The Passenger

 

I have, after many years and quite unexpectedly, joined a new union - that of the behatted bass players (official chapter). In lieu of a scheduled Helstock this year - times are tough for all of us, and the expense and inconvenience of assembling any number of bands to celebrate the official annual passing around the sun of La Mulley is tantalisingly beyond all of our reaches this year - I have been invited to step in to do the low notes for the Tony Winn Big Band in support of the estimable Marty O’Reilly at The Kelvedon Institute, and a mini-cheese fest has been laid out backstage in a nod to our traditional Helstock repast. Not in metaphorical terms - there’s actual cheese.

Marty himself is being filmed for what promises to be an - if you will - Rockumentary and is gamely discussing the journey so far through a fug of fatigue and Lemsip fumes. Tony, Helen and I are running through the set, which involves a selection of his back catalogue, and old song of hers, and me gamely thumping through the tunes channelling my finest Billy Peterson on a Westone Thunder bass which is - in common with de facto promoter, sound engineer and road mangler James - a veteran of the punk wars. Gamine co-support Lily Talmers enquires of these punk wars of which we speak. “He was listening to Neil Young” remarks James. “And we won” I respond.

Compere with the good hair Tony steps up on stage to set the scene and I remark that it would be amusing if he got his own name wrong during the introductions. Later he will throw his arms in the air despairing that he had got Lily’s name wrong during hers, but this is yet to pass. After a flawless rehearsal I inevitably fluff a couple of notes but, employing the tried and tested method of bass players through history in repeating them in verses two, three and four I present to the audience that when the progression resolves itself during the last chorus, it’s almost as if it was a deliberate attempt to build the tension throughout. 

Nevertheless, the post-show reaction is positive - in Kelvedon it is rarely anything but - both from front of house and from the Old Soul Orchestra sequestered behind the velvet curtain and stage door which separates our backstage lounge from the packed auditorium. It’s very kind of Jeff - another paid up member of the (BBP/O) union - to not point out my unique, jazz-inflected approach to doling out the low notes as he, unlike myself, does not play the bass like a guitarist who has been handed an octopus. Lily is magnificent. Marty and the boys even more so. They play an hour and a half of intense semi-improvised wild country-blues-jazz folk before they finish with a call-and-response gospel singalong, unamplified on the floor. It is wonderful.

Tony thanks me once again. “Any time” I say out loud. Internally I’m thinking “And I hope I passed the audition”.

Back in the Garage.

 

I am to commence recording again next week - honestly, the absence of pressure one feels when embarking on an enterprise that absolutely no-one has any interest at all in hearing is extraordinarily liberating - and I though that now might be the right time to revisit an old, old song of mine which came on in the car the other day and of which I was reminded that the demo we did around - I’d guess - thirty years ago had a couple of distinctly bum chords in it that we never got around to correcting, replacing or redoing - pushed, as we were, for time at the, um, time (it was a Sunday morning if I recall correctly). We probably couldn’t be bothered to demagnetise the heads again or something, and we’d already used up precious minutes forwarding the tape and then turning it over and doing it again so that it was properly stretched prior to recording.

Turns out I didn’t write down the words I now needed in my big book of things I made up out of my own head and so have spent no little time on a Saturday afternoon sitting in the car scrolling through many, many bits and bytes on a memory stick looking for something called ‘Unknown Album’, tracking down the song I need which I’m sure was somewhere in the middle of it, and then play and pausing whilst typing, then cut and pasting the fragments of lyric I *could* remember onto an iPad. This never used to happen when you had a cassette you’d mailed to yourself and a biro to wind things on with. Honestly, it would have been quicker to write a new one.

Libraries Gave Us Power…

There is a theory, admittedly discussed principally over three hour lunches and mostly with my good friend and occasional musical employer, award-winning songwriter Tony James Shevlin, that prophets rarely prosper in their own land. He posits the example of being denied access to the open mics, speakeasys and songwriters’ showcases of Chicago, until a well-placed expression of disappointment in this country’s finest Hugh Grant diction magically gains him entry. If Richard Curtis had been directing this would probably be the bit where Andie McDowell breathlessly intones “Is it still windy? I hadn’t noticed…”. The third wheel at one particular recent lunch attests to the power of the foreign accent* - “Meanwhile, I’m stuck out on the door like a dick”. Our colonial interlocutor is one Scott Stilwell, who much like a minor character in Love, Actually, Tony has met in a bar in America and who has followed him home.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect, of course - a trait, once again, I share with the esteemed writer/director of The Boat that Raped - however the very presence of Scott attests to the beguiling power of the non-indigenous performer. He is here to take part in a short tour of England**, at least in American terms, and on the penultimate night of the jaunt a healthy following has assembled to see the pair of them trade songs, stories, and occasionally accents in the convivial surroundings of a local library. The show is sold out and whilst I am impressed. I am also slightly jealous, as a recent planned expedition to a theatre in Colchester by my musical paramours had to be pulled as advance ticket sales meant that the audience would only just have outnumbered the band, and even for a seven-piece, that’s a sobering statistic.

