One Door Closes...

For five years I was the co-curator of a show called Why the Long Face? on Ipswich Community Radio. Initially we (Neale Foulger) and I started it as a pretty much like-for-like replacement of The Urban Sofa Beat Collective, a two hour ramble through the tangled undergrowth of the collected sub consciousness’s of (initially) James Kindred and latterly Simon Talbot – formerly of agit-Dada comedy collective Chimps in Suits - and Matt Marvel, the weird one. When Matt and Simon went on to host their own show on BBC Radio Suffolk Neale and I stepped in to fill the vacuum and recruited one Phil Bryer to be our disassociated Letter from America-type punctuation in the middle of a two hour chat show (to paraphrase Seinfeld) about nothing.

We had a darned good time, too. Occasionally we scripted things - Neale's Simon and Garfunkel skit was borderline pornographic, and I may even have declined the opportunity to take part in that one - there was a surrealistic Shipping Forecast, a weekly Soup Review and occasionally visitors and guest hosts would pop in when one or other of us took the week off. Lucy Sampson brought her boyfriend in, AloneMe offered to play live but were confused by Neale's insistence on counting the number of kidneys in the room, Dylan Hearn forgot to plug his book and regular listeners like our Catalan Correspondent Simon, Big Jan from New Zealand, Daron - the King of North East Minnesota, Izzy, Chloe, Lord Tilkey from Coggeshall and countless others enlivened our inbox on a weekly basis.  

I went fortnightly first, my weeks off being filled by Martyn Brown, and the show drew to its inevitable conclusion when Neale came to the same conclusion that I had, in that we’d said pretty much everything we could think of saying – whether scabrous, poignant, whimsical, completely in error or simply in the voice of Brian Blessed. Our last show went out this week and was a mix of the usual oblique ramblings, uninformed conjecture and lyric quizzes. One of the first questions we received from our listening public ran “Jesus – how drunk are you?!” We leave behind an archive of shows which, as Neale once pointed out, if intercepted by aliens monitoring broadcasts from Earth, is likely to bring down a shit-storm of Ming-like proportions in response. “Puny Earthlings!” they will ejaculate in fury. “No-one needs a fourth album from The Sundays – it’s the rule of three!”*

As I say, the end of an era – what with the Picturehouse reunion having gone the way of the end-of-term school play and Songs from The Blue House being on indefinite hiatus I was pretty much bereft of projects, and for a self-proclaimed creative like me, that’s an issue. The phone rang. It was Tony Shevlin, latterly of Nashville Tenn. (for a couple of weeks, at least) and progenitor of forthcoming album Songs from The Last Chance Saloon. “Can you be round mine on Tuesday?” he said. “We’ve got a gig on Sunday week”.

 

*Neale has a theory that any - and every - band should only ever release three albums. "If they haven't said it by then, it doesn't need saying" is his reasoning. We had quite a few conversations like that.

“When we started putting this set list together The Kaiser Chiefs were still in the charts…”

 

So, that’s happened then. Part reunion, part birthday, wholly celebratory, The Picturehouse Big Band’s 2014 foray into playing that fast thing (one more time) went as swimmingly as any of us had dared hope, especially given that only one of our number is still treading the boards with any regularity. The rest of us shrugged off the weight of our advancing years (“I kept my eyesight, they kept their hair…”) in order to shake some action, surprising not only our grizzled regular listeners from back in the day, but a few of the younger folk in attendance who hadn’t realised that you were allowed to have fun on stage as well as off.

Since the gig was a de facto birthday party (for me) there was a Wall of Shane comprising photos which helpfully demonstrated the progression of my decrepitude over the past few decades - including (quite movingly) a picture of me and my Dad which I worked out must have been taken when he was then the age that I am now. At the mid point of the evening I was presented with a four-foot long cake marked with candles in a long, single line which I had to extinguish by exhaling in one smooth motion. It was, as someone remarked, very much the antithesis of the late John Belushi’s idea of a birthday treat. The timing of the presentation also gave me an opportunity to revisit my balladeerian past with a stirring solo rendition of Billy Bragg’s A New England which brought forth a heartening degree of unprompted audience participation before the group embarked on the second set.

One genuinely unplanned encore later* “Can we do another one!?” I asked, still popped on adrenalin and band tab beers. Wendell laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder and gestured toward the door as folk filed out into the cool night air, babysitters to relieve and cabs to call. “I don’t think they want any more”. One half of our volunteer crew for the evening sidled up. “You know what the guy standing next to me said after that My Sharona solo?” he asked rhetorically. “Nailed it”. We cooled off in the pub garden, comparing notes about whether we’d now need a lie down, ice packs or earplugs. “The noise really gets to you after a while, doesn’t it?” commented someone. “My ears are buzzing”. “Oh yeah” said another “My car never sounds like it’s running smoother than on the way home from a gig”.   
 

