the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
The Guardian today has a collection of quotes from Mo Mowlam – more evidence of what a marvellous woman she was. I’d not read the one with her threatening to headbutt Gerry Adams before, that’s another classic to go alongside the Ian Paisley one.
Soundtrack – Baba, ‘Rap Canterbury Tales’ (saw this at the festival, an amazing show, and it works equally well as an audio story on CD)
I’m so upset by this – Mo was an amazing woman, one of the few New Labour politicians who never seemed to toe the party line at all. She will forever be remembered as the woman who told Ian Paisley to ‘fuck off’, something a lot of people have been wanting to say to him for a long time.
She spoke at stop the war rallies, she was openly critical of much of the Blairite agenda, and spoke up about the victimisation she faced in parliment – a situation I’m sure many more people have to deal with but never have the balls to go public on.
Her death is a huge loss to British public life, to the personality of British politics, and the surrounding press will be another reminder to Blair that he can’t shape public opinion. Just as Robin Cook will be remembered more for his ethical stance against the war than for his affair, so Mo will be remembered as a woman who didn’t take the shit that New Labour tried to throw at her.
The good ones always die first…
other links – Guardian Newsblog, the Indie, news.bbc
TAGS – Mo Mowlam
Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.
I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!
the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).
They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.
The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.
Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.
And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.
And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.
The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.
And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.
Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)
So, after me highlighting the ridiculousness of his set at Live8 each night in my Edinburgh show, it seems that news has filtered back to my homeboy Snoop and he’s trying to put things right by starting a junior football league – apparently his league is cheaper than the one that has been there for years and he’s stealing all the players from.
Snoop gives it up for the poor kids. He must’ve heard a bootleg of my show!
Word up, dawg.
A few more reports coming in from the Edinburgh show –
this one is on BassWorld.co.uk and includes some photos of the night with Guy Pratt, this one is from the Rev G’s blog – he came to four gigs, so was able to compare them a bit, and here are the reviews on edfringe.com. If you were there, please feel free to post reviews either at edfringe.com or preferably in the reviews section on my forum. It’d be lovely to hear what you thought of the show.
Today was spent shopping with Wes for a bass – I love taking people to The Gallery for the first time, as the magicalness of it strikes you the minute you walk through the door – great basses everywhere, amps piled to the ceiling and lovely helpful staff. We managed to pick up a real bargain – an OLP 5 string for £190.
And now I’m listening to the soon-to-be-released Bruce Cockburn album, ‘Speechless’ – it’s a collection of his instrumentals, and is as expected, perfect. Beautiful tunes beautifully played. What’s not to love?
This is very odd indeed, being back on my trusty desktop PC after two weeks using the new iBook… I’m not sure I like it…
There are certain things that the mac does so well, particularly the RSS/XML integration with Safari.
It’s also a lot newer, so my email set up on there isn’t in quite such a dreadful state as it is on here.
Lots of work to do!
We’re home!
We only just made it – loading up at the Rev G’s house yesterday, we had major major trouble getting everything in to the car, and ended up with TSP’s feet on the dashboard (good job she has feet that are detachable from her legs), and my rack back in the passenger footwell.
The weight of all the stuff had the car sitting pretty low on the back suspension, and I noticed that both of my front tires were pretty worn on the inside edge, suggesting that there’s a tracking issue that really needs sorting out. So, we drove all the way from Edinburgh to London at 60mph. Having a frontwheel blow out at 60 wouldn’t be funny at all, but would have been marginally less dangerous than at 70.
Still, we got here, in one piece (well, once I’d re-attached TSPs feet).
Looking back on the fest, it was a major success, lots of fun, exhausting in a good way, and a chance to meet up with lots of lovely people. I didn’t have a single off-night on the gig, all the audiences seemed to dig the show, even my one ‘bad’ review wasn’t really all that bad and said I was ‘top class’. And on top of that, I sold out an 80 seat venue on the last night, which is no mean feat at the Fringe.