Tony relates some well-worn and road hardened anecdotes while Scott, an owlish character in full moon glasses, a John Deere cap and double denim, is more of the moment - a fact I only glean because he uses something I said to him in The Green Room*** during one of his introductions. Although individual songwriters in their own right, these two have collaborated, and as they alternate between playing and listening raptly (as are the rest of us) there are subtle additions to the others’ performance, mostly in the form of keening harmonies which bring to mind the best work of (say) Boo Hewerdine working in tandem with Darden Smith. I can see how the most in demand product on the tour so far has been the album that they’re both on which, in an ironic twist, doesn’t exist. At an earlier show they have been upbraided for performing songs that haven’t been recorded, which seems harsh, even for Stowmarket.

Although struggling with a head cold, Scott gamely goes for the notes anyway and his suffering gives him an attractively husky tone which in the interval**** I mention brings to mind the best work of John Prine. In a further twist, he performs a song called Dear John Prine in the second set before giving way for one number to another of Tony’s songwriting collaborators and performers. Me. It’s terribly generous of Scott to make way - this is, after all the reason he’s here in the first place - and it’s very kind of Tony to invite me up. It’s also slightly nerve wracking as if this is the one song they don’t like, it’s going to be pretty obvious what the uncommon denominator is. Fortunately, we make it through to the end, harmonies intact, and pausing only to savour the generous applause I return to my seat.

The boys finish off the rest of the set, the lights go up, there is the sound of chairs being pushed away across the floor, creaking limbs being unfolded, the rain outside has abated, and the vapers are already in the car park. As we make our way toward the cloakroom, I feel a tap on my shoulder. 

“Nice song”.

*It’s exaggerated for effect. Tony’s actually from Burton-on-Trent, but you know what they say, just because you’re from Burton, that doesn’t make you a pint of Bass.

**It is revealed during the show that Scott once took a three hour drive from his home to see Tony play in Kansas City. On a slightly deflatory note, Scott confirms that he would also have driven that far for a barbecue.

***The dressing room - not the high end coffee shop down the road from where we had lunch. I’ve never seen so many electrical sockets in one room. Again, at the library, not the coffee shop.

****There’s a raffle, of course there’s a raffle.

"... about four and a half minutes"

Another lovely Doghearsal last night – and they’re not all lovely by any means, but this one was – as we hone our set for a forthcoming theatre show in the heart of swinging downtown Colchester. I’d reverted to Takamine type and was feeling much more comfortable with the weight of guitar on my hip, Mr. Wendell had retrieved his capo from his wife’s handbag, Turny Winn had remembered to bring the right harmonica, and remembered not to sit on the banjo just in time. After each of the first four songs in the set Mr. Wendell reverently intoned “…and that should be the single”.

Upon my return to Kirk Towers I considered that in order to maintain our online presence*  in light of our forthcoming engagement  I should probably post something to try and whip up our small but enthusiastic fanbase and any of their friends with convenient disposable income into buying some tickets, and so I fired up “What’s a Rainbow” (or alternately “What’s the Moonlight For?”) from our ‘Back of the Big’ EP and posted it into the ether. 

Upon relistening I was struck by a couple of things – firstly, that’s a really good recording and, courtesy of Fiddly, beautifully mixed and mastered** and secondly, how clever the wordplay constructed by Mr. Winn is – something you don’t always get to appreciate when you’re trying to remember if it’s this verse the key change comes in or not. He rhymes ‘Jealous’, ‘Fellas’ and ‘Cinderellas’ in one verse and although ‘…told me’, ‘…rosy’, ‘…know me’ and …cosy’ is straying into Chris Difford-like artistic license, there are many lesser*** writers also ploughing the same furrow, and it’s a fine club to be in. Mind you, he (Tony) also wrote a song where (deliberately) none of the lines rhymed, so he’s either better at this than he’s have us believe, or has far too much time on his hands. Or both.

Last week there was a temporary reunion of Songs from The Blue House. One of our better-loved songs among the rural community was always ‘Breaking These Rocks’, a cautionary tale of burglar-killing amongst the farming community – imagine Peter Gabriel’s ‘Intruder’ only where he gets blasted with a twelve-bore half way through – which is loosely based upon true life events and which once again received a resounding roar of approval when aired in the rural heartlands of mid-Suffolk. It’s not – strictly speaking – a celebration of the event, but has been streamed to buggery in the area for the last week or so, so we’re not really ones to complain about our art being misrepresented. Folk make up their own rules about what a song’s about once it’s out there.

Also performing at Shed Fest were The Neighbourhood Dogs. We have a song called ‘Nelson’, which usually gets a lengthy introduction on stage regarding its exegesis, and indeed for those parties interested in pursuing the matter further, there are blogs passim regarding the whole writing and recording malarkey. Shortly after it being performed at the festival I was taken aside by a frankly taken aback member of the audience. Bearing in mind that La Mulley came up with the words based on a couple of shared ideas we’d discussed about a lighthouse keeper I was surprised to be asked the question. “Oh my god – you wrote that about Dad, didn’t you?” 

I quietly considered the verse, bridge and outro. 

“I have now”.                

