Year: 2007

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fun gig.. eventually

So Mum and I went down to see my lovely Grandparents in the tin-box-on-wheels, a little later than planned due to road closures (pointless detail for the benefit of The Cheat – he panics if he doesn’t get the full picture). Lovely day spent with Les Gramps, then mum and I set off to Gipsy Hill in South London for me to play at Freedom Of Expression II – the second of the nights that Tim Eveleigh is now running (the first being the one in Croydon that I’ve played a few times, and the third being one i’m playing soonish… need to add that to the gig calendar).

Anyway, once again, I gave Google Maps directions far too much benefit of the doubt, and we got hopefully lost in that bit of South London that has towns called things like Pratt’s Bottom and Badger’s Arse or something…. So it took us about 45 minutes longer than it should’ve to get there.

But when we did, all was good – the lovely Cara Winter was on stage as we got there, sounding great as always, was followed by the also-great Gaz Twist, followed by me. The sound was great, the new strings were a little disconcerting (I change the strings on my fretless every 2 years or so, so new strings feel VERY odd to start with…) but I played OK, talked rubbish, and a fun time was had by all.

This morning my car was ready to be picked up, so I took the tin-box back, paid the £369 that could’ve been so much more if what they did hadn’t got it through, and got into my own car… shit, this thing’s easy to drive!!! Only after the tin box did I really get the full contrast. I remember what it felt like when I first got it, after 10 years of knackered diesel fiestas… yummmm.

And onto today magazine columns to be written, albums to be recorded, stuff to be packed. The life of the itinerant solo bassist…

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Gig tonight to be live webcast (Thursday)

Should’ve mentioned this before, but I’m being a bit slack of late with this stuff…

Anyway, my gig tonight in South London is being webcast – come back here about 10 to 10.30pm, and hopefully this embedded link will be featuring me playing lovely music…

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You've come a long way baby…

Where were we? Are yes, I was car-less in Barnet… well, I rang the garage who were sorting my car out for its MOT – T & H Motors in Barnet (020 8449 2672) – to ask if they knew of a place I could rent a car for tonight and tomorrow (given that I was going to lose teaching revenue and then not be able to go and see the lovely gramps tomorrow), and the response was that they had a car they’d lend me. Very nice indeed ‘it looks terrible but it’s very reliable’ i was told. And indeed, it doesn’t look like much.

But the big shock was driving it – you forget what cars used to be like, in the days before power steering, power assisted breaks, automatic choke and all the general comfort of any car made in the last 10-15 years. All cars used to be like this! It reminds me just how fortunate I am to have the Rover, even if it is about to cost me £££ to get it through it’s MOT, it’s a lovely car, comfortable, nice to drive, and all thanks to the delightful and wonderful Lovely G and Lovely J. Thanks!

Anyway, cars have come a long way in a relatively short space of time, so if you’re not driving around in a late 70s/early 80s tin can, say a small prayer of thanks to the Gods of Motoring (or Clarkson if you like) that car makers discovered comfort.

So tomorrow, my lil’ mum and I will be off to Sussex in said tin can, and then to my gig tomorrow night in south london… hang on, where the hell is my gig tomorrow night? I think i’d better find out…

Oh, the point of this – of course, it’s the wonder of being lent a car by T & H Motors – fabulous people, great mechanics (the specialise in Rolls Royce, Bentley, Jaguar etc…) and nice enough to lend a car to a long term customer… I’ve been taking my cars there for almost a decade, and they’ve had a few grand out of me in business by now (given that I had the big end go on one car, the head gasket on another and numerous other disasters along the way… :o) But now my loyalty to them is paying off in more ways than just great service, as I get lent the car. If you’re in North London and need a mechanic, call them on the number at the top, they’re the best.

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Call off the search

Well, i’ve found somewhere to live… the relevant info will be sent to those of you that need to know in the near future. Great news is it’s not only sharing with lovely friends, but the landlords are lovely friends, so no piling money into the pockets of some price-hiking property magnate for me. :o)

On the down side, my car has just failed its MOT, and it’ll be tomorrow lunch time before I know whether the £140 + VAT repairs will actually get it through, and if they don’t, it’ll be a lot more than that… bugger.

And i’ve got to get to St Alban’s tonight to teach… actually, no, I need to cancel my lesson in St Alban’s tonight, as it was going to be tight timing-wise even with a car. Without, I’ve got no chance… So that’s another £60 that the MOT has cost me, though it’ll be moved rather than scrapped altogether… ho hum…

What’s more of a problem is I’m meant to be taking my lovely mum to see my lovely (and 97 year old) Grandad and my equally lovely (and only slightly younger) nan tomorrow… ideas on a e-card… Ahh, shit, I’ve also got a gig tomorrow night… balls. This is going to require some planning. OK, less blogging more planning.

