“Everyone else is doing it - so why can’t we..?”

Back in the opening overs of the Great Unpleasantness, we were just about gearing up for Helstock (see blogs passim.) which in a different universe would have* taken place about a week after we were all finally told off and sent to our rooms to think about what we’d done. 

A year later, it was looking as if we were going to have to postpone or cancel again, before someone in Posh North Essex suggested we (or rather, ‘they’) host one of those online virtual festival thingies that we’d been hearing so much about recently - that way we could get more players in, there wouldn’t be a venue capacity on attendees, the queues for the toilets were definitely going to be a lot shorter, and no-one would have to get nailed to anything.

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs had a couple of remotely recorded and edited audio-visual submissions accepted, and having been invited to submit something of my own for consideration, I went back to the neglected corner of the bookcase where I keep my big book of things I’ve made up out of my own head, blew the dust off the spine and pored through the contents with a rheumy old eye until I came across this old thing, originally written on the back of a boat** somewhere up an Irish river, probably in Cork, and originally committed to hard drive some years later on the first Songs from The Blue House album, on which Olly from Crouch Vale played spoons.

Originally a quasi-comedy interlude in gods kitchen gigs (how dare you mock my suffering!) we ended up playing it at a lock-in back in Ireland some years later which was quite the blast but, as befits my advanced maturity and attendant gravitas, I decided to rework it in a more reflective manner hoping to reach out to those many fellow travellers on the road to love’s redemption I’ve shared asphalt burns with over the years.

I believe Clapton tried the same thing with ‘Layla’.

https://youtu.be/00X0QEoT6rA

*And indeed still might have done, depending on your philosophical bent and/or outstanding view on String Theory.

**Whilst travelling upon, not literally marked up in anti-foul paint on the stern.

Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - New Material for 2021

I am pleased and proud to announce that we have new product dropping this week*.

‘Hollow Man’ was recorded remotely in lockdown by the entire group, and is coupled with a new version of crowd-pleasing, set-closing favourite ‘Nelson’.

Both songs will be available on our Bandcamp site https://helenandtheneighbourhooddogs.bandcamp.com from Sunday March 21st.

Two accompanying videos will be aired as part of ‘What the Helstock?’ virtual festival on the Blue House Agency Facebook page livestream on Saturday the 20th - scheduled showtime is around half past eight GMT depending on prevailing winds and weather conditions in the East Anglian region - https://www.facebook.com/bhagency/

This is a digital only release, but you can listen to it a couple of times for free online before you make your mind up as to whether you want to own it or not.

We also do parties, festivals and house concerts, so once we’re up and running again, if you like what you hear, do get in touch. https://www.facebook.com/helenandthedogs

*Ed - please check with the young folk to see if this is still what they do.

“He’s thrown a kettle over a pub - what have you done..?”

You would be surprised - although not unduly, I feel -  at how little I make from this Blog. I know you like to think of me descending from my Dubai apartment in order to do a little light dictation between mocktail shoots, but it’s not all like sourdough and circuses in my career. That’s why I work in a car park, and you don’t*. 

Looking back - as I frequently do - over past chapters (mainly for throwback posts originally published on the same date as whenever I find myself in a contemplative mood - which is most of the time, these days) I sometimes wonder why certain entries have caught, if not the Zeitgeist, then occasionally eine vorübergehende Stimmung. As it turns out, this is usually when someone with more friends than me has reposted something on Facebook. I remember looking at the visitor count when it got to twenty thousand and thinking that was pretty impressive. I could visualise it as a well-attended Cropredy Festival, which was pretty special for me. Most individual entries get forty or fifty passing views, which if translated into a pub gig, would keep me more than happy and entertained for an evening (as, hopefully, I would them) so I’m quite happy essentially scribbling in the margins, occasionally making a grab for attention when I get involved with one of my celebrity friends.

It’s a very similar take on what I do with what I occasionally refer to as my music ‘career’. A few folk gathered together - every so often a festival crowd, and/or some perfect strangers taking the time out to let you know how they enjoyed the show. This is obviously a lot trickier than simply sitting down with a hot cup of tea and - very much in the manner and spirit of Led Zeppelin, simply rambling on. We have to get into a room, make things up out of our own heads, play them all at the same time - one of the issues with the great unpleasantness over the last year or so has been that even in times of reduced lockdown, allowing six people to meet in a socially-distanced scenario doesn’t really help if you’re in a seven piece band. You can’t always leave out the banjo player... 

As part of our prep for this year’s What the Helstock we have written, individually prepared, recorded, videoed and remotely submitted our parts for a brand new song, Fiddly has lovingly assembled, cut and pasted, re-worked, mixed and sent out rough mixes (that’s six other opinions to wrangle, remember) as well as revamping the band favourite (we usually close the first set with it) that we’ve been working on and tweaking via electronic mail and dead letter boxes for about a year now, and we won’t even be able to hear the applause when it goes out. A fellow traveller colleague spent hours on his multi-tracked, loving synchronised, cross-cultural, split-screen recording and was encouraged that it had clocked up a couple of hundred views on YouTube in under a week. One of our workmates whipped out her phone and navigated quickly to her sister’s TikTok. “She’s had one point one million views” she explained. We looked on, impressed. “What did she do?!” we breathed in wonder.

