Why The Long Face?

Community Radio is a marvellous thing - it gives a voice to those who would otherwise be reduced to, say, muttering things at the bus stop, sending Spotify playlists to their friends or writing stories about their children on blogs. Here's a good example of all of the above, taken from a recent performance on ICRFM, wherein three long-faced gentlemen extemporise at length on subjects close to their hearts, including that time Martyn found a bloke asleep in his driveway after a heavy evening out, my night with The Levellers, Neale's 'Why The Long Quiz?' and Phil Bryer's 'None of Your Business'. Come on in, the water's lovely.

http://soundcloud.com/neale-foulger/why-the-long-face-23-8-12

"...and *he* is very far away..."

 
We took our little boy to his first camping festival this weekend - The Levellers' Beautiful Days, where I saw The Waterboys, Public Image Limited, Midlake, Richard Thompson, The Travelling Band, Bellowhead and Three Daft Monkeys (all of whom were absolutely on top form) among others, and Lord Barchester saw two theatre group soundchecks before deciding at one minute to showtime that he was bored and wanted some pasta. Same group two days running, I should add. At two and a half he was also fairly distracted by things like trees with eyes, the bus which doubled as a tea room and a giant metal sculpture of a dragon (which he named Blackie), was intrigued by Bellowhead, and very much enjoyed banging a couple of plastic pails along to Alabama 3 in company with a host of other small people behind the sound tower. 

From the top of the field the stage is rather far away in terms of his perspective, and we did have a bit of a Father Ted-esque conversation regarding the relative size of the performers on stage compared to him. At about a quarter to Levellers at the climax of the festival on Sunday evening he announced that he'd quite like to go back to the tent, brush his teeth and go to sleep, which did at least leave his mother free to unleash her inner fifteen year old detached from the pressures of trying to keep tabs on a small boy in the dark, glowsticks attached to his trouser pockets or no. "Mummy is staying to watch the little singing man" he proposed. "She is, that's right" I said.  

As I got him ready for bed he chatted away, making sense of the world as only small boys can. "I have got feet" he announced. I agreed that all the evidence pointed to him indeed having feet. "Do you have feet?" he enquired. I confirmed that I did, demonstrably, have feet. Blackie has got feet" he further asserted before checking "...and has the little singing man got feet?". I posited that The Little Singing Man almost certainly had feet. As undressing continued he further confirmed that, anatomically, he had very much in common with me, Blackie, and The Levellers' front man, barring the obvious absence of a tail in myself, himself, and the man whose stirring rendition of One Way drifted across the clear Devon night even as we spoke.

This conversation continued at all stages throughout the changing and pyjama donning process and took in a wide range of aspects of anatomy along the way which is why, now, forever in my head I shall always think fondly of Mark Chadwick as "The Little Singing Man With The Winkie".         

So...

 

…the new Songs from The Blue House album is out. If Derek Taylor were alive today and we had the budget he’d probably have composed some chin-strokingly erudite sleeve notes over which one could pore late into the night, searching for that elusive hidden meaning, the fin de siècle, that certain je ne sais quoi for us. But he isn’t, so we’ve had to do it ourselves. One thing that has become plain over the past few years is that while I’m quite prepared to explain at length what my songs are about, even going so far as to point out the hitherto overlooked (or overwrought) metaphor-ridden middle eight that I think you should pay particular attention to, La Mulley hardly ever does - hence her songs remain elusive whispers on the ether - quite literally ethereal. For example it’s been five years now and I still don’t know what Her, from ‘Tree’, is about.       

IV Sleeve Notes - http://tinyurl.com/c88wyvd

SftBH Bandcamp - http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/

“No-one wants to hear about your kids…”

I was listening to the equivalent of the extra disc from a Songs from The Blue House box set this morning as, while looking for something else on the CDR shelf, I had stumbled across a copy of some early mixes for ‘Tree’, which included the songs that didn’t make it onto the final album. We whittled our initial selection of around fifteen or sixteen numbers down to the final running order after a lengthy process of deliberation and reference to outside panels of the great, good and discerning of taste (Mark Ellen, then editor of The Word magazine, gamely took part and expressed his concern on a later podcast that he may have mortally offended “Boggins the bass player” by marking an entry down. He hadn’t).

The main thing that the excluded items share - in common with a couple of things recorded for, but due to be left off our forthcoming album - is a lyrical theme based around children - their care, maintenance and/or lack of presence in the room. It seems that although we as listeners are prepared to make time to hear about loves lost, life on the road and the increasing difficulty in procuring quality pharmaceuticals whilst on tour, nothing stubs the metaphorical toe of the sombre artist’s listener than a not so subtly-nuanced reference to the pram in the hall. Even semi-carnally. For example who among us hasn’t reached for the skip button when John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy delays the arrival of Watching the Wheels by a full four minutes on Double Fantasy? Don’t answer that, by the way - there’s always one. The pram in someone else’s hall, on the other hand - that’s fair game – I mean who doesn’t love Hey Jude? (this question is posed on the same rhetorical basis as the above, by the way).         

Obviously there are clear reasons why a couple of the other songs I listened to this morning didn’t make the cut which are completely unconnected to their lyrical direction – quite why we were so enamoured of the concept of kicking a shed down a flight of stairs that we persuaded drummer Paul Read to unleash his inner Keith Moon in order to enhance the coda to a sensitive little acoustic ballad of Helen’s called Move is lost to posterity. That the session occurred on the same day as we had already spent fruitless hours getting him to overdub the sound of cutlery-as-percussion* may not be entirely unconnected. In the meantime, I’d forgotten we had even ever written a song called Move, let alone recorded and mixed it.

That we would dispatch a car to deepest Oxon. in order to collect Dame Judy Dyble, late of Fairport Convention and Trader Horne, so that she could deliver a beautiful reading of a nursery-baroque song called Little No-One and then leave it off the finished product seems an act of willful perversity. Playing it in the car, the string arrangement alone had me welling up, and that was even before I remembered that I’d had one exegesis of the lyric delivered to me with such blinding clarity** that I physically reeled at not having spotted the obvious before.

My Twinkly Lights was an early and obvious candidate for the cut, even before its twee and clunky sub-Springsteen blue collar narrative became bedecked with the sound of sleigh bells and a festive flute and fiddle part as a result of the banjo player identifying at an early run-through that the descending chord progression lent itself perfectly to the overlaying of the melody*** of the carol Good King Wenceslas, which was funny the first four times or so, but which we all agreed would pall over repeated listens – that and because we weren’t sure if Jingle Bells is out of copyright yet. We occasionally dig it out for downloads in December on the website however, and it is the first thing we offer to donate to festive charity compilations.             