*“We’re on all the usual platforms – Ceefax, MySpace, Friends Reunited…” 

** Don’t take my word for it.

***fewer

A Bullet From The Heart.

 I’ve been blessed by being able to play with some really, really good drummers and bass players. Two of the finest were Stephen Dean and Richard (Gibbon) Hammond, here channelling The Attractions, recorded in a caravan on a Fostex four track by the inestimable James Partridge and with my singing bolstered by Steve Constable, the David Crosby that my Neil Young always relied on to get me out of a harmonic hole. It’s Bandcamp fee-free Friday next week, so if you want to own this, maybe I can start saving up to re-do it.

https://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/track/stop-that-for-a-start

“Look at you jumping…”

 I am contacted by an old friend and musical confrere who is rooting through some old flyers and photographs and wonders if I remember playing on the same bill as him at a school concert in 1982? He lists the band members, as listed in the programme, and I confirm that not only do I remember the show, I remember what we started with, which was “Free and Easy” - a song from Uriah Heep’s non-charting 1977 album Innocent Victim, and a good indicator of the sort of person I was, given that I was shoehorning it into the set of our school band a mere five years later. We weren’t even all at the same school.

I reflect on my forty years on the fringes of the music business* later that week with the most recent iteration of my musical ambition in tangible** form where we are gathered to run through our entire repertoire in prospect of an increasingly rare public engagement and in the absence of Mr. Wendell, who is poorly. The first business of the evening is, naturally to check on how Turny’s vegetable patch is coming along, and much grave discussion is given to the plight of the allotment-holder without a handily accessible source of standpipe irrigation.*** Fiddly thinks he needs a pond - also so that he can develop a self-renewing methane gas facility to wean himself off the grid - someone mentions a bowser, Gibbon reflects that at certain times of day they actually pay you to use electricity and La Mulley steps in just as discussions look likely to turn heated, given the bent of the conversation toward gentlemen of a certain age being unable to retain water for any length of time, and encourages us toward the rehearsal room. Or ‘shed’.

A perfectly agreeable eight song forty minute opener is run through before we perform the remainder of our oeuvre - mainly through muscle memory although at one point Gib remarks on the similarity of the structure of one song to a number by one of our previous bands before I realise that I am, indeed, playing Songs from The Blue House’s ‘Bike’ by mistake. As Ed Sheeran has remarked, there are only twelve notes, chances are there are going to be some harmonic similarities cropping up somewhere along the line. I believe that John Fogerty was once sued by a particularly vengeful ex-publisher for plagiarising himself, so I’m in good company.

Sheeran crops up again later in the week, as I am enjoying a Friday pint with m’esteemed compadre, award-winning songwriter Tony James Shevlin. Essentially, I’m recounting most of the above, Shev mentions that at the exact moment that he and the bass player from Frisky were persuading the drummer not to walk around the outside of our hotel on the third floor ledge someone had the presence of mind to take a photograph, and we Waldorf and Statler across many topics including fetes, festivals and garden parties. He recounts the occasion when Ed Sheeran’s application to play Ipswich Music Day was rescued from the bin (his CD wouldn’t play) after one member of the panel insisted that this kid was going places and that he should really be given a spot, despite a functioning demo being strictly part of the selection process. I wonder if they would still have named a stage after him if he’d been canned? 

We reflect that so much of our collective musical heritage is down to chance encounters, the intervention of seasoned veterans of the scene and good, old-fashioned common sense. The sliding doors moments of rock. As we finish our drinks and prepare to depart, I remind him that we - The Neighbourhood Dogs - are playing a local pub in a couple of weeks and invite him along. “I’ll be there” he attests, showing me both a text message on his phone and his Musician’s Union diary. “Because we’ve been booked as well”. We write down the fee that both of us have been offered for the same gig on the same night, slide the folded paper across the table and look at the two different figures. I say “You take it”.

https://bluehouserecords.bandcamp.com/track/swell

*At the Cropredy Festival one year a solo acoustic Midge Ure similarly recalled his four decades “…trying to entertain people”.

“Don’t you worry Midge” called a wag in the crowd in response “You’ll get it one of these days!”

**Or ‘fungible’ I guess?

***I know, I know. The footage is hardly going to prompt Sir Bob to organise Live Aid 2, but you can only play the hand you’re dealt.

Look out Mama…

 Who wants to hear my Saturday day in version of a Neil Young song. Anyone? Anyone. Bueller?

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/xH9DS7R3aftMzZ4g6

The Magnificent Five in ‘Return to The Pickerel’

As has been posited in these very pages, if you do one gig a year, you’re - technically - still in a group. With this in mind, The Picturehouse Big Band decamp for one of our occasional soirees in the heart of swinging downtown Stowmarket, where the post-storm debris can be seen lying in gutters, fences are strewn across gardens and the A14 displays its own sorry harvest of boughs. They say in Barham there was up to a thousand pounds worth of improvements caused in a single night.*

The Singer and The Other Guitarist have both scratched an itch an have turned up with brand new guitars - Wendell with a new Fender Deluxe and Kilbey with a left-handed Squier Tele - The Bass Player is trialling a new monitoring system for his keyboards and my Secret Santa gift has finally arrived from the in-laws and as such I will be deploying the joy of compression to lift those vital guitar solos above the melee, with the unfortunate consequence that now, of course, people will actually be able to hear them.

