2005 – Page 26 – stevelawson.net

July 25, 2005

Italy post no. 6

(written 24/7/05 10.45)

I’ve just arrived at the venue for todays, gig and it’s unbelieveable – it’s in the grounds of a huge chateau, known locally as ‘little versailles’ – beautiful gardens, an 18th century stately home, and a massive great covered venue in the gardens – huge stage, lighting rig. Ripe for some solo bass loveliness.

The range of acts playing is pretty broad for a bass-centric event – from me at the start, through to a big band playing some of Jaco’s big band stuff at the end, with Michael Manring as featured guest. It’s going to be a fun day.

As well as that, there’s a bit of a gear expo going on – lots of freaky looking high end basses, gadgets and amps galore. The problem with having a set-up that I’m as happy with as I am is that gear loses its appeal, unless it does the same thing only smaller.

Michael and I have been talking a lot in the last couple of days about how to reduce our processing setup down to a laptop and a handful of pedal controllers. The idea of taking two basses and one bag to gigs, especially once I get my powered Accugroove speakers, is sublime. I’m definitely going to start investigating what’s possible, and checking out possible pitfalls like latency. It’d open up all kinds of other options for loopage and processing too – being able to use the Ohm Boys filter live would be a dream, as well as being able to have the tail on a reverb or delay carry on fading whilst switching to a whole other channel to carry on playing, with different reverb and delay settings. Geek heaven!

Today is definitely going to involve a lot of sitting around not doing much, but I can’t think of a nicer place to be sitting around doing nothing in.

July 23, 2005

Another London Tragedy

So it seems that the man shot on the tube yesterday wasn’t in any way connected to the terrorist bombings. Why am I more shaken and fearful as a result of this than the bombing? I feel sick to my stomach to know that an innocent man has been shot in the head by police on the underground. I’m not placing blame – I have no idea how thoroughly the police had followed whatever proceedure their anti-terrorist measures require, or just how unlucky the guy was to fit a profile so exactly that his behaviour ended with him receiving five shots to the head, but right now, I’m seriously freaked out.

And I feel deep sorrow for the policeman who fired the shots. The pain he will be going through is inconceivable. What a dreadful dreadful experience. To act to save a train-full of people and end up with innocent blood on your hands.

A very dark day for London.

The comments on the Guardian newsblog’s post about the shooting are an interesting reflection of the feelings of some londoners.

This is a time when it feels very strange to be this far from home.

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’.

July 23, 2005

Italy post no. 5

(written 23/7/05 14.37)

So I’m now in Bollate, near Milan – today is the clinic day of the Noi Bassisti bass event, with me, Michael Manring, Lorenzo Feliciati …. and others doing clinics. What I always forget is that doing a clinic with a translator means you can only say half as much. The hour flew by, but people seemed to be into it. We’ll see if I get any more feedback as the weekend goes on.

It’s great to see Michael again – after touring with someone as much as Michael and I have, it’s very tempting and easy to slip into your own homegrown language, particularly in a foreign country… …so we’ve succumbed, but are trying to explain the things we’re laughing at to the people around; an occasionally fruitless task given that no-one seems to laugh at the same stuff as us.

The journey from Brescia to Bollate was made very easy by Andrea and Marco from the film gig last night offering to drive me here, and drop me off. The Italians are such lovely people! I’ve not met one I don’t like. Italian audiences have all been very up for new music, and effusive in their feedback, and the promoters have – contrary to the reputation – been fantastic. I like it here!

Still haven’t had a chance to log on for long enough to see what’s going on in the world – given the amount of time I normally spend reading online news and blogs, it feels very odd to be cut off from the net here. I had a chance to log on briefly this morning, which is when I uploaded the other blog posts, but for the most part, I’ve been netless.

July 23, 2005

Italy post no. 4 – first gig of the trip

(written 23/7/05 1.10)

Well, tonight was probably the hardest solo gig I’ve ever done, but was pretty rewarding for it.