So, we need to start planning for next year now.
Stuff to do now I’m home? Need to get the remaining t-shirts listed in the e-shop here, and send out the orders that are waiting to go. I really need to pay my parking ticket from Edinburgh (which I felt strangely less worried about when looking out at a packed house on Tuesday night.)
I have a gig tonight at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park – not sure quite what I’m going to take with me yet for that one – whether I take the whole set up or just a scaled down mini-rig.
And this afternoon I’m going shopping with Martin and Wes for a new bass for Wes, which is always fun.
Oh, and somewhere in there, I’ve got to sort out the carnage that is my office, so that I can teach in here tomorrow!
Soundtrack – Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’ (this is the first music I’ve listened to in two weeks that isn’t Duncan Senyatso – and for the next week, his will be just about everything I’m listening to, as soon as I get a tape deck rigged up so I can listen to it.)
Words I wasn’t expecting to hear at the Fringe ‘hello can I get a ticket for ‘Bass: The Final Frontier?’ ‘no sorry, sir, he’s just sold out’.
Oh yes, a sell out. A rather confusing sellout, given that I’d got lots of comps and given them to friends, not expecting the room to be full at all, so just before I went on stage there were people who had bought tickets who didn’t have a seat… all v. mixed up. My fault. But hey, what a problem to have!
The show went superbly, and loads of lovely people were in tonight – the poetry legend that is Jude Simpson sat in on the show and did a cracking version of Femur (to the tune of Fever), Ronnie Golden was there (his show with Barry Cryer, Little Richard III has just started at the fest, go and see it!), Duncan, Simon and Rise – who I spent a fantastic 5 hours rehearsing with today for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – were there, Jack Cryer, the guys from Rap Canterbury Tales and of course the potty-mouthed Rev G. ‘Twas the perfect way to end a run at the fest, great crowd, I was on form, played well, bantered well, and sold lots of CDs and T-shirts. If you were there, thanks so much.
The CVenues crew in C Central were great to work with – lovely peoples who put up with a lot of crap.
And now it’s finished, and I’m off back to London, to spend the next week and a half teaching and learning the songs for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – the rehearsal was amazing, and the best bass lesson I’ve had in years, getting to grips with the African rhythmic stuff that Duncan and Rise were throwing at us. Being on stage with two guitarists that good will be a dream come true. They are both outstanding (Rise Kagona was the guitarist in the Bhundu Boys, one of the first African bands I was properly aware of, thanks to Peelie and Andy Kershaw).
So tomorrow we’re off home, via Berwick to see the family again. It’s been so much fun staying with Gareth and Jane – they are the perfect Edinburgh hosts, and it’s just a shame we’ve seen so little of Jane, as she goes to work before we get up, and is in bed before we arrive back in the middle of the night.
So if you’re still in Edinburgh please go and see the shows I recommended tonight at the show – Subverse, Paul Kerensa, Julie MeKee, Big Buzzard Boogie Band, Rap Canterbury Tales, Little Richard III.
And I’ll see you here again next year!
TAGS – Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Solo Bass, Steve Lawson.
So much so that I completely forgot to put a ticket on my car today, and so got a parking ticket – £30 needlessly wasted there… DOH!
TSP and I finally got rid of all our remaining flyers today – no more left for flyering tomorrow, which is just as well as I have a rehearsal for most of the day with Duncan Senyatso, for a gig at Greenbelt weekend after next.
I’m truly knackered, and it showed a little in my show tonight – I was a little more vacant than usual, but still played well and was funny enough to carry the gig off, just not as sparky as I have been. It was odd going back to doing People Get Ready on my own at the end, having had the truly wonderful Julie McKee sing it with me on Saturday and ‘Mr Fringe’ himself, Andy Williamson play a gorgeous tenor sax part on it with me last night. (Andy, for those of you who know what this means, is the Ralston Bowles of the Edinburgh Fringe – knows everyone, plays 17 shows a day, is the networking king and basically IS the festival. He’s also a very fine saxophonist and is playing up here with his fabulous Big Buzzard Boogie Band, and in a show called Sex With Mae West.