The real pearl in the out-take oyster though, is When Mama Sings, wherein Our (ostensibly gruff and unsentimental) Glorious Leader fires up the ringing open chords and delivers a quite, quite moving paean to the smalls, featuring a remarkable intertwined violin and cello arrangement trumping even that of Little No-One. And a bouzouki. I think in the end we already had a slow ballad, possibly based around the pursuits of loves lost, life on the road and the increasing difficulty in procuring quality pharmaceuticals whilst on tour, and so it missed the final cut, or it may, of course, have been the bouzouki all along. Perhaps we should put them all on a special compilation for new parents to give to one another when they hit the three month mark and are so coincidentally full of love and bereft of sleep that they’ll listen to any old thing at three in the morning. We could call it “No-One Wants to Hear About Your Kids”.

 ps; ...and, as if by magic
http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/tree-out-takes
Thank you, James.

*”More fork, more fork!” I remember being one of the instructions being bellowed over the talkback from the control room, which is not something anyone particularly needs in their headphones, let alone a drummer who’s taken the day off to help some mates out.       

** By one Keith Farnish by the bar at The Cropredy Festival in 1997.     

***"Tempus adest floridum" ("The time is near for flowering") first published in a 1582 song collection, if my Wiki cut and paste does not deceive me.

Old Friends, Bookends.

I spent a rather splendid evening rehearsing last night for one of my occasional forays into the live performance arena with gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe), the group I formed with Stephen Dean and Gibbon after the largely unheralded demise of heavy big pop standard bearers As Is in 1991. That’s right, nineteen ninety one.

At the time we had a regular weekly routine of getting together every Thursday at Stephen’s house, where he had had the good taste and foresight, with the judicious application of a number of mattresses and some gaffa tape, to convert his cellar into a rudimentary rehearsal space. This meant both that we saved ourselves the unnecessary expense of renting out one of those proper air-conditioned soundproofed places with coffee making facilities and nice-looking rugs on the walls and that when we turned up we were already set up and good to get started. It also meant that during the week (in the days before cable TV and The West Wing box sets) it was possible to relax with one of those new-fangled discman CD players, a set of headphones, a full drum kit and The Best of The Band for an hour or so, until the next-door neighbour politely suggested that it was time for Coronation Street and while she was here, could she possibly have this month's rent?  

When he moved out I was only too pleased to take on the lease and the drum kit and occasionally extended the opportunity to rehearse in (literally) homely surroundings to a few friends having asked for contributions to the larder in lieu of something quite so vulgar as money. Hence the discovery on one occasion upon my return to the bachelor pile, having made myself scarce for the evening while a group made up of vegetarians practiced downstairs, of a box of PG Tips, two cans of ratatouille and a packet of runner beans. Some other times I'd get sausages. Occasionally there would be lewd notes referring to my girlfriend.

The deal with gods kitchen rehearsals was that we would warm up with a couple of things that we already knew (possibly last week’s homework) before moving on to polishing up some new material that I probably would have written during the week. At ten o’clock we’d finish off with another couple of songs from the repertoire or we’d busk a cover version someone had heard on the radio to see how far we could get through it before the momentum of the whole thing either overtook us and it collapsed in an ungainly heap in the middle of the floor or we miraculously made it through to the end. We’d then go to The Spread Eagle just around the corner to discuss the session over a couple of cool pints of Guinness. Regular as clockwork, every week at eight o'clock. 

The consistency of this routine meant that I had to come up with a regular stream of new material, if only to keep the rhythm section interested from one session to the next, which certainly helped keep my songwriting muscles supple and toned (the only things that were at this point) and also meant that we were pretty much in a constant state of readiness in case anything came up in terms of live opportunities. I’m not necessarily saying that we put our 10,000 Outliers hours in, but it did (and does) mean that even without having played together for a couple of years now we can pretty much get together at the drop of a party invitation, do a count in and rattle out half a dozen numbers straight off the bat without pausing for breath as, gratifyingly, we did last night.

One of the things I was most pleased about was that none of the stuff we went through sounded out of time (chronologically at least, if not tempo-rhythmically). With so much guitar music under the metaphorical bridge these days it’s hard for anything to not sound like it is tipping a nod and a wink to what has gone before anyway, but I know that our Muswell Hill still beat Oasis’s Kinktastic She’s Electric out of the gate by a good four years (“This is about that bloke who twatted you one in The Old Times that once, isn’t it?” enquired Mr. Wendell on second guitar) and the recorded version of The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes still has an expressive grandeur that speaks volumes beyond its humble four track origins*.

By twenty past ten we have worked through the set we are going to play at the weekend. “Ted Bidits!” calls Stephen cheerily, the traditional The Big Wheel-inspired count down to curfew. I start a chugging rhythm with muted chords on the guitar. “When I said…” I begin singing “…that I loved you, I told a white lie, don’t you know?” It is an old song of the drummer’s, a twelve bar in E and we rattle it off with what passes for panache in a converted woodshed in the middle of the Suffolk countryside. “And that…” he chuckles at the song’s conclusion “…is what happens when you let twenty one year olds listen to George Jones”. Wendell and I consider the implications. “Wouldn’t it have been great at the jubilee concert if they’d booked the wrong G. Jones?” he posits. “George Jones, rocking a hula hoop and singing She Thinks I Still Care” I tender. “Now that…” he assents “…I would pay to see”.

*I like to think that the early work producer Owen Morris put in on some demos for me a few years earlier paid off in spades for him when called in later to work on Champagne Supernova.

How Mark Ellen made me a Rock Dad.

It’s been a bad month for those of us who like our popular culture expertly deconstructed and served up with picture caption jokes, as monthly compendium of aperçus The Word draws a discreet veil over its operations and ceases publication. The wailing and gnashing of cappuccino cups has been heard far and wide across the net – at one point the website turned into a virtual Kensington Palace – and among the tributes to the monthly’s wit and erudition and consensus that they really couldn’t have done any more in terms of positioning themselves in the new marketplace whilst determinedly fulfilling their manifesto to the last, there emerged smaller, more personal stories of how the magazine literally changed people’s lives. I have one such reflection, which even if the events therein didn’t move my life on to a different course, then certainly caused me to sail a bit closer to the wind than I otherwise would have done. In fact one could argue that the whole interactive Word weekend was a barrel of luffs*. It began with the July 2006 issue – number 41 – which contained a small article and jokey quiz about the rise of the Rock Dad. Tucked away at the end was a brief paragraph. “Are you a Rock Dad in a band?” it enquired, going on to suggest that if there were a collection of Rock Dads who had a demo MP3 and a decent photograph to hand then sending it in to the mailbox pretty sharpish might mean that such a group could find themselves opening The Cornbury Festival a few weeks later. As it happened, we did have a demo – a version of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper that we had recorded at High Barn Studio in darkest Posh North Essex a few weeks earlier in lieu of a fee for performing at their beer festival. The rise of the electronic communication age meant that we didn’t even have to find a jiffy bag and a clean C-90 in order to send it off. 