We have a healthy crowd, and notwithstanding the post-soundcheck, pre-gig discourse in the toilets (“‘As gunna be a fucken racket tunight ent ut?”) are looking forward to trying out another new song which joins the one we added only last year in a whirlwind of new tune admissions. This one, by The Icicle Works, is a mere thirty five years young, and so a positive nod to the new young generation of Picturehouse fans coming through the ranks and filling the banquettes at the back. Paul McCartney’s “Your Mother Should Know” springs to mind.

There is no sign of our great enthusiasts from the last Halloween gig who, resplendent in leather bustiers, heavy eye make up and fishnets, insisted on being given drum lessons at the close of festivities, which did hold up the pack down slightly. Partially because we couldn’t move the gear, and partially because it was quite the spectacle in itself. The Drummer is a kind and patient man who will give a quick lesson in the basics to pretty much anyone, but by the time they’d been in the business end of the pub for four hours or so, some of their hand-eye coordination seemed to have gone out of the room. Perhaps that’s why one of them fell over a stationary pile of mic stands?

This evening’s high drama is limited to a large, sticky drink being kicked over a pile of leads (the landlady waved a towel at us in order to help, which initially made me wonder if she was surrendering) and a temporarily misplaced pair of glasses, which did mean that The Singer’s snake-hipped Jim Morrison moves were temporarily replaced by a sort of faux-Velma Dinkley routine which, niche as it is, doesn’t really have the same affect on a baying crowd who want to know when this riot we keep predicting is going to kick off. I guess it keeps them from alternately wondering whether they should take it easy, or whether to keep on movin’.

“A few hiccups, but everything mostly seemed to go well” I say, after having my pub band membership card restamped for another season. “Yes” replies someone. “But I wish Kilbey would stop pretending he’s left-handed.”

*Trad. Arr.

You’ll have to excuse me…

 

Turns out that if you want to get a bloody legend to play on your recording, all you have to do is ask.

The last great white rhino in the reserve.

 

Around the start of The Great Unpleasantness I got a call from an agency. Would I be interested in helping out at one of these Covid testing centres the army were setting up around the country? I thought this might get me off the sofa for a few weeks, and so I duly responded, and a couple of days later found myself standing outside a portacabin on the newly deconsecrated Park n’ Ride somewhere near Copdock. 

Little did I know that twenty months later, I’d still be reporting for duty, albeit without the cheery farewell to the family which for some time consisted of the mantra “Cheerio, Daddy’s just off to collect phlegm in a bucket!” before the morning meeting in which we might be informed that (for instance) if we saw any drones overhead we should get under cover in case of a remotely-launched acid attack.

Over time the job evolved into something pitched as a hybrid somewhere between Big Brother and Love Island. The first wave led to a firm and lasting bond between the brotherhood of the Exit Bays - me, Craig, Callum and Tom - one of the driest and funniest people I’ve ever met - and our honorary fifth wheel, Sarah - My Lil’ Princess, for whom we had to bring in the kids’ version of the Trivial Pursuit questions and who would, if she didn’t know the answer to a geography question, answer ‘Australia’.*

There were a lot of nicknames around site -  That Crazy Russian, The Duchess, Sexy Harry (and of course Non-Sexy Harry), Young Blud, Thing One and Thing Two, Surallan, The Doc and - possibly my favourite - My Sex Dwarf. Someone would bring in a tray of cupcakes. I would arrange the sandwich deliveries in order of palatability. There were quizzes. At one point a Backgammon school was established.

Once the first few of a bewildering number of revolving door-style management changes put in place their squad rotation policy, the old gang broke up and we moved into a new era. Admittedly this allowed for making new acquaintances since I was no longer in an isolated outpost at the end of the car park, and from these conversations in shared adversity new friendships and bonds were formed. The long winter days just flew by.

By the time we celebrated my birthday with a themed quiz we knew each other so well that over seventy per cent of the respondents answered the question “Who would Shane like to see wrestle in jelly?” correctly and most of them also got the bonus answer to “What flavour?”.

We toyed with the idea of making our daily lives into a sitcom, but reasoned that many of the sits would be too far-fetched to be acceptable as ‘com’. The morning brief where we were informed that we needed to wash our hands more but use fewer paper towels overall and the Afghanistan-based rant by one particularly unhinged boss were merely two such examples. One of the guys and I wrote a song about it.

Time moved inexorably on and folk started returning to their roles in the real world. Students, bankers, chefs, airline pilots even. All with the tell-tale bikini-strap marks of a Summer spent wearing a mask outdoors. I got a job running one of the mobile units we operate out of the site, which meant I got to travel the length and breadth of the county and beyond. “Standing at the dock in Harwich” hasn’t got half the resonance as an opening line to ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ as it might have.

Anyway, today I picked up my Employee of the Month certificate, and had cause to think back on all of those people I’ve shared a birthday cake, a portaloo or a game of On Site Bingo with and who, for better or worse, have helped to make me the person I am today. I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.

