pitch in, whether it be The Star Club, Picturehouse or, more recently, Songs from The Blue House. 

Since The Picturehouse Big Band is no longer extant, when the most recent call came in for volunteers we reckoned we could throw together something for the couple of days we had been invited for with Kilbey, Reado and Andy from various Picturehouse line up's new rock n' roll Maitre 'D Matt White crowning the affair with a trip up North for their new band Matt White and The Emulsions. Incidentally, on an early trip up to Spalding one of the posters in the Red Lion's back room for the Jazz and Blues Club featured Matt's old band, Swagger. 

Another listed the line up for the 1967 Bank Holiday festival, which featured Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. Swagger cost more, by the way. However, from the initial expeditionary force, work commitments started picking people off, and by the time we departed, there were just the five of us making up the numbers - Picturehouse hadn't played for six months, I hadn't been in the band for a couple before that, and we now had two drummers. We couldn't pull out though - we'd made a promise, and besides, the name of the village where Big Paul's new pub was to be found was Donington, and the chance to drop that casually into conversation was too good to miss.

I decided to keep updates on Twitter. In between surreptitiously nipping out to text things on my phone I learned many things about the value of the friendship and companionship which is engendered by a shared experience in the musical trenches. And I learned that there really is something called "the meat sweats"... 

Fri 16th; Arrived and grabbed rooms. Pat has not packed socks or pants for the weekend. Am not bunked with Pat. Andy has just created the gammon Amy Winehouse. Don't ask. Made fatal error in attempting to trade solos with andy trill. Floor duly wiped... Good news. Jane Goldman lookalike in audience. Well, we've never medleyed my sharona with pressure drop before, but i think we got away with it... "oi ate ‘coont’, that's a fookin' bastard word ent it?". The post gig party lacks that dorothy parker touch. Update on the jane goldman lookalike from earlier - more of a caitlin moran at a fancy dress party-alike. There is an element of tequila involved with tonight's aftershow party. Latest round, four black sambucas and a fruit shoot. Yes, Kilbey is still up. There are ukeleles... Trill now shredding molly's chambers on mandolin. It is a rare skill, but in the right situation... Right - let's turn the amps back on and do sex on fire. Who doesn't love that at two in the morning? Every evening should end with at least one person in the room saying 'awesome!' 

Sat 17th; Dressed for afternoon gig. Kilbey in all black, Pat in red and glitter. Not sure what he's planning for the swimsuit round. Nice to meet an old mate who first saw the band fourteen years ago when he had just been diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. Pat and Reado are discussing correct ride cymbal emplacement at great length. Default opening conversational gambit in Spalding is an insult, followed up smartly with another insult. Incendiary born to run from reado followed by blagging of hotel rooms for the band. Excellent shevving i trust you'll agree? The landlord was in dr who and the silurians. Top trivia. We've now been coming to spalding to play beatles songs for longer than the beatles were together. Back at pub in donington. Pat is now taking orders in the restaurant and helping with the washing up. I think he may have found his calling. Trill eating a double mixed grill sans cutlery... Trill to be photographed for the pub's mixed grill wall of fame. Immortalised in Donington forever. 

Sunday 18th. Sharing a room with Reado. He showers to The Specials. Hope he's only skanking in there... I am reminded that this is the hotel where we were once so rock and roll that we threw a kettle out of the window. Well, the lead, at least. Have confused drummer by using the term 'zeitgeist' at breakfast. He is otherwise engaged spreading marmalade on his bacon. 

Twitter @doyoudoanywings

“Always pick the best bandana…”

As the dog days of winter shake the dew off their skirts and turn into bright spring mornings, a young man’s fancy turns to the Festival Season – a moveable feast traditionally bookended for us in Songs from The Blue House by Helstock at the start of the term and Acorn Fayre at the end. Betwixt and between we have a few shows already lined up, we’ve already declined at least one, one and we shall wait and see what providence and provenance comes up with regarding the rest. 

We are enormously pleased and privileged to be invited back to Acorn Fayre again (for details, see blogs passim), but our immediate thoughts turn to this weekend’s Helstock, where we return once more to The Steamboat in sunny downtown Ipswich for an evening of fun, frolics, light-hearted jollity, good company, fine dining and excessive consumption of good strong ale. This year we have a line up to appeal to the Fifty Quid Guy within all of us, with a slew of covers turns, a couple of surprises and, unusually for us, a weekend date for the Moot. 