“She got bored one day and dyed our pond blue”.

*Big up to the Park and Ride Massive. Whaddup, Beaches?

 

What the Helstock!?

Casting a rheumy eye back over blogs past in an effort to keep up the flow of
content – albeit reduced, reused, recycled or remixed content that makes little sense beyond the universal themes of getting, playing or regretting having played gigs – it seems that the overarching theme at this time of year is always “What are we going to do about Helstock*?”

Last year this was quite a simple task in that a suitable venue had been secured, folk were already eyeing up the cheese stall at their local farmer’s market** (entry is traditionally by interesting cheese) and I think we’d even put out a set list so that we could ignore it on the night at our leisure. Then of course came the first wave of the great unpleasantness, and even before you could say “Black Bob’s your uncle” folk were politely declining the opportunity to drive across county or even country lines in order to sit in an enclosed space with thirty or forty other people, some of whom would be projecting across the room as boisterously as possible, and even with your own microphone that’s a hell of an aerosol storm to get caught up in.

Fast forward to 2021*** and ruminant minds were already considering how best to go about marking the passing of another orbit around the daystar on Helen’s behalf. Virtual events seem to be in vogue this year, and so rather than gather the clans around a fixed point in the universe Blue House Music impressario and shed magnate James Partridge agreed that he might curate an online festival of the arts, combining live performances with pre-recorded inserts, and juggling the whole thing from the security of his own bunker (if nothing else, the backstage area is likely to have slightly better laundry facilities than he’s used to).

This obviously opened up a whole new world of opportunities for us in Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs in that we could contribute from the safety and security of our own bubbles AND none of us would have to appoint a designated driver to get us home afterwards.**** All those livestreamed events though? All a sham. Those bands aren’t playing live from their respective bedrooms, bathrooms or libraries (and I’ve lived in flats where that’s all one room, by the way), they’re carefully syncing up to a pre-recorded track, contributed ad hoc and carefully pieced together by a skilled engineer in his home studio – or workshop, since we’re getting Fiddly to do ours. It’s a bit like being on Top of the Pops in the olden days. 

Fortunately, Helen and I had a co-write all ready to go, so all we needed to do was to sync the parts, add a count in, make sure everyone had access to appropriate recording facilities and - I won’t lie to you – cross our fingers. I mean, if nothing else, it’s taken a shorter time to get through the process than our last effort, which I see from my notes involved Tony doing a squeezebox part on March 13^th last year and hasn’t seen the light of day since. It’s not like we’ve been holed up in Rockfield drinking cider and harassing the local dope dealers for the good shit, either.

I myself have contributed a pre-recorded solo performance which I’m rather hoping doesn’t get excluded for reasons of time, or insufficient global appeal, as it’s also my birthday around this time of year, and it means I get to piggyback on the celebrations (and occasionally the celebrants) without having to organise my own party. At least there’s a fair chance that I’ll make the cut in that I won’t have to fill in several pages of application form and contribute a short missive on what Helstock means to me before being considered (and ultimately ignored) by a committee of the righteous*****. Ironically, given the bits and bytes I’ve devoted to Helstock over the years, I am ideally situated to contribute just such a prize-winning essay, but hopefully it won’t come to that.

If it does, I might send this one.

Helstock will be broadcast live on YouTube on March 20th 

https://youtu.be/fC9yBmSrtAo

*Every year we get together around the time of The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley’s birthday for a shindig involving friends, relatives and, usually, one special guest whose actual job it is. Search the blogger tags for ‘Helstock’ and you’ll get the idea. There are so many on here that I once gave her a small book compiled of the entries as a birthday card.

**Mine was principally Italian in origin, which gives you some idea that the market was local, and the farmer was not.

***Or [Needle scratch] “You’re probably wondering how I ended up here..?”

****Although I did walk Helen home through town on a Friday night after we’d decamped to The Steamboat one year and I didn’t see a look that simultaneously appalled and bewildered until years later, when we put on The Chemical Brothers at Glastonbury while she was napping.

*****Obviously one way around this process is to be of a level of talent which means that you are invited to participate instead of having to submit a recent photograph and a YouTube video via email, but fortune has not smiled sufficiently on my endeavours thus far, The Star Club and Picturehouse aside. So, yeah, it has actually.

Another Frowback Friday

 

On January 30th, 2006 I sat down after a gig and wrote the first entry in one of these ‘Blogs’ I’d been reading so much about on the internet. I was in a band called Picturehouse (still am, or rather am again, if truth be told) whose mission statement was, and remains, “It’s like going to the pub with your mates”.

