"From Finborough to Fingringhoe..."

It’s tempting, I know, to consider me sitting back in my leather-bound armchair, puffing contentedly on a pipe and taking the occasional quaff on a stiff scotch as I dictate my memoir to a liveried flunky who then goes off to the British Library and uploads my latest reminiscence to an eager waiting public. Something about how the toilets in the Newt and Cucumber had a great reverb, or that bar whose gimmick was that all the tables had telephones on them, and the time that someone called the one nearest the stage to ask us to turn it down a bit as they couldn’t carry on their conversation without shouting, that sort of thing. Enquiring minds need to know - in fact only the other day I was parking the car when a gentleman stopped me to enquire whether I still get out and play and what the rest of The Star Club were up to. I informed him that our front man Shev was still writing and performing with his new band. “Ah” he shook his head wearily “But it’s not The Beatles, is it?”

I bumped into Frisky Pat, a drummer friend of mine the other day (at a child’s birthday party, where our respective scions were eating crisps and hitting each other with balloons – not unfamiliar behaviour from our time on the road together, as it happens) and talk got around to how the idea of being in a band is great, whereas the practicalities of missing tea and getting home at four in the morning so that a drunk person can shout “Sex on Fire!” at you repeatedly in between times for three hours gets a trifle wearing after a certain number of repetitions.

Nevertheless, I think it’s important to at least maintain the semblance of being in a band, even if that just means doing the occasional bit of writing and demoing at home just to keep your hand in, and so last week I foreswore the opportunity to go out and watch some of my friends playing music in order to stay in and make some of my own. Besides, once I start shouting for Kings of Leon songs after my third pint I tend to get on their nerves.

I had a simple little song which had previously been demoed and performed acoustically a couple of times, but I also had great dreams of swirling cinematic soundscapes of the sort McAlmont and Butler might hire Abbey Road to produce, or that Tom Scholz might dream up in his basement. I also had a nice bottle of Rioja, the riff from Love Will Tear Us Apart and a lyric which contained both the place name Fingringhoe and employed the term allopatric to describe a relationship. Here’s what happened...

soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywing…

So, having clocked in, I feel I have re-established my still-a-musician time-served credentials and can now get on with the business at hand. Perkins, plump up the cushions, bring me a fresh glass and let me tell you about the time one of our audience cornered my wife at a gig at The Manor Ballroom to ask if our first child would be named ‘John’ or ‘Paul’…      

      

Customers who bought this title also bought...

I did an interview over the phone a little while ago, which was quite the event for me, having not done one for many years. I think the last time before this was probably when a local fanzine - named Tiger Rag, I believe - took the trouble to invite me out for coffee and utilised the power of technology in the form of one of those new-fangled Walkmen (Walkmans?) in order to record my sage utterances for posterity. As it turned out either the batteries weren't up to it or the hubbub of the Took's Bakery & Cafe overtook the moment and my hapless interviewer had to ring me a few days later to see if I could remember anything I'd said, which I couldn't. I did mention that I'd been terribly earnest and was probably wearing an army surplus jacket.

 

This time around I was asked if and when it would be convenient to call me at home and was able to properly prepare myself with a pre-arranged list of questions, the answers to which were to be lovingly compiled and included in a book called The Semi-Pro Sixties. I've not read it myself, since the author declined to provide any of us interviewees with a free copy on the grounds that he was a bit skint having gone to all the trouble of getting the thing properly bound and published, but it has garnered a number of excellent reviews both on Amazon and the Waterstones sites, so it clearly turned out to be very good in the end. Obviously when I say 'a number' I mean they pretty much look like the same reviews in both places, but five stars is five stars, whatever their provenance.

 

David, the author, was kind enough to email me my bits to proof read, and I found his transcript of our conversation the other day. So in case you haven't got £11.99 to spare, let me guide you through some of the highlights contained within... 

 

Early influences

Shane Kirk; “We had a Dansette record player and we got given some records by a neighbour. There were records by Elvis, Cliff Richard and even Frankie Vaughan.”

Absolutely true, despite me being born in 1964. I am of the generation whose first frisson of excitement over an album sleeve came not while concentrating really hard (as it were) on Debbie Harry's dress on the front of Parallel Lines, but by looking through the extensive packaging of the South Pacific soundtrack. I also owned Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock EP and Frank Sinatra's version of Chicago (My Home Town) on 78. Still my favourite from this era is the timeless version of Wilhemina (is Plump and Round) which may be the first song I ever learned all the way through.    

 

Transport

 

Shane Kirk; “We’d hired this van to go to a gig on New Years Eve. It wasn’t from a very reputable company and we soon found out it didn’t have working wipers or washers. It started to snow and one of the band had to lean out of the window spraying water onto the windscreen in front of me so I could see where I was going.”

