the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Rise Kagona and Doug Veitch on BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Celtic Connections’ show – I’m SOOO looking forward to this gig! Rise and Doug sound great with just two guitars and percussion, so it’ll be great to hear what we manage to do with added bass, keys and drums.
Today is learning the songs day – there are some seriously tricky bass-parts, and this is going to take some work!
just had a ‘fringe bulletin’ email through, with some facts and figures about this year’s Fringe Festival –
Fringe 2005 presented 26,995 performances of 1800 shows in 247 venues, and hosted 16,190 performers.
As the 59th Edinburgh Festival Fringe drew to a close, the Fringe Society announced a record 1,335,000 ticket sales.
That’s nuts! And only the 335,000 were my gigs! Who were the other million, and why weren’t they at my show?
or ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’, as advertising men speaking cod-German say.
I’ve just bought meself an Oyster Card – prompted largely by the announcement that the cash price of tube tickets is going up, but oyster tickets are coming down. I guess the plan is to get more people prepaying for tickets, topping up either automatically or online, and therefor not clogging up ticket-halls with huge queues, and getting people in and out of the tube network quicker. Either way, the price decrease is welcome, and the increase isn’t, so I’m getting an Oyster card.
And what’s more, Oyster cards make a great bleeping noise when you go through the barriers. Very satisfying.
Britain’s public transport is currently a shambles. Well, not all of it, but certainly the london tube, and the national rail system are nowhere near of the standard they could and should be. Both are pretty much crippled by PFI, or the threat of PFI… The selling off of the Tube was one of those things that nobody, save people managing investment portfolios, wanted. Everyone except the government recognises that what’s needed is huge investment, on a level that won’t be profitable to the tube enough for it to work under private investment. That’s because the benefits won’t be felt by the Tube itself. it will be of benefit to London, make it more attractive to tourists, render cars a pain the ass, and generally improve access for all Londoners, but the necessary renovations will cost billions of pounds.
And I haven’t even started on just how far short of the legal requirements for disabled access the Tube system falls. Somewhere less than 10% of the stations are wheelchair accessible. What it must be like traveling by tube for a disabled person I dread to think. There’s no way that the PFI funding is going to prioritise disabled access – there’s no money to be made in helping cripples get round London, of course. They can just get their mobility busses, and rely on friends to ferry them around. Clearly their independence means nothing in this most modern of modern capital cities.
Anyway, I will soon be Oyster-boy, swanning in and out of tube stations without a care in the world.
Soundtrack – KD Lang, ‘Ingenue’.
Read the whole article – the number of laws enacted and misused since the much-maligned ‘Criminal Justice Act’ of the early 90s is staggering. The suppression of dissent is surely one of the hallmarks of a repressive regime – just the kind of behaviour that Tony and his buddy Dubya are always telling us is threatening democracy in all them foreign lands where bad people threaten our ‘freedoms’. Just in the paragraph above, the catalogue of misapplication of laws supposedly enacted to prevent terrorism should be enough to get any self-respecting supporter of the democratic right to disagree with your leaders up in arms. How any labour or lib-dem MP can possibly be silent in the light of such behaviour is mind-boggling. As George points out, it’s taken the aggressive man-handling of an octogenarian at the party conference for most of us to wake up to just how pernicious the outworking of these laws is, supposedly in the name of protecting liberty.
I don’t know about you, but I’m less worried right now about bombers than I am about the enactment of these crazy laws. Parliament can do what it wants, without anyone having the right to respond with even their presence outside the building. No placards, no massed gatherings, all in the cause of getting rid of Brian Haw.
Time to start making some noise about it methinks. Perhaps a letter to your MP might be in order?
Soundtrack – Charlie Peacock, ‘Love Press Ex-Curio’ (I’ve had this for a few weeks now, and I think it’s actually released now as well – it’s a fantastic change of direction for Charlie, whose previous work was kind of funky singer/songwriter stuff, fairly heavily Prince-influenced in places and very soulful. This is a contemporary jazz record, featuring lots of the biggest names in the field – Ravi Coltrane, Jeff Coffin, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joey Baron, James Genus, Victor Wooten, Kirk Whalum etc. etc. The sound is sort of Avishai Cohen/Dave Douglas/lots of other new york electric jazz peoples ball-park, and the writing and play are top notch. If you’re into that kind of thing, it’s a must, especially as all the ‘in the know’ types that you hang out with won’t have heard of it, and will be very jealous that you got there first when you play it to them.)