*Not, as it turned out, the bawled "Menswear!" when we asked if there were any requests - which if nothing else suggests that age shall not weary the foot soldiers in the Britpop Wars, even if the twenty year retrospectives may them condemn.       

Tips of the hat to Yammezz for PA wrangling, Val for the venue, Joe for rehearsals and one Ashley Robertson for the photo at the top. Sorry about throwing that book out to the chap who correctly guessed 'The Jags' and hitting that other guy in the face, by the way.   

The Return of Picturehouse

We’ve had a couple of cosy sit down affairs at Mr Wendell’s house (at one point I was going to take a souvenir photograph of our collective increasingly comfortable footwear, which contained at least one pair of slippers) but last night was the first full electric blow-out of the set for what we’re calling The Return of Picturehouse – a nod in part to Mike Scott’s epic The Return of Pan, in which he revisits the same chord sequence he employed for The Pan Within, but adds some bells and whistles over the top. This is effectively pretty much what our efforts at a reunion amount to. With age though has come, not necessarily wisdom, but certainly a degree of disposable income which has allowed some investment in labour-saving devices like combined multi-effects boards, tone controls that actually make a difference to the sound of your guitar and amplifiers which don’t require an application of what Drummer Reado refers euphemistically to as ‘impact rectification’ in order to make them start working. His other patented solution to amplifier-related issues is to “leave it in the car overnight” which he swears works in 83% of all applicable cases. Wendell has a proper Gibson acoustic. Turns out this is the first time it has been out of the house since he bought it.

With our new and improved battery of sounds and processing devices to hand we are not overly worried when Kilbey informs us that he has forgotten to bring his bass, since he has an octave divider contained within his FX box and will simply play the part on guitar, relying on the good auspices of Mr Boss (Roland rather than Hugo) to make the necessary tonal adjustments electronically on his behalf. I am also reluctant to pass comment since I had to phone him from the car on the A12 at the weekend when Mr Wendell tactfully pointed out to me that although we were on our way home from Helstock - at which I had once again had the pleasure and privilege of performing - my acoustic guitar was not. I think it might be an age thing. Certainly that was a contributing factor in our selection of rehearsal room, since the other one available to us was on the first floor and we’re all getting on a bit to be carrying large, heavy objects like amplifiers up two flights of stairs before we even get started.

So it was doubly galling when after we’d completed the first set and had briefly stepped out to enjoy the brisk, refreshing night air that we realised that the in-house PA had started emitting a low but pervasive hum, seemingly of its own accord - a low hum slightly sharp of ‘G’, as it happens. After unplugging everything, turning it off and then back on again, having swapped all the power leads and (without the luxury of being able to leave it in the car overnight) having called the studio owner to check if it was still under warranty we were faced with the prospect of either decamping to the upstairs room after all or calling it a night.

Fortunately at this point Gibbon, who had earlier confessed that he’d driven to the rehearsal not quite knowing what was in the back of his car other than that it was all probably going to be needed for something or another, remembered that he had a spare power amplifier which we could simply hook into the circuit and which would enable us to complete our practise without having to indulge in any further heavy lifting. We ran through the rest of the set, congratulated ourselves on a job well done, packed up and went home. The set sounds good, everyone can remember where all the bits go and in the interim between our retirement from active service and now the only real debate now turns out to be whether we need to start early so we can ensure everything fits in or whether we should just start early so we can be home and in bed before our knees give in. 
 

In the meantime Mr Wendell tells us that he had taken one of the flyers we're using to publicize the gig in to work last week. We've used an old photo of us, from when we all had hair as we figure that might remind people of who we were. "They spent the weekend trying to guess which one was me" he relates, sadly. "And only three of them got it right".  

The Picturehouse Big Band will be appearing at The Steamboat, New Cut West, Ipswich on Friday April the 11th. Do come, won't you?

Moby Dave.

Friends, pray serve my indulgence as I reproduce a heretofore un-blogged excerpt from All These Little Pieces (down in price to £4.99 for the paperback, everybody!) regarding Songs from The Blue House's appearance at The Cornbury Festival in 2006, at the behest of The Word magazine. There's a post script on this occasion.     

 

 

We are unwashed and slightly dazed the next morning when a dishevelled denim-clad fellow staggers toward us as we are drinking tea outside our tent, which is parked to the rear of the backstage area at the festival. “Hello” he introduces himself “I’m John Bonham’s son - Ravin’ Dave’s the name. I was here last night - s’posed to play drums with Plant, he’s known me since I was this high”. He waves an unsteady hand somewhere aroung knee level. “Thing is, I’ve flown in from fackin’ New York last night. I was in Barbados yesterday, got a gig tonight in Glasgow and now I’m in fackin’ Oxfordshire. I don’t know where the fack I am” - this much is clearly true, at least spiritually if not geographically.