Obviously if you're in a van which is hurtling up the A14 and it's snowing you don't want to be the one hanging out of the window trying to splash water (which will then freeze into a fine, opaque layer) over the windscreen. Driving wasn't much more fun.  

Embarrassing Situations

Shane Kirk; “We were booked to play in a huge club in Oxford. I’d written all the songs for the band and we were looking forward to the gig. We arrived and set up. There were loads of bar staff and several doormen all prepared for a busy night. Unfortunately nobody showed up, nobody at all. The Manager eventually told us to forget it, so we packed the gear away in the van ready to drive back home. We were just about to drive off when the Manager came out and paid us the full fee. Fair play to him.”

I still carry with me the look of despair on the club manager's face as we rolled round yet another few bars of the false ending of what turned out to be our closing number. He approached the stage, we carried on playing, he backed away, we built to a faux-climax, he approached again, we carried on playing...

Dangerous Situations

Shane Kirk; “We were doing a few gigs as a 'Beatles specialist' band and got booked into a rather rough type pub on an estate somewhere in Essex. After a rather nervous couple of sets and a few complaints about the noise we got re-booked with the proviso that we did an 'unplugged' type set. We weren't confident about the wisdom of this, but were assured that this was exactly what would be a winner with the clientele. Upon our return the landlord had gone on holiday and left his son in charge, who clearly did not quite have the gravitas and, frankly, bull neck to keep his regulars house trained, with the result that a few of them had basically gone feral and taken the place over - hence whatever casual passing trade there was had deserted the place until it was safe to return. It was a long and extremely lonely evening and at some point the toilets got smashed up - possibly after one fellow tried to join in by singing "Yesterday" and insisted rather forcefully that I was "...playing it wrong" for the sole purpose of making him look stupid. We tried to lighten the atmosphere at one point by explaining away the semi-acoustic nature of the gig by saying that the drummer had forgotten to pack his kit. Tumbleweedery ensued.

The postscript to this is that when the real landlord returned from holiday he angrily rang us up, outraged that we'd been so unprofessional as to forget to bring drums, said that we were the worst band he'd ever had to deal with and suggested that we might like to come back and do a free gig in order to make it up to him. 

Best Remembered Gigs

Shane Kirk; “We played at the British Legion Club in Felixstowe. I remember it well because the support band’s guitarist wore a kilt. When we finished playing at the end of the night, the audience called out for the support band to do an encore rather than us. It was a bit deflating.”

"They were still booing them when we came on..."

“Ted Bidits!”

Another year, another Maverick. From the Stygian gloom of the original Barn Stage, where we had to brush the cobwebs from our hair, shake them loose and let them fall before starting our set to the bright new world of queue-less bars and brightly-painted drag acts, what a long strange trip it’s been over the six years of the festival’s existence.

From such humble beginnings I have at least attended, if not played, every year since the festival's inception; nevertheless it was with no little trepidation that I found myself with a clipboard, a wristband and the title of Stage Manager at this year’s event, charged with the holy mission of administering the smooth running of The Barn Stage, the myriad duties of which included ensuring that those with camping chairs stayed exclusively on the left-hand side of the central divide. This, I’ll state for the record now, was the most stressful part of the weekend. I’ve been heckled on stage before, but never during someone else’s set and by someone waving a banjo and gesturing angrily at the space around their travel rug.

In practise my job, as I explained to the talent, was to introduce them at the start of their set, gesture at them to get off at the end, and repeat any requests addressed to me regarding technical matters in a slightly louder voice and at someone who actually knew what they were doing. As long as I held up my end of the bargain, I expected them to fulfil theirs. All of the line up turned out to be fantastically talented, most of them agreeably accepting of our extraordinarily tight ten minute turnarounds between acts, and a few of them so selflessly accommodating that I found myself making a quiet note to send them flowers.

I think we did pretty well – I mean we lost twenty minutes to a lengthy sound check on Saturday evening which we never made back, but taking the compression off the bass, losing the gate on the vocals and poking up the mids at 160hZ is going to take time, there’s no disputing that, and if you want to get it right you want to get it right. A similar principle was behind my checking the name of The Goat Roper Rodeo Band four times to ensure I didn’t get any of it in the wrong order. Obviously ideally I wouldn’t have been introducing them on stage at the time, but we got through it.

It would be unfair to single out anyone’s performance on stage, but off it I certainly developed a soft spot for Eileen Rose (“How do you want me to signal that time’s nearly up for the set?” “A bunch of flowers?”) Trevor Moss (“If we dropped a number from the set that’d give you a chance to make some time up, yeah?”) and Hannah Lou (“It’s from Debenhams”) and the extraordinarily delightful Rainbow Girls, who patiently drew me a stage plan helpfully indicating where the tap board should be miked up, and when asked if they needed anything, asked simply for a higher drum stool and wondered if they might have kittens delivered to the backstage area.