I still have the email I received from Our Glorious Leader in which the earthly representatives of Development Hell communicated their pleasure with our submission and invited us to apply for wristbands forthwith. By lucky happenstance we had picked a song that David Hepworth used to have as his mobile phone ringtone, and so announcing our version with a banjo riff had apparently tickled the adjudicating panel and bumped us to the top of the queue. There followed a flurry of communications between (among others) a production manager now faced not only with Robert Plant’s backline demands but also some bunch from Suffolk who intended to bring a banjo, a mandolin and a fiddle player, but who remained the soul of affable helpfulness throughout both this period and the festival itself. A request for a publishing-spec photograph meant a hasty call to one James Kindred (@sketchybear) – now CEO of his own agency but back then the only guy we knew with a top-end camera and a Mac to edit on. His off the cuff art direction was of such quality that we ended up using shots from the session for the centerfold of our album Tree, and he got a call shortly afterward from the magazine asking if he was available to go and take some shots of Peter, Bjorn and John at Latitude in exchange for a weekend press pass. His portrait of them appeared in the next issue and he got a weekend out into the deal, so I think we all kicked a goal on that one.

We rounded up Simon Allen from High Barn to provide a friendly ear behind the mixing desk, and corralled James Munson to perform a similar task on monitors. They packed tents and gumboots and joined the parade. With our set to be shoehorned into the section immediately after Robert Plant’s crew’s sanctioning of the stage for his headline set and before the festival’s official start time he carefully line checked us all in the face of rising pressure, including our drummer’s rendition of ‘Moby Dick’ and appropriation of Rocco Deluca and The Burden’s cowbell, and then did such a sterling job on us that he was invited to stay up there for the rest of the day. I believe he may have had a hand in refereeing Hayseed Dixie’s sound – again, a case of good deeds not only being their own reward, but offering a little bonus on the side.

At one point a film crew came backstage to interview us. I answered the “What’s a Rock Dad?” question at length, a combination of nerves and bravado, for what seemed like fifteen minutes. The interviewer turned to vocalist Helen. “And what’s a Rock Mum?” they ventured. “Pretty much that…with stretch marks” she deadpanned. When, shortly afterwards, we were introduced to our host and sponsor - one Mark Ellen - he immediately pounced on the remark, which he’d heard relayed anecdotally by one of the film crew,  and guffawed his appreciation while making us all feel immediately at ease with his story of the crushed lavender sprigs in the VIP restaurant area and a good-naturedly dismissive Rock Stars today shake of the head as he compared and contrasted the catering at great festivals past – he may have mentioned Weeley, or Bickershaw. He complimented us on the photo we’d submitted and that they’d published in the magazine’s follow up story (“Oh, which cover did it reminded me of? The Allmans! That’s it - The Allmans – what’s the album that’s from…? ‘Brothers and Sisters’!”) and good naturedly denied being The Rocking Vicar (“No-one knows…”). To be honest we’d probably have spent the next twenty minutes quite happily chatting with him rather than lurking behind the stage checking our watches. Having carefully made a note on a card so as not to inadvertently introduce us as Songs from the Blue Room (“We get that a lot…”) he made a short and funny announcement about what was coming next and let us loose on a big stage in front of a field capable of holding twenty thousand people.

I’ve mentioned in past blogs how the next day I bumped into him, sans pass, and got him back past security (“This is the editor of Word Magazine, one of the festival’s biggest sponsors…”) on condition that I could meet Peter Buck (He made a point of ensuring that he got my wife’s name right so that when he did the introductions he didn’t confuse her with someone else), and there’s a whole chapter in All These Little Pieces devoted to our weekend out at the festival, but none of this would have been possible without someone at The Word coming up with the idea of the Rock Dad, green lighting the idea of an article and then throwing the idea that they might get an actual band of Rock Dads onstage at the festival itself into the ring to top off the cake (I believe that the next year Ellen himself took to the stage with his band The Love Trousers). For that alone, notwithstanding nine years of entertainment for lively minds, thank you The Word. I shall miss you.        

 *Other puns are available.

There is a video of us performing Reaper and a song called Not That Kind of Girl at Cornbury here - http://www.myspace.com/songsfromthebluehouse

It's MySpace, so mind the cobwebs and try not to disturb the dust too much.  

"Right, I've sawn all four legs off the piano..."

It’s a conversation which I imagine takes place between stage managers and artistes the world over all the time. “I’ve got you a piano”. I tapped the flight case propped against the back wall of The Maverick Festival’s Peacock Café reassuringly.
Rose Cousins, Canadian singer, songwriter, and woman who had flown in from Cork that morning, caught a number of trains and then been delivered slightly bleary-eyed to a farm in the middle of rural Suffolk bearing a guitar and a battered suitcase gestured toward the stage. “What about that one?” she enquired, not wishing to disturb the audience enjoying the country blues stylings of Brooks Williams, currently performing on stage.
“That one” I replied, with one eye on the sound desk and one attempting to convey an air of calm authority and professionalism “…belongs to Gretchen Peters”.
“And we can’t use it?”
“I don’t think so”
“Have you asked?”
“No”.
“Why not?”
“Because I am afraid of her tour manager, who is bigger than I am”.
“You’re scared of her tour manager?”
“Very slightly, yes”.
“Oh”.
“We could probably use her stool though?”
She brightened. “Well, there’s something at least”.

To be fair, she had every right to maintain a number of reservations regarding the stage management of The Peacock Café, as I had been the one who’d collected her from the railway station earlier that day and had been making small talk on the way back to the festival site principally along the lines of what I hoped would be a typically self-deprecating English description of my own shortcomings as a sound engineer, general factotum and stage hand, a triad of opportunities that I had been performing since the previous evening when Simon, the proper grown-up sound man off the main stage, had pointed out the Aux sends feeding the stage left and right monitors, the three phantom powered DI boxes sub-grouped on channels one and two, and the microphones on seven and eight with the gain up at two o’clock and the mid cut rolled off at around 250 hZ. I know. Me too. I’d just got to the bit where I described my main function as mainly ensuring that no-one fell off the stage when I remembered that Rose was due to perform under my benevolent supervision later that evening after she’d conducted a songwriting workshop in the Tack Room over past the main stage. I explained how a falling tree had missed me and Jason Ringenberg by minutes on my previous trip to collect The Talent. “The thing is, this isn’t my vehicle, and the last thing I got told was to not damage it. I’m almost sorry I didn’t get the chance to go back and say ‘You’ll never guess what happened to your car!’” I chortled. She settled back in her seat, tired, hungry, and apparently in the care of someone who was prepared to finish Farmer Jason’s career and total a perfectly good Skoda into the bargain for the sake of a cheap anecdote. It’s a wonder she didn’t bail out at that point right there.       

As Brooks finished his set I bounded on to the stage, thanked him, asked the audience to continue showing their appreciation and then mentioned that if a few folk could move their camping chairs slightly to the side that would be a great help as I had a piano to move. A mild wave of amusement swept the floor. “No, really” I said.