Anyway, show went well, 33 people in, lots of CD sold (great for paying parking fines with!) – last night tomorrow, and then home…
TAGS – Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Solo Bass, Steve Lawson, Julie McKee , Andy Williamson.
Fringe Sunday began looking like it was going to be a total disaster – it was tipping it down with rain til gone 12, and given that they usually have almost a quarter of a million people out during the day to see all the Fringe festival-related stuff going on at (a secret location known only as) The Meadows, rain puts a bit of a downer on the day.
Fortunately it had stopped by 1pm, and by 2 it was drying up nicely.
I was booked to play in the Cabaret tent (how the hell did I morph from serious musician to cabaret performer??? Edinburgh seems to do this to you…), but had had a major brain freeze the night before and forgotten to bring my Echoplex pedal with me out of the box backstage, so was left with two Echoplexes and a bass, and no way to start the loops. A brain-wave just before I went on lead to me asking the wonderful Amy Kohn to come and be my footpedal. Not that I was going to tread on her or anything – we just planned it so that I’d count her in and out of hitting the record button on the Echoplex while I played ‘Amo Amatis Amare’. And as she was there on stage, it would seem mad not to get her to play some lovely accordion over the top. Which she did, beautifully.
So that went well. I had a couple of minutes left at the end of the set, so opted (rather unwisely, really) to playing ‘What A Wonderful World’ – I played it OK, but it is a struggle on the fretless, and doing it without decent monitoring, and more importantly with NO REVERB (!!!!), it didn’t sound great from where I was. Still, it was well received.
What I did realise was that being lumbered with armfulls of bass-techie equipment at Fringe Sunday is an f-ing liability, and I’d actually have had much better exposure if I’d not bothered playing and had just spent the day flyering near the music venues. As it was, it went OK, but me and one EDP with no reverb or processing is hardly a fair representation of the show. Thankfully the duet with Amy made it worth doing. She was fab.
So after that I took the Echoplex travel-rack home, picked up TSP and headed back into town. The best thing about weekends in Edinburgh isn’t, as most people will tell you, the larger crowds. Oh no, it’s the FREE PARKING!! We were able to park on the North Bridge, less than 50 yards from the front of my venue. Very nice.
Then it was back to the usual flyering mode, which I’ve been perfecting over the week. Flyering your own show definitely gives you an edge of the disinterested students trying to make some money to pay off their beer deficit for the year, and it does get people to stop and chat if you introduce the fact that it’s you on the flyer in an amusing way. By yesterday my patter for flyering had become (roughly) ‘One Man Music Show, four star review in Three Weeks (pause while they take the flyer) He’s a legend! He’s a genius! He’s MEEEEE!’ – cue much hilarity and a conversation with person being flyered about what the hell the show is… seems to be working well, as I had another audience of around 40 last night (didn’t get the official figure, but that’s the report from the venue manager).
The show itself went well – there were a lot of late-comers, walking in after the first song, so I hope the caught the explaination, or they’ll be going home telling their friends to give the Karaoke bass-monkey a miss, he just mimes to a mini-disc! Still, sold a bunch of CDs and tshirts, so all is good.
The Rev G (where did I get the abreviation Rvd from? I just made that up, and it’s not like I don’t know enough vicars so I have an excuse) was back in the house last night and performed very well in the role as ‘vicar with tourettes’ in the MMFSOG story – it’s odd, I just decided on the first night to explain the tune (not something I’ve ever bothered with at gigs before) and it’s become a bit of a favourite in the show). And the lovely Amy also came to show and was involved in the audience participation number, making a very odd sound which worked surprisingly well! That’s another spur of the moment addition to the set that has worked remarkably well. Might have to expand it to two tunes next year if I can come up with another angle that works…
TAGS – Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Solo Bass, Steve Lawson, Amy Kohn, Fringe Sunday.