At one point I found myself guiding the perfectly gentlemanly Neil Innes from Artist’s Reception to the backstage area. “What do you call a banjo at the bottom of the ocean?” he asked.

“A start”.

Ain't nobody get the better of you-know-who

Further to my posting of a Picturehouse-based Spotify playlist (it's the blog entry before this one - do have a browse) I realised with horror that I'd inadvertently left out one of my favourite songs - The Tom Robinson Band's 2-4-6-8 Motorway - as well as one by The Jags (you can probably guess which one - we were always pleased when people said afterwards "I love that song, but I haven't heard it for years...") and another couple of things from later on in the set. Obviously I've now redeemed these omissions, but the radio interview with Tom himself which prompted me to update the list reminded me of the greatness of Danny Kustow on guitar and led me to go and check one of the unforseen consequences of this blog. My profile once mentioned that we did 2-4-6-8 Motorway and as a result what (I'm assuming) is a fan page lifted one of the pictures from my page and so there it (still) is. I am the MySpace face of the guitar player from TRB.

https://myspace.com/dannykustow   

No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones...

 
"It's like going to the pub with your mates" - that was our combined USP, mantra and mission statement. When I regularly ventured out with The Picturehouse Big Band (so named to disinguish it from Mr Wendell and Kilbey's acoustic duo, Picturehouse and partially in tribute to Thompy's live outfit around the time of Hand of Kindness) it really was the best play date ever. I got to hang out with some of my best friends, threw a few shapes, hit a few power chords and occasionally mugged shamelessly to a live audience while shaking a tambourine, playing my guitar behind my head or just doing my best impersonation of Toddler, erstwhile frontman of the first band I covered a great many of the songs in our set with. He had the moves like Jagger long before Maroon 5 ever came up with the concept. It certainly beat hanging out at home with a tennis racquet and a mirror and besides, with the headphones on you were always likely to be surprised by someone bringing up a cup of tea.

Everyone got to sing - even Gibbon, who switched between bass and keyboards, occasionally handing over the Precision copy to me when Kilbey wanted to play guitar and I wanted to do that Derek Smalls thing with one hand playing the root notes while the other punched the air (and on one occasion, accidentally, a waitress who'd got too close while I wasn't looking but still managed to impart the information that the buffet was ready).

I was out with Mr Wendell this week in a social capacity and we got to a-jawin' about what songs we could remember and whether, if someone dropped a hat, we could reasonably be expected to perform them. These days I have trouble remembering whether I've left the bath running, let alone how many bars there are in that rundown in Born to Run.

Some of you, very kindly, have bought the book - Do You Do Any Wings? - which I self published regarding these halcyon days but it occurred to me that very many of the folk enjoying ribald tales of Kiss t-shirts and mains power-cancelling noise monitors may not have had the opportunity to experience the PHBB, um, experience first hand. With the advent of Spotify however, we can go some way to bringing you up to speed. Simply scatter a small amount of wood glue on your carpet, let a nice pint of lager warm gently for a few hours before pouring it over your shoes, get a friend or neighbour to blow cigarette smoke in your ear for a while, click on the link, sit back, and enjoy the meat n' potatoes pub rock grandstanding that comprised the set list of the Picturehouse Big Band.

Don't look for us, we're not there any more.        


Do You Do Any Wings?

“Blimey – at Glastonbury we just get an orange and a cup of tea!”

 

Regular correspondents will be well aware of my foray into stage management at last year’s Maverick Festival during which I successfully got a keyboard on and off stage without dropping it, asked if Alejandro Escovedo’s bass player could be turned down a bit, prevented Jason Ringenberg from being crushed by a tree  and introduced Amelia Curran as “…probably the best Canadian singer-songwriter in this room right now!” after I had fallen very slightly for her, a flame I maintain to this day despite the fact that she never writes, she never calls, she never phones.   

Due to my less than exacting schedule, ‘tween stage time wasn’t terribly trying, to be honest. I wandered around the festival site vaguely offering help to anyone who looked particularly stressed, and as a result at one point spent thirty minutes queuing for a latte for That Nice David Booth, who probably knows what a lighting truss is and why you shouldn’t plug the input/output parametric EQ through the reverse foldback loop while the PFL’s being deployed - mine was very much the Sergeant Wilson role in all of this which is why I was in the coffee tent and he was standing next to a man with a black t-shirt and a maglite. Nevertheless I have been invited back, in much the same way as I was invited back for the Orwell High School First XV when I was thirteen and a half, which is to say although not necessarily of any great use aside from making up the numbers, I am willing, available and have my own transport.