“I was s’posed to play drums” he continues “But Robert took one look at me and says “You’re jet lagged - you can’t play, but can our drummer use your kit?””. Robert Plant, it is inferred, has remembered to bring his own mixing desk but seems to have forgotten to bring a drum kit. Lucky that Ravin’ Dave’s roadie was there in time, eh? That’s what we thought. “Where’s my coffee?” Our passing soundman has been persuaded to grab a couple of reviving hot drinks from catering for the tired and emotional alleged offspring of erstwhile rock legend ‘Bonzo’. “Back in the day, yes, I was heavyweight boxing champion of Great Britain you know” he continues apropos of nothing. We are aware that a line of security men are observing from a safe distance and chuckling visibly to each other.

“You know what’s unusual about me?” We can’t think of a safe answer to this and so decline to answer at all. There follows a long and involved monologue about the South African security services and how Ravin’ Dave was unfairly incarcerated under the same laws that put Nelson Mandela away - “...and poor old Steve...” Dave shakes his head sadly “...of course he never made it. Can I buy a fag off yer, I fackin’ hate rollies”. His rather damp and sad-looking cigarette is indeed hanging unloved and unlit in his hand.

There is further discussion around his consumption of drugs and alcohol over the previous twenty four hours, and indeed forty two years. “I’ve got an interview with Kate from The Guardian” he mumbles, and gestures to indicate where his drinks are to be delivered. ‘Kate from The Guardian’ seems to resemble nothing so much as a startled and rather nervous looking gentleman, who spares us a pleading look as we make eye contact. An idea seems to occur to Dave - “You’re beautiful” he announces to one of our party “I bet you’ve got a beautiful body - do you want to go skinny-dipping in the lake?” Rock Mum Helen politely demurs. Dave senses that he has outstayed his welcome. “What the fack did I say that for?” he wonders out loud. No-one can provide a cogent answer and so he gathers what remain of his wits about him and stumbles off. The guys on security are still chuckling contentedly to themselves.

 

So anyway, James did the sound for Deborah Bonham on Saturday last and asked her if she by any chance had a nephew called Dave. Apparently she hasn't. We were pretty sure that was the case, but the confirmation prompted a momentary frisson in both of us anyway. Presumably there's an LA club doorman somewhere still wondering if that guy that night really was the drummer from Coldplay. If you're reading, sir, that was the night my mate Steve tried it on.  

Danny Whitten's Legacy

A quick rehearsal last night in preparation for my forthcoming appearance at this year’s Helstock (see blogs passim) wherein I shall be performing as part of revolving-door be-lineupped family ensemble The Arctic Mulleys, having run out of bands of my own to reform over the past decades’ soirées and not having had time to form a new one since the appearance of the Theotrio at last year’s event, after which co-conspirator Mr Wendell stopped returning my calls. I will be performing on the acoustic guitar in support of The Birthday Girl in our customary opening slot – a bit like The Levellers do to herald the start of Beautiful Days, but indoors and with a sight fewer camper vans - after which I shall to retire gracefully to the buffet in order to investigate fully the results of the evening’s entry-by-possession-of-an-interesting-cheese-only admissions policy.

My original suggestion for my appearance was to revive and perform the three song demo which first brought me into the orbit of La Mulley’s main squeeze and paramour Lord Tilkey some years ago. This now ancient and revered artefact consisted of two original songs recorded to cassette tape along with a cover version of Danny Whitten’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” which we knocked out at the end of the session on the basis that he didn’t have a copy of the song, he wanted one, he didn’t know anybody he could tape it off, and I knew how to play it. It seemed a pretty sensible quid pro quo in return for securing his services behind the Tascam four track, on an overdubbed guitar solo, and then on some suitably Eighties synth* - this is exactly the sort of creative endeavour and home recording solution solving that Spotify has put a stop to, I should add.**

When it came to recording IDWTTAI James generously added a plaintive harmony on the chorus which very much enhanced the whole melancholia of the thing and topped the session off nicely. We were in a bit of a rush and so it wasn’t until later that we noticed that in my reverie I had sung (inaccurately as it turns out) “If you wait here just a little bit longer/If you will won’t you listen/to my heart?” and James, not unreasonably, had echoed in a perfect fifth “…if you wait, won’t you listen…” the cumulative effect of which was, when listening back to the beautifully blended vocals in the finished version that we appeared to be singing “If you widdle…”. We should have toured as Charles Hawtrey and Crazy Horse.

 
*Although to be fair this was in the eighties.

**shakes walking stick at the internet.

  

“You can't disown the dream you only borrowed.”

