"Big Hands, I Know You're The One..."

To the wilds of Mid-Suffolk, where erstwhile SftBH banjo-botherer Turny Winn has decamped, all the better in order to be able to get it together in the country. He lives in some converted cottages amidst many unpacked boxes in a village with two pubs, a Co-op and a transitory weekend population – principally through choice rather than for geo-politically motivated migratory reasons. As a permanent resident he is therefore considered somewhat of a social reformer locally, not being given to arriving on a Friday in time for a late supper before packing up his Macbook again on a Sunday night and cursing the A12 road works during his enforcedly slow journey back to a glittering media career in That There London. In the village there are also, we are to discover later, street lights, which provoke a faux-Randy Crawford inspired outbreak of car singing on the way home. We don’t get out much.

At the point where you join us however, The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley has already invested in a lengthy journey from her home in Posh North Essex in order to collect myself* and Mr. Wendell from the IP postcode ‘hood, and we are engaged in quite the discussion regarding her forthcoming dinner engagement, a ‘Red, White and Blue’ affair, for which she is invited to bring a bottle of red wine, a bottle of white, and a blue joke. La Mulley is not, by nature, the most natural progenitor of bawditry and has enlisted our help in order to prepare. We suggest a short vignette of such filth that she cannot in truth bear to repeat it out loud. We wipe tears of self-generated mirth from our rheumy old eyes. As I say, we're not out a lot these days. 

Darkness falls. A sense of foreboding pervades. “It’s a good job he moved out here once we already knew we liked him” offers Helen, well into her second hour of driving. And this is just to rehearse. “Ah – here we are!” she trills. Wendell and I despatch thoughts of who we’d have to eat first in order to survive from our minds as we are ushered hospitably into the welcoming hearth and home of The Winns. There are, satisfactorily, roses around the door and a sturdy latch with which to secure it. No mobile coverage mind, but at least it has its own post code.

We are here to revamp, reboot, rewrite and reverse engineer material for a forthcoming performance under the nom-de-song Helen and the Neighbourhood Dogs – it’s not a great moniker, I know, but offers just the right amount of flexibility in that as long as there’s a nominative Helen we can make up the rest of the numbers in pretty much any fashion we prefer. After a couple of hours of capo shifting, note searching and unfolding bits of hieroglyph-ridden paper – notes written in the white hot crucibles of previous rehearsals, aides memoires from another age - or, in one case, “Come on Tony, you used to play this!” we have five songs of consistent quality which we can perform from start to finish and in mostly the right order of verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, outro. That’s pretty much most of what we’re going to need. “Once you start talking, that’ll fill the time up” says Tony, sanguine through experience. I demur. “I’m all about standing at the back tuning between songs these days”.

“Hey, Helen” suggests Wendell, brightly. “Why don't you tell them your joke?”

 

*I read somewhere on social media that use of this word rather than ‘me’ or ‘I’ was driving someone crazy. This one’s for you.    

We're making a list and we're checking it twice.

 Apologies to regular bloghounds for the radio silence recently, however I hope to be able to announce some exciting news regarding a new venture with the fragrant and charming Helen Mulley shortly - in yet another box-ticking exercise during a long and glittering career I am currently under an actual true-life press embargo regarding leakages and am fully aware that this is in the nature of being an announcement of an announcement, which I generally regard as being in the same ballpark as telling people you're going to become engaged - "When's the wedding?" I ask.
"Oh, we don't know yet"
"Essentially, you just want a toaster, don't you?"
In the mean time, here's a song we once wrote with fellow traveler, the not-so-fragrant-but-almost-equally-as-charming Mr. Wendell. I imagine things will go pretty much in this fashion. 

http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/another-happy-day 

'Newsnight presenter's furious attack on "bloated" BBC management of "time-servers" and "biddable people"' (The New Statesman, November 2012).

There have been rumours circulating for a couple of years, but it was confirmed today that the BBC would not be sponsoring a stage at this year's Ipswich Music Day. This is a shame, because "I'll see you by the BBC stage" had become, over the years, as much a mantra for music-goers as "Meet me by Sir Alf" is for fans of the local soccerball side. The consistent quality of the output has been maintained over the years by the careful curation of local DJ, writer, promoter, presenter, compere and simply enthusiast Stephen Foster, who has had the rug badly pulled from under him by his managers (I won't say 'superiors', as that would be prevaricative).

If I'm to 'fess up my own interests then, yes, I've had my share of benefits thrown my way - a spot on the Songwriter's Showcase (all original material, and I think I even MC'd one year), a live broadcast by The Star Club (later repeated on Bank Holiday Monday with the inadvertent cuss bomb skillfully edited out by long term OB van-dweller and on-the-hoof recording engineer extraordinaire Dave Butcher), the jukebox theatre of The Perfectly Good Guitars, a storming covers set by The Picturehouse Big Band and a pre-Cornbury warm up with Songs from The Blue House. Didn't get paid a bean for any of 'em. What makes it all the more disappointing then, is that a corporate behemoth that can afford to hire a helicopter - not a car, a real, whirlybird helicopter - to get Jeremy Clarkson from his filming location back to his hotel in time for for dinner and then keep it hanging around for two hours while he finishes his pint won't spin out a few thou' to carry on with a flagship stage at the largest one day free music event in the UK, an event which has been thriving for just shy of quarter of a century.

Shame on you BBC Radio Suffolk. Shame on you.    

Tenor Lady.

And so to Arlington’s – former museum, dancehall, and now thriving brasserie (the breakfasts are a thing of wonder) and on this occasion venue for an open mic night hosted by one Charlie Law, a thoroughly good egg* who also runs a night in Woodbridge, and curated by the good people of Unity in Music who are recording and filming the event for posterity. TJS has secured us a mid-evening spot wherein we, The Chancers – on this occasion TJS, myself and Tiny Diva - will perform lovely new song Nashville State of Mind, and Run until We Drop off’ve the album.