 

This year, having not broken anything or been photographed in a compromising position over by the Tipis by the gutter press I have been promoted to The Barn, which to all intents and purposes is the main stage for much of the weekend and from where I shall have dominion over such folk as Hallelulah Trails (I’ve met them, they’re lovely, and they do a great version of ‘Jackson’), Feral Mouth (Norfolk newgrass and not, as one might suspect, Grindcore) and one Leeroy Stagger, who I’m assuming wouldn’t be taking such an ambivalent approach to receiving an introduction along the lines of Amelia’s should I improvise in such fashion again.

Having been on the receiving end of some pretty injurious stage management myself over the years, I’m quietly confident of being able to respond politely but firmly to most of the ad hoc requests that are likely to come my way, all the while employing a Pirsigian approach to The Talent but being aware that however much the band in possession would like to maintain their presence on stage (musicians tend to be one of the few sub-group of employees to regard knocking off early with a disdainful curl of the lip and/or eyebrow) any over-runs necessarily impact on the next domino in the chain, and with eleven turns and ten minute changeovers being the norm then time becomes a valuable commodity, virtually to the point of being currency. I once watched Neil Innes tune up a twelve string guitar for fifteen minutes before going on at a festival (to be fair these were pre-electronic tuner days and Keith Allen was on stage at the time) and to tell you the truth I’m not looking forward to having to pull him off halfway through “I’m The Urban Spaceman”.

 

The Maverick Festival is at Easton Farm Park from the 5^th – 7^th July 2013. http://www.maverickfestival.co.uk/   

       

Kickstarter target achieved, world exhales involuntary sigh of relief.

With no little fanfare (and more than an element of regret regarding the Epiphone Sheraton I threw in at the last minute, just in case) it would appear that we have reached our target and that the Songs from The Blue House live album will be going ahead as planned.

I can’t remember which one, but it was definitely a significant birthday. Our Glorious Leader had organised a party during which he would perform with as many musicians from his recent past as possible, in reverse order, and as such my band gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) were on first. Stepping up to the microphone before our first number I did my pre-intro spiel. “When I invited James to join the group” I began “I remember he said to me ‘gods kitchen? That’s the last band I want to play with!’”

At the time it got a big laugh as JP had effectively (as I once spoonerisedly exclaimed over a Chinese meal and a few Tiger beers) ‘…bit the quizness’, although as it turned out this announcement would prove to be dramatically premature. A short time after his (and singer Helen and bass player Gibbon’s) performance we found ourselves perched on stools in his spare bedroom trying to write something together. The first song completed then, as with the forthcoming live CD, was entitled Bike. I’ve still got a copy of the recorded demo, labelled ‘Our Thing’ in marker pen at the time, and it sounds remarkably similar to the version on what will be our fifth album together, which is either an example of our instinctive feel for the right arrangement straight off the bat or a practical demonstration of a worrying lack of improvement in terms of our musical prowess over the ensuing decade.

In between times we have gathered and dispersed any number of combinations of friends, acquaintances and (on the odd occasion) hired help in order to move enough air to make these noises happen both in recording studios and in front of audiences. Prominent amongst these are the good folk at The High Barn who actually released our third album on their own label, meaning it had a barcode and you could buy it in shops and shit. Frequently we have been in the company of accommodating barmen and women and, more recently, increasingly in the company of our children. To all of those people, I extend my warmest thanks for a decade well-lived - the guy who demanded we perform Needles and Pins at that beer festival that one time notwithstanding.

If you’d asked me in 2003, when we started putting our bits and pieces together to make up songs out of our own heads, where I thought this was going I’d have said “Songs from The Blue House?

That’s the last band I want to play with.”  

"...and all the world is football shaped."

I once made a CD all of my own, you know. It was going to be the last thing that I did in terms of music - after all, they'd pretty much called time in The Last Chance Saloon and so I'd finished my pint, settled up my tab and was just doing my coat up ready to leave. I just had time to get a few friends in to do some singing and playing and as I thought it might be a nice thing to look back on in years to come I went the full nine yards in terms of different-cloured jewel cases, printed CDs, a logo, and a website for the project which my friend Wendell Gee and I planned one night over a few beers with a large sheet of paper, a ruler and a couple of pencils. "Congratulations - you've done about two grand's worth of design work there" he said as I departed at the end of the evening with a list of topics to write copy about.

One of the things I delivered was a Pete Frame-type family tree of the bands I'd played with which he very kindly extricated from the primitive Word-based file I had delivered it in and then dropped among some properly formatted text on the webpage. Here's the section that dealt with a band called As Is who I joined in the Summer of 1989 (and was out of again by the time 1991 had had time to catch its breath).