 

We’re getting the old gang back together one more time for a run (or at least a spirited amble) through the old hits, inspired in part by an evening spent playing Texas Hold ‘em for high stakes at my house (many a Picturehouse heir has rued the day they let their piggy bank out of sight on the occasion of a boys’ night in with the Maxim playing cards) to the soundtrack of a Spotify playlist of fifty or so of the songs I could remember us doing off the top of my head (of which, more later). By the time we’d got through the second hour of hits we were chatting about the good old days and how selective memory is really the only kind to indulge in.

Three of us got together the other evening and having actually remembered most of the chords without recourse to the internet (although playing YouTube videos from your phone via the big box of witchcraft in the corner and out through your stereo is a boon in terms of actual arrangements) we decided to go for it. Wendell sent me a picture to go with the Facebook announcement of our return which even in such short a time as has accumulated since we stopped doing this regularly tells a vivid story.

There’s me, still hale of hairline and able to crane over my demi-dextrous fret work with nary a care in the world regarding my soon-to-be encompassing male pattern baldness. Kilbey and Wendell haven’t yet graduated to the thick-rimmed hipster glasses they’re now rocking on a daily basis. There’s a set list discarded on the amplifier at the back, tinsel wraps the television which marks one edge of our territory, with the fruit machine delineating the other edge. Is it Christmas? Maybe – perhaps they just forgot to take the decorations down in the New Year. At least they remembered to turn it off for our appearance, which didn’t always happen. All that’s missing is an ashtray.

http://open.spotify.com/user/1163801448/playlist/4bdLXkCgiTu8Qq7mguCVRe

When You Were Young.

I  went to see del Amitri last week. They are a special band for me because their second album, Waking Hours (you probably know it as "the one with Nothing Ever Happens on it") was the background music to a very difficult period in my life (when you're kicking off your morning commute with Kiss This Thing Goodbye every single day there's probably something there underlying which has not been adequately addressed). When they played Hull's legendary Adelphi Club* to promote the album and then dropped into the record shop where I worked the next morning I insisted that they help themselves to a few of our albums in return for signing theirs. Guitarist Iain Harvie picked up a copy of Neil Young's Zuma and Justin Currie signed my copy (which I still have) "Anything for a freebie". Guitarist and future Fast Show writer Dave Cummings declined to add his signature on the not unreasonable grounds that "...I'm not on it". 

 Their next LP Change Everything... pretty much soundtracked my personal renaissance, so I retain a soft spot a mile wide for them and their works. I even bought their compilation 'The Collection', which has one of the worst covers ever committed to print and doesn't even have Kiss This Thing... on it. There's still an online review available which is headed "Del Amitri were great - but please don't buy this album..."  

 The concert was also an opportunity to catch up with one of my old English teachers - not the Welsh one with the novels who turned out to be right about Graham Greene - the other one whose first job it was to coach me through the tricky opening scene of The Sea King's Daughter for our school play ("Behold! The Sea King!" - I can still remember my big line even now). How I principally remember him is as a slight, beardy drama enthusiast, which is what he remains, albeit a now a retired ex-headmasterly one. He was the one who bought Ziggy Stardust into the lunch time record club and got us to deconstruct 10cc lyrics in class. He also provided exercise books for me to fill with poetry and doggerel which he helpfully critiqued on his own time. He posted an update on Facebook this week about our meeting.

 Tuesday was very special seeing Del Amitri back together after many years and playing as if it was only yesterday. An extra bonus was meeting up with Shane Kirk at the gig after over 35 years! He was 11 and in my first English class in 1976 – a first rate student who produced the most amazing writing which encouraged me to continue in the job. Those are the times that are never forgotten and make it a privilege to have been a teacher. Such a shame that today’s teachers do not have the opportunities to teach to the interests of their children rather than those of the lunatic, Gove.   

Thank you, Sir. That means a lot.



*Essentially a couple of terraced houses knocked together, so that attending a show had the air of nothing so much as an over-boisterous party in someone's living room while their parents were away.

"We'd like to do a song that's been...very kind to us..."

I get struck every so often by the thought that without that particular musical experience maybe I wouldn’t have made that left turn into balladry - perhaps I might have decided otherwise - perchance I might have got into drum n’ bass instead of picking up an acoustic guitar and trying to get people to clap at me in public while I sang at them about ex-girlfriends and imaginary slights. Sometimes it’s when I think about that Bob Dylan lyric someone pasted up on the sixth form common room notice board, obviously it happens whenever I hear a Neil Young song on the radio, definitely when Rory Gallagher’s Irish Tour movie makes it on to the late night schedule, occasionally even when I’m moved to slot that Uriah Heep compilation into the car stereo on long car journeys.  