What a sad sad loss. Without a doubt, one of the finest comedy actors and writers Britain has ever seen. When they recently brought back the best of the Two Ronnies on BBC1, the thought that they might be gearing up for some new material was fantastic – That Ronnie Barker hadn’t been writing comedy for 15 years seemed like such a waste. His love of word play, and remarkable facility with language meant that it was comedy that often required focussed listening, and it was justification for their writing when the ‘Four Candles’ sketch was recently voted the nations favourite comedy sketch. (It was that sketch that inspired the titles of two of the tunes on Lessons Learned From An Aged Feline Pt II)
So he’ll be hugely missed, and we’ll now never have that one last Christmas special. Just endless hours of Two Ronnies and Porridge videos to remind us of one of the funniest people any of us have ever seen.
From The BBC news site –
This certainly tallies with my experience – of late, digital sales have been out running CD sales for quite a few months (not counting CD sales at gigs, which is still the place where most CDs are sold). I’m probably selling three downloads for every two CDs, with people seemingly opting for the instant nature of downloads, and the reduced price (and no shipping price).
Which is great for me – it’s nice being able to pass the savings onto the buyer with not having to sell a physical CD. I still can’t envisage a time when I was releasing download-only albums as my main release format, but it means that I can continue to do what I do now, which is to press a run of CDs, and then have them become download-only when the CDs sell out. At some point in the future I might press a double or triple-pack CD of the first two or three solo Cds, but I’d have to shift a lot of them for it to be worth my while…
The download thing also means that I’ll be able to do the extra disc with the next album (Lessons Learned.. vol III?) as a download, which will mean that those ordering the next album will get something to listen to as soon as they order the album, and I won’t have to pay pressing costs for a CD I’m not actually selling… and as soon as the CD release date arrives, the extra disc becomes available for sale.
I do love the way that OSCommerce handles web-sales, managing downloads, differing prices for concession gig tickets, options to choose t-shirt sizes etc… when I get enough web-space, I’ll even be able to start offering the download albums in a range of formats… It’s all good.
Oh, which reminds me, Don’t forget to get your tickets for the gig at Darbucka on the 13th… 
Soundtrack – Duke Ellington, ‘Classic Tracks Of The 1940s’
Phone rings. Caller ID thingie says it’s Ned Evett. Where’s Ned? I answer. Turns out his in Islington! (the exclamation mark is there ‘cos I was expecting him to be in Boise, Idaho – if someone from St Luvvie’s had rung me to say they were in Islington, they wouldn’t warrant any ! at all.)
Fortunately, I had a few hours that I’d set aside for practicing and writing new tunes that I could happily sacrifice for a couple of hours sat eating and drinking mint tea with Ned. Ned’s a fretless guitarist – makes his own fretless guitars (or, at least, renders other guitars fretless) by removing the fingerboards and replacing them with mirrored glass. Yes, that’s what I said, mirrored glass. No lines, no frets, just smooth glass. He’s clearly insane, or would be if it didn’t sound so great. The lovely thing about Ned’s music is that despite the freakishness of his chosen instrument, it’s all about songs. He’s a singer/songwriter, who happens to have a guitar that looks like it was designed by Salvador Dali.
Anyway, I can’t think of many nicer ways to spend a monday afternoon that sitting chatting with Ned.
Soundtrack – Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’.
OK, I know I’ve just done one of these, and really it ought to be a month-end thing, but the search terms that have come up for the blog in the last two days are just mad –
1 2 8.70% armstrong
2 2 8.70% crepe crusader
3 2 8.70% strange things
4 1 4.35% bassworld
5 1 4.35% birthdays e-mails
6 1 4.35% do nothing til you hear from me
7 1 4.35% doug lunn
8 1 4.35% francis dunnery the brook southampton set list
9 1 4.35% jeff buckley french government
10 1 4.35% lindisfarne uk holy island
11 1 4.35% michael manring soliloquy 12
12 1 4.35% one quiet night preamp
13 1 4.35% raphaËl nadal photos
14 1 4.35% really cool myspace
15 1 4.35% ross noble interviews
16 1 4.35% steve the racist
17 1 4.35% things to do in december london
18 1 4.35% top banana with timmy mallett
19 1 4.35% video killed the radio star – a protest song
20 1 4.35% work is more fun than fun
Do I really need to highlight any of them in particular that are freaky, dear bloglings?? Good lord, there are some crazy mutants out there in webworld.