By the time I got back to the sound desk Rose had the situation in hand – “I’ll clear a path, you bring the piano” she said striding determinedly off. Ten minutes later we were set up, ready to go, I’d done the stage intro and she was half way to performing “Go First” a truly heart-rending break up ballad that I had to tear myself away from in order to get an update from Simon, who’d popped in to make sure that none of the red lights on the desk were flashing warnings at me. “It sounds pretty good!” he marveled. “Well, I’m not a complete idiot you know” I replied, mock-indignantly. “You will be here by the time Gretchen goes on though, won’t you?” The trace of nerves in my voice must have come through. “Of course” he said reassuringly. He slipped away, replaced almost immediately by Scary Tour Manager. “We are running on time, aren’t we?” The significance of the question was hinted at with undertones of consequence.

“How long do I have?” Rose invited from the stage.
“Fifteen minutes – make ‘em good ones!” I hollered back, cheerily.
“Oh, they’re all good!” she replied, ever the trouper.
“I’d have said twelve minutes” said STM, flashing a wolfish grin and melting back into the crowd.

Next up, Otis Gibbs. “I just need a vocal mic, I have my own DI box, and what time do you want me off?” he said.
“Otis, you are a stage manager’s dream” I gushed.
“Well, you haven’t heard me play yet…”.

Back at the desk I tweaked the onstage mix as directed, trying hard to read the expression of a man in a baseball cap, wearing glasses and with a foot-long frontiersman’s beard standing forty feet away. “Aw heck” he said affably after a while “We’ll split the difference”.  
By the time Gretchen Peters was in the building (right on time, right on cue) the cavalry had arrived and I was grateful for the opportunity to revert to my preferred role of moving things from one place to another without dropping them. The professional sound engineer cast a benevolent, but critical eye over the mixing desk, alighting on a recalcitrant red fader hovering somewhere around the halfway mark. “Why have you got that there?” he enquired.

“Simon…I have absolutely no idea”.

Despatched to check the monitors (“Your ears are of considerably less value than hers”) I forwent the traditional roadie’s “One-Two, One-Two” and borne on wings of combined adrenalin release and post-responsibility Brewers Gold, launched into a spirited verse of Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me”. Came from behind the sound desk a thumbs up, and from the audience a good-natured round of applause. I turned to find Grammy-nominated, CMA Award-winning, Isle of Wight Festival-playing singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters, the woman who wrote ‘On a Bus to St. Cloud’, ‘Independence Day’ and ‘This Uncivil War’ regarding me wryly.

“...and how are we supposed to follow that?” she twinkled.   

Being for the benefit of Mr. McCartney

I love an international football championship, I do. They are like misty watercoloured milestones for me - not necessarily who won the things, but where I was at key moments, who I was with, and what we were doing. When David Platt scored the equaliser against Belgium at Italia 90, for example, I was in the bar  at The George Robey hoping that This Side of Summer wouldn't finish before the game was up so that I and the rest of the coach party who'd come down from Ipswich wouldn't feel like we'd let the guys down by not seeing the gig.

Gareth Southgate's penalty miss meant we had to go and start The Star Club gig at The Earl Roberts (bear in mind that the game had already gone to extra time, so to say we were a bit on the drag may be understating somewhat) whereas the 1991 5-1 drubbing of Germany in the World Cup qualifiers meant that we did that night's show with an extra spring in our step amid a rarely-equalled atmosphere of  bonhomie. I think even the bride got into it that night.

       
1996, and Stuart Pearce's redemptive penalty against Spain however, was the year that my band gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) recorded a five track demo called North of Nowhere at Gemini Studios under the watchful eye of engineer & de facto producer Pat Gruber and under the generous patronage of bass player Gibbon, who stumped up for the cost of the sessions in a fit of unaccountable enthusiasm. Stephen Dean played his Pete Thomas drum kit, Steve 'Kilbey' Mears played guitar and sang backing vocals. There's no whammy bar on that guitar at the end there by the way - it's all neck bend.

 It's a simple song structurally, which means that it has resurfaced at times when (say) you need something a bit lively to encore with and you are able to shout the chords in short order at your accompanists and then get on with having a bit of a bounce at the front without having to do that thing where you hold up your guitar in what looks like a triumphal Springsteen-esque pose, whereas you are in reality just making sure the bass player can see what root notes you're playing on the chords. 

On occasion it has been employed in exactly this capacity by Songs from The Blue House possessing as it does both of those vital qualities of having an easily pick-upable singalong chorus (SftBH chanteuse The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley is responsible for an early revision of one of the lyrics from "...sadness' hell" to "...Sadler's Wells") and, perhaps more importantly in a band which prominently features a banjo and a fiddle player, being in the key of G. This may not mean much to you or me, but believe me, it makes a world of difference to them. 

 I was reminded of the song last week when Sir Paul McCartney celebrated what I understand to be his 70th birthday by dusting off his Hofner bass, bucking up a few young tyros and performing a few old hits for The Queen, a large crowd, and an impressively sized television audience all at the same time. The middle eight* of  North of Nowhere refers directly to Sir Paul, and was prompted in part by a documentary I'd watched wherein he seemed to be playing a whole bunch of those silly love songs he's so famous for curating - checking the dates I'd guess it was probably around the time of the release of Off The Ground (go on, name the singles from that album without recourse to wikipedia) - and I felt moved to comment on his output, believing that he was past his best in terms of putting forth a performance. Of course back then he would have only been in his early fifties so it was an easy mistake to make. Umm, sorry Macca.

As yet Sir Paul has not felt it necessary to comment on how he feels my contribution to the world of music has panned out. There's still time.

gods kitchen performing North of Nowhere;

http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/north-of-nowhere
 

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/guide/song_middle.shtml          

221B

“Hi, is that Kanye West’s, the furriers?”

I was doing my regular late night slot on the wireless yesterday and conversation came around to album cover-related landmarks. Our studio guest, Ian Wade out of http://mybandtshirt.tumblr.com/ related the story of his visit to Paul’s Boutique in New York, and I mentioned that a plaque had recently been unveiled at the site of the iconic image on the sleeve of David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars. I suggested that this was only the second such commemoration afforded to a fictional character. Co-curator Neale, perhaps still distracted by the failure of his Cocteau Twins-themed karaoke idea, wondered aloud who the other one was dedicated to. “I’ll give you a clue” I said. “It’s in Baker Street”.

“Ah, of course”. He nodded sagely. “Gerry Rafferty…”     

Journey Through The Past

“The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.” – Gil Scott Heron.

 I’ve always liked nostalgia – the idea of looking back to a kinder, gentler time appeals to my sense of a cosy, sepia-tinted, halcyon age that, let’s face it, you and I both know never really existed. When I first worked at Andy's Records we used to play Gil Scott-Heron’s Greatest Hits in the shop all the time. Always a bit embarrassing when somebody wanted to buy it as we had to explain that we kept a stock copy especially for playing in-store which was definitely, no way, not the same one that we had the sleeve for out in the browser and which we unaccountably seemed to have lost. 

Pretty soon we cottoned on the idea that if we really did hold one for playing and a couple for selling then everyone would be a lot happier and no-one would need to get nailed to anything. In later years this would be explained to me as a putative kanban system, however at the time it just meant we had to hide a copy when Andy came round as he didn’t like us holding too much stock.

