Author: Steve

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Petersfield gig last night

Another fun night in Petersfield – almost didn’t get there on time, thanks to traffic nightmare on M25 and around Guildford, but was able to finish setting up while people were coming in for the clinic/masterclass/Q & A thingie.

This was very enjoyable for me. I tend not to plan too much when I’m doing a session like this, because it really needs to be tailored to the range of people in the room, and how many there are. On the way up I was half expecting to be doing a proper bass demo, playing some solo tunes and explaining them, but somehow the conversation got started off about music education, so I just talked about process and motivation for learning music, about the building blocks, about focussed goals, practice methods, prioritising learning what you need to know, keeping yourself intersested etc.

It was one of those sessions where you give people what they really need, rather that what you think they might think they want. I’m not great at second guessing what people ‘want’ in any setting, but when it comes to music education, it’s a fairly easy guess to spot what’s missing from most people’s thought process, so easy enough to give them what they need. The tricky bit is convincing them they need it, and getting them to talk about it. I think this was largely successful, the small size of the group meant that we could all gather round a table while I showed my simplified way of viewing diatonic harmony, which went down well.

The gig itself was fun as always, though the smaller audience suggests I’ve saturated Petersfield as a market for a while. It’s always fun to go and play down there, and great to see some regulars and some new faces, especially meeting people that I know of from various online communities (Loopers Delight and The Dude Pit were both represented at the gig last night.)

Played a mix of tunes, similar stuff to the night before, though I also did an improv, which I prefaced by describing what ambient good was all about, and then played something very un-ambient. As an encore I was asked to play ‘Channel Surfing’ which I haven’t played for ages – almost a year, I’d have thought – but managed to pull it off!

If you were there, thanks very much for coming, it was very nice to see you!

Soundtrack – Patty Larkin, ‘Stranger’s World’.

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Thank God it's not 'goodbye'

On his BBC London breakfast show, Danny Baker has been making reference to this being his last week on the show for a while. The thought of him leaving was too horrid to comtemplate, so I’ve been hoping against hope that this was just another weird Baker joke.

So I was delighted to find this article on the BBC London Website – apparently he’s taking the summer off, and will be back in the Autumn. While I’d rather have him there for the summer as well, I can see the need for some time off after getting up at 4am for years on end. Here’s hoping he has a marvellous break and is back fully of mind boggling weirdness on our airwaves before too long…

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the poster for tonight's gig…

Just found the poster for tonight’s gig on the graphic designer’s website –

Ali Martin is his name, and he’s very good – does great posters, flyers, websites etc. Check him out if you need such things.

The photo is one from the recent shoot I had with Steve Brown, who also took some shots at last night’s gig – here’s a few of them –



So, you could get the whole package by hiring Steve to do some studio and live shots of your band, then getting Ali to design your posters and flyers! Job’s a good ‘un!

Soundtrack – Patty Larkin, ‘Stranger’s World’ (actually, the apostrophe in Stranger’s is missing on the album sleeve – shabby mistake, but Bruce Cockburn sings on a track or two, so all is forgiven)

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Musos, check this out…

The Cheat just sent me a link to this fantastic new pedal –

It’s designed so that you can use an expression pedal to change the parameters on any normal FX pedal – it just attaches to the pot in question, and moving the pedal turns the pot! What a genius idea. This really ought to win design awards. Very very useful indeed. One of my gripes with pedals for years has been that you can’t tweak them in real time, or change them easily from song to song. Now you can.

Genius.

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"Unbelievable. Incredible. Brilliant. The whole country is very proud of you."

In a message to the Liverpool Football Team, after they won the European Champions League thing last night, Tony Blair said: “Unbelievable. Incredible. Brilliant. The whole country is very proud of you.”

Sorry, Tony, I’m not. I couldn’t give a shit. I don’t care.

I’m told it was very tense – very tense if you care about a field full of millionaires kicking a ball around to make money for the club shareholders… …or, according to Jude if you care ‘about a kid who grew up in merseyside and went on to be captain of the club he supported as a boy… and wins the european cup’ – clearly I don’t. That’s very nice for him, but it registers pretty low on the giveashitometer.

I think I was just all footballed out as a kid – my dad worked for Wimbledon at the time when they were starting their rise from non-league to First Division (in those pre-premiership days) in 8 seasons (the previous quickest was something like 32 years). I went to home games, away games, youth team games, training sessions, supporters club parties etc. etc. etc. It was quite fun when I was little. I even ended up pictured in a book about football, in my mascot outfit at the age of five –

but by my mid teens I was sick of it, bored with blokes kicking a ball around, and increasingly distrustful of any unisex activity – too much testosterone involved! And I discovered music, where there are no winners and losers, just people playing what they want to play. Ahhh, that’s more like it.