The room is packed – admittedly it’s quite a small room – and there are a multiplicity of cameras, lights and expensive-looking microphones dotted around the place. There are also attractive young people of every stripe, many of whom bear horn-rimmed glasses, artfully-teased beards and inked arms. I feel like Michael Caine with the hordes bearing down on him. “Hipsters!” I mutter “Faarrrsands of ‘em…”. As with all of these occasions the quantity and quality of the performances vary. With our wizened old song writing heads on Shev and I subtly critique the material. Our consensus is that most people could probably afford to lose a verse and that Ed Sheeran’s got a lot to answer for. A few years ago it was all prom dresses, pianos and faux-cockney confessionals, this week it would appear that parlour guitars are in. They come, they go, but the art school dance goes on forever.

I have taken the bus into town and so am pleased to be offered a lift home by my employer** and so while composing ourselves in the lobby I am able to eavesdrop on a monologue being delivered by a gentleman who appears to have lived a life both well and full. Lemmy is mentioned, and Paul Kossoff. At one point he pauses for breath and I am able to intervene by requesting a picture of the young lady, who bears a striking resemblance in terms of style and bearing to one Judy Dyble in her pomp (see above).  “Who’s she?” enquires the rock Zelig. “Is she famous?”

Our exeunt sadly precludes watching Fern Teather, who I have recognised simply by dint of the red dress she was wearing at the last songwriter’s showcase I saw her at - which if nothing else proves the value of good branding. I apologise for having to leave but ask if she could assume that I’d watched her set, enjoyed it enormously and congratulated her afterward, since this is what had happened every other time I’d seen her. She said that she thought this was a good idea and would certainly save a lot of time in social interaction if we simply adopted it as a default position in future. “Did you play earlier?” she asked. I confirmed that I had, indeed already performed. “I’m sorry I missed it” she said. “You were great, by the way”.    

* "The X factor are coming down to take over one night soon, they asked me to mention it. Quite rudely actually. I won't be here..." he said at one point, and also "Does anyone know any jokes?", rather more frequently. 

**I am later relieved at the timing as a round of a (can of) Guinness, a Peroni and an orange juice and lemonade sets me back over a tenner, and I only brought twenty quid out with me.     

"Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every byway..."

I think anyone who gets even part way into this crazy business we call 'show' is necessarily ambitious to some degree. It may be a minor thing – Wouldn’t it be good if I played someone my song and they applauded? say. Then that becomes Maybe I could play a whole set in front of people and they might applaud? and before you know it you’re on tour somewhere in the Midwest and complaining that they haven’t got your guacamole recipe quite right backstage.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky with my ambitions. Quite early on I found a group of people who were willing to play my songs (rather than, for example, ‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street, which once you’ve got the chords of E and A mastered is pretty much your common room-led path to glory and adulation) and a while later we won an award with one of them. We went into a recording studio. We had a cassette with our songs on with a printed inlay and we even had an official rejection letter on headed notepaper from WEA. A girl at one gig cried upon hearing us play one song which she said spoke to her. We played the local ABC Cinema, then we played at The Corn Exchange. The local paper actually asked us if they could take our picture. Some time later I got to play abroad, I was on a vinyl single, I signed a publishing deal, I went to the BBC studios in Maida Vale and recorded a session, I was on a CD, and then I was on a CD released by a proper record company, with a barcode and available in HMV and everything. Then I won another award!

Well, I say that I won another award. What happened was that The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley (pictured above) and I were collaborating on a number of things, mainly through the medium of me strumming chord progressions into a cassette recorder and then handing them over to her so that she could play them in the car on her way to work over and over until by a process of virtual osmosis she had absorbed the rhythms, patterns and tones and was then in a position to write some words, a lovely melody and we’d be laughing all the way to the folk club. One of these was a song which ended up being titled Waste of Angels – the original working title, Then There Was Sunshine, as scribbled on the tape inlay, was appropriated by Our Glorious Leader, who used a very similar compositional technique (and about a third of the chords). Both of these eventually appeared on Songs from The Blue House Too and by various ways and means Waste of Angels started appearing in the nominations list for that year’s Hancock Awards on the venerable acoustic music-based forum Talkawhile, eventually coming out top in a straight tie with John Tams’ Man of Constant Sorrow. Helen, you’ll be pleased to hear, had demurred at the thought of voting for a song she had had a hand in co-composing but was nontheless delighted upon the arrival of a shiny trophy, lovingly inscribed with the winner’s name. Singular. Hers.

This is the way of stuff and although it’s nice to receive plaudits and prizes, it’s sometimes good to be reminded that this is not what we strive for. Adventure, heh. Excitement, heh – a songwriter craves not these things - besides, it wouldn’t be too long before Boo Hewerdine was singing backing vocals on one of my songs, we were opening for Robert Plant and appearing on a film soundtrack, so it was easy to become caught up with the ride we were already on without fretting unnecessarily about who got to keep the resulting hardware.

After the success of album number two we moved on to number three, buoyed by the prospect of spending someone else’s money in the studio and with the promise that it would be available on iTunes (tick!) as well as in (at that point) conventional CD form (tick!). Since we weren’t sure if we’d ever get the chance to repeat this opportunity we resolved to record as many songs as possible - things we were playing live, bespoke numbers created especially for the new album and a few older tunes which we weren’t sure if we’d ever get the chance to commit to hard drive in a professional studio again. One of these was called Little No-One.