It was probably Shev’s mention of the song he wrote for Amnesty International at last week’s Songwriter’s Night that prompted me to revisit probably the most influential album I remember from my teen years – the pair of sets of performances that seeded the idea that you could take things somewhere else. Nothing that my parents owned did the trick – I didn’t grow up listening to their Joni and Beatles albums (that came later) since they simply didn’t have any, although a bunch of singles by the likes of Elvis, Cliff and Bill Haley bequeathed by friends and neighbours must have sown some seeds. The compilation that put me on my path to a glittering career of general audience indifference woven inextricably with occasional personal triumphs were those provided by The Secret Policeman’s Balls of 1979 and 1981.

I was convinced that the performances I remember so fondly were of one year, but research tells me otherwise, nevertheless they seeped into my impressionable sponge of a teenaged mind and sat there, waiting for their moment(s) to spring forth in inspiration. That Pete Townsend could strip down Won’t Get Fooled Again, drag classical guitarist John Williams into the mix and spit out a particularly, seemingly ad-libbed and venomous “Do ya?!” is, pleasingly, as grainy on Youtube as it is in my memory. I didn't know you could just call up people with no prior relationship with your material and just get them to come along and do something like that (and one day, all of our memories will be in black and white). Similarly, that the brittle chopped chords of The Police’s Roxanne could be broken down into a chorus pedalled melancholy reflection was a revelation. I didn’t know you were allowed to leave out the bass and drums and do that. Although it was pretty much a solo effort anyway, I Don’t Like Mondays gained a whole lot more from being stripped of its orchestral cladding and Tom Robinson’s Glad To Be Gay made me think that if you had an acoustic guitar it meant that you really were a protest singer. If only I’d thought to write that down at the time.

Aside from those, the most affecting performance in the film and on the album came from the most unlikely source. These days Phil Collins is slighted principally as the all-overpowering eighties behemoth that ate Genesis but back then he was an unlikely piano player who’d tentatively released a solo album (after the other two, Rutherford and Banks, had already dipped their toes in the stream) and made his first solo live performance at the ball performing a couple of songs from Face Value, one of which was a tremendously moving character-driven ballad on which he got a former member of Jean-Luc Ponty’s band to accompany him on the banjo.  

It all sinks in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjOvErpQVqs

"...apart from that, we've had a lovely evening".

Sometime in the last century my friend Tony - recently returned to the wilds of Suffolk from out of That There London - mentioned that he was thinking of starting a Songwriters’ Night at a local pub and asked if I would come along to support the venture by performing, at least until it picked up enough momentum to sustain itself and we could stop playing our songs at each other. An unsuitable venue was procured in that it had the disadvantage of being the saloon bar of a local pub. This did at least mean that we weren’t going to be stuck away in a back room where no-one ventured and it also put the onus on the performers being good enough to entertain a live audience. It wasn’t exactly going to be a Friday Night Comedy Store bear pit, or as brutal as a late show at The Glasgow Empire, but you were definitely going to get some feedback on what the punters thought of your material nonetheless. Shev had also very cleverly negotiated a deal whereby performers, at least once they’d taken the stage for at least one number, got to drink for free (within reason, depending on the cognitive processes of whoever was behind the bar that evening, open mic nights being a notoriously under-desired shift among the bar keeping community).

It built very well, as it happens – we got some great buy-in from our hosts which made running the show a whole lot easier and when landlord Ady constructed an elaborate stage prop to coincide with Shev’s traditional set-closer Robert the Bunny one night it very nearly brought the house down. On any given evening there would be the usual suspects – a nervous singer-songwriter emboldened by her peers and channeling her parents’ collection of Joni Mitchell albums (this was pre-Kate Nash, so the accents tended to be more Saskatchewan via Topanga Canyon than Camden mockney in the main), a keyboard player embellishing his bedsit-logue with some jazzy motifs, a country band slumming it for the free booze, some guy who could afford a Gibson-Martin-Fender on which to frame his rudimentary barre chords with a spidery strum, and usually a bloke who’d brought his own tightly-bound sheaves of lyrics and was aggrieved to find that we didn’t have a music stand on which to mount it (we refused on principle). Okay, maybe it got a bit cliquey at times, but folk were generally respectful enough not to talk through the work in progress, a few people were encouraged in their endeavours and relationships and friendships were forged, many of which last to this day.

Statler and I went down to the latest incarnation of the evening last week with The Charming and Fragrant Helen Mulley, with whom we’d worked up a couple of things in the collaborative spirit of the olden times. Back then we used to write a song a month to the deadline of having something new to perform, this time round we’d tweaked a couple of things we already had lying around. The spirit of the occasion was quite similar to the feel of old, even if we’d picked the evening when the banks of the nearby River Orwell were forecast to burst and engulf the venue, and so attendance was a little chary. What the hell, that at least meant that we got two goes each and I even fulfilled a request from the floor (“…if I could do most of the requests I get I’d be in a circus”). It wasn’t until the end of the night when a rambling series of jazz chords presaged a heretical version of Sweet Home Alabama that attentions wandered and smartphones were consulted. One of my companions gestured toward the illuminated screen hidden below table level. “Nelson Mandela has died” it said.      