In the succeeding decade and a half we split up, reformed, played in (at least) half a dozen splinter outfits, formed bands, recorded albums, went to festivals, and I started reflecting on not only our life in the slow lane, but that of my friends, colleagues, family and contemporaries - many of whom are the same people. I got a job in radio, I wrangled some Americana, and at various times shared a stage with at least one ex-member of Fairport Convention, a Grammy winner, and the drummer out of Cake (not all the same person).

Occasionally I rustled up the blogs and made them into books - hence my CV, which begins “Bon vivant and best-selling author...”*. Obviously, recent events have meant that the juggernaut of breathless prose and reportage has been slowed from a deluge to a trickle, hence the recycling going on over the past few months, but I’m keeping my head above water. There’s a weekly cover version going up on my Soundcloud page - it may not seem that impressive at first glance but if this pandemic goes on much longer it’s going to make a hell of a Spotify playlist of the originals - and we in The Neighbourhood Dogs are dipping our collective toes into the wellspring of remote recording. Maybe we’ll get one of those Celebrity Squares-type videos out for you.

If you’ve been on the bus for a while, thanks. Make a seat for yourself and make sure you don’t eat your sandwiches too early - there’ll be nothing more until lunchtime. If you’ve only recently joined the company, welcome aboard. Enjoy the ride. What a long, strange trip it’s become...

It doesn’t.*

The Word Bin.

 ‘What word would you bin (get rid of) and why? 

A 5 minute-ish podcast in which you will hear 3 people binning a word of their choice and explaining their reasons for doing so.’

I’m on this one. Listen to me channel my inner Phil Bryer as I make a wild claim about Neil Young and - as anyone who has spoken to me before about five in the afternoon in real life will be able to attest - attempt to not make it obvious how enjoyable those first three glasses of delicious New Zealand Pinot Noir were. Many thanks to Nadia Kingsley for having me, and do feel free to chip in with a word of your own!

https://thewordbin.podbean.com/e/the-word-bin-episode-118/

“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar it meant that you were a protest singer.“

A couple of blogs ago I wrote about writing and recording with my long-term Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha Tony James Shevlin. He sidled up to me at the office. “I don’t know about the intrinsic artistic integrity of the recording in terms of fully mastered digital release - do you want to make a video?” (I’m paraphrasing). So we got together again and made a stripped-down, if you will, ‘unplugged’ version with him on the expensive acoustic guitar he bought in Nashville and me on what they call, just North of the Humber, the Durrbrurr.

We’ve decided to put it out there in the online wild partly because we feel we need to make a statement upon these crazy, unprecedented times with our crazy, unprecedented rhymes, and partly because these things otherwise tend to sit unloved in musty drawers until they’re old and irrelevant, and no-one wants that, least of all us. Not at our age. 

It’s not the longest protest song ever written - I mean, it’s got one less verse than ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’, which Bob Dylan wrote when he was only twenty two. Mind you, I could play that when I was twelve, and I think that says quite a lot. 

I showed it to my wife. “Remember” I said beforehand “They say that the camera adds ten pounds.”

“Christ” she responded. “How many cameras did he use?”

https://youtu.be/5Sxg9saaqVs

“...and a scarecrow in my bed”

I had been away. A long way away. I had loved, lost, been an idiot about it, and even people - my people - were beginning to suggest that if things weren’t exactly rotten in the state of Shanemark, then at least a little spring clean and an airing of the furniture might be the way forward. They were right. So I went away.

A friend of mine had talked about a half-remembered film - there was a denouement involving a beach, a misunderstanding, a tragic accident; all of this filtered through my muddy head and twisted itself into a narrative wherein a therapist’s simple instruction - “Draw your family” - drew on me to the point where I focussed in so much on her narrative that I forgot to consider my own.

I’d already written a song called “I’m Sorry”, and so I figured that I couldn’t just hack over that old ground even though, once again, I truly was. 

I had borrowed a sturdy travelling guitar flight case for the trip which was the only thing I guarded (genuinely) more carefully than my life (it still holds purpose to this day - there’s a twelve-string guitar in it round at Shev’s house as I write) which I occasionally wiped the salty sea air off and strummed as if my life depended on it. To this day sometimes I still think it really did.

Anyway, I wrote a song - one of the songs - and came back and recorded it. I threw in a Byrds lick - which doesn’t come across terribly well on this recording - and Stephen Dean played the hell out of the drums, in his Pete Thomasesque way; Gibbon did some amazing bass, and I stayed up late to record the shipping forecast, which I had listened to every night for the previous two months - not as an affectation, but as a genuine tool for survival as I sailed the sea and totally missed the Crowded House gig that I had tickets for, and that all my friends had gone to. We dubbed that in, crouched over a cassette machine in a caravan in Westerfield - where the dream begins.

I heard it again tonight.

You can too.

If you like.

https://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/track/a-long-weekend

Well, let’s start at that end and see how far we get...

The great unpleasantness seems to have been going on for an eternity now. Gigs are off, book signings are muted, and expensive residential studios in the country are beyond reach...so some things remain constant, at least. Brooding on the state of the isle, Tony James Shevlin - songsmith of this parish - issues an edict. “Be at mine on Wednesday” he says. “And bring the dog.”