Now that pro football is all about shareholders and millionaires, date-rape scandals, failed drugs tests and club takeovers by shady billionaires, it has even less appeal. Even if I enjoyed the game, I think I’d rather go out and support my local pub team.

But I’d still rather go to a gig.

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Another fine Darbucka gig

So last night I was back at Darbucka, which, contrary to previous knowledge is no longer underneath India EC1 – they’ve taken over the upstairs part now, and the whole place is Darbucka! How cool is that?

Anyway, ’twas my third gig there, and I love playing there. The atmosphere is fab, the seating very relaxed and the owner, Ahmad is a good friend and supporter of live music.

Last night was extra-specially fun due to my two special guests, BJ Cole and Cleveland Watkiss.

The slightly surreal air that seems to drift around at my gigs began even before the show started, with George Galloway being in the venue when we got there… …sadly, he wasn’t there for an evening of mellow bass noodling, and left not long after we arrived to set up.

First set was just me, doing my thing. It was fun to play a slightly longer set, and get to play a couple of old tunes I haven’t played for a while – Highway One, and No More Us And Them, as well as a couple of new tunes – one slow country-ish thing so far called ‘What Happens When You Listen To Too Much Gillian Welch Late At Night’ (subject to change), and another untitled one, dedicated to Eric Roche a great friend and genius musician, going through a bit of a rough patch. (speaking of Eric, he’s playing at The Troubadour in Earl’s Court tonight, and is unmissably good – please go along and support him, you’ll thank me afterwards.)

Response to both old and new tunes was good, and Cleveland arrived during the last song of the set, so that was good!

Second set began with me on my own doing on tune (No More Us And Them, I think), and then BJ joined me for the next world premier of the evening – it was the first time BJ and I had played anything that was pre-written together. Usually, we just start playing and see where it goes. This time, we did a tune that BJ had joined in on in my soundcheck, a new tune called ‘So Long And Thanks For All The Thumbs’, and he added a huge amount of loveliness to the track! We then followed that with a bleepy, trippy improv, which ended with BJ in fine industrial soundscape mode, wringing all manner of weird and wonderful sounds from his knitting machine. What a fab player!

So I then kicked him off the stage, and brought up guest #2 for world premier #3 – Cleveland Watkiss. This was the first time Cleveland and I had played together on stage – we’ve played together twice before, but both times in my living room. He started us off with a clicky vocal percussion track, which I looped, slightly out of time, and we glitched it into a really really cool percussive soundscape with layers of oohs and aahs, and some dubby vocal samples, just him singing and me tweaking. At one point I was tempted to join in, but it didn’t need it, so I carried on tweaking and he carried on singing, and that was tune #1.

The second tune we did I started it off, funky thing in Am, which built up with layers and layers of fantastic beatbox into a full on clubby dancey thing, wah-wah guitars, clattering drums, dub vocals, all from just he and I. Another big success.

To finish off, I closed the main set with ‘People Get Ready’, then got BJ and Cleveland back for a mellow country ballad improv thing which just topped off the evening perfectly. A resounding success!

Hopefully I’ll be back at Darbucka before too long, I love it there!

if you want to get BJ’s or Cleveland’s CDs, you can get BJ’s here and Cleveland’s here (BJ’s newest album Trouble In Paradise is fantastic, as is Cleveland’s duet with Nikki Yeo)

If you were at the gig, please post your thoughts over in the reviews section of my forum.

Soundtrack – Maxwell, ‘Embrya’; Lewis Taylor, ‘Lewis Taylor’.

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Preparation for tonight's gig…

It’s gig time – playing a solo gig tonight at Darbucka (which you REALLY ought to know about already – if not, please sign up for the mailing list). It’s going to be a lots of fun – for starters, I’ll get to play for longer than I have been of late – I’ve done a fair few 30-45 minute sets of late, and tonight I’ll get to play at least an hour or so of solo material plus some improv duets with BJ Cole and Cleveland Watkiss.

I’m really looking forward to it, and am just running over some of the new tunes I’m thinking of playing tonight, trying to work out how they go, what order the various weird noises appear in, and to a lesser degree, what the tunes are – at this stage in the compositional process, the melody is pretty open to interpretation, and I’ll improvise a lot of it to see if I can get something better than the bits I’ve got already.

All being well, there should be four new tunes tonight, which only a handful of people have heard (the small person, obviously, the cheat and sue, who finally gets her first mention on a blog – yay for sue!)

Other than that, I need to fill up a box with CDs for sale, decide on what to wear, write out the guestlist, decide whether or not I’m taking any extra lighting with me (Darbucka is pretty dark on stage), then I’ve got two hours teaching to do, then pack up my stuff, load the car (not fun given that I’ve got a trapped nerve or something in my back from sleeping funny a couple of nights ago).