The gig was providing an improvised soundtrack to a silent film from the 20’s called L’Inhumaine, directed by M. L’Herbier – a part surreal/part narrative film that was OVER TWO HOURS LONG!! This last bit I wasn’t told til about an hour before the gig.

The venue was beautiful – a cloistered court yard, with an art exhibition hanging in the cloisters, and chairs laid out in the courtyard facing a huge screen that was projected onto, with me sat in front of it, slightly off to the left, watching the film and reacting to what went on on screen.

There were two major problems that I hadn’t really forseen – the first was not having a light – the organisers had offered me one, but I thought there’d be enough ambient light to see what I was doing. i was wrong. And number two, the bits on the film where words come up on screen to help you follow the story, Harold Lloyd stylee, were in Italian. The film was French, and if the bits between had been french I’d have been fine, as I’d have been able to follow the story a lot more clearly. As it was, it took me quite a while to work out who was who in the story, and who was a good guy and who was a bad guy, and who was just some weirdness thrown in for Avant Garde effect.

As it is, it was a qualified success – the second half was a lot better than the first, as I had worked out what I was doing by then, and started to use the loops in much more sophisticated ways, keeping some loops and fading them in and out as leitmotifs for different bits of the story, I also had stopped trying to add to many literal ideas and near-sound-effects – I tried this a few times, and it was largely a bad idea (worked for a couple of driving scenes, but not so well for crowd noise etc.)

Thankfully, the audience loved it – it got loads of applause, for a v. long time, and lots of lovely compliments afterwards.

The other fun angle on the gig was that about a third of the way through, we started to see lightning in the sky, obviously from a fair way away, but there was always the possibility that it was heading our way. As the film went on, we had the occasional moment of gusty wind, which made the screen flap about, but cooled me down a little.

The actual rain held off until less than a minute after I’d finished – people were still clapping when the first drop of rain hit me, and within another minute from then, the rain was torrential – fortunately, we got my gear under cover before that bit happened. The rain then turned to hail – huge great mint imperial-sized hail stones, accompanied by lightning that lit up the sky like an apocalyptic hollywood special effects team who’d be asked to go really OTT on the lightning.

So all in, a fun, worthwhile evening that was very well appreciated by the lovely Italian crowd (are Italian crowds ever anything less than lovely? I think not.), and a great learning experience for me.

July 23, 2005

italy post no. 3

(written 22/7/05 14.15)

It’s really odd being away from home, and away from fast internet when people are getting shot on the London underground. I sent TSP a text message this morning from the beside the pool, sitting in the sun having just had a lovely swim and a leisurely breakfast, and got one back saying that a guy had been shot dead by plain clothes police on the London underground. That kind of thing messes with your head, big time.

So I got online and had a read about it on the BBC news site, but being back using a dial-up connection was fairly debilitating, and meant I couldn’t find all my usual news blogs etc. (time to get my del.ic.ious page up to scratch so I can get all my links anywhere any time… )

So I’m having a lovely time in Italy – great food, great wine, fantastic company, scintillating conversation, and all the while London is in turmoil, quite understandably.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can find out why the bombs yesterday didn’t go off – one suggestion is that they were made at the same time as the last lot and were somehow out of date by now (dunno if this was some sort of electronic detonation device, or if they included some sort of organic ingredient that had just decayed). Either way, it seems like thursday’s bombs were a really lucky escape for London, and have left a bit of a trail for the phorensic peoples to chase up.

Feel free to email bits of info if you have them!

Soundtrack – right now I’m listening to ‘Grace And Gratitude’ – by some weirdness, I’d not actually sent Luca a copy when it came out (can’t quite believe that, but still!), so I’m playing it to him…

July 23, 2005

Italy post no. 2

(written 21/7/05 23.53)

So I’ve landed in Italy, and it looks like my rack made it through unscathed (haven’t plugged it in yet, but no external damage suggests no internal damage either, hopefully.