*You should have seen her face that time the answer was actually ‘Australia’.

Green and Red

After two years of The Great Unpleasantness interfering with our plans, The Picturehouse Big Band made its return to the live arena in Stowmarket (natch) and despite fearing that we might have forgotten how these things work, by the end of the evening I think we had firmly reestablished the central tenet and mission statement of the group in that it’s just like going to the pub with your friends.

From TAFKAG’s* studious reprogramming  of his keyboard sounds during the day (he also literally dusted off his speakers, which is when he found one of the tweeters rolling around in the cabinet where a tweeter is not supposed rolling around to be), to the surprise guest singer toward the end of the set (modesty forbids identifying the party, but regular ‘Swich gig goers will be astonished to learn that he did not perform bearfoot…) we had an almost literal riot.

Admittedly Last Nite was a bit tawdry around the edges, but it was still better than The Strokes’ version, and that second encore meant that at least we got to re-do Band on the Run, but properly this time. 

Many thanks firstly to my Picturehouse brethren, everyone who rocked up to a packed Pickerel (especially Linda Stix for the photo), that nice girl who played drums in the full Nell Gwynne corset and Harvey Two-Face Halloween** make up while we were packing away, Pat for PA, and lastly Greenwich Mean Time, for letting us have an extra hour in bed on the morning after.

*The Artist Formerly Known as Gibbon.

**At least I’m assuming she doesn’t go around like that all the time.

“A Picture House in Every One Horse Town”

I am having everything above the neck trimmed and tidied when Danny, my hairdresser* enquires as to my plans for the rest of the day. As they do. I am to rehearse with Picturehouse prior to a forthcoming engagement, as we in the band figure that muscle memory alone is not going to pull us through, what with The Great Unpleasantness having put off our gig schedule by about two years, and we’ve never been the best at remembering to rehearse anyway. I realise that this will probably actually be the first time I’ve sat down with (say) The Drummer for about two years. I know, right?

Everyone having remembered where he lives, we gather at (indeed) The Drummer’s house, he plugs in his electronic kit, tiny tiny amplifiers are produced seemingly from out of nowhere and we start to work through the set list, which The Singer has resisted the temptation to put into chronological order. Since he, The Bass Player and I are also in this country’s premier proponents of East Angliacana, we have seen each other only recently, but it is splendid to hang out with The Other Guitarist again, he resplendent in the almost ubiquitous (these days) thick framed glasses**, his flaming ginger thatch calmed by the passing of the years into subdued autumnal strawberry blond. 

During a break in proceedings, The Bass Player recounts a visit to a mutual friend of ours, who is reluctantly selling his drums. Due to the nature of the Suffolk rock, pop, folk and ambient loon jazz scene, we all have various connections in common, and so he - the vendor - had enlisted help in identifying who it was in the picture he was going to use to advertise the kit online. He knew that it had been taken at The Moon and Mushroom, a bijou establishment in Swilland***, twice named Suffolk Pub of the Year and at a gig by his band Cara Cleibh (also featuring Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs’ Fiddly Richard), and also that the support act was on stage at the time. It was a good photo of the kit, it was just that they couldn’t work out who was playing just in front of it. Drummer Seamus**** suggested it might be The Other Guitarist.

The Bass Player squinted at the picture and pointed out that The Other Guitarist was, and remains, left-handed and that the ginger guitar player in the photo was demonstrably not. “That” he pointed out “Is Ed Sheeran”.

*And beard, and ears and eyebrows.

**Only Gibbon, on bass and keyboards, has resisted the temptation to let his eyes decay with age.

***Literally ‘Pig Land’.

****Seamus Hussey. When we’re in the band gods kitchen together I’m Ted Bidits and Gib is Justin Credible. Stephen is Wendell Gee and Steve is Kilbey. Keep up at the back, there’ll be a quiz later.

The Heaped Plaise of Frattery.

To The Snug, where a full complement of Dogs have assembled beneath the hopbines in order to [dramatic hand gesture] create. We haven’t got our heads together in the country for quite the time due to The Great Unpleasantness and so it is with some trepidation that we take to our seats, sofas, deckchairs and, in one case, exercise bicycle and collectively wonder out loud what we’re going to do. La Mulley suggests that we warm up with something we know, and so a slow, countrified version of Not That Kind of Girl is extemporised.*

Suitably warmed up, I suggest something I’ve been working on, tentatively working titled The Merchant of Venus and before long we are locked back into the familiar cycle of hesitation, repetition and deviation - almost the anti-Just a Minute, and during which we learn that Helen has never seen an episode of Taskmaster, Mr. Wendell and I discuss our top five favourite Waterboys gigs, and Turny Winn buys a snake.

Over in the corner by the Marty O’Reilly poster, Helen takes a pencil to the extended, breath-defying opening line. I suggest an alternative to one later couplet, to conclude with the phrase “…surfers in The Suez”. Someone suggests that this deliberately invites a Mondegreen, and although I agree that “…in the sewers” might perform the role admirably, it’s nowhere near that time TT wondered why ‘cokehead’ might be such a deliberate term of endearment to employ in an otherwise perfectly serviceable love song. “It’s ‘coquette’”.