TJS has the mind to write a song about the current state of affairs, and enjoins me to contribute some of the words I have swirling about in my head as a result of many of our conversations on the subject, and a number of the chords I have at my very fingertips. This is best done in person, we feel, as recently someone has asked if they can record one of my songs and I have spent three days looking up a variant on ‘E’ so I can inform them of the dramatic change involved in the second line (it’s ‘best aside’ not ‘pesticide’ I feel it is pertinent to point out via text message) and so we consider that it’s probably appropriate if we just show each other what we mean in person, although the shorthand between Shev and myself means that I could probably just say “The ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ chord” and we’d both know what I intend.*

Hence I am reflecting on a shit show of a year, guitar in hand, and he has generously provided tea and biscuits. He’s also holding the pen, which means he has the whip hand in terms of what goes down on paper. You can read up all you like about how if you don’t remember it in the morning it wasn’t memorable enough, but we’re both of an age that sometimes we have to write down what we came into the room for, so it makes sense to the pair of us to have a method of at least jogging our memories when it comes to why there are four empty tea mugs and a packet of hobnobs on the garden table. Also, he’s got one of those new-fangled phones that record what you’ve just done, like the young people have and so if we wanted to Snapchat the session, we’re all covered. After a couple of hours we have three verses, a chorus and a banging middle eight, or at least an agreeably sentient one. At about three I make my excuses and break off for the school run. I’m collecting, not hanging out like David Crosby at the gates of Tamalpais High. 

We exchange notes. We arrange to record a reasonably proper version, and so the next week I return to Shevlin Towers. Since we’re recording, this time I don’t bring the dog. She’s terrible on barre chords anyway. Tony runs down the guide version he’s put down and I scan the wall of guitars, looking for a suitable victim...um, tool. First up is the Yamaha, which I immediately capo at the second so I can play the song in D. This is my default recording mode. Up next, the dobro. These do not lend themselves, generally, to artificial key-transposition devices and so I finger-pick - a technique first taught to me by Donovan, at that Ashram in 1967. The National guitar is shining like the Mississippi Delta, and comes off the wall completely in tune, if not a little dusty.

I like Strats but historically, they don’t like me. I pull one off the wall nevertheless and drop in a descending  line over a chorus, feeling like Stephen Stills, only without the hockey jersey and raging coke habit. There’s a custom Tele, with a tone control coil tap. That goes into the mix too. About the time I pick up a bass to try and fill in a descending line on that middle eight I was talking about earlier the lap top is set to ‘save’ and I am quietly reassured that nothing will go to waste. 

The dog needs walking anyway. 

*Turns out it was an Emajor7

Strange Days Indeed...

The great unpleasantness of 2020 has touched us all in different ways. Mr. Wendell messages to say that he had a dream in which Eric Clapton had moved to Felixstowe and was invited out for a slightly glum drink with Picturehouse (“Everyone just wants to talk about George...”) whilst I myself am recently awoken from a fever dream in which cardboard cut-outs of the band were included in a press conference conducted by a producer friend of ours, wearing a balaclava and menacingly reading a list of demands (“More reverb in the monitors” most likely being top of the list). I mean, I’ve had the Les Paul out and attempted to annoy the neighbours by widdly-widdling at top volume but that wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been, principally because they’d moved out the week before, so it’s not really the same as pulling the full Pete Townsend in a pub in Stowmarket. But then again – what is?.

In other off-CV engagements I was recently involved in a responsibly-distanced garden gig, wherein the list of T&Cs quite respectably outpaced Van Halen’s notorious M&M-centric rider by a good few pages. Notably, audience members were to use wipes to clean the facilities after use and then discard them in a conveniently placed bin, a measure which festival promoters might want to take a good long look at for the 2021 season, assuming this wasn’t just a ploy on behalf of the hosts to get people to clean their bathroom for them for free - something which can’t of course be entirely discounted.

I enjoyed the show, especially given that these days I rarely get to play to any more than thirty or so socially-distanced people anyway, so it wasn’t too out of the ordinary an experience for me, despite my being the designated driver for the evening inevitably taking the edge off my finely-honed and expansive performance style, but it was also a sobering reminder of what we have (hopefully only temporarily) left behind. One of my co-performers reflected sadly on his entire year of work disappearing into the ether within a single forty eight hour period, and of the curious virus that swept through the tour bus in early February.

For those of us slightly more on the periphery of the business of show of course, the impact has been softer in terms of actual able-to-pay-the-rentiness, but similarly dispiriting in terms of bring Key of G-based folk/country/blues/rock/pop to the masses. I speak, naturally, of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs, whose occasional sojourns into the fetes, festivals and provincial theatres of East Angular were also brought to a summary stop by the impact of the lockdown. We’ve had a couple of get-togethers in the country since then, utilising the space afforded by Fiddly’s English country garden on one occasion and a freshly broom-swept workshop on another. “Don’t worry about the mice” he said reassuringly as Helen attempted to retrieve a half-consumed brownie during a tea break. “They don’t affect the three second rule...”