My absolute favourite Neil Young song (and I have a lot of favourite Neil Young songs) is probably ‘Ambulance Blues’. It’s a rambling acoustic number which closes his masterwork On the Beach. It is chock-full of metaphor and opaque references and one which I laboriously copied out in longhand and blu-tacked to my bedroom wall some years ago before either appropriating or deriving a number of phrases when Ol’ Neil seemed to have put something down so much better than I ever could, which was most of the time. “Picking up tips on the Navajo Trail…” began one such couplet, which later helped win me a songwriting award. It's on my parents' wall, in their office.

The song itself begins with the line “Back in the old folky days / The air was magic when we played” which I consciously appropriated when starting a misty-eyed glance at my own back pages in a thing I wrote called “Start One of Your Own”, which opens its account with the deliberate homage “Back when I was someone / I used to write these songs…”. My version goes on to name check some actual people I used to be in bands with and one (“…and another guy on lead”) that I have fairly consistently been in a group with ever since.

It also references a few pubs that have gone the way of so many of the fondly-remembered venues of our youth, a couple of which may not necessarily have embodied paradise per se, but are indeed now parking lots. The old landlord of one of them is now a bus driver, and I can only imagine the expression he conceals when pulling up at the stop whose sign now bears fading, solitary witness that there was ever a pub there at all, let alone one whose cellar bore witness to countless debut gigs by keen young guitar thrashers, myself included.

I put a live version of my song on a CD I had burned and made available called “This Much Talent” which contained both a two note harmonica solo I attributed to Alanis Morissette and a dedication to one ‘Albert Herring’ who’d penned a (presumably) pseudonymous complaint to the local paper regarding the number of local tribute bands siphoning off the goodwill, interest and money that would clearly otherwise be channeled toward the great number of exponents of producing original, self-financed music there were available to fill our Chelsea boots. Having a foot in both camps, I had to admit that could see his (or her) point somewhere on the horizon, without necessarily agreeing with it, given that around the time the CD came out, my participation in the former was financing my dabbling in the latter. 

In maintaining this dual life, I suspect that I may have helped to sell more Beatles records than those of my own compositions over the course of my performing career, but then I think we’d all agree that they had the better tunes in the first place. I've looked at crowds from both sides now and, sadly, in my experience there is very little to match the indignation of an audience who haven’t paid to get in somewhere at close of play, or their capacity to offer timely advice and instruction on how you can proceed. 

The number of times I’ve heard the phrase “Come on lads - earn your money!” toward the end of an evening’s free entertainment is alluded to in “Do You Do Any Wings?”, as is the once heard, never forgotten imprecation to “Get back on that stage and play some more, you cunts!”. In contrast, you very rarely get that sort of thing at Suffolk Songwriters Night.

My final contribution to the most recent round of Songs from The Blue House recording sessions was in April 2011. One of the things we included was a version of Start One of Your Own, which I sang, and to which Nick Zala, John Bennett, Tony Turrell and Steve Constable notably added frills and flourishes aplenty. My other main contribution during the recording process was to get the drummer put a tea towel on his snare to damp the sound and to invite him to limit fills to a maximum of two throughout the course of the number. 

In my head I was channeling Dave Mattacks’ attempt to get Levon Helm’s drum sound at Liege and Lief rehearsals, Ringo playing Get Back on the roof of the Apple building in Savile Row, and Neil Young’s efforts to get Crosby, Stills, Nash and Dallas Taylor to slow down enough to play Helpless at his pace in the studio. In Helpless, a twenty five year old Young looks back on his schooldays in Ontario. I’m forty eight and I’m nostalgic for last year.   

http://www.lulu.com/shop/shane-kirk/do-you-do-any-wings/paperback/product-1490069.html?showPreview=true

History Is Written By The Victors

Even out here at the unfashionable end of the galaxy of stardom, where we very rarely brush the hem of the garments of greatness sported by the pantheon of stars around which we shyly orbit, I do occasionally come across the odd morsel from the high table. Last night, for example, I was in a meeting* with someone who used to be in a beat combo who you’ll probably have heard of. He, in common with many members of groups who have become ex-members not necessarily of their own volition, was still clearly narked by the nature of his departure. “There was a book about the band” he gruntled “…and I actually read it hoping that it might explain why they wanted me out. ‘It was all going well’ said the singer ‘And I don’t know why he left’ it said. I’ll tell you why I left – because your fucking manager rang me up and said ‘Howard wants you out of the band’!”

*The Pub.

 

"What's the difference between a BAFTA and an Oscar?"

"Nine points, if you're on a triple word score..."

I have a very good book at home by Elizabeth Cohen called 'The House on Beartown Road' which I took a shine to and bought solely on the basis of a good review I read in one of the Saturday supplements. Essentially it's the memoir of a woman who, rather than move her father into a care home upon the onset of his Alzheimer's, moves him in to live with her. Over the course of the book she describes the intertwining relationships between herself, her ailing father, her new daughter and her husband, who gives up half way through and goes to live with his mistress. It's a bit of a tearjerker on occasion, if I'm being honest.
 

I live round the corner from Ipswich Cemetery and on Mothering Sunday the queue for parking goes on for miles - my lovely wife Hannah was moved to comment once as we drove past that "The graveyard's always full on Mother's Day", and so when I came to write the lyrics to what had previously been an instrumental known simply as "Doobedobedo", that became the verbatim first line as I switched Elizabeth Cohen's scenario round so that it presupposed that there was a man who had made the opposite decision (i.e. entrusted his mother to the care of a supervised facility) and upon her death is to be found reflecting on the choices he has made. This isn't based on real life by the way. My Mother is currently in rude health and quite able to decide where she's going to live for herself. I did visit her mother, my grandmother, once in a retirement home where she was slowly but surely (and extremely contentedly) slipping away from us. "Did you bring this table?" she asked over tea and biscuits. In her mind she was twenty-eight again, and in love with a handsome young officer from the RAF who could crack walnuts with his fists. 'Grandpa', we called him.

When Songs from The Blue House recorded the song for our album ‘Tree’ I remember hauling my friend Wendell's enormously weighty Fender Twin amplifier all the way to Great Bardfield in order to record an authentic tremelo-heavy riff in the intro, before we ended up recreating the sound with some technology. Still, I think it enjoyed the day out. Given the contrary nature of our recording technique at the time we had also put everything down to a click track (right up until the point that we were enjoying ourselves toward the end of the song and started playing so loudly that we couldn’t hear it any more) and so it fell to our drummer du jour, Mr. Paul Read, to try and match up his fills to the slightly wavering time signature we had bequeathed him, well after the event. Then we made him go in and sing a backing vocal to it, and then we got our mate Kilbey in to sing a further harmony to that. Then, because we had a banjo, pedal steel and fiddle all soloing over the end section we had to decide what was going to stay and what was going to be muted. We ended up keeping the pedal steel at the end, which proved to have first-rate repercussions

Some time after the release of the album we received an email from Our Beloved Record Company stating that they had received an enquiry from one of their media partners in Los Angeles asking if they could use an excerpt from Beartown Road in a film that they had been tasked with licensing the music for;
Scene: Jack meets Lauren for the first time at the local diner, Hopps.
Usage: One (1) Background Vocal Use, :45it said.