Despite the brevity of our time together the year and a half that I enjoyed behind the second guitar involved a series of truly pivotal points in my so-called career and, more importantly, my life. After As Is, things were never quite the same again, for any number of reasons that may not necessarily detain us here now. During As Is, on the other hand, I enjoyed life as only a generously-mulletted libertine let loose at the fag end of the eighties should have done. We had baggy white shirts and chorus pedals - what else were we supposed to need? You can find a video of us playing live at Colchester Arts Centre in 1990 here; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKRyVRH3BtE&list=UUqxkoPLBKrc-yfxPc4gszEA&index=6

In the clip Drummer Malcolm is wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of one of his favourite bands - The Replacements, which is a fresh irony to me given that this was the second wholesale line up change behind singer/ guitarist (and online archivist archivist) James. When we'd recorded Away From You in the studio Malcolm's brother (the artist formerly known as The Stupids' Marty Tuff) had added an outro lead guitar break which upon re-listening sounded oddly familiar... Once we'd worked out what it was we had an acknowledgement etched into the run-out groove of the single, which then resolutely failed to break us big in the indie charts. Bass player Ross once found a box of them, sad, lonely and unsold, in a charity shop in Brighton.   

As a postscript, we got together a couple of years ago to play at Ross's birthday party. Someone remarked that we were "...kind of Franz Ferdinandy" and would probably do quite well if we stuck at it.        

The End of The Rainbow

I made a video once. Well, I say made – was in. As it was explained to me all I had to do was meet up beforehand in order to expound on a few of the more flowery metaphors in the song over a couple of roll ups and a nice cup of tea, and then turn up and wait in my trailer until called for my close up before the light went. It certainly sounded like a good deal to me – a couple of friends at Suffolk College got a piece for their year-end art and media coursework and we got granted all rights in perpetuity to a promo that we could send to MTV, always assuming we had a friend who could link two VCRs together for long enough to run us off a few copies.

Meeting done, storyboard cut and pasted*, backdrop decorated, televisions procured and raw videotape sourced we assembled at an old airbase somewhere in the middle of Cambridgeshire which was enjoying a new lease of life as an arts and media hub, by which I mean it was no longer used for storing mustard gas or nuclear weapons, but had had a brazier dragged into the middle of the largest bunker and a few plywood walls half-heartedly nailed together in order to partition off a few of the less draughty corners for the use of the likes of us and, as we were to discover later, a band who were absolutely determined to get the intro to The Doobie Brothers’ China Grove bang on, no matter how many times this meant them starting over.

The shooting schedule seemed reasonable enough and so we got on with looking moodily off camera while miming our parts, hitting various marks and cheerfully faking a conversation while ensconced on a sofa which was intended to portray us as louche, detached observers of the scene. D.P. Hammond, our moodily-lit bass player, took the detachment bit to method acting levels by actually getting so involved in reading the paper that he missed his cue – although his cue, fortuitously, was to 'start reading a paper'. He, it should be said, was generally laid back to the point of the metaphorically horizontal anyway, and was once late for a rehearsal at his own house. We honoured him with an instrumental called “Donald Finally Wakes Up but Then Falls Asleep on His Way to The Bass Amp”. 

Drummer Gary meanwhile manfully stomped on a kick drum pedal for about twenty minutes while it was lit and shot, and then enthusiastically joined in with dropping three televisions off a balcony in order to capture the best angle on tape before tossing the resultant detritus into a skip outside, only to be rewarded with a further cathode ray tube explosion which launched either a screwdriver or a chisel (reports vary) whistling past his ear in the dark.

 Singer Steve donned a coat and scarf and channelled his inner Jim Kerr whilst being arranged carefully around a discarded toy tank, had newsreel footage projected on to his face, and rushed to catch the last of the light as a deeply significant metaphor burst into flames before our collective fret frottaging gurns. Pretty much the last shot to be completed was the alarm clock ticking down the sixteenth beat hi-hat intro from a deliberately significant two minutes to twelve. Listen, it was the eighties. Have you not heard Two Tribes..!?  

After two (freezing) days on location we were done, the crew (who’d stayed over in the bunker while we fled to the sanctuary of central heating and hot baths at home) finally went back to their digs to thaw out, to edit in the newsreel footage in in post-production, sync the video footage to the ghetto blaster-based playback and approve the final cut.

Here it is… 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhuuoKLuXPM&feature=share&list=UUqxkoPLBKrc-yfxPc4gszEA

*literally

Thanks to Lord Tilkey for archiving and posting on YouTube. Turns out we didn't need MTV after all. Just an awful lot of patience and Tim Berners-Lee.