"...and get your bloody feet off the sofa"

 You know how those last three or four blogs went on about such seemingly disparate matters as drum damping, song writing, Kickstarter projects and, um...that other one - probably about biscuits or how the eighties were better or something, they usually are. Well, in a plot arc worthy of Russell T. Davies at his most baffling, as it turns out it's sort of all really been leading to this post. Here is a video of Songs from the Blue House performing a song called Not That Kind of Girl, which a nice man called Darran asked us to do before he'd give us any money for our last album. It was performed completely live out at The Recording Booth, and then Anthony James Shevlin moved the camera around a bit, made us do it again and then mixed the bits together. 

 Speaking of songwriting, Helen sings "White gold anklets", not "...ants" or "...antlers" in the line after "You can build me bridges", although the latter would have made a nice ad-lib if we were doing a gig over christmas anywhere. It'll make sense when you hear it.

Enjoy, contemplate, share. It's as much a mantra as anyone else lives by.

http://youtu.be/Vnz1NTrcsss 

“I don’t know who you are but you’re a real dead ringer for a post-feminist dialectic critique on the traditional gender-based mores of the patriarchy...”

Humming a happy tune in my head the other day as I do sometimes (it helps block out the voices) I found myself segueing effortlessly betwixt SftBH’s Not That Kind of Girl (originally from the album Too) and a tune by my old chum Tony James Shevlin entitled Would I Lie? What they have in common, beyond the key of E, a shuffly boogie back beat and an extraordinarily catchy hook each is that they deal with the thorny subject of embarking upon intrapersonal relationships. In short, they’re both about trying to pull.

My input on the former was that I made up the words and music out of my own head and then sent a version of it to The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley for approval and re-drafting as she was clearly going to have to take responsibility for delivering the polemic in song and since the phrase check your privilege hadn’t been invented at the time I thought it best to cede final edit on the lyric. She responded to by adding a whole extra verse just in case there remained any misunderstanding regarding the intent and also took out the line about being given “a damned good thrashing” which seemed fair enough, Portman Road seemingly being enough in the media spotlight at the time.

The revisions clarified our point, and we proceeded to rehearse, record and gig our new song whereupon it became one of our most popular numbers (a recent review of the live album mentioned it glowingly) to the point where when we were raising money through Kickstarter in order to cover the costs of pressing, dressing and posting the CD someone had requested that we video a unique version of it dedicated to them, which is why I’d ended up back in a studio with Shev in the first place, he being the director entrusted with recording the event for post-editry.

“Well” I thought to myself “There’s no point just wondering about it” and so I asked both Helen and Shev whether they’d consider getting together in order to see whether we could make a call-and-response combined version of the two songs and maybe go out and sing it at people if it went well, a suggestion which they both regarded with commendable equanimity, which is how we found ourselves working through an acoustic mash-up in Tony’s music room trying to ensure that no-one got the definitive last word and attempting to keep a lid on the raw smouldering intertextuality steaming up the windows.

Then, of course, we had to run through another couple of songs (that thing where a musician rocks up at the venue, bounds on stage, rips through one number to the enthusiastic screams of the audience and then disappears into the night with an inappropriately dressed girl on the back of his motorcycle happens remarkably rarely outside of the movie Purple Rain and besides there were three if us, so we’d need a sidecar at least if we were going to try to pull it off) so we chose Elephant, which Helen and I had played at last year’s Helstock (with Mr Wendell) and which I fondly like to imagine is the sort of thing The Indigo Girls might have released if they’d been produced by Clive Gregson. I also picked out one of my Shevlin favourites from the olden days of Suffolk Songwriters’ (he used to play to me, I used to play to him…) to complete the small-but-perfectly-formed set.

In response he started playing something that I was sure I recognised and that my hands seemed to be able to form the chords to through some sort of auto-folk memory. I even managed some harmonies on the chorus. “Where do I know that from?” I wondered aloud at its conclusion. “You remember” he replied “We played it once…at a party…in 1998”.       

"...it's his brother, Alan!" "Oh Yeah".

 
 Back in the day(tm) we raised awareness and funds for causes close to our hearts not by appearing on Newsnight but through the issuing of badges, fanzines, and cassette compilations. For a while in the eighties there was a thing called the Venue for Ipswich Campaign, or 'VIC'. One of the things that came of this was Ipswich Community Radio, which exists to this day, and another (indirectly) was the CSV centre which provided community-based services and rehearsal space. 