Oh, and on top of all that, I’m days and days late on my column for Bass Guitar Magazine and have an album’s worth of bass tracks to record for an album by a fab singer from Leeds (more on that as it unfolds) – I did some last night, which sound good, but there’s lots to be done, in between overspending on the car, moving house, getting to East Sussex to see lovely old peoples, paying my tax bill (forgot about that bit) writing articles and teaching…

So not busy at all then.

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Monbiot on Eco-comsumerism…

Once again, the wonderful George Monbiot has hit the nail on the head in this article for the Guardian, in which he addresses the false notion that the future of the planet can be assured by doing business as usual with a coat of green paint – keep buying all the same old shit, just make sure it’s the ‘green’ version. Keep flying all over the place, just ‘carbon off-set’, keep driving the huge car, just get the bio-diesel version. At least then you won’t have to mix with the plebs on public transport.

The three Rs of the eco-movement, as told to us by Jack Johnson are Reduce Reuse Recycle. there’s a reason why Reduce is the first. Cutting our consumption is by the far the most important of these. It’d be great if we didn’t need to recycle stuff because we could reuse, and even better if we weren’t using it in the first place.

The biggest fallacy in all of this is the carbon-offsetting thing – what started out as a well-meaning and vaguely scientific way of introducing some balance into our carbon producing actions has now become a cheap way to assuage the guilt of the middle classes, so that instead of flying less or driving less or using less, they can just buy themselves a licence to pollute. Plant a few trees, keep the hummer, fly to Manchester instead of taking the train? no problem, just sprout a conifer or two and all is forgiven. Bollocks. Utter bollocks. Carbon-offsetting is a great idea to help to minimise the impact of UNAVOIDABLE carbon-useage. it’s a great reminder of our need to consume less. It doesn’t, never can and never will repair the damage we’re doing. If we are still fostering a culture of cheap domestic flights and allowing politicians to get away with airport expansion, we’re screwed. That all needs to change, both on a political level and a personal one.

And as always, I say this as someone who uses planes, who hates it every time I HAVE to and will avoid them wherever possible.

There are loads of great things you can do, lots of the stuff that the style mags write about – using shopping bags instead of plastic ones, eating organic, shopping local, buying at farmers markets, driving hybrids, catching trains instead of driving, recycling, but the bottom line is that we need to CONSUME LESS. The seemingly sad news is that there isn’t a way to maintain the level of consumption and waste that we’re currently at in the UK and even more so the US. There isn’t a ‘green version’ of that. It’s going to affect our lifestyles.

The good news, however, is that cutting back will give us that which we can’t buy. Time. Time for people, for hobbies, for reading, for music, art, cooking – stuff that doesn’t require endless stuff being fed into it to keep it going (OK, musicians need strings, plectrums, reeds etc. and artists need paint/clay etc but it hardly compares with helicopter rides or Branson’s domestic space program in terms of the consumption…) I’m pretty confident that the world can be a much better place AND a place of drastically reduced consumption in time to save it all. It just won’t be the same, and it certainly won’t be normal, thank God. After all, we all know that the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

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not really one for the U2 obsessives…

Here’s a clip from Ross Noble’s Randomist DVD – without doubt two of the funniest hours of comedy I’ve ever seen, and the bit in this clip where he starts going on about Bono made me cry the first time I heard it. Mike Radcliffe, you’re really not going to like this… ;o)

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Tony Levin – international man of myth-stories…

Went up to Hitchin to see/hear Tony Levin play and talk this evening. I’ve met Tony a number of times (the first being when I interviewed him for Bassist magazine back in the late 90s, and was introduced to the ideas behind the free improv of the King Crimson crowd by him and Trey Gunn, which directly shaped the ideas for the Recycle Collective so many years later…)

Anyway, it was lovely to see Tony and catch up a little without the din of NAMM or some aftershow party going on, and was even better to hear him talk about his career, his music and the people he’s played with. There’s this assumption that bass clinics are all about clever playing, but there are certain guys – Tony, Lee Sklar, Anthony Jackson, Chuck Rainey, and a bunch of others, who have so much experience, have seen so much – and no doubt made lots of mistakes along the way – that hearing them speak is of at least as much value as hearing them play. In Tony’s case, he’s also a fascinating composer, so it’s great that he played a couple of things, as well as demonstrating some Peter Gabriel lines, but hearing him talk about what happens on sessions, what it’s like working with certain people etc. – it’s an insight into the workings of the industry that few of the people there would get on a regular basis. All in all a fab evening, and an audience full of old friends, acquaintances and audience members, with quite a few people coming up and saying they’d seen me play with Michael the last couple of times he was over… all good stuff.

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All change!

….bass strings, that is! It’s been two years since I changed the strings on my fretless 6, so today was the day for a change. And while I was at it, I took the flatwound strings off my fretted 6, and put roundwounds on. The reason? Due to my having been on tour for 18 weeks of this year so far with nothing but a 6 string fretless bass, I can now play all the stuff I do on the fretted on the fretless. I’ve got a live recording of Jimmy James (probably the single hardest part to play on the fretless of all my tunes) that we recorded in Nebraska that’ll be on the live album, and it sounds great.