I also had a one-to-one with banjoista Tony at his recently re-finished country cottage (painted in ‘Red Stallion’, I’m told. It’s also a film) remembering chords to recently-forgotten songs and finessing our first-ever co-write! There’s one song in the set where we swap roles, and he gets to play guitar (and do the “Can you hear the banjo?” quip) and I suggested that I might refamiliarise myself with the chords of G (natch), C and D in order to best perform my supporting role. He retrieved the five-stringed instrument of joy from its case, ony to find that after months in isolation it was perfectly – and I mean electronically tested by specially calibrated instruments – in tune. This never happens. We sighed at each other. “No-one will ever believe us...” #fakenews

All of this set-list remembering malarkey is not entirely of an altruistic mindfulness-restoring nature, of course. We have an unusual show – a good two hours betwixt breakfast and lunch - so we’ve had to remember even the ones that weren’t in the festival set. In another box ticking first, we’re playing in a churchyard. My suggestion that we knock out a quick version of Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues has been quietly paddled to the side of the suggestion pool, but nevertheless we approach the event with all the accumulated professionalism, decorum and gravitas for which we are rightly respected withn the tight-knit world of East Angliacana. “Where’s the venue?” someone asks.

“You can’t miss it – it’s the dead centre of the village.”

Throwback Thursday

In these uncertain times many of us – not all, by any means – have found time for reflection, for casting our minds back, for remembering*. As the title of one Suffolk-based compilation once had it Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits or, as Gil Scott-Heron more prosaically put it;

"The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.

They want to go back as far as they can.

Even if it's only as far as last week."

Many of my reflections are prompted by whatever comes on in the mobile listening station on my way to work. That I can listen to pretty much any one of the albums in my collection merely by flicking a switch on the steering wheel is still tantamount to witch craft in my opinion, but I’m happy to let the random selection throw up whatever it feels like, safe in the knowledge that if I don’t feel like listening to this particular song for whatever reason, there’ll be another one that I definitely do like in a minute. Or nine or ten minutes if something from that Yes compilation comes up.

Regular readers will know that I’m not averse in any way, shape or form to revisiting past glories – I wallow in nostalgia in the same way that C-list celebrities wallow in the attention of the Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame, but this isn’t about what I wore to work this week, or what I was flaunting while I was doing it, it’s about – in the words of Goffin and/or King – Goin’ Back**. This has been quite the week for throwing up my back pages – there was the live recording from Denmark on which my friend and compadre Ross manfully attempted to replicate some rather complex three part harmonies on his own, shortly after which having listened to***, he started posting updates on the social media about his new home in Denmark. Spooky.

Last night it was the turn of Songs from The Blue House, for whom I used to contribute comments very similar to these, regarding what we’d done, where we’d been and who we’d done it to, with or for. Even now I occasionally whack up something from this blog from the (fairly) recent past that some of the participants have no recollection of enjoying. I had a good listen to the first album we did together, and had kind of forgotten how good it sounded then, and consequently how proud I am of it now.

There are a few genuinely stunning songs on there that even back in the day we had quietly dropped from the set once we had moved on to beer festivals and parties in the park. Gathering band members, exploring the highways and byways of Posh North Essex, a pregnant La Mulley expanding in all sorts of interesting directions. The band is gone, the website domain returned to the wild, only the recordings preserved in aspic. I missed those days. I went to bed nostalgic and slightly rueful.

And then when I woke up, I remembered The Wayback Machine.

*I believe that the good folk who work in those drive-through testing centres they have nowadays are reminded periodically of festivals they’ve been to in the past, their day consisting as it does of getting up ridiculously early, shitting in a portaloo and then standing around in a wide open space in the rain, eating terrible food and waiting for something to happen.

**Yes, I did watch Echo in the Canyon last night, why do you ask?

***Grammar police, please check.

"......and Stig sued himself accidentally."

During the current unpleasantness, many things have been put on hold. The Neighbourhood Dogs, for example, should have been entering the final phases of tweaking our next single for release, but instead we find ourselves antisocially distanced – flung to the five corners of the unfashionable end of East Angular and bereft of one to one (or two, or three, or six) interaction.

Another consequence of the lockdown has been that dreams are, apparently, more realistic to us than before as our minds take advantage of the extra space they’ve been afforded to stretch their legs, settle down into a comfy armchair, and explore their surroundings. Some of these metaphorical devices may not work togeher quite as one might hope, but at least there’s hope. And so it was with no little anxiety that I awoke from a fevered dream – not the one in which The Present Mrs. Kirk had only clipped one leg of the labradoodle, so everyone thought she was a pirate* - but to the realisation that in my sleep I had been finessing our new song, but had woken up with another running through my head. I was literally in a Nashville State of Mind state of mind.