So now I’m staying with the marvellous Luca and Giovanna – two very dear friends who manage to make any trip to their place feel like a home from home. After the rather fraught journey, dinner at Cascina Capuzza and much intelligent chat with Luca and Gio was just what the doctor ordered. I’m now sat in bed, writing this having edited my address book export (a CSV file, messed up by any line where I’ve put a comma after a word…) so that it could be imported into the Mac address book.

Still haven’t found a way to copy my diary onto here… I think I’ll have to get a bluetooth thingie for the laptop and see if that recognises my phone any better than it does via the USB cable…

July 23, 2005

Italy post no. 1

(written on the plane, 21/7/05 18.02)

What a day!

Given the travel fuck-ups in London of late, I decided to leave plenty of time to get to Gatwick for the flight to Italy… Little did I know I’d need every second of the FIVE HOURS that it took to get from Southgate to the airport!

The Picadilly Line is already suspended up where I am, so I had to get the ‘rail replacement bus service’ from Arnos Grove to Seven Sisters (oh yes, I’m going into all the really dull details, just for you lovely bloglings… and cos I’m on a flight with not much else to do!) but when I got to Seven Sisters tube, a little man in an orange jacket (perhaps fresh from Guantanamo) said that the whole Victoria Line was suspended…

At this point, the serendipity of my having just got a new phone (Sony K750i) kicked in, as it has an FM Radio built in. I’d been listening to the mighty Robert Elms on BBC Radio London, and he’d done a quick announcement that something had happened just before I got to the tube, but as I crossed the road to try and get on a bus towards Victoria, the situation started to unfold in a fledgling way. The report came through that three ‘incidents’ had taken place, at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush tube stations, and soon after a fourth incident came through on a bus in Shepherd’s Bush. Radio London switched to rolling news, and kept updating with all the facts and no speculation, and did a remarkable job, which greatly helped with the next installment of my journey, definitely the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me on a bus…

…the radio broadcast is interrupted by my phone ringing, and it’s Muriel Anderson on the other end of the line – it’s always a delight to hear from Muriel and my immediate assumption was that she was coming to England to look for gigs. ‘I’m in Indianapolis, doing a live radio spot, and was wondering if you wanted to talk on air about the bomb situation’…!! I checked to see whether they meant the one from two weeks ago, or todays – not knowing whether news would have filtered as far as Indianapolis – and they confirmed it was today. Fortunately having been listening to the radio I was able to fill them in on all the latest official details, and quash a few rumours about huge explosions and the like… My first ever live international radio interview whilst on public transport, that’s for sure!

The bus proved to be a pretty unreliable way of getting across London – it stopped for over an hour on High Holborn, and then turfed us all out – but with the tube network being pretty much closed, I didn’t have any choice but to sit it out, and watch the three hour margin I’d left myself gradually ebb away. The second bus moved much quicker once we got past Oxford Street, and eventually we got to Victoria, and I made it straight onto the Gatwick Express.

At this point, I want to praise British Airways. my initial idea for this trip was to take my rack on the plane as handluggage, and put my bass in the hold in a foam-flight-case. But I weighed my rack-case this morning and it was 50lbs! Not the kind of thing you can get away with as hand luggage. So the plan switched to taking the bass in a soft case again, and checking the rack, hoping it’ll get through OK (it is packed with all my clothes too, so should be padded OK).

I’m used to having to sweet-talk my bass onto a planes by all means neccesary – starting with chat about favourite shades of nail varnish, moving up to compliments on people’s hairstyles, and culminating in blind panic if it looks like I’m going to have to put a soft case in the hold… At the BA check in desk, not a question was asked. The lovely lady who took the rack from me was fine with me taking the laptop and the bass onto the plane, and was very helpful with labeling up the rack as fragile and getting it hand carried down to the plane. None of the other BA staff questioned me taking the bass on board, and it’s now nestling in the overhead compartment above my head!