Before too too long we have an acceptable demonstration version available, which we commit to Garageband for reasons of austerity and Mr. Wendell, as usual, lasers in on probable sources and influences.

“It’s that Nagasaki thing” he suggests, and I am indeed reminded** of the first night I saw Channel 4, taking a break from work in the hotel restaurant, and slumping down in front of the staff room TV to see this strange fusion of rock and folk music***, the likes I’d never heard before, and which was probably the first time I discovered something for my very own self - probably why I dove headlong into the oeuvre, and still haven’t properly surfaced to this day. I used to perform a couple of Christy Moore songs during my folk troubadour phase, and indeed I did Moving Hearts’ Hiroshima, Nagasaki Russian Roulette which it turns out has an extraordinary number of verses and is tongue-twistingly tricky at some points, and which is possibly one of the reasons that I have been venting my frustration on Helen by presenting her with similar challenges ever since.**** (My belated sympathies with various audiences in The Albion Mills, who’d probably just nipped out for a pint of mild and a game of darts and had to listen to me earnestly performing Sacco and Vanzetti instead. In front of the dart board).

I looked it up today and although I’m not sure it’s the same gig, it sure looks like it. None more eighties, even down to the hot wired Strat neck pick up and the out of phase lead guitar solo (see also The Home Service, whom I similarly fell heavily for and for whom still hold a candle).

So there you go - musical fellow travellers who know you better than you know yourself. Mind you, he’s gonna freak when he hears JJ Cale’s Carry On…

• *Yes we will, probably.
• **This part’s a bit like that scene in Ratatouille - bear with…
• ***The next week they had The Damned doing White Rabbit, so things could all have turned out so very differently.
• ****”Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”

“…and Leon’s getting LARGER!”

“It’s about that time of the evening - when you’ve had a dreadful day trying to corral the twins - and you finally snuggle up with a boy under each arm, fresh out of the bath, them smelling of talc, their tousled hair sticking out at angles, ready to hear the bedtime story you’ve been working your way through for the last few nights…” Helen emotes to a hushed audience, introducing the next song.

“…and then you remember you don’t have kids…” interjects Mr. Wendell, drily.

We are exploring the second rule of songwriting at The Fisher Theatre in the heart of swinging downtown Bungay, a much delayed return to the theatre of dreams which has been put off so often by the great unpleasantness that we are not sure if anyone will remember who we are from the last time we played. To be honest, a few of us are having the same issue. Nevertheless, we have been warmly welcomed to the venue by sound engineer Dan, who regards the seven-piece line up phlegmatically, and enquires as to whether we’d like onstage monitors with an air which suggests that he would really, really appreciate an answer in line with the one that small children asking if they can have a fourth chocolate biscuit wouldn’t. Of course, in order to maintain the eternal balance between the talent on stage and that of the technical expertise deployed backstage, we insist that we do. And another vocal mic wouldn’t go amiss while you’re down there…

Monitors in situ, old-school DI’s and snakes appropriately routed, we soundcheck and retire to the dressing rooms (plural) to consider our good fortune. There are mirrors, lights, an unfeasibly large collection of theatre costumes (including what looks very much like a lioness stole and a tiara, which La Mulley seriously considers adopting for the evening as a ‘look’). There are also five members of the group considering the paisley button-down which I have placed on a convenient hanger. 

“Is that your shirt?” Turny Winn asks, solicitously.

“Yes” I reply truthfully.

“Are you planning to wear it onstage?” he continues.

“Yes” I affirm.

He indicates the rest of the group in a manner reminiscent of a shop steward in a Carry On film from the golden age, with a waggle of his thumb.

“We don’t think you’ll get into it…”

Infamy.

After a lovely set from our co-traveller Tony James Shevlin, we are unleashed upon the good folk of Bungay, who seem as pleased to be back in a proper venue listening to proper music as we are. They are kind, solicitous, engaged and appreciative, and buoyed by their vibes we, in turn, take our chance to shine. Up in the gallery Dan - it turns out - has spent some of the set with headphones plugged into the console, enjoying his own private concert experience. 

We relax into the show. Everyone is on top of their game. I even eschew the opportunity to do a banjo joke. That’s how in the moment we were. The theatre audience - two thirds full, not one third empty - grants us an encore.

“This is unprecedented in the history of pop music!” quips Helen. “Another song!? Well, I’m not sure we have anything prepared…”

By the time I get home, there are already laudatory comments on social media. I retire far too late (tell me about it…) with a warm glow, not entirely Pinot Noir-dependent. The next day at work a woman in a posh car drives over the cleaning equipment we’d put out to mop up the mess where some bloke had taken the opportunity to spit at me. That’s the thing about fame, fame, fleeting fame. Some days you’re the BMW, some days you’re the bucket.

Schrödinger's Acoustic Spot.

After a short delay (of about a year and two months), I am off to The Maverick Festival (see blogs passim) for a weekend of country, blues, folk and Americana in the country, and this year - due in no small part to the ravages of The Great Unpleasantness - with added East Angliacana in the shape of Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs. 