To explain further, we - Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - have been working on a lovely ballad, to which I have contributed a simple slide guitar motif, much as one might find on the more tasteful end of the East Angliacana thirty second taster intro scene but which, importantly, I suddenly thought that I might have lifted wholesale from the exquisite Nashville State of Mind by one Tony James Shevlin which – even more crucially – I had played on at a session for the BBC and which was currently doing the rounds of social media again after it had popped up in both of our timeline ‘memories’. Rightly so – it’s a wonderful song, one of Shev’s best, and I love it dearly both for its sentiment and its lack of sentimentality. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to focus on the chord sequences of two apparently unrelated songs before you’ve even switched off the alarm and let the dog out in the morning, but it’s a disconcerting process.

Firstly I had to ascertain whether the chords were related, in the same ballpark, or even playing the same sport. I imagine that George Harrison went through a very similar process off the back of that whole My Sweet Lord malarkey before he released This Song, which dealt with that exact process and although sounding like something he might have knocked off in his sleep (and probably did, to be honest). I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live recently in which he and his chums seemed to be having a whale of a time, but that doesn’t make the track any more memorable. Maybe that was the idea. At the time he was hanging out with Eric Idle, whose whole Rutles gig was built around making something similar-to-but-not-quite, and so when songwriter-in-residence Neil Innes found that Johnny and the Moondogs-come-lately Oasis had been third-guessing his work with their Whatever, it must have come as a pleasant, and financially rewarding, surprise.

I remembered that at an early rehearsal of our song someone had commented that it may have shared some songwriterly DNA with a previous effort that many of the group had been involved with, called Risk. I comforted myself with the thought that at least I’d co-written that, although anyone who remembers the case of Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Zaentz vs. Fogerty will be aware that this is a tricky defence to mount in the face of a determined legal team with dollar signs in their sights. Also, that was me playing del Amitri’s Driving With The Brakes On really badly, so that was never going to help.

 Eventually, I worked out in my head that although the initial chords shared some of the songwriterly essence to which we all aspire (the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift – we’ve all done it), Shev’s intro - which I had dutifully transcribed and learned – was more complex, melodically more satisfying, tonally appropriate, and well beyond a legal matter.

No. It was from Torn, by Natalie Imbruglia.

*Sylvie, not Mrs. K. 

Hovellian.

I have been recorded many times in the past. In fact the other day I was trying to work out how many tapes and CDs we have amassed between us in Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs, but it started getting over-complicated when I couldn’t decide whether The World Service five-song demo that Me, Wendell and Gibbon did at Spaceward counted as one example or three. Nevertheless, between us we’ve been in church halls, sports halls, Baptist chapels, converted pig pens, garden sheds, cellars, caravans, twenty four track custom built digital facilities, radio stations, and – that one time – the BBC Studios at (in?) Maida Vale and come out with some sort of reproduction of our – or at least ‘a’ - performance.

We made a decision at the start of the latest cycle of the seasons to write and record something from scratch, thereby avoiding all of that tedious “Well that’s not what you did live...” entrenchment that can sometimes occur when you’re trying to recreate a performance in the studio and it turns out you've been playing an A minor  against a C major root. You might be able to get away with that sort of shizzle on a Friday night at The Coggeshall Beer Festival, but the pristine digital modern studio will highlight that missing relative major as clear as the nose on your face. Happy is the producer who can work up a track all on his own, fly in a vocal recorded in a hotel room and held somewhere in the ether, whack on a bit of autotune and have it on the kids’ iPhones before their parents even realise what Grimmeh thinks of it on a Friday teatime. Yes, I have been listening to Radio One in the car, how could you tell?

Our de Facto producer – Fiddly – has been patiently recording various contributions to the sum of our parts over the past few weeks, building from a simple guitar and vocal demo which I put down to create a canvas which if not entirely blank*, certainly left room for everyone else to do a bit of colouring in without having to worry about going over the lines. It’s not like we had to rewind the tape over and over again in order to get down the perfect take – we’re not in the eighties, for goodness’ sake – but we thought we might make it slightly easier for the rest of the group by ensuring that it was at least in time.

You may or may not be familiar with the idea of The Click Track. This is the metronomic beat which was initially put on recordings to make sure the drummer played in time without speeding up or slowing down** before industrious recording engineers with one eye on the clock (and the other on the attendant studio bill) decided to largely replace the latter with the former, thereby coincidentally saving a fortune on vacuuming fragments of Vic Firth 5As off the studio carpet. I’ve never been very good with click tracks, and after a couple of run throughs with the default Cubase metronome fighting against my uniquely rhythmic stress and weave approach to strumming the backing track, we decided that alternate methods of keeping in good order were required. Cutting the odd extra beat out of the two inch tape with a razor was no longer an option, and neither was slowing down the tapes by judicious application of the tape brake.