So, that means I can try something different on the fretted bass, so I’ve put twangy roundwound strings on (still Bass Centre Elites – I’ve been using the same brand of strings for about 14 or 15 years now…) and it sounds and feels really different.. and great! Should be fun seeing what comes out when I start writing for it…

Need to do the four string fretted tomorrow, when I can find the strings for it in amongst the craziness of my room…

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Two gigs that didn't really live up to their billing.

I’ve been to two ‘cool’ gigs in the last week – I’m not really one for cool gigs, preferring to avoid things that are either a) over-hyped or b) feature drums (the latter being due to my deep loathing of overly loud music…)

Anyway, last week I went to see Mogwai at Somerset House, and on Monday to see Squarepusher AKA Tom Jenkinson with Evan Parker at the QEH.

the Mogwai gig was OK. just OK. They played well, Somerset House is a great place for a gig, but… but none of it really went anywhere – I REALLY want to love Mogwai. There are bits about what they do that I really like. I love the big guitar sounds, I enjoy the fiddling around with odd time signatures and displaced beats etc. But it seems like their fear of turning into some sort of post-rock answer to Pink Floyd stops them from adding any BIG tunes to their stuff. So you get a handful of notes played over the wall of guitars on keyboard, or heavily processed voice, but it never goes stratospheric… or rather is very rarely does – the last two tunes they did before the Encore were getting there. Some great moments in those. So a good gig, but as they say on the interwebs it was all a bit ‘meh’.

And then to the QEH – I must preface this by saying that Squarepusher is without doubt one of the most interesting, iconoclastic and influential electronic artists in the UK, if not the world – his records are full of amazing compositions, incredible production, fascinating harmony and the maddest most sublime rhythmic programming you’ve ever heard. AND, most importantly in this context, some breathtaking bass playing. Really really amazing bass playing. Crazy fast funky magical bass playing.

This gig was, unbeknownst to me, a ‘solo bass gig’. The first set was just Tom and a 6 string bass. Before it started, I REALLY wanted to like it, I was hoping it was going to blow me away. But half way through the set, I was already drafting this blog and trawling through what he was doing desperately trying to find something positive to drag from it to contrast with the overwhelming impression that it was utter nonsense. A load of largely poor executed arpeggios – a range of techniques, few of them done particularly well, rattled off like a NAMM show demo by a kid with ADD.

I genuinely have no idea what Tom was aiming for. I have no idea what part of his strange and wonderful and clearly at times baffling musical world he was exploring with this, but one thing I’ve heard him say in interviews was writ large over the whole gig – he claims he doesn’t listen to much other music, avoids influence. And in the case of this gig, that’s exactly why he sounded like a solo bassist of about 15-20 years ago, making all the same overly twiddly ‘we can be as fast and wanky as guitarists’ mistakes that everyone else made back then, without attaching anything musical to it. Perhaps if he’d allowed himself to listen to Michael Manring or Jonas Hellborg, Trip Wamsley or Victor Wooten, it might have given him insight into some other musical paradigm possible with solo bass. But it really did absolutely nothing for me at all. I would LOVE to know what he thought of it. The audience – possibly the friendliest crowd I’ve ever come across – gave him a rapturous reception, to my utter amazement. Were they huge Squarepusher fans that would have applauded if he’s just taken a dump on the stage? Were they bass players easily impressed by a bunch of fairly sloppy overly fast arpeggiated chords? Or did they love it? Did I completely miss what he was trying to do? I’m guessing not, given that I’m pretty much slap bang in the middle of his target audience – a huge fan of his usual output, and someone who’s been interested in and exploring the whole idea of solo bass for nearly 20 years.

So the second half? Well, it started with out of the most remarkable bits of soprano sax playing I’ve ever heard, from Evan Parker – Evan has been a mainstay (and driving force behind) the UK free improv scene for 40 something years. A true giant of the instrument. And tonight he proved why. The piece was a technical, sonic and mesmerising tour de force, making a completely unprocessed soprano sax sound like at least four instruments intertwined. unbelievable.

And the evening finished with a free duo between the two of them, which was much better than the first half – Tom delved deep into the canon of well used free improv techniques, but that’s a good thing – he’d done his homework for sure, and created some lovely textures and interesting rhythms, whilst listening to and reacting to Evan’s glorious sax playing. It rescued the bass part of the evening for me, but I’m still baffled as to what on earth the first half was about…

Today on the tube, I put on his album ‘Go Plastic’ on the iPod. Yup, it’s incredible. Amazing stuff. He really is a genius. I then listened to the London Sinfonietta playing one or two of his pieces, and that too was great.

I hope he keeps going with solo bass, cos when he gets it right, I’m sure it’ll be amazing, and as with everything else he does, it’ll be unlike what anyone else has done with it. But on the strength of this show, I hope he does the rest of the exploration either behind closed doors or in a workshop setting…

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