In explaining to one of the people we’ve corralled into playing for us what the evening is about I usually embark on a lengthy explanation of how we initially started by having a birthday party one year for the Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley at which a few people got up and played and then decided to do it again the next year, and the next, before Gibbon adroitly steps in and confirms that the whole thing is basically an excuse for me to spend as much time on stage during the course of the evening as possible, and with my participation in three of the five scheduled turns, I do have to say that he has a point.

The slightly off-kilter nature of the evening means that this year I will be taking the opportunity to experiment slightly and will be going electric with the previously all-acoustic SftBH and hoping to provoke catcalls of “Judas!” from stunned audience members before Our Glorious Leader goes off to find an axe somewhere with which to cut the power cables. To be fair, that’s pretty much his standard response when he sees me wielding an electric guitar anyway, and so there’s no real sea-change in attitudes there. Later on he himself will be taking to the boards as part of The Rainy Day Women and continuing the Dylan theme by covering some of the Bard of Duluth’s finest moments, which are not expected to contain renditions of either ‘Mozambique’ or ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, although as the old folks are apparently prone to say, c’est la vie; you never can tell.

I myself have been tangled up in Bruce, attempting to garner support and sympathy toward an idea I had to start a loose collective of musicians willing to go out and perform a classic album in its entirety a couple of times before dusting ourselves down and moving on to the next one. The first project to be undertaken has been Springsteen’s seminal Born to Run (or “That’s pretty much ‘Bat Out of Hell’ isn’t it?” as winsome young keyboard player Adam would have it as he patiently works his way through ‘Thunder Road’ on piano). Chief co-conspirator Tony ‘Shev’ Shevlin (there are no prizes for commenting on the exegesis of his moniker, by the way) and I managed to pretty much nail down three songs as a trial run, roping in Frisky Pat from the now-sadly defunct Picturehouse on drums, Adam, and stalwart bass player Gibbon before spending last week trying to track down a saxophone player with the necessary gravitas to fill the role of The Big Man.

After a few wrong turns and blind alleys we managed to persuade a very kind man called Steve to dep for us, who turned up with a sheaf of dots and squiggles on paper and a mildly concerned attitude which, certainly for me, brought to mind the early Songs from The Blue House days of persuading Fiddly that what he really needed in his life were a couple of non-reading guitar players whose idea of writing an arrangement was to hum things, play a couple of chords on the guitar and then go to the bar. Steve ran through the set a few times, crossed out and scribbled a few dots and pronounced himself willing to take on the challenge. “This Springsteen bloke” he enquired affably “…much of a following has he?” Having learned most of the horn parts off a bewildering selection of thirty five years-worth of clips of versions available on YouTube he had only one major concern. 

“You’re not going to run across the stage and kiss me, are you?” he asked.

“When I get off’ve this mountain, I know where I wanna go…”

I received news this week that one of my old landladies had passed on. Not so big news in itself, especially to those who never knew her, but it did stir memories of what she facilitated by her general easy-going nature, for the house that I rented off her had a basement, you see. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of an electric guitar, must be in want of somewhere to play it, and having a cellar, a couple of old mattresses and some egg boxes meant that this ambition was easily attained. 

Her forbearance had already been assured by the previous tenant who, by happy coincidence, was also the drummer in my band and so aside from the occasional intervention by bored policemen passing on foot patrol in the street above, we were perfectly able to spend every Thursday evening working on songs, mucking about with cover versions, writing, tweaking, recording demos and occasionally auditioning guitarists as the last one decided that they rather had more urgent engagements to attend to than to spend every Thursday evening…well, you get the idea. And at around ten o’clock we’d draw a veil over the evening’s work and pop around the corner to The Spread Eagle and ruminate over a few pints on what we’d achieved or, more likely, on whatever took our fancy as the subject of conversation that evening.