So as you can now tell, I made it onto the plane, from whence I write (to be uploaded when I find some delicious Italian WiFi at the other end). I’m sat here, listening to Gillian Welch, sipping tomato juice (why do I only ever drink tomato juice on planes? I really like it!) having just eaten a lovely veggie meal, along with everyone else: BA are smart enough to just serve veggie food to everyone, so there’s no questions about who gets what food! smart as plums.

Anyway, the situation with the ‘incidents’ as I left it in London was that there had been four explosions, all much much smaller than the ones two weeks ago, and that no-one had been killed, and there were very few casualties at all – the only confirmed one being the owner of on of the rucksacks that exploded.

Whoever it was who did it did a rather good job of ballsing up London’s transport for another day, and have probably scared quite a few commuters. I’m just glad that the bombs either malfuctioned or were only detonators with no payload. Enough already with the bombing, please!

…and in that serendipitous way that chance can provide a day’s soundtrack, the track that’s just come on iTunes is John Martyn’s ‘I don’t want to know about evil’ – I don’t want to know about evil, I only want to know about love… I’ll find the lyrics and post them when I find the delicious italian wifi.

Soundtrack – John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

July 20, 2005

Be A Witness

From the BeAWitness.org website –

“During June 2005, CNN, FOXNews, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur.”

I’ve recently started reading a blog from an aid worker in Darfur, and was saddened at how little of what she writes about I’d read from other sources. I’ve heard a fair bit about the Darfur situation, but there still seems to be nowhere near enough pressure to change things there, and clearly not enough news coverage.

So the BeAWitness.org people are petitioning the news sources to cover the story more – check out their website, sign the petition and have a read of the Darfur aid worker blog too – both well worth seeing.

July 20, 2005

'democracy' brings a shift to the right in Iraq.

Well, lots of people said it would happen. Apparently, the new Iraqi constitution “could sharply curb women’s rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.”

So what happened to this new found freedom that The US promised following blowing up Iraqi cities? We’ve already got a situation where ‘immodestly dressed’ iraqi women are having acid thrown at them.

All it shows is that the invaders have really not thought through the ramifications of attempts to democratise in the middle east. Obviously bombing for democracy is a shitty idea anyway, but what happens if the democratically elected government don’t meet with your approval? Are we going to be heading for a situation in the middle east like we had in Central America in the 70s and 80s where the CIA were training and funding right wing militia groups to try and oust democratically elected left wing governements? Only this time it’ll be islamic governments that get elected, and bringing elements of sharia law. At the moment, there are very few countries that use sharia law, but it may become more popular as ‘open’ elections allow militants to run alongside moderates, and challenge people to vote for a ‘proper’ islamic party.

It will, ironically, probably mirror the insane scare tactics used by Bush in the last election in the US, where the religious vote is galvanised around a couple of issues that are deemed to be the most important for people of faith, thus allowing a hideous government to get elected despite them having the worst interests of most of the people at heart. In the US, it was abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. I’m not even going to speculate how things would go in the middle east.

Either way, this new Iraqi constitution could lead to yet more suffering and bloodshed in the quest for ‘democracy’.

Soundtrack – Jughead, ‘Jughead’.

July 20, 2005

Ken Livingstone on the bombings…

nice to see Ken getting back to his campaigning side. In the aftermath of the bombings, he quite understandably steered clear of political point scoring and sought to offer words of consolation for the victims and condemnation for those who carried out the bombings.

But now he’s placing the blame for the unrest between Arabs and the west squarely at the feet of 80s years of interventionist politics in the middle east. There are some choice quotes in the article, taken from an interview he did this morning on the Today Programme on Radio 4.

You can Listen again to his interview here.

Most of his comments are bleedin’ obvious, but it’s important that they are made at this time. I think Ken’s timing is also worthy of note – he’s left a respectful gap before engaging in the politics of the discussion, giving time for the first wave of shock and grief to pass (though obviously not for the families of those who died).

Anyway, nice one Ken.