Little No-One was originally titled Everywhere and Nowhere In Between and had been sporadically performed by my band gods kitchen during what I like to refer to as our Richard and Linda phase, wherein I had persuaded the rest of the group that what we really needed was a female singer to counterpoint my manly tenor and to occasionally step out from the shadows in order to belt out a heart-rending power ballad to pull in the punters perhaps put off by our regular raw, smouldering manly sexuality*. At one living room get-together with guitarist Steve ‘Kilbey’ Mears I started playing a seventh fret guitar figure, he joined in with a counter-harmony and before too long we had a simple recurring pattern to which I was enjoined to write some lyrics. When it came to pulling together material for what was to become Tree (I think) Helen recalled “…that thing you used to play with Paula” and so we resolved to include it on the list of things to do, the only problem being that no-one could quite remember the words. I checked my big book of poetry, various cassettes were unearthed and scanned with no result until eventually we decided that it would just be quicker for La Mulley to write her own – she, after all, would be the one performing it in the studio.

In the midst of all this we were A & R'ing furiously and someone suggested that what we really needed for the appropriate delivery of the new lyrics was someone with perfect, cut-glass, top-note intonation & inflection and since Julie Andrews was in retirement at the time why didn’t we ask someone closer to the group? With one eye on the furthering of our personal dream team-related ambitions we resolved to enquire gently whether one Judith Aileen de a Bédoyère – Dame Judy from Talkawhile to us, Judy Dyble out of Fairport Convention, Giles, Giles & Fripp, Trader Horne and The Incredible String Band to you – might be entreated to sing on it for us. Turns out she was up for the experience, and so Our Glorious Leader was despatched to darkest Oxfordshire to collect her by car in time not only for her to rehearse and record the number, but to guest with us (or us with her, depending on your perspective) during a short set at the late and lamented High Barn’s acoustic night on the evening before we had the studio booked for the Saturday. Hence I found myself under the bright lights of an Essex venue essaying the guitar solo from Fairport Convention’s version of Joni Mitchell’s I Don’t Know Where I Stand with UFO Club and Middle Earth veteran Judy Dyble, who’d sung it on the album**. Tickety, tick, tick, tick!

Anyone who owns our Junior*** effort will doubtless be aware that such a track does not however exist on the album. It is not to be found on the sleeve, is not evident as a hidden track, a bonus, an extra. So what happened? Well, we spent many a long hour debating the relative merits of all of the songs we had backed up with an eye to bringing the number down to a whole which would flow and change organically over the course of the record. Something that we’d never even (or would ever) play live**** made the cut whilst another couple of new songs didn’t. A cover version got added, one tune with a festive-related in-joke had to go and, finally, Little No-One was quietly retired from active service. One reason was that having five different vocalists on the same dozen or so songs might have been confusing, maybe it didn’t fit the overall mood, but for whatever reason it seemed doomed to obscurity and occasional availability on download sites. Maybe if we ever got round to compiling a career-spanning boxed set overview of our oeuvre we’d find a home for it?

The compilation, the anthology, the career retrospective was one thing I’d not ticked off my big list of things to do, nor had I looked likely to. Admittedly the limited edition double CD Shane Kirk’s Forty, with its jewel case, remastered hits, live tracks and rarities and including full colour booklet had been a treat and a pleasure, but had also also been a one-off birthday present and so didn’t really count,  however word had begun to waft on the wind of a bringing together of material by one Judy Dyble... There’d been a false alarm a few years ago when Universal had started in on a similar project only to get cold feet (there had even been a catalogue number assigned) but it seemed as if having taken the project on herself this time it might go through to completion and after a few hints, a number of excited tweets and, finally some Facebook photographs of the completed artwork, the triple disc, forty eight song retrospective emerged, blinking and uncertain, into the world this week. This is where I get off this crazy ride, I thought to myself. There are no more peaks to ascend, no more milestones to pass, no more certificates to frame – to paraphrase the great Boo Hewerdine, there would be my name in the brackets. I scanned the track listing proudly and there it was – half way through CD two. Little No-One (H.Mulley).             

Judy Dyble's Gathering The Threads is out now.

*That didn’t really come off, to be honest, but we did end up performing as an acoustic duo called Cover Girl which she later fired me from. I still get the occasional apologetic email. 

**The performance ended up on YouTube, where one person commented rather unkindly that viewing the clip was akin to watching half a dozen brickies with a geography teacher (IIRC). Once OGL had checked the source and it turned out to be a guy who had videoed himself pissing off his apartment’s balcony and then uploaded it to the internet we kind of brushed over his finely-nuanced critical sequitur. 

***It’s the grade that follows ‘sophomore’.

****The principally Gibbon-composed Vanilla. It turned out to be one local radio DJ’s favourite song on the album.  

"One of you should have worn a hat; that's what made me get the camera out..."

There is an idea expanded on and monetised in the popular pamphlet Freakonomics that with 10,000 hours practice you can make pretty much anything look casual. We didn't quite go that far in terms of rehearsal time but a lot of prep went into this week’s Tony James Shevlin and The Chancers gig at The Kelvedon Institute. In my adjunctory role as Stage Left Chancer I was able to contribute, suggest, advise and prompt, but the final decisions upon matters of set list, vocal arrangement and appropriate chord inversion were ultimately down to the guy whose name was on the poster - we did, however, defer to Tiny Diva (Stage Right, vocals and percussion) upon matters of wardrobe. “Not those shoes” she issued sternly. “Undo another button on that shirt” came forth sagely.

The set list had been timed, pruned, checked for lyrical subject matter, keys, tempos and instrumentation and ‘tween song intros had been buffed and burnished appropriately. We were in a listening venue, so stretching out on the lyrical exegesis was going to be okay – no danger of losing them while Shev explained, with the benefit of eight by ten glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, how he came up with that tricky middle eight before the key change. It did not go quite that far, but the intro to Déjà Vu (a song written by TJS at the behest of Larry Page on behalf of Reg Presley, who then went on to record it with three quarters of REM – I necessarily précis here) probably took longer than it did to play the song itself.