"Spare a talent for an old ex-leper..."

We (Songs from The Blue House) did a pop show the other day at The High Barn in Great Bardfield, which is where we originally turned up some years ago to do a set at their beer festival, the fee for which we negotiated down to a day's recording at which we did a version of "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". This set in motion many trains of endeavour, not least the one which lead to us featuring in The Word Magazine as a bunch of Rock Dads (I've gone on about this at length before many, many times) which in turn meant that our friend James Kindred, who we'd corralled at short notice to do the accompanying photo for us, got sent a press pass to the Latitude Festival in order to do some shots with Peter, Bjorn and John. He put them in deck chairs eating ice creams if I recall correctly, and his submission featured in the next issue. Kind of serendipitious, I reckon.  

Anyhoo, long story short, we were belatedly launching our cunningly-titled album 'IV' at the gig and decided to do a chronologically-based set list starting with the first song we wrote and finishing some hour and a half later with the most recent. Since there's a fully-automated 69-track digital studio right there it seemed a shame not to record the whole thing for posterity, and once the engineering voles had cleared enough space on the hard drive (in the old days we'd just have taped over someone's precious once-in-a-lifetime, life-savings-consuming two inch demo master tape and left them weeping at their inability to cough up the £50 required to preserve it for a month in storage, but then I suppose that's progress for you) that's what we did.

In the great tradition of epoch-defining live albums (I'm thinking All The World's A Stage, On Your Feet or On Your Knees, or perhaps Showaddywaddy's Live in Germany) we'd now like to put the recording of the gig out as a CD or download or somesuch. Which is where you come in.

We have decided to employ the phenomenon of crowdsourcing (as opposed to crowd surfing - that didn't go so well that one time, but then I blame the supper club-style seating plan) to provide some lowly sound engineer with the means by which to both feed his family and to be able to afford the electricity required in order to be able to switch the studio equipment on for long enough to be able to fix that sloppy tuning in the second number and put enough EQ on the audience mics that we don't have to use the second-hand crowd track from The Adicts' Rockers Into Orbit. I hear we're going to leave in that bit about percussionist Mick Harding being able to kill a bear with his man hands.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter page, which details a number of enticing packages that you can invest in, and which also features a short video explaining our predicament vis-a-vis finance in which I end up threatening Our Glorious Leader with a battery powered drill. Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1807726723/songs-from-the-blue-house-live-album             

Amazing Adventures in Time and Spaceward.

There’s been a gratifying response to my last post regarding The World Service and our adventures in The Big Music, to the extent that some folk have expressed an interest in uncovering the actual sound recordings that we made at the time. From a dusty corner of his digital archive, my good friend James Partridge has been kind enough to retrieve and host delicately preserved copies of these artefacts, wrapped carefully in old newspaper and bubble wrap, and I am pleased to be able to offer you, dear reader, the opportunity to hear these things and make your mind up regarding our merits (or otherwise) first hand.

First, a bit of background. The World Service had been in existence for a couple of years by the point we made these demos, although principally in a slightly different aggregation to that on the recording, the former line up’s career having concluded when the self same James had invited our then bass player to join his band and he, Steven ‘Kilbey’ Mears, had agreed. Singer Stephen ‘Wendell’ Constable and I split the band, reformed without telling the drummer and started looking around for suitable replacements, which led us to recruiting one Donald Hammond on bass, his brother Gibbon (later to become a pivotal bass-playing tri-corner of Songs from The Blue House) on keyboards while Gary Forbes, second cousin of Simple Minds’ bass player Derek, became our drummer. Eagle-eyed SftBH completists will have already spotted that this is the line up referred to in the lyrics of Start One of Your Own (still available for digital download http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/album/youre-so-vain). 

With a rather overweening sense of ambition we then booked ourselves into Spaceward Studio in darkest Cambridgeshire for a couple of nights to do some recording. As we rolled up in a pair of cars overloaded with guitars and amplifiers the freshly-signed The Bible, featuring Boo Hewerdine, were having their gear loaded out into a considerably larger van. We nodded cheerily at him in the pub while we waited for their crew to finish vacating the premises at which he looked a tad startled and disappeared a bit further into his greatcoat. It probably would have been relevant to mention that Steve and I, in our capacity as fellow employees of Andy’s Records, had spoken to him on the phone on a hundred occasions, but we didn’t think to bring that up at the time.

Here are just a couple of vignettes from the sessions, which were perfectly curated by in-house engineer and recording producer Owen Morris. “I hate doing guitars” he remarked at one point as he nonchalantly swept a palms-width spread of extremely expensive faders up to ten so that Steve could put his coffee down on the end of the mixing desk. Posterity does not record if this is how he then introduced himself to Noel Gallagher prior to mixing Definitely Maybe.

