"...and Lady Mondegreen"

For many, many years folk have disagreed with each other about when music finally went wrong. When skiffle first came out of the coffee bars, electrified itself and started hanging out in smoky clubs and beat-group cellars there were furious letters to The Jazz, Ragtime and Blue Note Gazette fulminating against the beatniks’ employment of massive fifteen watt electric amplifiers and wanton use of the spurious bongo*. Some say (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) that coming in out of the fields was a bad idea in the first place - indeed Samuel Pepys makes reference in his diary for September the 2^nd 1666 to ‘…an unholy rackette caused bye the minstrelry of severalle unkempt youths who did so sully the middle eight of ‘Merry Down, Dilly Down, Alle the Longe Daye’ with their raucous assaulte upon thee mandoline that I was barelye able to sit through the succeeding version of ‘Wonderwalle’ without recourse to blockinge of mine ears. At climaxe of thee performance, during ‘My Lady Thy Displayeth the Attributes of Ye Vixen’ saide youths perforce did set their lutes aflayme!’ Pepys did not return to an open session ever again, and the fate of the Pudding Lane Folk, Jazz and Blues Club remains unclear.

There is a whiff of irony that these days the largest celebrations of the people’s music are once again held in the rolling fields and meadows where our forebears once sang lustily of feasting and wenching whilst gazing enviously at the Manor House to whose plumped and primped luxuriance they could only aspire. Or Download, as it is known these days and so it was with a pleasingly retrogressive air that I pitched up at a local coffee house (one of the ones that apparently paid its corporation tax, according to the charming barista of whom I enquired) in the company of the Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley, with whom I was to perform a handful of songs at an acoustic showcase night** before we both pitched in with Tony Shevlin, event curator and Master of Ceremonies on a few things from his current Songs from The Last Chance Saloon album.

It was interesting to hang out and watch a few other performers, which I do shamefully infrequently these days, to see which way the wind is blowin’ in terms of what’s hot in the singer-songwriter scene. A few years ago you couldn’t move for be-capo’d scallies in John Lennon caps, then there was a wave of gamine faux-Cockneys slipstreaming Kate Nash. Last time I looked it was all echo pedals and loops and I was wondering whether there would be a number of Sheeran-lites in ginger wigs beat boxing and interspersing their plaintive choruses with some of that rapping that they have now. You’ve seen them, down the town hall, the rappers..? As it happened, there weren’t, but the current thing seems to be tapping out a rhythm on your guitar’s body. There’s a lot of it. It was two songs in before I stopped going to answer the door. “Do I have to do that?” I asked Helen. “No, you don’t” she reassured me. “In fact, I’d much rather you didn’t. If you ask me it’s this season’s Cajon”.

Helen and I were introduced as Songs from The Blue House which, strictly speaking, we and they were, although as she did her part I was rather left to fill in the space formerly occupied by two guitars, a fiddle, some keyboards, a banjo, a bit of pedal steel and a bass. Oh, and the other three vocalists. In the circumstances I thought I did rather well. Certainly well enough that we sold a couple of the CDs I’d stuffed into my bag before leaving the house. (Note to SftBH ‘Too’ purchasers – Ophelia goes D – G – D – A in that instrumental section, not D – A – D – D – A – G – G – D as performed on the evening. Ahem).

Next up, TJS and The Chancers took to the cleared floor area in front of the disabled toilet, whereupon Helen stepped up again to add some ethereal flute to Heart and The High Moral Ground, we did a couple more and then finished up with the album’s closer, Run Until We Drop – a gorgeous big-screen chunk of Americana with a Sam Shepard script just waiting to burst out of it. Hel’s sister Moj was taking photos – “Did you get one of us?” I asked. “There’s one of you at the end” she replied “I’ll send it to you”. There seemed to some confusion about one of the lyrics. “I’m afraid” she continued “I will, from now on, always think of that song you did earlier about having expensive tastes as ‘Champagne Tits on a Lemonade Pay’”.       

 

 

*TMFTL    

**Apparently there are a series of arcane but weapons-grade conditions which delineate the Acoustic Showcase from the Open Mic and, furthermore, from the Come All Ye. I’m not sure where the boundaries lie, but you don’t seem to get paid for any of them.   

"Let me ride on the wall of death, one more time..."

My grandparents went to Felixstowe on holiday. I've seen the photos, faded black and white echoes of an era of charabancs and bonnets. They may even have promenaded past Wallis Simpson, holed up on the East Coast, taking in the sea air whilst waiting for her divorce to be finalised at Ipswich Magistrates Court. I went there as a child many times - on one occasion, when I was not much older than my son is now, losing my parents by the pier and resolving to find them, as you do, with the impenetrable logic of simply walking to one end of the prom and then retracing my steps back again, and back again, and back, knowing that sooner or later I'd be bound to bump into them, which I eventually did. Naturally, just where I'd left them. I'm not sure how long it took me, but for them it must have seemed an awful lot longer.