Suzie-at-the-office wasn’t sure how the deal worked precisely, but we were assured that there would be a small sum of money for the writers (Me and James) and that “…hopefully” we’d gain a great advantage from the exposure once the film was released. In the small print was the proviso that once sales of the video/DVD reached 50,000 units the deal would be renegotiated. We gladly granted our permission. The evening paper interviewed us in my local and, in the way of regional news photographers everywhere, pictured us holding a pen and paper in order to signify that we were writers. We forwarded the press on to the movie’s producers, and asked politely if they could send us a copy of the film.

They didn’t. Eventually James sought one out on Amazon and bought it, incurring in the process more expense than we’d actually seen from licensing the rights to the song. He made it through about fifteen minutes of it I think, before lending it to me one evening so that I could play RomCom bingo with the plot and characters and take a screencap of our name in the closing credits. Having been primed to listen out for us in the scene where Jack meets Lauren for the first time at the local diner, I made sure I was paying extra attention. Sure enough, there in the background, as if playing on a local country music radio station, was Nick Zala’s solo from the end of our song. The third time I rewound and played the scene I was pretty sure that was definitely it.

Here's us playing Beartown Road at a gig at High Barn, captured for posterity by our friend Keith Farnish - www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVhLvrYKRdk

...and here's the actual movie whose closing credits bear my name - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1144541/

Rolling and Tumbling

I’ve always really liked a good song title. Sometimes the nomenclature turns out to be better than the actual song itself. In a former world, where exploring music wasn’t as easy as typing the name of an artist into the right torrent site and clicking a button, titles like Blues Run the Game, or Pushed It Over the End, or Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing were just hints contained within biographies, or photocopied on cassette inserts, or listed on expensive imports in the back of weekly rock magazines. Until quite recently I deliberately saved the experience of listening to Bob Dylan’s "Thunder on the Mountain" as a special treat for this very reason, only to find that it was a pretty standard twelve bar dirge - other opinions are available.

Song titles can be hugely evocative things – I think we all pretty much know what to expect from something called “I Will Always Love You” and “It Was a Hell of a Break by Ray Reardon”, but what about “I Often Dream of Trains”, “Life During Wartime” or “The Kid and the Smoking Gun”? And if you're a writer of any stripe there’s the decision of what to call your song. Do you name it after the oft-repeated line in the chorus, after nothing at all or – and this is my favourite, if only because it throws up an amusing number of pub quiz trivia battles – the last line where it only appears once - "Virginia Plain" or "Up the Junction", say. For a while in 1987 my friend James was plagued by a rash of singles released by established bands just after he’d put the finishing touches to his version. I remember Fleetwood Mac and George Michael sparking particular ire at the time for their releases of "Big Love" and "Faith" respectively.

I liked the idea of Cream’s "Rollin’ and Tumblin’" from the point at which I first became aware of it. As far as I recall, this would have been on a cassette inlay in the footwell of my friend Joey’s Mini van as we pulled up by the Felixstowe seafront sometime in the early 1980’s. I saw some pictures from the gig we played later that day on Facebook recently, as it happens. The song itself was originally (as far as any of these things can ever be satisfactorily concluded) recorded by the splendidly-monickered Hambone Willie Newbern (according to an internet site I just typed the title into) and there are apparently hundreds of extant versions, including one by Bob Dylan, which he’s claimed a writing credit for. When, some time ago now, I came away from a SftBH songwriting session with a CD copy of a piano-heavy demo that Our Glorious Leader had recorded with Tony ‘TT’ Turrell I instinctively knew that the very first words had to be “Rolling and tumbling…” and where we went after that would work itself out. Having seen Eagle-friendly songwriter JD Souther mess up an intro at a live gig in Norwich – I think there may have been a misplaced capo involved - I had scribbled down his rueful response - “I tend to treasure my mistakes” – in my pocket notebook, where the phrase sat for quite a while. Its time was soon to come. I sketched out the rest of the lyric, mailed it to James, and waited for the pollice verso.

We have recorded "Rolling and Tumbling" for the new/next Songs from The Blue House album with a lovely introductory soundscape composed by Paul Sartin - one of The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley’s college chums - which places the song in context before he plays a beautiful adaptation of the part Fiddly has been performing at live renditions in the intro. TT does a lovely sweeping descending arpeggio that wouldn’t scare the horses in Billy Joel’s stables and James picks out a simple single string guitar figure, the naivete of which prefigures the vocal melody to come. In order to presage a suitably stirring finale Tony Winn adopts a West 23rd Street hobo persona to fill out the sound with a marvelous harmonica part which, if nothing else, often gives me the opportunity to do that joke about a mouse walking into a music shop wanting to buy a mouth organ.

I’m hardly on that version, if at all. My backing vocal got replaced by a passing Boo Hewerdine (see the George Clooney in Reverse blog from December 2011) although during a later playback he did apparently look up from his breakfast for long enough to comment approvingly on one of my lyrics, which is something I shall treasure like a mistake for some time to come. We performed the song at Helstock this year and, sans piano, fiddle, and any rehearsal in stead of these absences, there was a lovely frailty about the performance that evoked the original feeling I had, sitting in my car in the dark waiting for the (then instrumental) tune to finish and knowing, just knowing, that this song was called "Rolling and Tumbling".

http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/sftbh-rolling-tumbling

Theodore

"I Think That Went Quite Well..."

Theodore live at Helstock 2012. "How did you come up with the name?" We asked Wendell. "It was from an interview I heard with Dawes" he said. "They got asked the same question and said that 'Dawes' was their Grandfather's name. 'If he'd had a cool name like Theodore or something it would have been different...'". It was only afterwards that we started going up to each other and saying "...and I am Ted 'Theodore' Logan!"

http://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/theodore-time-spent-in-los

As Was

“It was twenty two years ago today…”

To Helstock, the official launch of the festival season and dedicated annually to the titular celebrant - The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley - upon the occasion of her birthday. Usually I get to reform at least one band for the occasion and this year I have also rosined up a new group – Theodore – and we open our set with a song called A Company of Strangers, which contains the couplet “What happened to those bright young things / Did we grow into the people we always wanted to be?” Afterward, co-curator Mr. Wendell pores over news clippings from the last century – actual pieces of paper marked with highlighter pen, imagine that - in which he, in his guise as rock and pop reporter for the local paper, discusses the prospects for the bright young things that Our Glorious Leader and I once were. In black and white pictures we are preserved, all big hair and billowing shirts earnestly looking to take on the world with our chorused guitars and our tasselled scarves. The past is a different country; even Cactus World News had a record deal back then.