I mentioned in my previous blog that there were shiny prizes on offer in the Rock & Pop Competition and I ended up taking one home in the shape of the ‘Best Song’ award for I’m Sorry. I don’t remember saxophone player Jane Leighton (as was) doing any more than two takes on anything and so that double tracked end solo with the third harmony and grace notes added was in all probability recorded in pretty much the time it takes to listen to it, a feat which I still find astonishing.

The End of The Rainbow is a snapshot of what was happening politically in the mid to late eighties from the viewpoint of a twenty-something singer-songwriter and one which I’m not at all embarrassed to stand behind today although as I point out to myself toward the end there, “You don’t get a medal for watching the news, reading the paper, or singing the blues”. In hindsight, Eric Clapton CBE may beg to differ.

The last song on the session – Danny Whitten’s Legacy - involved Gibbon playing the grand piano in the studio’s live room while we monitored his performance from around the corner in the gallery. After a few fluffed takes, tension was rising perceptibly as we were all well aware we were on a fixed budget in terms of both time and money. It also hadn’t worked in our favour so far that someone had pointed out that the rolling chords he was attempting to string together most closely resembled the theme from popular Sunday night vet-centric family entertainment All Creatures Great and Small. These were the days of rewinding tapes and possibly compiling a serviceable final version from a number of performances, not digitally click-and-pasting them to where they should be on the visual laser display unit, and so we were literally running out of space in which to store his work so far. As another take succumbed to the combined pressures of expectation and performance-related anxiety there was a significant pause, an intake of breath, an exhalation. Finally a voice floated ethereally through the monitors from the other side of the wall. “Don’t shoot me” he began phlegmatically. “I’m only the piano player”.

You can listen to The World Service here; http://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/album/world-service
(Tracks 1-6 recorded at Spaceward by Owen Morris - the Constable Mix of "Far Away" is because Steve didn't like the effect Owen put on his acoustic guitar at the start of the song and so he (Owen) asked him if he (Steve) thought he could do any better. It had been a long night. Tracks 7-10 recorded with the Neale Foulger/Steve 'Kilbey' Mears rhythm section on Tascam 4-track at at The Portaloo, Clarkson Street, Ipswich by James Partridge). 

There is a splendid Spaceward Studios archive online from which I stole the photo of the desk above, and which includes some pictures of Owen, a story about how Iron Maiden’s first demo got wiped, a shot of Julian Cope recording Fried and a list of bands who recorded there which as well as us (“demo”) includes Stiff Little Fingers. They recorded Alternative Ulster, which I’m not sure Mr Wendell realised at the time.
http://www.spaceward.co.uk/spaceward-studios/index.htm

Empire Song

It was what, eighty-six, eighty-seven? Mr Wendell and I were in the fullest flush of our baggy shirts and pixie boots period – he more so than I, as I was still coming off the back of a serious Neil Young phase (still am, always will be) and so I trended toward the checked shirt and tasselled scarf rather than the suede that he favoured, shielded behind Blues Brothers shades but both of us in thrall to The Big Music. It was the fag end of the Thatcher years and so we had more than enough to keep us going in terms of targets for our lyrical barbs - Rod Stewart and Sun City, the French and Greenpeace, sexual politics which I barely understood (and am still working on) and politicians who were “…scanning the map for an island to defend”. The big beat of Mel Gaynor and the fierce Celtic hotwired soul of The Waterboys were our touchstones. Spitting Image was on the television, John Hegley was on at Glastonbury and Billy Bragg was putting out singles about The Diggers. These were heady times indeed.

 

In the middle of all of this we (were) entered into what was officially termed The Celestion Suffolk Rock and Pop Competition. Due to enforced line-up changes we only had five songs rehearsed at this point, which we played in every round. The biggest, most epic one of these was called ‘Empire Song’. “Stand straight, stand tall you can fight them all” ran the chorus “...it’s an attitude of mind. But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for, you won’t find”. We were non-com observers – grandiose, bellicose, living in a world of faux-grandeur that allowed no compromise between the new gold dream and the tumble on the sea – I, the lyricist, Wendell my willing accomplice mouthpiece. Take that, Bono! The song also had a lovely D-C-G chord progression in the verse that lent itself to a arpeggiated part on the electric guitar which I very much enjoyed phasing and chorusing in that 80’s way, over a majestic backdrop of big snare, twelve string guitar and sustained Hammond organ chords.