 Charlie Manning's was the epicentre of the Felixstowe holiday experience in the seventies - funfair, arcade and fish & chip dispensary all in one - soundtracked by Glam Rock and heady with the smell of hot dogs, fried onions and brylcreem. By the time I went to secondary school local folk were still calling it Butlin's, as the avuncular holiday camp magnate of that name had built the faux-art deco edifice in the thirties before surrendering it to the Manning family in 1946 after which they took the carousel, the ghost train, the cakewalk, the roller coaster and the hall of mirrors and created an empire of fun.

Tony James Shevlin called me last week and asked if I'd come along to provide support for his continuing attempt at world domination through the power of key change-friendly acoustic roots pop by playing guitar and singing on a number of songs he has just had released in the form of Songs from The Last Chance Saloon and, after checking the weather forecast, I said that I would be delighted to revisit an old stomping ground and so I duly packed the family and a guitar into the car and headed East. 

 The walls remain, but the interior of Manning's is very different today. Where you used to be able to get candy floss and a kiss me quick hat and still have change from a ha'penny and six before living out the fairground scene (in your head, at least) from Mary Poppins you can today get a replacement cover for your phone or a discounted tub of Febreze. A lone carousel pony, rampant like a riderless Milanese statue of Garibaldi, is mounted upon the Doric-supported canopy and watches forlornly over the market stalls, the second-hand book shop, the CD emporium and our home for the afternoon, Grandma's Porch where for some unfathomable reason some benighted soul has decided to put on Sunday afternoon music just next to the vintage guitar shop. Oh, did I not mention the vintage guitar shop? They have sofas, twin-necked six and twelve strings, pre-lawsuit Les Paul copies, a Hofner bass, a Rickenbacker copy and a four-string cigar box guitar which looks like it fell into a case of components and barely escaped with its tailpiece intact. It's awesome.    

On this occasion it would be me, TJS and Jules-off-the-album spending some time together and while he and she do the heavy lifting, I bask in the June sunshine and fill in the gaps. I am terribly fortunate in that while Shev and Jules harmonise beautifully on vocals all I have to do is find something (a) within my range and (b) that doesn't spook the horses and it all sounds lovely and full. I get to riff a bit, pick a bit, arpeggiate even, and since we are blessed with the kind of sound guy who makes sure we can hear everything in the monitors and who rides the faders sensitively and with due care and attention* we can get on with the job in hand to the best of our abilities. Their consummate abilities mean that I get to reimagine myself once again in terms of great sidemen in the rock/folk/pop pantheon. On this occasion I am Simon Nicol in Hokey Pokey.  

 Early on Jules gets a burst of spontaneous applause for her vocal extrapolation in Faith in Myself, I manage to remember most of the licks which Tony has painstakingly tracked in the studio and which I'm now improvising on (at one point, when I've only just remembered to include one signature riff he sidles over and mutters "Nice you could join us" with an amused lift of the eyebrow). After too short a time, it's done, we're off, and I have to go and find my family, who have decamped to the beach. 

As I walk past the dodgems, fresh fish and chips wafting on the sea breeze, they're still playing The Sweet's Blockbuster.  
   


*It's a little thing, but someone who bothers to mute the faders so you can plug and unplug your guitar, points out the water bottles before you start and doesn't spend your set looking at his phone is likely to be on the receiving end of some effusive thanks, whether they like it or not. 
While I'm here, many thanks to Gerry in the guitar shop, who lent me a shiny new G7 capo with nary a raised eyebrow regarding someone who would turn up at a gig without a vital piece of equipment. Reader, I bought it.                          

"Late last night, I heard the screen door slam..."

Any Ipswich musician, poet or performance artist worth their crisps will know exactly what you mean if you utter the timeless phrase “Well, it is Val”. Formerly at The Earl Roberts, briefly at The Beehive and latterly at The Steamboat, Val was your go-to girl for any occasion which needed an artistic outlet, whether it be jam nights (one extended version of ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ was reputed to have started in September 1987 and not concluded until the harmonica player’s lung collapsed over an extended b-flat glissando sometime in Spring the following year), student band debuts, songwriter showcases, jazz on a Summer’s day, folk weekends, punk revivals or brief reformations for old times’ sake – which we in Picturehouse fortuitously managed to squeeze in last month - before she finally threw in the towel this weekend, after a mounting series of exercises by the revenue-thirsty local traffic enforcement authorities and those associated bastions of law and order, the Suffolk Constabulary* finally did what the rising tide of the adjacent River Orwell never quite managed to do. To paraphrase The Hollies, she is King Canute in Reverse, finally overwhelmed.

Innumerable turns have grown, blossomed, wilted or imploded under her benevolent gaze and for a long time the first question any act showing up with a battered Strat copy and some third-hand cymbals wrapped in a bin liner would be “What do you want to eat?” – her chilli is legendary, the corned beef hash known to reduce grown men to tears of joy – and it’s no surprise that quintuple platinum selling, BRIT-winning, Grammy-snaffling songwriter Ed Sheeran popped back recently for a warm up show as “Playing this venue for me, I feel very comfortable here, I’ve played it a bunch of times.” We all have.