That we weren’t paying by the hour meant that work was conducted in a more reflective, quality-intensive way than if we’d been clock watching the whole time and of course the added benefit for me was that for the rest of the week I had a drum kit set up, a pair of headphones and The Band’s Greatest Hits on CD. I really couldn’t speculate on the amount of time I invested in happily plodding through those marvelous syncopations, but I do know that it was all time well spent. Without those evenings I wouldn’t have been teaching a song to the band when one of our members queried one of the lines by remarking that “Sadler’s Wells” was an odd thing to throw into a lyric. That wasn’t the original line, but that throwaway comment meant that the chorus got re-written on the spot to include it from that point on. Once again, that may not necessarily a biggie for you, but I still play that song sometimes, and not a chorus goes past that I don’t think about it. 

Anyone with such a facility is obviously going to become quite popular in the musicianly circles he mixes in and so there were occasions that I made myself scarce for the evening and left a key under the mat for others. I didn’t like to be too usurious about the arrangement and so I generally left instruction that the guys could use the place to their own content and help themselves to tea and coffee, but that I’d appreciate it if they left items of food in the kitchen for me to be pleasantly surprised by when I got back. Trust me to lend the place out to the only bunch of vegetarians on the block, but at least I know now not to trust canned ratatouille. On one occasion I came back to find appreciative graffiti from Big Ray regarding the photographs of my girlfriend I had on the kitchen pinboard. 

I had houseguest for a while too, and when I played an Eric Clapton record once he responded by playing the first Taj Mahal album to impress on me what guitar playing was really about. In response I upped the stakes by sticking on The Allman Brothers, and the silent one-upmanship went on all evening until he finally rooted around upstairs and dug out Electrif Lycanthrope by Little Feat then trumped all previous hands by simply sitting back and daring me to find anything better. Obviously, I couldn’t. 

All of this and more went on in the end terrace house, endured stoically and benignly by the kindly lady next door, who once a month I went round to see, handed over my rent to, had a cup of tea with and a chat and then padded back again to my place. According to their deeds shall you know them, and also by their tolerance of young men with electric guitars. So long, Vera. And thanks.

“Like Gibbon, she dances across the porch as the radio plays…”

It is always an intriguing time, the gestation of a new band. From concept to concert, there are any number of pitfalls and pratfalls that can easily beset the righteous man on all sides. When Bob Geldof compared getting The Who back together for Live Aid as being like reuniting a man and his three ex-wives he wasn’t exaggerating for effect. 

I myself have recently gone through a very painful period of adjusting to the fact that a couple of my metaphorical ex-wives have moved on and are now in a perfectly happy relationship with someone new. I see them on the street in company sometimes, and it still pains my heart to watch them together – going to all the old places we used to, doing the things we used to do, seeing the people we used to see, but, you know, I’ve moved on, we all have.

 *Sniffs, reaches theatrically for monogrammed handkerchief, dabs eyes* 

And so, in pursuit of closure, and having found myself with a bit of spare time on my hands, I rustled up a couple of old chums and threw an idea at them. How about the concept of a floating band, with no real permanent members, who could take on classic albums, one reissue at a time, perform them in their entirety and then move on to the next? 

The idea appealed, and so in a nervous, baby steps sort of way we set ourselves a deadline and decided that we would perform three numbers from Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run in March at Helstock, the now annual celebration of the Diva’s Diva - La Mulley, out of Songs from The Blue House. 

We gathered together in The Blue Room at McGinty’s, made sure everything was tuned up, turned on and nailed down, and took our first tentative steps through the Backstreets toward Jungleland. Obviously this wasn’t a complete throwing together of strangers forced by necessity and/or penury to take any job that came their way, as can so often be the case with musicians, so we all had some common ground between us, but it was really grand to be in the sort of situation where the fine line between deprecation and dedication was admirably negotiated and, since everyone had done their homework, the whole get together was smoothly accomplished. 

By the end of the night we had passable working versions of three songs and a couple of pints of Guinness each in our slipstream. For a one-off Wednesday night’s work, that’s not bad going. The benefits of working in a warm, great-sounding and relaxed environment obviously include easy access to a bar, a smoking area, friendly and hospitable hosts and the sort of toilets that have both flyers for a Chap Hop event (that sounds a terrifically interesting concept, and one I made a mental note to explore further) and graffiti in the cubicles extolling the virtues of The Go Betweens. 