This is where Fiddly’s approach to accomodating studio kit came in extraordinarily handy. There is a long and noble tradition of repurposing surfeit gear at The Hovel – essentially anything which fellow recording folk believe is obsolete, surplus, outmoded, outdated or just overly complicated to operate will be gratefully hoovered up and stored until required with the result that he has accumulated quite the collection of equipment which, with the cycle that these things inevitably follow, has become highly desirable. It’s a strange combination of classic tech and Heath Robinson invention at the business end of the studio complex, which is where we now found ourselves.

 

One reasonably modern thing he had acquired was one of these new-fangled*** loop pedal thingies they’re filling Chantry Park with these days and after a flash of inspiration he scuttled off to the main house to track it down and one extravagant unboxing and a crash course in stomping in time later, we had a chunka-chunka**** rhythm perfectly suited to the syncopation required for a succesful take.

Later we added a guide vocal, a few tracks of backing vocal - building, building, gently building. “I’ve got a proper pop shield” said Fiddly from behind the control room glass as I sang into another vintage mic through some indeterminate gauze stretched across a coat hanger “...but this works, and so much better.”

 

“You don’t want to know how long those tights have been on there” he chuckled in my headphones.

“How long?” I asked good-humouredly.

“What did I just say?”

*One of my favourite jokes from the eighties was that the real name of the bass player in Linx – nicknamed ‘Sketch’ - was ‘Preliminary Drawing’. Obviously the only correct response to this was to reply “You’re lying.”

**You don’t find classic album bands like Bucks Fizz wang on about this sort of thing, do you? [checks earpiece] Oh...

***Circa 2004.

****Technical term.

Print The Legend...

I've, ahem, dropped a new compilation of the blog (to buy, click in the links section) - I believe that's what the modern media folk say. this is the introduction, written by m'learned colleague Shev, who appears in the book almost as much as I do.

 I first met Shane Kirk in 1997 when I auditioned for his Beatles specialist band The Star Club. I was feeling very pleased with myself until he dryly informed me that I was the only applicant.

In the intervening years we have shared many stages together. When I have a harebrained musical idea, he is most often the first person I call. “Do you want to help me start a songwriters' night?” “Shall we start a band where we pretend to be an American family playing Country songs?” The answer is always yes.

There have been many books written about the goings on and antics of rock stars. This is not one of them. However, this is one in a series of books that you may enjoy if you want to know both the struggle of writing, recording and performing your own songs with very little prospect of retiring on the proceeds of these endeavours, as well as spending your weekends working in a covers band, playing songs you wished you'd written, in pubs you wished you weren't in.
Someone had to write this book; I'm glad it's Shane Kirk.

My name crops up in a few of these stories. I look forward to more musical mayhem with the author. And then reading about them...

He also very kindly supplied me some notes. In the immortal and probably entirely fictional words of Salieri...

  

The Boy Looked at Johnny.

 

Jimmie Nicol, Alan White, that kid who stepped in when Keith Moon fell off his stool* at a The Who gig. The list of stand-in and dep drummers is long, illustrious and – like the road to hell** – paved with good intentions. To add this roll of honour we meet today to celebrate one Linda Stix who, upon hearing that we in The Picturehouse Big Band were one drummer short of quintet agreed to step up and learn our entire set, which as regular readers will know has been laboriously compiled over (literally) many decades of pop history and lovingly curated to the point where we daren’t listen to the originals any more*** in case we become distracted from our core mission of playing the songs in a form of which a pub audience would probably still recognise them, even without the aid of the Shazam (TM) app.

In return, Johnny-out-of-Five Mile High said that he’d guest on a couple of songs, and we learned a handful of theirs (FMH), which meant that for at least half a dozen numbers I would, essentially, be the guitarist in Five Mile High, for Linda is their drummer and The Other Guitarist, in a Clark Kent-esque twist of happenstance, is also their bass player. At one point, to emphasise the wile of the situation he takes off his glasses. Turns out that’s just because they fogged up when he came in from the car park, but you get the gist.

By about the Thursday before the gig I realise with mounting horror that simply recognising the titles of songs doesn’t, technically, count as knowing them****, especially when you have the added responsibility of not being the one who fucks it up for everyone else. (This is me having to (re)learn four songs, three of which I’ve played before by the way. Now multiply that by seven to get some idea of what Linda’s been going through). Hence there is an evening on the sofa with YouTube, a search engine tuned to those guitar tab sites you can get on the electric internet these days, and a Squier Telecaster (with individual saddle bridges and the three way selector switch rewired so that you can run the pick ups in series as well as in parallel. But I digress). In the olden days, of course, you’d be stuck in front of a turntable getting progressively worsening RSI from all that moving the tone arm backwards and forwards on the record, but we have crowdsourcing and the associated resources to cut and paste the same basic errors on to multiple sites these days, which saves a lot of time. And who doesn’t relish the idea of playing Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law in a non-ironic fashion, which is something that comes up less often than you’d like, but more often than you’d think.