We made it as far as the final of the competition and, knowing that we were up against the finest that Suffolk could produce (or at least the finest that had entered, had hit the various judging panels’ buttons and who had all turned up in time for each round) we knew we had to exert a bit of what we referred to in our off-message moments as stage presence if we were going to take home any of the various trophies on offer. We had, after all (spoiler alert) beaten our main competition all hands down in the semi-final and were looking to repeat the experience (it’s complicated – I think a precursor to the Duckworth-Lewis method may have been involved). They, similarly, knew they were going to have to up their game.

Settling into our not-at-all rehearsed routine Wendell and I threw shapes, postured, jumped on and off monitors and, during one contemplative post-middle eight section, spontaneously sat together on the edge of the drum riser. I picked out harmonics, he faux-wearily addressed the state of the nation in song. The verse built, the chords achieved a certain stridency…I felt a hand in the small of my back. It gently urged me forward. “Up” it said. “Up, and let’s take these fuckers on”. To the casual observer we probably looked like a couple of hectoring students caught mid-SU bar debate (neither of us were students – the hectoring part is still open to what I suspect would be a very short discussion) sharing a microphone stand picked out in the stage centre spotlight. In our heads we were Jagger and Richards, Strummer and Jones, Tom Robinson, Mike Scott, Paul Weller in all his badly-fringed red wedge fury. “Stand straight, stand tall, you can fight them all, it’s an attitude of mind!” we shouted in unison. “But your pleas for reform won’t keep you warm, and what you’re looking for you won’t find”. I’ll remember the moment of that proprietal hand pushing me forward, reassuring me that we were in this together and that here was someone who really, truly believed in me until death or dementia take me.

We came second.                 

"No, It's spelled 'Nosmo King'..."

As an increasing number of these entries seem to do, this one broadly kicks off “Of course, back in the day…” You could probably Google that phrase and find this blog coming up top of the list. I’m not going to though; I refuse to read any further than the first occurrence of the phrase “If you Google…” in any article ever, as that gives me a pretty good idea of where the research for it was done. Mind you, some people refuse to read beyond the first instance of a semi colon, especially in the opening paragraph.

Back in the day, when I toiled unceasingly behind a number of counters of an award-winning chain of record shops, there were label catalogues to check through in order to ensure that we had the right selection of top-selling platters (and a few staff favourites) available to the casual browser at any time. I used to love doing checklists as it meant I could spend an awful lot of time reading sleeve notes, memorising catalogue numbers - Kiss’s Love Gun was PRICE 69, as it happens – and at one point I could rattle off the entire Black Sabbath discography in order, including the NEMS stuff, and give you the Judie Tzuke back catalogue in ILPS number order as a result of my time delving through the racks. Not a great party trick, I’ll admit, and subsequently I spent a great deal of the early eighties single - principally, I suspect, because that was my party trick.
 

These were the times when coming back from the shop floor with a list of browser dividers which needed replacing with the legend “M’Head” scrawled carelessly upon it would garner you a withering look and the enquiry as to whether you were referring to Medicine Head, Motorhead or Murray Head? The sleeves in our TV advertised section bore the legend ‘625’ as that was the number of lines broadcast on an analogue television. It was that kind of atmosphere – look, you’ve seen ‘High Fidelity’, right? But then, if it hadn’t been for browser ordering and poor transcription, I would never have had the opportunity to live through the chucklesome but perfectly factually accurate receipt of the one intended for the jazz section headed “THE LONELIEST MONK”.

In order to locate those hard-to-find or even impossible-to-imagine customer requests however, one needed to employ a combination of low cunning, a genuine sleuthing instinct and to not be too proud to call on fellow staff members’ arcane knowledge of (say) the solo works of ex-members of Trip. You also needed a voluminous tome called The Music Master. Once you had identified the album being requested, the artist, or even the label you could refer to the listings within before attempting to track down a current distributor with whom you (a) had an account and (b) weren’t on stop with because their bill hadn’t been settled for a couple of months due to some administrative oversight. Even in the case of scenario (b) you’d probably still take payment and issue a receipt (basically an IOU if truth be told) as that might help bump up the outstanding balance to the point where they would accept an order from you since it would actually be worth sending out a box of stock by Securicor. Amazon, their one-click ordering and everyone’s opinion on their tax affairs was still some way off at this point, as you may have guessed.
 

The thing is, with so many independent labels having sprung up over the years, the publishers of the Music Master couldn’t possibly monitor every operation and their release schedules to ensure that they were genuine, let alone update deletion dates, which is why there is a cassette-only release by a band called gods kitchen on House of God Records, catalogue number GK29 in the 1991 version, and in all subsequent editions, called The Boy Who Loved Aeroplanes. Today, if you want, you can look it up on the worldwide web and have it downloaded to your computer like *clicks fingers* that. Of course, back in the day...