I mean if I had to quibble over the details I might say that access and egress is a bit limited, but then I catch sight in the mirror of a fleeting half-glimpse of myself from the Eighties, and remind myself not to be such a doddering old fool. It’s just that the car park’s rammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

"The Guitar's all very well Shane - oh, and there's some money in it...“

Frankly, it wasn't looking promising for this one. Out of the core Songs from the Blue House triumvirate James was laid up with a migraine, I had a sore throat and Gibbon wasn't coming at all. Along with all this, we were due to play a Valentine's fund-raising dinner in a hall in Essex, and there was going to be a raffle. As my radio co-host Neale had remarked when I brought the subject up this week "Why don't you just play happy songs and then everyone will get along and have a nice time?". With our set list? It didn't seem possible. Coming along for the ride was Mr. Wendell, who had been corralled as our sound man du jour although, as he remarked, when it comes to sound mixing he's more Steve Martin than George Martin. To make him feel at home I asked him to mention if there was anything he didn't like. "Well" he responded Scousily "I don't like that scarf..." 

Sound check concluded, we retired to the backstage area where a nice table had been laid out for dinner and before too long we were thoroughly enjoying a nice meal provided by our hosts. "This is nicer than the KFC" remarked Diane. More bands should get together for a social evening - we had a splendid lasagne provided by our hosts (veggie for Wendell for, as we explained, he doesn't eat meat, subsisting as he does mainly on leaves and air), two types of dessert, and were thoroughly enjoying each other's company, with the conversation ranging from the correct use of grammar, through the likelihood of the existence (or not) of the spirit world (I particularly enjoyed the story of the ghost who was visible only from the knees upward, as the floors had been a lot lower in their time), whether The Double Deckers actually ever drove that bus, and how difficult it must be to lift things if you exist mainly on a diet of leaves and air.

Obviously we were enjoying this even more as the clock ticked past nine o'clock and we were now being paid for it as well. The old showbiz saw that "It'll sound different once there are some people in" was never more happily accomplished as the cabaret seating and supper club vibe somehow gave a zing to the top end (sounds impossible, I know, but it's true) and tightened up the woolly mids and the fluffy bottoms (there'd been a lot of this sort of thing coming up in over dinner chat so you can tell what sort of mood we were in) until we were in a bright bubble of beautiful sound. 

Everything came together wonderfully. TT was filling in down the dusty end of his piano to cover for the errant bass player as well as doing his usual wonderful job up at the top end on the plinky ones (it's technical muso term - don't worry if you're not perfectly au fait with it), The Fragrant and Charming Helen was on splendid form, Parters was inspired, Turny Winn - on home turf - was his usual raffish self on banjo (and that's not an easy trick to pull off) and Fiddly Richard, all the way from Thorndon, was taking the whole thing so seriously that he'd donned one of his extra special colourful weskits for the occasion and was sawing away at the back like a man possessed. Given the dinner conversation we'd just had, this may have been an actual spiritual happening. 

Notable highlights of the SftBH love fest were a peerless reading of Aretha Franklin/Etta James/The Flying Burrito Brothers' (depending on who you listen to) Do Right Woman - a duet of such touching fragility that even as we were playing it I was cursing myself for not remembering to insist that James record the show off the desk so that I could luxuriate in its wonder later on at my own convenience. I was indulged a lengthy introductory speech for Rolling and Tumbling, Turny stepped up to deliver a beautiful and heartfelt The Girl With The Scrambled Yellow Hair (his own song, and another first for us) during which Fiddly delivered a sublime solo which had me cursing all over again, and then Our Glorious Leader stepped up to sing the third in a trilogy of heartfelt love songs. His was called Bike. 

A brief break for the raffle - the band collectively won a bag of Rolos for completing the quiz sheet with one of the top three scores - a closing section during which my throat finally gave out leading to a swift on the hoof, off the cuff re-arrangement of a couple of verses, someone bought a book (All These Little Pieces - still available at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/all-these-little-pieces/5939858 by the way) and a last number during which we introduced the band, the audience set up a rhythmic clapping beat completely of their own volition then dragged us back for an encore, and then possibly the best compliment of the evening - Mr. Wendell confessing that for once he wished he were on stage. Waiting in the dressing room there were chocolate-covered strawberries. 