Once in The Heart of The Stow***** we are reassured by the ever-avuncular presence of TOG, who assures us that he will be keeping a paternal eye on things****** and providing prompts and cues as required. This is a huge relief to the rest of us, who are frankly often never quite sure where we are during any given middle eight, or what we came in here for in the first place. Our default position in case of any navigation errors is to turn around and glare at whoever is playing bass at the time, which is a handy trope with which to engage. It also helps share the blame around a bit, however as it turns out, no-one demands a Paddington stare, and none of the audience need recourse to Shazam (TM) at any time, such is the diligence that Linda has paid in both listening to the original versions and also in taking note of our quirks and extensions when it comes to arrangements. Admittedly there was a point where I thought my kidneys were going to be dissolved slowly until they filtered out of my body in a coagulant mess, but it turned out that The Bass Player had just stepped on his octave divider pedal by mistake, and I’m sure the foundations of the building are sturdy enough to withstand a couple of verses of that. There was also another passing moment of disbelief and uncertainty, but that’s what being charged £3.20 for a pint of lime and soda will do for you.

The post-show playlist brings up Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion – one of The Drummer’s favourite tracks to play. I remember to send him a text to the gig in which he is currently engaged or – more likely, as we are – packing up in the rain after. “Happy Birthday” I type, two-fingered. “You’re fired” {smiley face}.

Photo credit by friend of the band Claire Woodbridge. Ironically, you can’t see Linda or Johnny in this one.

*One of The Other Guitarist’s favourite jokes goes “Can I help push your stool back in?” “Well, you could buy me dinner first...” kerrtisshhhh

**Presumably that’s the one Chris Rea drives home for Christmas on.

***They later became The New Originals. I know – one paragraph in and three footnotes already. I’m on fire today.

****A handy aides-memoire for any potential audience members who fancy offering to help us out by having a go anytime soon.

*****Coincidentally also the title of an unreleased Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe demo from the 1990 bootleg Yesoteric.

******I know – there’s a whole complex uncle/parent thing going on there. I’m not sure about it myself to be honest.

"What About That!?"

To the Theatre of Legends!* The Stadium of Light!** The Arena of Dreams!*** Actually, the second of those epithets is not entirely without foundation, as we have two sets of lighting rigs aboard the good ship Picturehouse this evening, as well as a sturdy PA system, of which sound engineer-du-soir Pat is attaching microphones to The Drummer’s kit even as I tune up. I express mild surprise that a venue of this capacity warrants such wanton frippery. “It’s so I don’t have to hit them so hard” he explains, inserting the second of his earplugs**** “Let the microphone do the work, that’s what I say.”

He may, indeed, have a point. As The Bass Player and I confer over half time refreshments, the sound does indeed seem to have an air of clarification about it. It is pleasing to be able to reflect on a notably good performance after so many years in harness. I adjourn to use the facilities. “Yeah, come in tomorrow, there’s a really good band on – I’ll pick you up” one patron is enthusiastically recruiting his companion, in the stall. I silently insert my own italics.

 

We are not ones for resting on our laurels, however. This evening’s programme features not only a first, but a second introduction of completely new material (to us) – one of the songs a mere thirty one years in gestation and the other, a Kinks b-side. For us, the former is pretty much like plucking something from the top forty although in doing our homework we realise both that time flies and that – curious as it sounds to the post-Millenial ear, once upon a time Michael Stipe could have passed for a young and vibrant Stewart Lee*****. It seems to go well, and there’s an extra tidy three minutes right there (the first set runs a tidy hour and ten as it is).

Sadly, it is upon more familiar material that I take a tumble. You’d be hard pushed to find a band that doesn’t do a version of My Sharona, in my experience, and so it’s a handy go-to when comparing like with unlike. Last time three fifths of the band decided to do a chorus of Tom Robinson’s Up Against The Wall in lieu of an actual guitar solo, which might have been a good idea this time round. I couldn’t even get away with describing it as a free jazz atonal exploration. Someone suggested I do it on kazoo next time.

With our brutal touring schedule being what it is I’ll now have to wait until the election after this one before being able to get it out of my system. Still, April’s not that far off when you think about it.

The Drummer is considering our dearth of bookings. “Maybe we could get a few at somewehere where there’s room for us?” he ponders. “We could give them a list of who we play and get them to buy into that?”

“The Waterboys?” - I adopt the role of both prospective entertainer and interlocutor.

“No, we don’t do the one you might have heard of.”

“Travis?”

“The only song they didn’t play on that last tour.”

“REM?”

“Nope, not the one with the mandolin, I’m afraid.”

The Drummer reflects.

“I’ll tell you what though. If there was band that played Tiger Feet – and only Tiger Feet – all night, I’d join it in a heartbeat.”

 

The updated Picturehouse Big Band Spotify play list of songs is here. Unlike those Top of the Pops albums of the early seventies, these recordings are most definitely performed by the original artists.

*The Pickerel.

**Nope, really – it’s The Pickerel.

***There’s no dressing this up, it really is The Pickerel.

****One in each ear. He’s not a freak.

*****”That Michael stipe’s let himself go...” etc etc