As it happens, it also happens to be my actual birthday, which prompts me to recall that it is exactly twenty two years since the then bass player with As Is (and currently appearing at a punk festival near you with The Stupids) Ross Geraghty played his official last gig with the band at the end of a short tour we had organised ourselves and which climaxed with a show in a small cinema in South Wales. Singer James and I recall the highs and lows of the transitory life of the jobbing (i.e. broke) musician – sleeping six to a van on a lovingly-assembled pile of amplifiers and PA speakers beside the Manchester ship canal, where he was awoken both by condensation created by the band’s combined breath dripping from the van’s roof in a steady metronomic stream onto his face and the sound of something he felt only able to describe as ‘thwacking’ from outside. Having lustily thrown open the back doors of the van to greet the new morn (imagine that post-Judith scene with Graham Chapman in The Life of Brian) he recoiled slightly from the scene of an early morning fisherman beating his catch to death by repeatedly slamming it by the tail against the concrete canal wall.

“It wasn’t all bad though”, he reminds us. “There was that time in Leicester…” (the sadly lamented Princess Charlotte – along with The George Robey and The Powerhaus as much a fixture for the ascendant indie band as the Fillmore West was for a generation of peace and love-toting hippy bands from The Bay Area) “…where we were selling records on the pavement outside afterwards and that guy invited us back to his house, got us really stoned and then played the stereo version of Magical Mystery Tour while we looked through kaleidoscopes”. “You were leaning against the wardrobe”, I said. “That was the one that had the speaker with the bass mix on it” sighs James wistfully. “That really opened my eyes to what an amazing bass player Paul McCartney is” - this from a man who once performed a gig in a Dadaist prank billed as Thebeatles. “Then Ross got really paranoid and convinced everyone that the guy must be a serial killer and wouldn’t go into the kitchen” I recalled. As it happened, he took us all to the local greasy spoon the next morning and bought us breakfast, which was very kind considering he hadn’t even been to the gig.

We get up to perform a set comprised of songs from back in the day. When we get to the last number James prepares to open his throat to sing out the first line, which displays a remarkable prescience. “When this whole thing falls apart on us…” it runs “…looking back, it won’t seem real”.

Why The Long Face?

On a fortnightly basis, I go into the glowering neo-thirties edifice which houses Ipswich Community Radio and I speak on the air as nation unto nation - quite literally so in some cases, as through the joy of the internet we have received responses to the studio from America, Spain, and New Zealand - not all places that I have relatives in.

The two hour show is called "Why The Long Face?" and, as our trail proudly announces at the top of the hour (of ten o'clock at night) it involves two long-faced men talking about whatever strikes them as worthy of comment in that particular instance - imagine, if you will, a podcast which outstays welcome by (say) about an hour and a half. Sandwiched as we are in between Cosmic Jazz and Urban Beats, we don't really have a station demographic that stays with us for the evening, although Neil from CJ says he often listens to us from his hotel in China when he's away on business - he'll have especially enjoyed this week's programme, starting as it did with some jazz and then a fragment of dead air, as during the show handover his mate Derek had taken the wrong CD out of the player and nearly walked off with a copy of the new Dawes album.

We have a number of precepts regarding the subject matter of our discussions - Bond films, any update in the holder of the title of world's shortest man, car troubles - over time our listeners will know thus hath the candle singd the moath on a fairly regular basis. Here's a fairly typical edition of the show then, during which we discuss plans for a three hundred foot statue of Lee Brilleaux, congratulate Kiss on the opening of their new miniature golf course in Las Vegas, reflect on the changing nature of Disney cartoons ("I find it deeply ironic that a duck - Donald - should end up being tarred and feathered..."), wonder about the ingredients of Pope Benedict's aftershave, mourn the ear-less rabbit stepped on by a German cameraman, I take co-curator Neale through my weird dream set in a mall where eating the burgers makes the muzak sound better and which climaxes in a horrifying finale involving Andy Trill out of Picturehouse, there is a Van-based quiz, and we play Inside the Why The Long Face? Studio, wherein Neale takes the James Lipton role and begins by asking me what my favourite word is. You'll never guess what my ideal job would be...

http://www.icrfm.co.uk/index2.php?option=com_joomradio&page=show_radio&id=8789

The book of the series;

http://www.lulu.com/shop/philip-bryer/why-the-long-face%3F-the-paper-trail/paperback/product-14954100.html

Do Some Old!

It is nearly Helstock time again, and so The Artist Formerly Known as The Singer and I have been painstakingly putting together a hand-picked band to perform the best in early 70’s (1973, specifically) vintage-style rock, rework prior songwriting triumphs and to play covers of things that we think best exemplify the genre we’ve been inspired by. Or, to put it another way, we’ve phoned up a couple of mates to see if they can get their domestic pass stamped in order to allow them to come out on a week night and make a racket in a rehearsal studio with us.
Having recorded last week’s get together and listened back for A&R purposes, Mr. Wendell and I got together this week for a quick acoustic strum/executive brainstorming session and to fine tune a couple of the guitar solos so that they didn't sound quite so much like someone kicking a banjo down a fire escape. We also played through another old number of ours which marks among its pedigree the combined virtues of being quite short (there’s no middle eight) and having very few chords. We considered that if things went well during the next (and final) rehearsal session we might devote some time to seeing if we could nail this one too, thus enabling us to take our set triumphantly over the magic twenty minute mark. Sadly we haven’t been able to track down our original demo version in the archive*, but the version we did once have was recorded in the back room upstairs at a pub that closed in 1997 and is now a listed building, which gives you some idea of its epoch.
There was a space in the second verse where neither of us could for the life of us remember the missing couplet so we were forced to write a new one, much in the fashion of those guys who go back and remaster their old albums and take the opportunity to fix that bit they never really liked but were forced to include at the time because they’d run out of multitracks/money/bugle or had a tour to be getting on with. At one point we started messing about with a couple of chords that sounded nice together. “Hang on – I’ll record that” said Wendellsteve. He placed a mobile phone on the coffee table. “Off you go” he said.

*Big bag of cassettes under the bed in Steve’s spare room.

The Perfectly Good Guitarist

I am not now, and it must be said, I never have been Ipswich’s go-to guitarist when it comes to dep and session work - this, you may be surprised to learn, is in the manner of a massive understatement. Very early in my career I took to heart the mantra that one note played with feeling was worth a hundred rattled off at speed, and the knowledge that I probably couldn’t play a hundred notes in a row at any speed without stopping for a cup of tea and a breather half way through then, and I certainly can’t now, has certainly helped me to maintain this conviction over the course of the years. Drummers, usually the last refuge of the guitarist who has run out of banjo jokes but who still needs a fall guy, have been heard to hum along with solos of mine in real time, not because they are so memorable and catchy, but because they are always the same. It isn’t that I’ve not tried. I could probably quote you chapter and verse from Ralph Denyer’s seminal The Guitar Handbook, although it’d probably be the chapters containing pictures of Jimmy Page wearing a dangerously low-slung Les Paul and some gemstone en-Zoso’ed flares rather than the one explaining the modern diatonic scale and where to locate it on the neck of a serviceable electric. The Guitar Workout for the Interminably Busy* is rarely far from hand, however in terms of graduating from the paperwork to the fret work I remain, like E.L.Wisty’s High Court Judge, tantalizingly short of the Latin.