Agentleman from the audience came up to me afterwards, clutching two CDs. "You lot" he muttered, almost unbelievingly, "killed up there tonight".

We're just four lost souls, swimming in a fishbowl...

I went to the last Picturehouse gig tonight. Obviously, having been in the band previously, and having departed on unusually good terms, this was not a thing that I necessarily wanted to be a part of, the farewell, I mean - I never wanted it to end. The whole Picturehouse ethos has, and had, always been one of giving the people not necessarily what they thought they needed in terms of light pub rock entertainment, but what they should have. Satisfactorily, the band pulled out an old Charlatans number toward the end of the evening in order to get Mr. Wendell back up on stage, and then followed that with a song which allowed me to overact tremendously in a shape-throwingly hammy performance of a Kings of Leon track. Earlier, bass player Kilbey had pointed out that the only song which had stayed in the set from day one of the band's existence all the way through to the final gig was an obscure REM cover of a song by Wire. As it happened I was called up for an encore, and channelled all I knew about fronting a band, armed only with a mic stand and working elbows, and tried to do justice to Toddler, who was the first singer I ever saw who threw his arms about, smoked a cigarette and performed Suffragette City in a way that made me think that one day I'd like to do the same. Tonight, I hope I did that legacy justice. You know that thing that goes "blah di blah just a band...hmm hmm hmm - just a band..."? Well, Picturehouse were - just a band, but a tiny piece of me died tonight with that group. They - no, we, were just a band, but they were my band, and for some of us, they were the best thing on the planet. They gave me the opportunity to be Jimmy Page; for a while I was Pete Townsend, on a couple of occasions I did Mick Ronson.
You probably won't have seen this band, you didn't clap for the encore, they didn't even once play your wedding, but if they had, oh, if they had...
Odd, this - a eulogy for a little combo that we put together just so that we could go to the pub with our mates. And we did. Boys, oh we did.

"The stars are alive and nights like these were born to be..."

I was rather hoping for a nice review of All These Little Pieces in the local paper, and so when one duly turned up I was not only gratified but also quite touched that it started with congratulations upon the delivery of not only a finished manuscript but also of Archie - my new son, heir to the Kirk estate, and future King of the World. 

As I mention in the book itself, over time we in Songs from The Blue House developed what could comfortably be referred to as a (does that thing with the fingers in mid air) 'relationship' with local journalist, promoter and music producer Stephen Foster, engendered principally on our ability to string a sentence together without resorting to base Anglo Saxon epithets, to not bump into the furniture and to say 'please' and 'thank you' when we're offered coffee in the BBC Radio Suffolk green room, and it was good of him to step up to the plate, as it were. 

I ended up with a nice cover shot for the book and so with the two threads of this particular process wending their way together it would seem that the good people who put together The Grapevine - since 1991 Ipswich, Suffolk and East Anglia's best free music guide - considered that a combination of Foz's good word for us and the striking image of my Eric Clapton album cover pastiche was enough to throw us on to the cover of the January 2010 issue of the magazine. 

Now, I've been on the cover before - in fact if you go to The Grapevine's website you'll see a number of me, featured in the photo from the front of the December 2001 issue, where The Final Twist - the gig we promoted at The Manor Ballroom in Ippo to herald the last hurrah of our Beatles specialist band The Star Club - was quite rightly heralded as many folks' gig of the year (it was definitely mine, and there were certainly three other guys who to my knowledge I'm sure would go along with that). 

To find myself in the position of being back on there though, is exciting (and humbling) not least because the reason I'm pictured, in all my faux-Backless glory, is thanks to the publication of a happy collaboration with friends upon what is, essentially, a very long love letter to SftBH. I will be scooping up copies of The Grapevine (alas, now that it has downsized in format it shan't make for such a splendid framing opportunity as did its predecessor) and showing them to friends, sending them to family, and also tucking a single copy away in Archie's special bag o' papers, so he can dig it out in thirty years time, smooth out the dry, cracked and yellowing paper, and pore over the words that someone wrote about some words that someone once wrote. Holding the fading photograph up to the wan light of the window, he can trace the outline of the photograph on the cover. "So that's what he looked like..." he'll say "...before." 