There were a couple of new numbers in the set* which were nice for me because I had much less of the redoing the parts that were on the album to perform and more of the this is the arrangement and can you find a bit to go in here? sort of thing to play with. They are also a couple of absolutely corking songs which I really rather hope I’ll be invited in to wrangle when the time comes to record them. That's never a given, of course - only the other night we were discussing the lot of the touring band session guy for (I think it was) Chris Isaak, who I believe takes his whole band in to record an album except for the lead guitarist, who is replaced for the duration by a studio hound and who then presumably has plenty of time to nurse a deepening sense of grievance while he does all those odd jobs around the house that he has not had time to do while he’s out recreating those parts on the road.

So when the time came for my big number I made absolutely sure I was in tune, stepped back slightly so as not to intrude on either the sight lines of those in the front few rows or the raw power of the wall of sound being coaxed from my ten watt Vox and waited for my cue. As it happened, this was the point at which Shev decided to go off-roading. He went into his spiel about the infinite number of songwriters with an infinite number of typewriters. He then continued, guaranteeing that for the duration of the song every single person in the house would have their attention focused completely on his delivery at the microphone. “We did a gig a couple of weeks ago and I accidentally bent my thumb back so far it touched my wrist, so whenever I play an F sharp minor it really hurts, and F sharp minor is integral to this next song. So when you see me doing this face…” (at this point he pulls an expression worthy of Robin Trower at his grimmacitically correct best) “…I’m not doing that lead guitarist face, it means it really, really hurts. Anyway, here we go…”  

*Songwriter’s shorthand #36 – “They’re all new to you, but this is a new one for us too…” 

Photograph of The Kelvedon Institute reproduced without the express permission of Keith Farnish.

"I keep getting the nagging feeling I've slept somewhere before..."*

I had the great pleasure of attending the palatial country pile of Tony James Shevlin (pictured right, performing at The Bluebird Cafe in Nashville) this week for the purpose of brushing up on a few licks in advance of our return to active duty in Kelvedon next month. As well as conquering the expanding markets of the Suffolk borders Shev has designs on several territories far west of the Posh North Essex demographic and was pleased to be able to confide that he was fairly confident of securing an engagement in Athens, Georgia this Summer - this being the home of Pylon, Matthew Sweet, The B-52s and (probably most notably) REM. He mused that this would be a splendid opportunity to perform a number close to both the hearts of his potential audience and to himself - not his regular function band staple Love Shack, but the self-penned and Troggs-tastic Deja Vu, recorded by none other than Reg Presley himself with one-time jobbing backing band Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry. The only problem was that he couldn't comprehensively remember exactly how the two decades-old song actually went.
"What did you do?" asked concerned co-vocalist and percussionista Jules. "Find an old demo, hook up the record deck, search through your old lyric folder..?"
"Looked the video up on YouTube for the chords and found the words through Google" he confirmed happily. "Isn't technology wonderful?"


*The phenomenon known as Duvet Ja (Thanks to Harry Harris). 
 

"That's me in the corner..."

 Called upon once again with regard to my exemplary stage vacuuming skillset and uncanny ability to spot a snapped top E Dean Markley Custom Light at ten paces I spent Saturday night poised cat-like stage left at The Manor Ballroom in Ipswich*, curating The Featherz, Still Life in Action and Panorama in Black as they came together in a celebration of thirty years of post-punk and to raise money for the purpose of putting on an exhibition of the art and poetry of the late David Martin, a friend of many of the musicians and members of the audience (there is an online petition calling for an official inquest into the nature of his passing here). 

 My role in the whole affair was pretty peripheral - three broken strings (a pretty quiet set when considered in terms of The Goat Roper Rodeo Band, although they have the good grace not to employ an eighties vintage Ibanez with locking nut, floating bridge and a tremelo, capoed at the first fret because of a key-specific encore - but I digress) however this did give me the opportunity to take in the overall ambience** of the whole event and that was principally one of fraternity (and/or sorority). It's fairly common memetic shorthand (and lordy knows I've indulged often enough myself) to refer to The Punk Wars, but this was watching a veterans reunion first hand. Folk had flown in from The States, come in from their parents' houses to see what the rumours and legends of the old days were all about and, in one instance, come back to see what the band his seven year-old self used to listen to rehearsing in the basement next door sounded like without a wall, but with thirty years between them. 

 The over-riding emotion in the room, underneath all the intensity*** onstage and hail fellow well-metness off, was care. The first thought most of these people had when they heard of Dave's passing was what can we do? It was humbling. They raised over a thousand pounds on the night, through donations and sales of t-shirts, CDs and singles. It looks like the exhibition is going to go ahead.
 Anyway, here's Panorama in Black channeling The Stooges. Watch out for the seamless guitar change over at the end...  
         



*A punk reunion gig was only ever going to take place here. Principally, it must be said, because all the other venues from way back then have been torn down and turned into car parks.

**Not 'ambulance' as my spell-checker insists upon. Although one of those did turn up later. "It's not a punk gig until the emergency services have been called" quipped one veteran.

***Still Life in Action delivered a magnificent display of Joy Division-style disapproachment and didn't, I believe, utter a single word to the audience throughout. 

If I Had Brazilian Dollars...

 

Regular correspondents may recall the unlikely tale of how we ended up on the soundtrack of a movie. Word now reaches me from my erstwhile writing partner of an incoming cheque sufficient to offset the cost of buying his own copy of the film on DVD which has been derived from royalties accrued in, of all places, Brazil. One can only speculate on the circumstances behind our meteoric rise in the estimations of play list compilers from Vera Cruz to Itaquaquecetuba, but I do love a happy ending.

 

Shot By Both Sides

I was reading an interesting thing the other day on how to write a hit single (which I obviously then copied out by hand, annotated and tucked away in my homework folder for reference to later on) especially regarding the bit where they talk about the structure of the common-or-garden boy band hit generally being “…verse, chorus, verse chorus, middle eight/bridge, double chorus with a possible key change…” which, as any fule kno, is how it’s supposed to be. I was reminded of this old saw during some online correspondence between myself, Mr Wendell and The Fragrant and Charming La Mulley regarding a get-together at someone’s house in order to do some songing, make a few tentative plans regarding public performances and generally act in private like a latter-day hipster Peter, Paul and Mary (although to be fair, they were pretty hip at the time, and I’m sure it won’t be long before Puff the Magic Dragon is the sound track to the consumption of a thousand skinny mocha lattes out of old marmalade pots in pop-up Wagon Wheel bars - but I digress).