Phlegmatically, I’ve come to figure that since in any room containing three or more other musicians there’s statistically likely to be someone better than me, one of them may as well get on with the business of taking care of, um, business. Although I might have the ego for the lengthy guitar duel I certainly don’t have the chops, and I’m generally happy to fulfill the gurning for the cameras and keeping an eye out for the ladies part of the on stage equation. Apart from that one time, of course.

Since I was already involved with the raiding party being dispatched to help Ippo’s twin town celebrate France’s national music day (as one seventh of The Perfectly Good Guitars**) I suppose it made sense, when one of the other bands' guitarist pulled out, to ask if I would fill in. After checking twice that they’d got the right phone number I agreed, and then immediately went into the sort of bowel-loosening cold sweat that usually involves the prospect of a hospital appointment or a driving test. The Frisky set itself was a mix of originals from singer Jules’s past, a few things from keyboard player TT’s solo album*** and a couple of covers - one of which, Paul McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed, even if not wholly dependent for its success on the guitar solo per se, would certainly be deflated in its impact if I fluffed the whole thing up during my time in the spotlight. There began a series of rather intense CD listening sessions during which I spent an awful lot of time hovering over the pause and rewind buttons, and which also involved a certain degree of deciding to pack away the guitar at the end of an evening and heading off to bed with a mild headache before switching the lights back on and trying to run through the whole set without making a mistake just one more time.

At the single rehearsal we had time for I managed to bluff my way through without persuading anyone else in the group that simply drawing a discreet veil over proceedings and withdrawing gracefully from the engagement would be in the best interests of everybody, and I think I even added an extra part into one of the songs through judicious use of finger-tapping during one of the intros where there had been an atmospheric keyboard overdub on the recorded version. Thus emboldened, I hopped in the van determined to give it my best shot. That the gig itself was reasonably uneventful was cause enough for celebration on my part – no-one fell off the stage, we managed to play all of the songs all the way through without having to stare accusingly at a recalcitrant amplifier in order to cover up momentary brain freeze, and my climactic solo went unremarked, which I was more than happy to accept as validation of its authenticity.

Afterwards we all piled off to the nearest Irish pub where party leader Shev had blagged an impromptu gig for “…beers only for the guys in the band” to celebrate, whereupon he invited so many members of the touring party up in succession, like a jam session Gandalf inveigling Thorin’s dwarves into a Joycean Rivendell, that it would have been cheaper for the bar owner to give free beer to the audience members instead. I was, and remain, profoundly grateful for the faith they showed in me that weekend and, as I often think regarding whatever has befallen or may come between us in the intervening near-decade, we’ll always have Arras.

*It’s a real title.

**It’s fair to say that there was already a fairly generous cross-fertilisation going on between the nominal groups that made the trip. At one point Shev swears he heard one of the promoters exclaim “Eet is the same guitar player - burt zees time ‘e is wearing a ‘at!”

***This received the best review I’ve ever read, from The Blackpool Courier, which concluded "The influences of Rick Wakeman, Tony Banks and Jools Holland can be heard without a trace of plagiarism... Tony's playing deserves credit. More's the pity then that I can't find any tracks on the album that I like"

Here are me, Andy, TT and Frisky Pat reunited some years later, backing Steve ‘Kilbey’ Mears on a version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Unlike during our time in Arras, I stood on my guitar lead half way through this song, hence my nervous glance toward the amplifier before I check all four controls on the guitar and finally wiggle the lead around until it starts making noise again. You don’t really notice because of the tremendous racket the other three are making, which was also of great comfort during some of the trickier sections of Summer in the City in France.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5rWU_Hua9I

"This song was number one...

....on the set list earlier, but we changed it"

It’s always interesting to watch a band from the other side of the monitors from a musician’s (or at least band member’s) POV. This week I went to Live At The Institute in Kelvedon, a lovely little monthly club night with no bar and a bring your own policy regarding both food and drink, which means that the turns are blissfully uninterrupted by the rattle of the till and the clank of change on palm during their sets, and that the audience is one prone to listening rather than discussing whose round it is and whether they require salt and vinegar crisps with their pickled egg, although I will say that I momentarily misread the enquiry “Chilli nuts?” from one of our party given that it was minus eight in darkest Essex that night and I’d just been out for a fag.

We were there to watch a band called Moses touring their ten year old The Swimming Zoo album (almost) in its entirety and to marvel at both their song and their stagecraft - both of which were depressingly still on top of their game after a decade of baffling obscurity for this superb collection of singers, musicians and potty-mouthed betwixt song raconteurs. Before that then, the supporting artistes. First up were a four piece acoustic band called One Sixth of Tommy which, before we go any further, I have no hesitation in damning as a terrible name for a group, even given that ours (Songs from The Blue House) is as eminently memorable as that of the band who hit number three in the Billboard chart with Jackie Blue in 1975 by comparison.

Forever the fate of the support act is to go through the middle-aged musician’s filter. How old are they? What are they wearing? Can they play? Can they sing? Do they insist on explaining how they came to write their songs? Who do they sound like? Where can I file them away in in my internal rolodex of genres? And, finally, what are the songs up to? OSoT, as I expect no-one outside their Google Calendar stenographers refer to them, were through all of these hoops like an otter through the country of the two rivers as my jaundiced forty-something eyes took in their schtick, cast about for a suitable pigeonhole in which to place them, and ate some more chilli nuts.

I liked ‘em. At one point they advised that their next song was available as a free download from their website. But that’s not what I want. When I’m in the room, the sound of digital reverb still echoing off the rafters, and wondering if I’ve got time to nip to the toilet before the proprietors have rearranged the onstage furniture for the next act, I want to go to the merch stand, proffer a round sum in currency, and have something in my pocket that I can listen to in the car. Hence today’s tweet - Buying a band's CD at the gig is like leaving a tip, or writing a thank you note. It also means they can afford a Ginster's on the way home. I bought One Sixth of Tommy’s CD because it was shorthand for explaining that I thought they had a lot of promise and I hoped they’d do well, that they wouldn’t split up and go off to separate universities and split the band, and that I really appreciated them coming out to a large village in Essex in the middle of winter for third on the bill expenses, and because I’ve been on the unwilling receiving end of so many post-gig lectures about what I should be doing to further my career in music that I wrote a book about it.

This isn’t so much about my night out. It’s about how a tangible product is always going to be a better calling card than, say, a calling card. How folk faced with a merchandise table and a queue will pay a tenner for an album and get to their next appointment rather than wait around for the person in front to have their one pound and a penny in change counted out (whoever’s manning the table will appreciate it too, incidentally) and how the critical process is generally merely a number of box ticking exercises undertaken by middle-aged men with chilli nuts.

There was one more thing. I hope I managed it.

This is One Sixth of Tommy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxFxkCM-4xQ

The Swimming Zoo by Moses is available at CDBaby http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mosesuk