Read all you like about on the electric interweb about why us people do these things - everyone's got a theory. Writers, performers, bedroom arrivistes with their Garageband mix tapes and their pro tools-heavy downloads. Self-publicists, self-publishists, pamphleteers, buccaneers, YouTubers, cover bands and tribute brands, lovers, thieves, fools and pretenders. Why? In the words of a song somebody once wrote; "I just want to be up here you see, with something of my own".

A Tale of Two Singers

Before we start, it is important to establish two facts. One is that Judy Dyble, the one-time lead singer out of Fairport Convention, and current solo artist in her own right, very kindly agreed to once appear onstage with Songs from The Blue House. At the time we featured our friend Steve 'Kilbey' Mears on vocals. The other is that Anthony Costa, one of the blokes out of the pop group Blue, is currently appearing in panto in Ippo. Now then, let's begin...

So. Kilbey's out on a works do, the sort of thing where you get introduced to people and have to find some common ground over the canapes and then rather uncomfortably skip out to the car park for a restorative Marlboro light as soon as possible, ruefully considering that if the company spent half as much on your annual bonus as they did on forcing you to go out with clients then everybody would be a lot happier in the long run. But then, as they say, that's the difference between a bonus and a penis. You can always find someone willing to spend time enjoying making the most of your bonus. Apparently, on this occasion Kilbs gets into conversation with a nice chap who, as it happens, likes music and bands and enjoys conversing with people who like music and bands. The inevitable question comes up - "So, what sort of stuff do you like?". The chap pauses, knowing that this is a hole he's had to dig himself out of many times before, and tentatively asks "I don't suppose you've heard of a guy called Richard Thompson...?". Kilbey, after many years in my company immediately spots an in. "Mate" he says "He wrote Meet On The Ledge, yeah? I love that song - one of my best friends (he's not talking about me) says it's his favourite song, and I think it's a beautiful song, and every time I hear it I'm close to tears through all the connections and stuff..." The chap is visibly impressed. "Oh, so you're familiar with Fairport Convention?" he asks. "Oh yeah..." replies Kilbey "...in fact I wrote a song that Judy Dyble sang with some friends of mine". "No, way!!!!" says the guy "I BLOODY LOVE JUDY DYBLE!!!" At this point, Kilbey remembers something else. "Oh yeah" he says "We did a gig with her once - so, y'know, I've duetted with Judy Dyble on stage!". "YOU'RE FUCKING KIDDING ME!?!?!?" replies his new friend and, calming into lower case, responds "That's awesome, mate, you're so lucky!" Kilbey confirms that he is, indeed, very lucky, does a whole back story around our friend Big Paul (who first introduced him to FC), what little he knows about Jude, reflects on the band, some of the people we have in common, swaps numbers, and promises to keep in touch. A group formed over forty years ago has provided, through chance and connection, a conduit for people to start a social relationship, converse, swap stories over common ground and rediscover their love for its music. Jude will infer that when Jimi Hendrix got up to jam with the band back in the day she was busy knitting. But she was busy knitting there.

In the mean time, after two (count 'em) performances of the pantomime at the Ipswich Regent, it is agreed that the lead actor should mime both (both!) of his songs as he can't really hold up the rest of his performance if he strains his throat trying to hold a tune in his featured spots. As a result and an aside, the talented young actress playing opposite him now also has to mime. The actor has a VIP area reserved at an Ipswich nightclub where he is gifted champagne as a consequence of his exalted status. The free champagne (I've talked to one of the staff) costs about 70p a bottle at trade prices and last week the club DJ put on 'Killing In The Name' and pointedly dedicated it to manufactured pop stars.

Here's a question. Whose CV would you rather have?

Made in the Eighties.