We’ve written together before, the three of us, but this time I thought it might be nice if we just went into something pre-prepared so that we could get straight on with deciding which fret to capo up at and who was going to do the low harmony. ‘Twas then that I remembered the alternate version of Beartown Road. As regular correspondents will know, this was the opening track on Songs from The Blue House’s Tree album and secured our place in the cinematographic pantheon with its appearance in largely forgettable RomCom Coyote County Loser. When SftBH put out a Rarities compilation to help fund the release of our live album last year I was surprised to find that there was a version of the track with a whole, entirely different lyric, sung by Helen. Not only that, but the verses weren’t where the verse should be, the chorus was in a different place too, and as for the middle eight…  

As well as the two-stools-facing school of composition that the various combinations of writers in the band had long employed, we also favoured the bang-it-down-on-a-cassette*-and-hand-it-over-to-play-on-repeat-in-the-car method, by which means we had curated a great deal of the preceding Too album. The tracks Then There Was Sunshine and the award-winning Waste of Angels had clearly been cut from the same cloth and this re-lifed outtake was clearly also a result of the vehicle-bound creation process. Not since the alternate version of Racing in the Streets had turned up on The Promise had I been so astonished that you could take one whole slab of writing or composition and drop it almost seamlessly into something else. I was also intrigued that either I’d completely forgotten about this version's very existence or that I had completely blanked it from my mind – it had effectively been coldly Stalinised. With the forthcoming challenge of completely re-interpreting the song  foremost in my mind I considered how best to avoid what would effectively consist of playing the old version in new pyjamas. After some thought I concluded that this was clearly going to take more than eschewing counting bars in my head and an E flat-creating capo placement. Summoning my offspring and heir from his iPad-related avocation further up the sofa I adopted my best stentorian tone. “Fetch me the bouzouki…”   

 

*latterly superseded by the compact disc and then MP3. I understand that even as I write those Google guys are working on a literal earworm. Like in Star Trek II.

Donkey Horsey - Another Guest Blog...

...is linked to below, in which I am referred to as a putative 'George', a 'Miami Steve' and an - if you will - 'Fancy'. I prefer the sobriquet 'Sancho'*. Within his blog Mr. Shevlin refers to our seventeen year engagement, the onset of which we were reminiscing about only the other morning. Having been the only person to respond to our notice in The Grapevine seeking someone to fill the recently-vacated John spot in our Beatles specialist band The Star Club, he'd come round to the drummer's house for a run-through of some songs and to see if and how we all got on with each other. As it turned out, he wasn't able to fulfil any gigs immediately as he was being flown to Australia as a result of winning some song writing competiton or another, but it all seemed to go quite well and we agreed that we'd meet up again after he got back. We went for a drink in the local pub afterwards to celebrate and, as these things tend to do, the guitar case (containing the very Takamine referred to in the blog after this one, regarding recording acoustic guitars) he was carrying attracted the attention of the landlord - keen, it would appear, to engage the services of a musician such as he to enliven the quiet weekday evenings. Thursdays, I think he mentioned. "So, what kind of music do you play?" enquired mine host. 

Shev thoughtfully placed his glass back on to the table and, with the practised ease of the professional musician, channelled his inner Sammy Cahn. "What sort of music do you need?"       

http://www.tonyjamesshevlin.com/2014/11/02/what-we-did-this-summer/


*Sancho Panza offers interpolated narrative voice throughout the tale, a literary convention invented by Cervantes. Sancho is the everyman, who remains his ever-faithful companion, realist, and functions as the clever sidekick. (Wikipedia)

The Congreve and The Clay Beneath My Feet.

 I recently ventured out on the weekend to see some old chums currently trading as The Rock Hudsons. Not - as one might imagine - a guitar-thumping tribute to Upstairs, Downstairs buttling screen legend Gordon Jackson in a post-Downton novelty act scenario, but a tight trio utilising the best in onstage technology and human three-part harmonies to make a much bigger sound than they really have a right to. Hence the horn parts in Midnight Oil's Beds Are Burning and the Farfisa-friendly* keyboard arrangement to Split Enz's I Got You which are wheeled proudly out at pub gigs and parties alongside a goodly number of fondly-recalled beat numbers from the last century and more recent pop chart hits, some of which even I had some idea of the provenance of. If this approach sounds familiar it is probably because Andy and Kilbey of the group were once Picturehousemates of mine and indeed some of the current set I could still air-guitar along to with no little semblance of accuracy. Along with some material, the pair of them (and drummer Dave) have also retained infuriatingly good hair since our parting, which I felt the need to upbraid them about during the half time break. Well it was either that or suggest that since S Club 7 are back together maybe it was time to (re)introduce Don't Stop Movin' to the set.   

 I was with my friend Simon, who was dolefully recounting the progress of a family trip to the glittering gold-paved streets of London that very day for which his only ambitions were to return with both a meerschaum pipe (all the better with which to ruminate on matters of import in the comfort of his own home) and a scale model figurine of Antman, from The Forbidden Planet. Neither of these schemes had come to fruition and so, although philosophical regarding the outcome, he was possibly not as chipper as he could have been. I pointed out both the couple at the front, so entranced with each other and caught up in terpsichore that they radiated waves of joy which inevitably embraced us all, and the trio of willowy femmes fatales who drifted across the dance floor, tucked themselves up at a booth in the corner and played chess for an hour and a half before sashaying equally insouciantly out, in an attempt to refocus and brighten his jibcut. Reminding him of that time he attempted to qualify the worth of a hypnotherapist who'd claimed he could teach anyone to play guitar in a month by embarking on the course and then joining us for a song** onstage in Felixstowe at its culmination seemed to help lighten his mood. 