We are contemplating our name on the playbill outside The Barn Stage prior to soundcheck and considering - even with the Americanisation of dropping the ‘U’ - how much room it takes up on posters. “I’m thinking we might change our name to ‘The Neighbourhood’ confides Mr. Wendell. “Yes, but those three, four and five letter words aren’t really the issue here, are they?” points out WAG Becky phlegmatically.

I am also here in my guise as Stage Wrangler for The Medicine Show - a pop up boutique stage for the off duty talent to stretch out with some covers or, in some cases, simply warm up for the main event. Tucked away in a paddock behind the bar, I am doing the equivalent of tightening the rigging and checking the bowsprit for woodworm when I hear the first of the turns being announced in The Barn. At which point I remember that we’re the first turn on in the barn…

A short sprint through the crowd later I have managed to retain both my stage shirt and my dignity and we haul away into our opening number. The unspoken advantage of being bottom of the bill is that you are, necessarily, often top of the list for sound-checks, and so we are buoyant from the off, confident that our pre-show run through of The Byrds “You’re Still On My Mind” has settled the nerves of the sound crew, and Helen, who did ask if we could follow it up with “…something we know”.*

Fiddly seems unencumbered by the lack of most of his pinkie, which he apparently managed to remove with some sort of mechanical implement earlier in the week, just as Turny’s banjo-fingering digit has grown back after that incident with the secateurs some weeks ago, and we are all - band and audience - pleased to be back in the room/barn, doing what we like to do best. We, telling stories with wood and string, and they listening, applauding, and buying our records afterwards. 

A VIP area has been set up to thank those who retained their tickets throughout The Great Unpleasantness but it is empty. No-one wants to be swanning around drinking free Big Drop when there’s an actual, physical manifestation of a festival happening just over the velvet rope. There’s a palpable sense of relief all round, an exhalation of pressure - one agent mentions that we’re the first band he’s seen play live in two years. Poor bastard.

Job done, and back to the acting, I welcome the legend that is Jon Langford to The Show with the immortal words “THE Jon Langford?” He is a grizzled old veteran of the punk wars, hunkered down in a big hat and sheepskin jacket that makes him look like the sort of rancher who has had to deal with his reckless youngest son shooting off his mouth in the saloon in town once too often. He also greets me with his beautiful deep Welsh burr by name all weekend, enquiring after my welfare each time. The sort of turn you are prepared to crawl over broken riders for.

I take time out to burst into Dana Immanuel’s backstage enclave to wish them well for their show. “You won’t remember me!” I exclaim. “I do…” purrs cajonista H, albeit in the sort of tone which suggests that somebody may have forgotten to renew a restraining order. “Do a fabulous show!” is all I can think of to blurt. I resist the temptation to go the full Wizard of Oz and continue “…and your little doggie!!” in case I’m dragged away by security but do manage a strangled “I love you!”** The next time I saw Dana was at two in the morning singing ‘Wagon Wheel’. As you do.

Saturday dawns full and bright, and I have another day of my virtual twelve hour house concert to enjoy. M’good friend and occasional employer Tony James Shevlin puts in a shift in the afternoon and then later again in the Stygian gloom of the evening, where we are delighted to bump into Rich Hall, later to appear in his own show, but currently mournfully regarding the line up for the John Prine tribute to take place in The Peacock Cafe (another barn in all truth), which has been COVID- safeguarded in terms of ventilation  by the simple expedient of taking out about a third of the wall. 

The queue for the stage is considerably larger than some of the audiences I’ve seen, but Rich is kind enough to look obligingly like he knows me for my souvenir snap. During a gap in proceedings on The Medicine Show I take to the stage myself, indulging in a few songs just in order that I can say I trod the boards as a solo artist once again. Helen is later annoyed that I didn’t summon her to perform and I gravely inform her that this constitutes misuse of the radio under the Stage Manager’s Code. She nods solemnly, abashed.

On Sunday I have a lighter line up than I deserve, and so have mostly to make sure Tony Winn doesn’t fall off the stage during his return to the live arena. He is ably supported by The Fragrant and Charming Helen Mulley on vocals, who is keen that her offspring should be attendant to behold her magnificence. The boys are working the festival and so I offer to summon them via the power of wireless communication. “I thought that breached the Stage Manager’s Code?” she suggests.

I summon my inner Captain Barbossa. “It’s not so much a code, Missy” I explain piratically. It’s more a set o’ guidelines…”

*Diva

**That from me to them, not the other way round, in case you were wondering.

“You can dress me in Prada and uncomfortable shoes…”

Finally, a return to the live arena for Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs as we are engaged to perform at an end of term/retirement party at a local Primary School. The audience is overwhelmingly female - I haven’t played to such a gender specific crowd since that time The Star Club did a graduation party for student nurses, when bass player-come-booking agent Kilbey, upon being informed of the generous fee, replied solemnly “Well, you’ll have to give us time to raise the money…”

We are to perform al fresco, which gives us a sense of health and personal safety during the time of the great unpleasantness, and the familiar setting of the sports field gazebo lends us an enormous sense of wellbeing, as does the reassuring presence behind the sound desk of Blue House James, who has merely had to haul everything out of his shed, set it up, plug it in, and hope it all works as well as it did last time*. He regards a mildewy microphone solemnly. “This hasn’t been cleaned in about a year and a half” he explains “But neither has it been used”.