Bob Geldof commented that getting The Who to play Live Aid was like getting a man and his three exes back together. It wasn't quite so fractious when the four of us who made up the As Is (mk.III) line up reconvened after a gap of about nineteen years to play at one time Behemoth of the Bass Ross Geraghty's birthday party in darkest North London this weekend and anyway, there was only one of my exes there. Having rooted around in the attic for a set of matching drum sticks, drummer Malcolm, the rocking barrister from Followill, Followill, Followill and Followill (I believe he is formally attached to Molly's Chambers) was limbering up gently at a table in the corner when James and I arrived fresh from the same route that he used to take into London in the olden days of the Punk Wars, when horses and carts laden with turnips for market would also convey fun loving Adicts fans to dark, black-painted rooms, where they would drink snakebite and exchange copydex recipes. 

Rossco and the house band warmed up the PA with a brisk run through some pub rock standards (after the third I thought, "Well there go all the things I can play along on") garnering a series of huge rounds of applause in the process and then after a few ginger tweaks and tune ups we gathered together on stage and prepared to trundle through half a dozen songs we hadn't played in nearly two decades. To be honest, I don't think we'd actually all been in the same room with each other in that time. Bearing in mind that this was supposed to be a party and that there were only two other people in the room who had heard any of the songs we were about to play before, I don't think we were entirely sure how this was all going to come off. The band was so unfamiliar even to Ross's mates that one of them asked who our bass player was. There were four clicks on the sticks and then we were off, and to be honest, it wasn't so much that the years slipped away, it was more that it seemed that the years hadn't actually been there in the first place.

It was terribly nice that so many people came up and asked if that was all our own stuff and how long had we been rehearsing for it afterward, but the main pleasure was simply being back in harness with the coolest rhythm section in town (one of whom surely has a portrait in the attic which has take on the job of ageing on his behalf), whacking up the distortion and wailing the fuck out. On the way home we picked up a kebab, just like the old days (and I understand it may even have been from the same shop as back in the day), and once I got home I realised that the eighties scarf I'd dug out to wear especially had been lost in transit betwixt stage and hearth. If I were a more spiritual man I'd say that it was a fitting metaphor for closure. As it is, I probably just dropped it in the pub. Probably the sort of careless act I would have done back then, except I probably wouldn't have bothered remembering to reclaim my spare plectrum and we really would have gone through with nicking the mics. But what sort of example would that be to the kids?

I second that emulsion.

It's been said that being in a band is like being in a marriage*. I wouldn't necessarily go quite that far, being (as I am) in a conventional marriage already, but it's certainly one of the more intensive, if not invasive, relationships you'll ever be fortunate enough to have. It's more like, oh, possibly an open marriage, say, or a polygamous one. Certainly when your (ex) partner moves on to someone new, the situation has the propensity to be one of those times when you can't help but wonder out loud about their new love; you find yourself checking out pictures of them together, wondering if you should have stayed that bit longer, looking back on those special times and wondering if you should or could have done anything different. What is it, you think, that's so special about their new partner(s), even though, deep down, you already know.
Those reunion albums, those nostalgia tours, every one off reunion gig ('for the fans', naturally) that you nurture, they're all one step off've picking up the phone after one too many late night gins and asking what the hell went wrong (you've read/seen High Fidelity, right?) Occasionally you might look back, pausing long enough only to take your rose tinted spectacles off, wipe a nostalgic tear from your cheek and sniff that you were right to move on and that things will never be the same for them, that they'll never know what they're missing, and that if they don't wake up in the middle of the night clutching the space that you used to occupy, then they darned well should do. Then you take a long pull on your Jack & Coke, substitute 'you' for 'they' and move on.
Every once in a while though, it's good to flirt with an ex. I hope to be at my friend Ross's birthday party in December, and we'll see then if there's still something between us. We'll show those new partners, those exes, and those who've fooled around with us in the mean time what they've been missing. Oh yes we will.

www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/all-these-little-pieces/7862956

*Brian Molko out of Placebo, since you ask.

All These Littles Pieces

I am pleased and proud to announce the arrival of second best thing I've had delivered this week. Ease up on that scrolling finger, friends! No need to take the lap top into the bathroom with you when you get to a good bit! Highlights from the Songs from The Blue House back pages, lovingly compiled into one handy volume, for all your stocking-filling needs.

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/all-these-little-pieces/7862956 

"Thundering acoustic guitar licks..."