 "Looks like Andy didn't get the dress code memo" said Si, regarding the two thirds of the group clad in regulation black. Simon had spent his own interval wondering if he could get the band to play any Shakatak (Andy, typically, was game to at least give it a go). I recognised Kilbey's attire, and since we were in Ipswich's reputedly oldest and most haunted pub*** I recounted the story of the time that he had been so spooked by the apparition of ghostly faces appearing before him during the post-gig load out that he'd dropped his amplifier, only to realise that it had been the reflection of his own Kiss t-shirt in the rear window of his people carrier that had surprised him. As I recounted the detail, I felt sure I'd written about that particular occasion before, but I couldn't seem to track down the blog involved, however in passing, I found this one http://skirky.blogspot.nl/2006/08/turn-em-all-on-then-turn-em-all-down.html from a gig at the same pub. According to my Google stats, no-one has ever read it online. Here you go. 

*Possibly a Yamaha CS-80 on record.
** All I Have by Snow Patrol. There's footage somewhere.
**There are at least three others that I know of.

The 'Road Go On Forever

To The Steamboat for Suffolk Songwriters’ Night, where the great and the good (and occasionally the ghastly) of the Ipswich scene gather to show off their wares, try out some new stuff or, if you’re the informally-monikered Acorn Trio (Shev, La Mulley and Myself), get together over a couple of pints and play that fast thing one more time. Having secured non restriction-infringing parking round the corner we wend our way to the venue, guitar cases in hand like so many of the hopeful, the hapless and (on one occasion) the harpist before us. As we pass along Bath Street I note that the recently landscaped waste ground is where my father used to sit designing parts for the biggest walking dragline in the world (there’s a model of it in the Ipswich Transport Museum – I can point out the bits that he did much in the same way that Slartibartfast would recall the Magrathean fjords) and where I was catapulted headlong into children’s Christmas parties in the staff canteen. It seems so long ago, and far away. The past is a different country. They make things there.

Onstage are the mighty Buffalo Road newly re-enlivened, as so many of us are, by a one-off reunion gig which sparks the old synapses back into action and which leads to at least a partial reformation. Some twenty or so years after the release of their last album they’re back in the studio and back on stage, kicking a grit pail down that dusty ol’ back road one more time. Singer and guitarist Mike appears to have spent the intervening years cryogenically preserved in a Memphis store room. Shev searches for a wisp of a name “Tall guy, hat, skinny jeans…”. “Dwight Yoakham?” I suggest. “That’s him”. I’ve been listening to a lot of Joe Ely recently. It's that sort of ballpark. Upon the introduction of a song from their debut album Ro, my niece, whispers “I wasn’t even born then”.

Taking the stage before an audience containing a good number of his performing arts students Shev observes that “We started this night, sixteen years ago…”*  We run through our allotted three song set to a gratifying reception and remember to observe the unwritten constitution of SSW – pay attention, be polite, no talking during the turns – beforehand and afterwards. Next up is a band featuring one of the aforementioned kids from the college. He is a tall fellow who attacks his bass with the puppyish enthusiasm of a neophyte and reminds me simultaneously of my brother-in-law and of the bass player from Dawes. “He’s all over the place, he can’t wait to get around the neck” comments his mentor approvingly. “So as an exercise I made him play the full version of Papa Was a Rolling Stone. It drove him mad”. He chuckles into his beer. “We should do this again some time”.           

 

With thanks to Mike for the photo.

*I had to check the date this morning through the power of Google to confirm it. Sixteen years ago we didn’t even have Google.   

Here be Dragonnes...

“The good news is…” Shev greets us at his front door “…at least there’ll be a bit more room in the car”. The season of promotion for his album Songs from the Last Chance Saloon which began in the bright spring sunshine of the acoustic stage at The International Workers' Day Festival in May, has wend and wound its way through the Felixstowe Carnival Fringe, The Secret Garden Party, the Grandma’s Porch Sessions, the BBC, Ipswich Music Day, FolkEast, not to mention TJS’s impromptu appearance at The Grand Old Opry* during his fortnight sojourn around the open mics and showcase nights of Nashville, and is now gathering its autumn skirts closer and wrapping a cosy muffler around her neck with a concluding performance at Acorn Fayre, a boutique festival in the wild Northampton heartlands. Tiny Diva, our vocal co-pilot, percussionist and latterly stunt bassist has had to call off with an unspecified condition, but one with which we are advised that close proximity within a moving vehicle would be inadvisable. Fortunately, along for the ride on this occasion is album-complementing flautist and singer La Mulley, ready to add a couple of harmonies when required but principally to add her haunting aerophonics as per the CD.   

We are approaching Cambridge Services (when the story of the beat scene of the early twenty first century is written, this will be our mythic Blue Boar) as Shev is telling me how he came to sell one of his albums in Minnesota, of all places. “We’re playlisted on Radio Heartland” he begins. “Some guy is driving down Interstate 94, he’s coming through the Twin Cities, it's night time, he’s got the radio on and he hears Nobody. ‘I like that’ he thinks to himself, and so he gets home – he’s not from St. Paul, he’s just passing through – and he gets on the internet, he looks me up, he finds out where the label is and he mails us, wants a CD. By the time we’ve put on the postage and the customs stuff it’s pretty expensive, but he wants the thing, the physical object. We asked him where he heard the album and that’s what he told us”. We are both impressed by the tenacity of the man who heard something on the radio and was so very determined to track it down. We pull into the services. I fill up with diesel. “I’ll get this” he says.