I am trying out the Nashville Tuning of which I have been reading so much recently, which essentially involves buying a set of twelve-string light gauges, and throwing away all the thicker ones. It gives a few of the songs a lighter, jangly, almost mandolin-y feel, aside from all the ones where I’ve put a capo on the fifth fret to give it a lighter, jangly…well,you get the idea.

Turny Winn, having secateured his banjo fingering hand into uselessness, is on one-handed melodeon, taking time out mid-performance to play a short set of his love songs** to the accompaniment of the Head, who has also delivered a stirring speech thanking the staff for their sterling efforts over the past year and a half, and which delivers the sort of analysis of the performance of certain ministers of state over the same time period which is most akin to the reviews of Spinal Tap’s 1980 Polymer Records comeback album. He also points out that the event (including our stipend) has been independently funded (just in case you, or a passing columnist for The Spectator was unduly concerned).

At break time we retire to a classroom to enjoy a hearty repast, including (somewhat appropriately) Eton Mess Cake, home made coleslaw, chicken satay and a vegetarian option for Mr. Wendell who, as with most of his kind, usually exists on crisps and crudités if and when Green Room catering is provided. He spends the second set slightly bloated as a result. Luckily (for him) he doesn’t sing much. “Don’t let me do that again” he entreats.

As the sun sets magnificently behind the gazebo, the full moon emerges from behind the sports centre, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Radio Nowhere’ soundtracks  the pack-down, Fiddly reflects on the incomers to his village over the course of the pandemic. “All looking to garden” he says. “Topsoil’s gone through the roof”. We consider this scenario, solemnly. “You can tell they’re not locals” he concludes. “Country folk don’t buy dirt”

*It does, it really does.

** https://open.spotify.com/album/0cvHvKgRbopVHstmRsH67D?si=ARd5Df_iR9eLvMqXlqu_0A&dl_branch=1

Whoooahhh - your secateurs are on fiiirrre!

“Which one is The Mendlesham Mast?” I interrupt the discussion to enquire. “Is it the tall thin one, or the one that looks like The Empire State Building?” Mr. Wendell is momentarily nonplussed. “I always thought it was that one” he waves peremptorily at the gargantuan structure off the port bow. He doesn’t shout “Robots!” though, which is what my son used to do on his way to nursery.

We are deep in discussion regarding the wisdom of boxed sets - currently The Esher Demos are receiving our attention, and if you don’t know what The Esher Demos are, you’d probably best sit in the back with La Mulley, who is bathed in the warm reflective glow of her mobile device and letting talk of the Bob Johnston sessions wash over her like cool rain on a summer’s night. It is also, coincidentally, both summer, and raining.

We are on our way back from Fiddly’s, where we have been workshopping the festival set in anticipation of our return to the live arena at the tail end of next month. In terms of social distancing and isolation, we are essentially the poster band for government guidelines in that it is astonishingly rare for us to be able to assemble all seven members of the band in one place at any one time anyway, hence the last-month preparation.

It is doubly egregious then, to receive the news that Turny Winn - our esteemed banjoista and Edinburgh Fringe veteran - has been occupying himself in the garden and has inadvertently pruned an integral part of his left hand. “Is it his whole finger?” someone asks, anxiously. “No, I think it’s the one next to it”. He regards the workshop full of awls and bandsaws cautiously. Fiddly takes the precaution of turning the nearest one off at the wall, first pointing out the scar from when he dragged his own finger across it. I quietly regard the bit where a sliced my knuckle with the sharp bit of the dog food can that morning, feeling a bit like Richard Dreyfuss in that bit on the boat in Jaws.

There have already been a number of less-than sympathetic exchanges on social media regarding the impact that Turny’s mishap might have on his technique - my own contribution is to point out that when Deep Purple’s Tommy Bolin was similarly incapacitated, the guitar roadie simply tuned his guitars to a number of open chords, pushed him out on the stage and told him to get on with it. Mind you, there were 14,000 eager Japanese fans waiting to see that performance, not a small group of teachers eager to celebrate the end of term with some gently applied East Angliacana in Colchester.

Mr. Winn compensates for his banjo-less fortune with some hastily adapted melodeon parts (ie he plays some new arrangements on the squeezebox, not that he uses the bellows to strum a G major on the Appalachian frying pan, that’s much more a Fred Frith kind of turn. Although a lot of our stuff is in G, so it couldn’t hurt). As when we had a bass player who played stand-up string, we are playing the same songs, but a subtle shift in instrumentation means that they now have a more pastoral, Trad. arr. aspect to them. 

This is pleasing to us generally, Turny aside, who enjoys playing it and is concerned that this might be part of a greater plot to oust the five string calfskin racquet from the ensemble. I assure him that this is not the case, however someone points out that with the reduction in percussive attack afforded by its absence Young Young Bob is going to have to work a lot harder on the banging and shaking front.

“That’s fine” says Gibbon, over by the bobbin sander. “He is the youngest. Anyway, what did I come in here for..?”

“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.