So that’s me today, and tomorrow it all happens again for the gig in Petersfield. What fun.

See you later.

Soundtrack – right now, recordings of the new things for tonight. Before that, Lewis Taylor, ‘Lewis Taylor’; Sophia, ‘People Are Like Seasons’; Kaki King, ‘Legs To Make Us Longer’; Todd Johnson/Kristin Korb, ‘Get Happy’ (I rolled the wheel of my office chair over my copy of this last week, and immediately ordered a new one, which arrived a couple of days ago)

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Some thoughts on live music in the UK…

Recently, The Mean Fiddler, one of the largest groups of music venues in the UK, were
bought out by Clear Channel – the american media giant, who have begun to take over the US airwaves and gig scene. There’s been a pretty vocal backlash to their activities in the US, but the complicity of a lot of big name bands and labels has lead to them getting a serious stranglehold on the american live music scene.

The ramifications in the US are pretty scary – Clear Channel sign exclusive deals with acts to handle all their live work, so only book them into their venues. They promote them on their own radio stations, and no doubt work with other ‘media partners’ for greater exposure. It’s the live equivalent of a major record label deal. They also only book support acts signed to them, and so become the only apparent option for a lot of bands trying to ‘make it’ (a misnomer if ever I heard one, but still…)

In the UK, The Mean Fiddler already have a pretty dreadful reputation for not treating bands too well. They are a big player in the London live music scene, owning The Mean Fiddler, The Astoria, The Jazz Cafe, The Forum, The Borderline and a handful of other venues. They also have a fairly large stake in the Glastonbury Festival, as well as the Reading and Leeds festivals. All that is now in the hands of Clear Channel.

The situation here doesn’t look quite as grim as the US in that there’s some competition. The biggest competitor to the Mean Fiddler Group is probably Carling – the brewery that now have a series of ‘Carling Academy’ venues around the country. However, the problem for musicians is that Carling are, not surprisingly, primarily interested in selling beer. So, they’ll book music based on its beer sales potential, and set venues out to maximise traffic to the bar, not to make the listening situation ideal. I saw Nick Harper at the Bar Academy in Islington. Now, Nick’s a pretty high energy performer for one bloke and an acoustic guitar, but he’s still just a bloke and an acoustic guitar. The venue was standing only. No seats, except stools at the bar. It didn’t look like seating was an option. Why? Cos people sat in rows in seats don’t get up to go to the bar mid-gig. They wait til the break. That’s no good when you’re not concerned with the music, just selling beer.

This is not good news for people who play quieter music. Particularly those that are signed to labels who do deals with certain venue chains. You turn up to the gig, thinking it’s a gig, and realise you’re playing in a bar, with a low stage, the room isn’t really set out to focus on you, rather to filter people towards the bar. You play louder to try and keep people’s attention (a standing, drinking audience is never going to be as quiet or attentive as a seated one), and all of a sudden you’re thinking ‘maybe next album I need to put some more uptempo songs in there for situations like this.

It doesn’t affect me all that much, given that there are loads of really cool little venues in the UK, most of them provincial theatres and dedicated music clubs that lap up interesting original music, and still manage to make money over the bar. But I fear for my musician friends who end up getting sucked into the circuit of these venues – it’s pretty demoralising when your audience are getting steadily more hammered, and corespondingly loud…

Have a look at clearchannelsucks.org for more on what Clear Channel have done in the US.

Soundtrack – The Bears, ‘Live’; Maxwell, ‘Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite’; A Mighty Wind, ‘OST’; Roseanne Cash, ‘ Rules Of Travel’.

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Other ways of ending an FA Cup final

So yesterday’s FA Cup final went to penalties for the first time ever.

Anyway, file me in the box marked ‘couldn’tgiveashit’, but I really think they could come up with some better ways to sort it out if both teams can’t score a single goal after 120 minutes.

1 – Twister. Each team picks two team members, and they play Twister to decide the winner.
2 – General knowledge – can’t score goals? Try them on capital cities or european history and see who’s best.
3 – paper scissors stone – not quite so dramatic, but it’d get it over an done with pretty quick.
4 – A battle royal – roll a wrestling ring into the middle of the field, all 22 blokes in there, last standing wins.

Other options to liven up the dull spectacle that is football (yes, football, not ‘soccer’) –

1 – remove the goalies.
2 – widen the goals by a few feet.
3 – introduce ‘It’s A Knockout’-style obstacles – it’d be much more fun with each of the players dressed as giant disney characters in 4 foot shoes, trying to kick a beach ball with a four foot diameter whilst being squirted with water cannon and trying to carry a custard pie.
4 – scrap it, and go to a gig instead.

Soundtrack – Patty Larkin, ‘Angels Running’.

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