As we travel further on up the road we have a quick recap of the situation. Helen was due to pick a third harmony to complement Jules’s vocal but since we are currently deprived of her talents generally and Clare Torry-esque signature feature in Faith in Myself specifically, Shev suggests that this might create the opportunity for a flute solo instead. “Oh, and since she isn’t going to be taking the main harmonies you might as well do those as well. Think of it as having been down in the programme to play spear carrier and turning up to the theatre to find that you’re now principal boy". There is the slightest of pauses from the back seat. “Do you think we could listen to the album through one more time?” Helen says. 

Upon arrival Tony is quickly appraised of what I meant by ‘a boutique festival’. I had sold it to him on the premise that although a bijou affair, the audience would be principally comprise bloggers and forumistas, and so what they lacked in numbers they would more than be making up for in terms of vociferousness. Maybe using the word ‘festival’ had been mildly misleading. Perhaps ‘showcase’ might have been a better word. “I’m beginning to think I may have oversold this to you” I confess. “Ya think?” he replies, Gobi-dry. “Did you keep the receipt for the diesel?” I ask. There is the subtlest gesture of assent, his visage a picture worth a good half dozen choice words. “It’s not a big college town” I reassure him. Come show time however, buoyed by the free bar, the company and the prospect of a complimentary barbecue to follow, game faces are on. Badinage is batted forth, the obligatory promotional plugs are delivered and (I shouldn’t be surprised) La Mulley plays a blinder – emoting and purring her way through the set like she’d been singing these songs her whole summer. “It’s amazing how you all fit together” remarks a post-gig admirer. “It is. It really is” I agree.

Heading south again after supper we review the day’s doings. “I’d estimate that one in ten of those people there today bought a CD” Tony says to me. “Extrapolating from those numbers, imagine if we’d played Glastonbury!” 

                    

*To be fair, he was on a tourist tour, but he did get to play Your Cheatin’ Heart onstage during a photo opportunity.  

Ten Albums by White, Male, Singer-Songwriters.

I was included in one of those Name Your Top Albums things on social media this week and, being not only a bloke, but a huge record spod to boot, I was unable to resist the siren call of compiling a list. Similarly, as a victim of terminal verbosity, I was unable to keep my comments down to what I’d consider to be reasonable limits in terms of expecting folk to skip across pictures of anthropomorphic dogs and amusing pub signs on their Facebook feeds and dig into the equivalent of one of those buyer’s guides you get at the back of Uncut magazine, so I’ve put it here. All of these records have moved me (frequently to tears) have expressed emotions I couldn’t otherwise articulate and have inspired me to aspire to their lofty heights of artistic achievement – principally, I have to admit, by playing bad versions of their songs in pubs with my eyes closed. That’s a given. The individual addenda are merely mansplaining on my part. There are not a great number of what you’d call recent albums on the list – I mean, I work with people who are younger than most of these records - but to me it calls to mind the possibly apocryphal story of when Joseph Heller was buttonholed at a party by someone who pointed out that he hadn’t written anything comparable since the publication of Catch-22 many years earlier. “Neither” replied Heller drily “Has anyone else”. 

1; Richard Thompson – Mock Tudor.

Picking only one album by Thompy was the biggest challenge for me. Henry The Human Fly is inspiring in terms of a man (barely in his early twenties) finding his post-Fairport feet and melding trad folk and raga rock, Hokey Pokey has some of the most joyful music of his career (as well as the most doleful), Hand of Kindness is the break up album’s break up album but, significantly, when he (or at least Capitol Records) brought in a couple of left-field outside producers in the shape of Tom Rothrock (Foo Fighters, Beck, Moby, Motorhead) and Rob Schnapf he was able to really buff the formula until it gleamed. The notes on Dave Mattacks’ website regarding recording the drums are so boggling in their attention to detail that you wonder how they ever dragged him away from the recording booth in the first place. Key Track: Hard on Me.  

2; Neil Young – Time Fades Away.  

Part of the celebrated so-called Ditch Trilogy, this is the album so ragged, on the edge and painful to listen to that Young has never been able to satisfactorily revisit the original tapes in order to get it out on CD - and he remastered Everybody’s Rockin’ . It is the soundtrack to a man falling apart on stage, aided and abetted by Crosby, Nash, a shitload of tequila and bizarrely, a Gibson Flying V. That it was recorded principally on the tour scheduled to support the release of Harvest only adds to its wayward charm in that the befuddled audiences on these dates must have wondered if they'd come on the wrong night. I would also hazard a guess that the yawling Yonder Stands the Sinner is never going to turn up on a Seventies Gold station on heavy rotation. This is careering, in the same way that my snowboarding would probably be. Key Track: Love in Mind.   

3; Clive Gregson – Strange Persuasions.

So clean, so compressed, so beautifully studio-bound (aside from the piano, which sounds like it was recorded in the pub next door after closing time), these are the songs that Gregson still had in his locker after the demise of the sadly underrated Any Trouble. Decamping to a demo studio in Oldham, he enlisted his old rhythm section (sparingly) and a young folk singer he’d come across by the name of Christine Collister to record what looked like it might be his farewell note to the business of show. Following the mantra of dour lyric/happy tune, I Still See Her Face is as jaunty a breakup song as you could hope to hear – the overdubbed guitar interplay presaging that which he’d enjoy with Richard Thompson on a couple of live promotional OGWT performances preserved in the digital aspic of YouTube. Thankfully the Gregson/Collister partnership blossomed and although their subsequent live shows didn’t feature the haunting French horn included in this version of signature song Home is Where the Heart Is they didn’t run to the Springsteen tribute bombast of American Car either.  Key Track: I Fall Apart.   

4; Jackson Browne – Running on Empty

“Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels” the album begins, “Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields”. This is a record about yearning, the songs linked by the unlikely bedfellows of hope and ennui – almost a suite. Largely co-written, and recorded live this is (literally) the sound of backstage, the bus and the hotel room writ large. Overwhelmingly, everyone sounds tired. Danny Kortchmar’s Shaky Town is a postcard from somewhere in the mid-west, Lowell George and Valerie Carter’s Love Needs a Heart could have been written in the condensation on the inside of the tour bus window, in Rosie the guy on the sound desk comforts himself with, well let’s not dwell on that. Only in the joyous closing cover Stay do the band celebrate their incarceration together and even then there’s the sense that these moments, too, will be lost in time. Key Track: The Load Out.