Through the consciousness-raising auspices of the committee there also came about numerous gigs (I think it was The Charlatans who redecorated the dressing room at The Caribbean Club with pizza) by which means I got to play in a band supporting Carter USM, which I never fail to mention every time 'Sheriff Fatman' comes on 6 Music. I also appeared on one of these tapes (in two different guises) alongside many of the Ipperati of the day, many of whom had been recorded by one James Partridge with his Tascam four track facility, popularly known as 'The Portaloo'.

For some reason I was humming one of the songs from the collection today - not As Is's "The Big Adventure", not This Side of Summer's "Hole In My Life", not even my "Showtime" but ‘Alan Peel’ by Edible Vomit - sing along if you know the chorus!

Subsequent online research reveals that Edible Vomit gave their first gig to a little known Ipswich band at The Albion Mills, who went on to become Cradle of Filth. I mean, I don’t want to get all Only Connect about this, but it’s good to know we all helped out each other, whether we knew about it at the time or not.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/7287890-Edible-Vomit

"A bit more duvet in the bass drum, please..."

 The history of the tea towel in rock occupies a sadly neglected nook in the overall pantheon of the fables of the deconstruction of pop history. Greil Marcus barely touches upon it, Johnny Rogan dismisses it in a paragraph, and only Donovan’s perpetual claim that he invented it on every BBC 4 documentary about the sixties that he can claw his way into briefly keeps the subject hovering athwart the listening public’s consciousness. 

 Like most people, I first became aware of the phenomenon when watching footage of the legendary rooftop concert performed by The Beatles during the sessions for what eventually became Let It Be. Most people can’t get past the horrific plastic mac Ringo is sporting (possibly one of Maureen’s) but once can tear your eyes away it is clear that he has customised his drum kit by carefully placing a tea towel over firstly the floor tom and then the snare. Before the invention of those little gummy blue pads that you can now attach to your drum heads and in the absence of the gaffa tape first introduced to Liverpool by merchant seamen in the thirties (and then eagerly swapped like gum, chocolates and silk stockings with GIs during the war by impressionable young percussionists throughout the home counties) this was the only way to damp down an overly timbalesque snare. With the experience of unsuccessfully trying to record the drum part for Tomorrow Never Knows while the kit was set up in the revolving door at the EMI offices in Manchester Square (John Lennon apparently wanted it to sound like “…a thousand Tibetan monks all paradiddling on temple drums at once”) still fresh in his mind Ringo would have been careful not to draw any attention to issues with recording the kit, and it is also enchanting to think of him absent-mindedly reading a humorous summary of the laws of cricket, or looking at Giles Martin’s and classmates’ handprints, or perhaps reflecting on some mawkish poetry about a mother’s love whilst shuffling his way through Get Back.

 Ringo was not alone in his pursuit of sonic experimentation. Across town Dave Mattacks, newly installed as drummer of incipient folk rockers Fairport Convention was struggling to reproduce the loose sound of Levon Helm’s kit as heard on The Band’s Music from Big Pink. “We ended up draping a tea towel across the snare to mute it – give it that subdued basement feel” he told Patrick Humphries some years later in a conversation recounted in the Fairport biography Meet by the Fridge. 

 Sometimes the old ways are the best. Only last week I myself was involved in recording an acoustic session wherein le batterie, even lovingly attended to with brushes by our sensitive and attentive percussionist, was overwhelming the delicate nuance of the banjo accompaniment. With a knowing sideways glance and a nod to the long and noble tradition of thinking outside the box our drummer rushed to the kitchen, returning with a lovingly wefted little Fairtrade cotton number which he draped over the snare in order to dampen down the intrusive rattle.

 It turns out than in these days of electronic gizmos and digitally-manipulated sound technology, where decades of improvisation and recording expertise and moving the mics and damping the room and tweaking the EQs have been reduced to bits and VDUs, you can now just buy a plug-in.       

I'm not in love...

 
I gave up all this malarkey once, y'know. I thought, "Well, that's it. I've had a good run, I've made people laugh, I've made them cry, I've stood on stage in Blues Brothers shades and a flouncy scarf, I've won a trophy - maybe it's time to move over just in time for some kid from Framlingham to take over and take on the world. But before I go..." 

All of this is true.

Before I went, I thought I should record some songs for posterity. Just pretty basic things - I gave Gibbon a CD of Clive Gregson's Strange Persuasions and told him that I wanted it to sound like that. He had a portastudio and a drum machine and a bass so it seemed like a pretty simple plan. Of course it didn't turn out anything like that. 