A recent review confirms that I really am in a band, and illuminates a few details which will also be be covered briefly in the forthcoming All These Little Pieces - available shortly.

http://www.maverick-country.com/#/songs-from-the-bluehouselive/4536405746

My Phone’s on Vibrate for You.

May I take this opportunity to express the fondest regards and the best of wishes to the good folk of Halstead for inviting us into their second home, The Dog, and letting us take up a corner of their local with our country-folk-blues-pop stylings last night. A friendly crowd lowered the hubbub and made best of order for the SftBH show on October 29th, allowing us free rein to indulge our penchant for tales of love, loss, woe, hope, optimism and the occasional punitive exercising of the right to defend one’s farmhouse against those who would trespass against us. That last one always goes down well in the Essex borders. 

Also notable was the opportunity to fill in a string-replacing lull in proceedings with a fine version of “Love Hurts”, which I always enjoy imposing on the group as it gives me the opportunity to do my best Gram Parsons impression. Coupled with that was the availability of a couple of shelves’ worth of casks of ale which came associated with the imprecation to “help yourselves” and the wonderful opportunism of landlord Ady, who took our throwaway “This one’s in ‘D’ – I hope you all have your harmonicas ready?” to indeed scurry off upstairs only to reappear with an appropriately tuned harmonica, find a handy microphone and engage in a spirited instrumental duet with Tony Winn on “Rolling and Tumbling”. There was absolutely no call for the subsequent “…and if you’ve ever wondered what two cats fighting in a bag would sound like…” comment, there really wasn’t. 

In the break I got chatting to a chap who mentioned in passing that he’d once jammed on stage with Van Morrison. I enquired further. It turns out that he was once in The 100 Club with some mates who were in a band, and who should walk in mid-soundcheck but the late, great Lonnie Donegan. The skiffle legend was hastily invited up for a jam, and things were going swimmingly before Van the Man himself actually walked in, took in the scene and decided to join his old mucker up on the stage! As you can imagine, our friend was mightily impressed by this astonishing turn of fortune and was even more delighted when Morrison made come hither gestures toward him, indicating that he, too, should join in with the communal merry-making. Having protested that he couldn’t play an instrument, he was handed a tambourine with the comment that no-one could muck that up, and it was important that everyone be able express themselves. 

One lengthy improvisation later our chum was delighted to be approached by the great man, who extended a warm paw toward him. “Looks like I was wrong about that then. I’ll have that off you, if you don’t mind…” he said, witheringly.

Some days, you eat the bear. 

It's difficult to know what to say when you finish a set and one of your previously sane and rational friends storms the (admittedly minor) length of the venue, vaults on to the stage, embraces every member of the band within armshot and exclaims "That was fucking awesome!". It seems only fair to express gratitude, especially if he's also just bought dinner for the entire band. After sober and censorious reflection, said chum was willing to repeat his critical appraisal this mornng over a pub breakfast and so I'm going to have to trust him on this one.

It was a necessarily short set, tucked in between an extraordinarily personable percussion-looping open-tuned virtuoso guitarist and one Melanie Dekker, a wonderful Canadian singer/songwriter blissfully untroubled by any prior interaction with the ugly stick, the whole thing being introduced by BBC Radio's Sue Marchant, delightfully both free of spirit and scat of ty. 

There was a minor set list adjustment prior to the show on the grounds that it was "the wrong room" for one of the songs, but if you can't indulge the whims and fancies of one of your trusted bandmates in a cellar full of pews, when can you? She was right, of course. It was a good set, a good gig, a good show - hell, the sound guy even congratulated me on one of my jokes, that's how good we were. 

You know that bit in movies featuring bands, where the caricature singer turns up at the stage door, throws on a guitar, strides centre stage and without a soundcheck counts the band in, wows the crowd, throws off his axe, gets the girl and rides off in to the sunset on a powerful motorcycle all within the space of one anthemic number? It was like that all the way through. On the application form you have to fill in whenever you want to form a band (there's a central registry and a government department and everything- I think one of the Miliband brothers is in charge of it at the moment) there's a section at the bottom where they ask why it is that you and your friends want to be in a band. After careful consideration, on mine I wrote "We could be heroes. Just for one day".

https://youtu.be/tJtSTuLYmRc