5; Bruce Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I know – I couldn’t believe it either. I first encountered Springsteen in his Eighties, bulked-up, MTV, Arthur Baker Remix-fuelled pomp, and so it was understandable that I didn’t really take to him at the time. We all know what gated reverb did to a generation of drummers, some of whom are still not entirely over it to this day.  It wasn’t until he’d got all that (and Outlaw Pete) out of his system that I found myself in Hyde Park watching the tangled Terence Malick narrative of Racing in the Street play out in front of me as the sun set over Hyde Park. All that stuff that The Boss bores tell you about the live experience? It’s all true. Better still is having the entire back catalogue waiting and ready for you to work through at your leisure. I was tempted to stop at Darkness, where the carefree street jokers of Asbury Park have aged and withered to become the enervated protagonists of songs like Factory and Prove It All Night. Even more astonishing, as revealed by the release of outtakes compilation The Promise, is what he left off it. Key Track: The Promised Land

6; del Amitri – Waking Hours,

I listened to this album every single day on my way to work for three months solid. Anyone who is familiar with the lyrical content of the ten songs contained within will be aware that this is not necessarily a healthy state of mind to find yourself in. “I’m watching the fumes foul up the sunrise / I’m watching the light fade away” is never going to be a couplet likely to get your endorphins racing in the morning, and so it turned out. Eventually I moved away, before my small, small town turned around and swallowed me. I’d been entranced from the moment I first heard the opening track – I’d argue that it starts with one of the all-time great “Ah-one, two, three, four…” count ins - and from the off it was pretty clear that this wasn’t going to be a re-tread of their prior jangly buckskin fringed Sticks and Stones Girl period. I bought all the singles too – “Don’t I look Like the Kind of Guy You Used to Hate?” sounds as lemon-juice-on-a-paper cut as it reads on the page. Key Track: Empty

7: The Waterboys – A Pagan Place

Another Damacsene conversion for me was when Mike Scott turned the UEA into a swirling pit of heart, soul, twelve string guitars and tasselled scarves while I watched on unbelieving, the music like a massive wave simultaneously sucking the shingle from under my feet and pummelling me in the chest as it swept over and around and through me. This is the album where The Waterboys – then at least nominally a band – first successfully combined Van Morrison’s Woodstock Celt vibrations with the Chelsea Hotel attitude of New York’s CBGBs scene and produced the first great Big Music. Two albums later, they’d moved on - which is where we first met. Scott’s modus operandi is principally to set up a revolving door of four or five chords and then declaim across them, and that technique serves him beautifully here, notably on the epic Kazakh-referencing Red Army Blues. Don’t get the remastered re-issue, by the way. This album doesn’t need an extra verse, an extended outro or a bunch of extra tracks added on the end, no matter what the limitations of vinyl album running length might have you believe. Fun fact – the “What have I got to lose, somebody might wave back?” hook in track five is lifted directly from a line of dialogue in the Elvis movie G.I. Blues. Key Track: Rags        

8; Warren Zevon – Transverse City

Ah Warren – none more West Coast; you with your floppy-haired, plaid-shirted, harmony-contributing Californian pals and your breezy songs about werewolves and Chines menus and headless Thompson gunners. Who better to produce a late-career claustrophobic concept album about paranoia, alienation and chemophobia with added Dave Gilmour? Acoustic-led Neil Young-athon Splendid Isolation and familiarly-styled ballad Nobody’s In Love This Year aside, the rest of the record is synth-driven and intense – there aren’t any jokes on this one. Key Track: Run Straight Down

9; Spirit of the West – Go Figure

Another genre-hopping release was the 1991 effort by former trad-punksters Spirit of the West, who I’d been in the same room as in what must have been around 1987 and who I hadn’t heard a lot of since, independent releases by Canadian folk bands not being as easy to casually acquire in the latter part of the twentieth century as they were to become in the post-Amazon world. I seriously thought I’d put on the wrong CD in the shop, as what started the first track contained not the cheeky prod in the ribs of the bodhran I’d been expecting, but some sort of Pink Floyd power chordage underpinning the sound of a heavily amplified slide mandolin (and who came up with that idea!?) combined in turn with the tom-tom heavy percussive assault of somebody building a particularly impressive shed in the background. I fell instantly for it, a bit like the way in which Danny does for Sandy at the end of Grease. I’m generally a lyrics man, and so when further investigation reaped a limpid pool of intricate construction and shaded detail I fell in love with it all over again. Once you knew that they are about a children’s hospital, listening carefully to the words of Goodbye Grace had the tendency to prompt a whole new wave of Kleenex-heavy blubbery. And that was before I had any of my own. Key Track: D for Democracy (Scour the House).

10; Loudon Wainwright – History

Bleak, introspective, heavy on the sarcasm, generous helpings of self-loathing and brutal as a kids’ party at Katie Hopkins’ house. Also does tit jokes. Either you buy into Loud’s schtick or you don’t, and I do. He edges past Randy Newman in the irony stakes while puncturing his own ego and that of every family member he can line up a bead on. Talk about solipsistic. Also, as I say, does tit jokes. The one-note riff which is the talking blues of Talking New Bob Dylan aside, the songs on this album are breath taking – usually a quick intake of breath followed by a long, reflective exhalation as you inwardly digest what someone who isn’t even a close friend of yours has just told you about their behaviour – see When I’m At Your House for example, or Hitting You. That this album edged out close contenders More Love Songs and Here Come the Choppers is probably down to his heart breaking performance on the Key Track:  Sometimes I Forget.