I’ve done Songwriter’s Nights, birthday parties, hawked original bands and performed the legendary live Beatles karaoke (we provide the band – you get up and front it with a Fabs hit of your choice) under Val’s kindly aegis. On a personal and rather poignant note The Steamboat is also where The Present Mrs Kirk and I staged our post-wedding all-dayer, which started with the new bride in full regalia and I performing The Beautiful South’s “Don’t Marry Her” (album version) and concluded some eight hours later with a three-drummer version of “Route 66” curated by Zippy Nicholson on guitar (for which, thanks once again everybody). Sad times ahoy for anyone who wants a space to just get up and try something. Sad times indeed.          

A few of us were there yesterday afternoon, the sun glinting off the river like an Argos catalogue full of glinty things, the gentle clack of pool balls, insects buzzing in the beer garden, the camouflage netting shading the teatime smokers as they put the world to rights in that slow and steady way that we in Suffok do. The pile of admin perched on a table in the shade of the quiz machine. The Grapevine magazine racked up by the door and black and white prints of long-scrapped sailing vessels lining the walls. If the Ip-Art committee had any conscience at all they’d rename one of the Ipswich Music Day stages the Val Taylor Stage immediately and be done with it. We shan’t see her like again.   

 

*Keen-eyed readers will remember that this is the venue which was advised by the police to close for the day rather than have its planned anti-racism gig picketed by the EDL.

“I’m nobody, but I’m someone else’s nobody…”

The inaugural performance of Tony James Shevlin and his newly-monickered band The Chancers in support of new album Songs from The Last Chance Saloon passed without notable adverse incident last week – nobody fell over the monitors, impaled themselves on a stray tent peg or kicked a water bottle over the DI box for example – and if some of the talent could have been a little more gracious (“Thanks to…er…whoever organised this…”) then at least we were not subject to the vicissitudes provoked by one artiste* that the crew on the main stage still talked about in awed tones. “She brought her own crew, her own monitors, microphones, unplugged everything of ours, did a line check on every single feed…by the time we got the second act on we were an hour and a half late on the scheduled running time”.

 In my assigned role as first spear carrier I am enjoying a number of new experiences. I’m not on the album (although Songs from The Blue House alumni Mr Gibbon and La Mulley do both feature), I didn’t write any of the songs and I don’t really have an emotional or pecuniary interest in its performance in the iTunes charts beyond that the bloody thing is riddled with earworms and most of the guitar parts are the sort of thing I enjoy playing anyway. Okay, so there’s maybe one key change more than I’d have included (by design there’s an acapella chorus just beforehand wherein TJS and I have just enough time to move our respective capos in order to facilitate a suitably inversion-tastic coda) in Fifteen LongYears, and that verse of Crazy in which he appears to lump himself in with Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King does have a whiff of the Russell Brand about it, and when Shev sings “Talk is cheap and thoughts are free” in Nobody I am irresistibly minded that the Club Tropicana also promises that there is sufficient fun and sunshine to go around, and I’m delighted to be along for the ride.

 It is not, however, the sort of gig which is going to set me up in soft drinks and Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers DVDs for life** - at one stage I asked TJS if it would be possible to have a plus one for one of the festivals he has lined up. “You are my plus one” he replied – and so I have decided to embrace the current vogue for so-called Meet & Greet fan packages in order to supplement my meagre income on the road this Summer. There is limited availability, so please do get in touch as early as possible with your offers.

 Package One; Meet and greet before the gig, receive signed rehearsal crib sheet (much thumbed), a used 9V battery and participant’s choice of 500 ml bottle of still water from backstage cache (not available at all dates).

 Package Two; Meet and greet prior to the performance, receive selection of used packages of Elite Custom Light guitar strings (mainly missing top E), get the sound man’s mobile number so you can text him to suggest fader-riding tweaks during the gig itself, and a dedication of the closing number (probably Run Until We Drop) to you personally. 

 Package Three; Turn up early, meet us at the gate when we get there, hand over the car park passes, do the sound check (you should be able to play G on a standard-tuned guitar, point at the monitors, then at your own ear, then at the sky and shake your head ruefully), hold my bottleneck*** for that bit between verses two and three in Faith in Myself where I need to use all four fingers, re-attach my guitar lead when I inevitably step on it during the fourth song and unbeknownst to me it becomes unplugged, go for a cheeseburger after completion of the set. Drive home.

*I can’t tell you who it was, I’m afraid *coughs* Kate Rusby

**It is fairly well known that touring musicians would often, in the heady days of the record company advance and the publishing expense account, often pass the long dark teatime of the soul between tour dates indulging in coke and hoofers.  

***I was using a glass one for the slide bits, but Tony has lent me his. He literally has a brass 'neck.

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