We did a few things late at night and quietly. We booked a live room for a day. My friend Ross could sing and was willing to get the train up from London for an afternoon. Wendell couldn't really shred but he had a twelve-string Rickenbacker and so I got him to play a solo (the last time I'd done that I'd asked him to try and make it sound like "...a musical box running out of wind on a playground situated in the midst of a post-nuclear wasteland", so I knew he'd be up for something as simple as "I want you to tell me how much you love this person with as few notes as possible").

We later re-recorded this song properly for SftBH III - without drums but with proper keyboards, a fiddle player and a pedal steel. TT (who did some truly lovely work on string parts and piano) always giggled at "This could be the pesticide" and "cokehead" in the lyrics. For the record, it's "Best aside" and "Coquette", but, y'know, whatever works for you is fine by me. While I was clearing some stuff up in the kitchen earlier today Mrs Skirky's iPod happened to be on her favourites list and it came on. 

Here it is. https://soundcloud.com/doyoudoanywings/in-my-arms
 
  

"It Breaks My Heart..."

 

I am in receipt of a slew of mails and tweets from The New Wolsey Theatre regarding their revival of the so-called ‘jukebox musical’ Our House, which takes the back catalogue of eighties pop funstrels Madness* as a starting point and then weaves a compelling narrative throughout in order to produce a compelling, evocative and fun evening out for all the family. Or, if you’re Ben Elton, involves you dashing off a bewildering load of old tosh on the back of a fag packet in crayon before trousering eye-watering amounts of cash and hanging out at parties with Robert De Niro.

This minds me to recall my own time in musical theatre, playing the part of Hank Jr. Jr. in the stage production of The Perfectly Good Guitars, which played at The New Wolsey, at Ipswich Music Day and the Place des Héros in Arras as part of a cultural exchange. The narrative explored the story of what was originally the Guitare family and followed their fortunes throughout generations of Guitars as they journeyed from their original home in France to Nova Scotia, Maine and finally Louisiana, each new step of the journey prompted by the then-current patriarch of the family becoming involved in an unfortunate “…bit of trouble with a local girl”.

In reality this was simply a scheme cooked up between myself and one Tony James Shevlin after some time idly speculating whether we should form a band simply for the express purpose of being able to put every guitar we owned on stage at the same time – I only had the four to bring to the party but he had half a dozen at least and was able to throw in a couple of basses for good measure. After we’d come up with the name, Shev fleshed out the concept and made a few calls until we had a cast of actor/musicians – Wendell G, TT, Billy-Bob, and the Mandolin sisters (and cousins) Ophelia and Emmylou – with small back stories which meant that we could drop a bunch of our favourite bits of Americana into the mix and have a ball at the same time. 

Once we had arranged the set list we allocated showcase numbers to each of the group so that numbers like Steve Earle’s Only When I’m Blue, Tompall Glaser’s Streets of Baltimore, Love Hurts, and Bruce Springsteen’s From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come) fitted snugly into the narrative, each monologue ending with a resigned “…with a local girl” before we kicked into the song proper. It was the latter which gave us the biggest surprise at our first rehearsal when Tony ‘TT’ Turrell, (operating under his regular nickname) burst note-perfect into the rollicking key-change boogie woogie piano solo which closes Dave Edmunds’ version and which we’d previously agreed might be a bit much to drop into someone’s lap given the deadline we were operating under, which was to get the show on at The Wolsey as part of the Ip Art festival that year. After that we all upped our game a bit.

Shev based the show around the concept that we as a group had come to Ipswich to see where Daddy was stationed during the war (he’d been asked to leave after a bit of trouble with…well, you get the picture**) which we affected to be mightily impressed by. He wrote lines based around the gifted happenstance that a few town centre buildings had been recently converted into licensed premises (“They had a theatre, and they turned it into a bar….even the job centre is now a pub!”) and that “They even have a Route 66!” “It’s a bus route Wendell – it goes to Martlesham…”

By making it a show rather than a gig we managed to fill most of the venue on the night and many happy theatre-goers congratulated us on our American accents in the bar afterward – a couple even going so far as to ask us how long we were over for. The trip to France may have slightly confused the non-Anglophone audience, not least because many of the line up were also playing gigs with their regular bands at the same festival (“Eet is ze same singer as yesterday…but zis time ‘e ‘as got a ‘at!”) but probably the finest compliment to our thespian integrity came when we performed at Ipswich Music Day. As we compared notes in The Milestone - about five minutes walk away from the park down the hill - afterwards (“A triumph darling – you were wonderful! Mwah! Mwah!”) the landlord approached us with a mischievous grin playing about his features. “I had one of the people who saw your act in here earlier” he twinkled. “Saw the first two numbers, stomped out of the park, down here, ordered a pint and addressed us all in part and no-one in particular. ‘I can’t stand those fucking Yanks’ he said”.

*Other descriptions are available. 

**Allegedly based on why Geno Washington skipped town. Possibly. Yes, that one.