Regular readers or Stevie-gig-goers will already be familiar with John Lester – he’s proof if ever it were needed that being fantastic won’t necessarily make you a star (if it did, he’d be the new Sting). For the uninitiated, he’s a singer/songwriter who plays upright and electric bass to accompany himself. He’s a marvelous songwriter, and a really gifted bassist, and has released two really lovely albums.
One of his now-regular gigs is with Nashville-based singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters, both opening the show solo and playing bass for Gretchen’s trio.
It’s one of my favourite gig experiences – going to see a friend play that I know is fantastic, but the rest of the audience is pretty much unaware of, knowing that within the next half an hour, lots of people are going to have a new artist to add to their list of favourites. I remember seeing Julie Lee play at the Stables on one of the Bob Harris Presents… nights, where very few people knew who she was, and most of the audience were in love before she came off stage. A great feeling. I like offering things like that to my audience (obviously in a smaller way, as my crowds tend to be smaller than those that Gretchen or the Bob Harris gigs pull) – the gigs I’ve done with Rob Jackson, Calamateur and John Lester have offered that to the people who had come to see me play, and got to hear something else marvelous into the bargain.
Anyway, John won the audience over last night with his first song, and by the end of the set, was selling CDs like a headline act. Great to see.
I wasn’t familiar with Gretchen’s music before the gig, but am a convert now – there are hints of Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow before she went crap, and even a bit of Joni Mitchell, but in a really mellow guitar/double bass/piano trio. Beautiful songs played to perfection. It was great seeing John just doing the bassist’s job – we solo players rarely get to see each other playing in bands (oh, if I had a fiver for every email I get saying ‘I’d love to see you playing in a band’…) so that was a real treat.
And what’s more, the early curfew at the venue meant that John and I could head off for curry and catch up on a year’s worth of news and gig stories.
The only downer on the evening at all was the choice of venue – I’ve done my rant about Carling venues before, and this one was at the Bar Academy in Islington – this was a better environment that when I saw Nick Harper here, but why have an all standing venue for an acoustic trio?? Why have a barman making loads of noise when an acoustic trio is on? The layout of the venue is rubbish, and again, the lack of chairs seems primarily aimed at keeping the beer drinking potential of the audience mobile enough to up their consumption.
I hope the promoter of the show finds a more suited venue soon…
Soundtrack – Vikki Clayton, ‘Looking At The Stars’.
Here’s the top 20 search terms for the blog – not surprisingly, Eric was by far the most searched for query that lead people to the site. the others aren’t that exciting, though I love the idea of somebody being so bored that they’d search the internet for ‘strange things’. And for some reason ‘etymology of dude’ crops up every month in the list – how weird is that??
1 eric roche
2 steve lawson
3 tal wilkenfeld
4 brooklyn beckham
5 background images for myspace
6 myspace people
7 eric roche illness
8 love press ex-curio
9 strange things
10 joe perman
11 myspace background images
12 narcissim
13 amy kohn
14 bangla ringtone
15 bassworld
16 charlie peacock love press ex curio review
17 do nothing til you hear from me
18 etymology of dude
19 laws on piracy
20 link 182
…and here’s a handful of the more bizarre search strings that led to www.stevelawson.net over the last month – the mind boggles!
german chicken dance download
when did robbie williams play at la scala in london
steve lawson afc wimbledon
supergluing cuts
garmet sawing machine
guestbook northampton 2005
telephone number st columba s church johnstone terrace edinburgh
fingers vinegar callouses -leroy
e=mc2 mks
electric archlute
died from hiccups
dr fox hypothesis
finley quaye = kevin bacon
i like to go bowling with my friend bert mp3
houmus recipe