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sleeping with the enemy…

…actually, that’s too horrid a metaphor to use. Writing to the enemy, more like…

Having just had another read of TurnUpTheHeat.org, I emailed David Cameron. Here’s what I wrote (check out me with my not swearing or calling him Tory scum!)

“Dear David,

it’s been wonderful to hear you highlighting the dangers of climate change in your many public engagements of late. It’s quite clearly the single biggest issue facing mankind over the next few years, and your assertion that there are things more important than money was surprising for a Tory leader but deeply heartening.

In the light of this, I’m decidedly puzzled by your choice of John Redwood as Shadow Transport Minster, a man who is a climate change denier who is clearly more in favour of promoting private car usage than providing incentives to promote mass transit in the form of trains and trams (I’m a musician and travel regularly on the continent by train to avoid flying, and the trains there put ours to shame – surely we need a transport policy that would reinvigorate the train system in order to give people a positive incentive to use them as an alternative to cars, which are such a huge contributor to our climate change emissions problem).

As I said, I’m utterly delighted that you are so concerned (and informed) about Climate Change, but it is definitely going to require a joined up set of policies that regulate the aviation industry, the car industry and house building.

I look forward to seeing your concern coalesce into a strong defined environmentally minded set of policies.

yours,

Steve Lawson
www.stevelawson.net “

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Turning Up The Heat

One of the major problems with the ideological left and the green/ecology movement is that they/we are generally terrible at marketing – you just have to have seen the footage of the Green Party conference to see how just unattractive earnestness is. It’s all very worthy, but who wants to hang around with a bunch of beardy arran jumper wearers tilting and windmills and pissing in the wind, however much you agree with their basic premise that something needs to be done about the way we are screwing up the planet.

So it’s always hugely heartening when someone comes along with a strategy that’s marketable, engaging, zeitgeisty, funny and sexy. So it is with turnuptheheat.org, the latest venture from journalist and activist George Monbiot. George has at times come across as the earnest beardy-without-a-beard type, but his research is pretty damn near faultless and his journalism is honest, human, and at times actually funny.

Turn Up The Heat is George’s attempt to hold celebs and notable figures who claim to be eco-monkeys accountable for their hypocrisies. So whether it’s Branson giving billions to fight climate change whilst still forging a head with a space flight program, or Chris Martin giving it the eco-warrior spiel while flying all over the place in a private jet, George catalogues it, and gives them the space to respond. Whether any of them will or not is debatable – it would be fantastic to see these people change their ways as a result.

there’s a poster campaign in London for the website, and for George’s new book, ‘Heat’, all about combatting climate change – it’s well designed, eye-catching and engaging. Thanks George!

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Ned Evett Trio At The Troubadour

Back-pedalling to Monday night, I headed down to the Troubadour (home of my first ever solo gig) to see Ned Evett play with his trio. I’d only ever seen Ned play solo before… actually, that’s not true, i did see Ned with a couple of other musicians when I first met him at La Nuit De La Fretlesse in Mende, France, back in… 2001?

anyway, it’s a long time since I’ve seen Ned play with a band, so it was great to hear what he sounds like in that setting. The only problem was that their bags were lost on the flight over, so Ned was completely without his pedal board and two of his guitars. Yup. My. Worst. Nightmare. Well, not quite on a par with world war, or UKIP winning a general election, but still a pretty fearful thought for any musician.

Still, Ned did a fabulous job with just his one guitar, a rented amp and a delay pedal. The juxtaposition of Ned’s fretless guitar and the upright bass is an inspired combination, and Ned’s well developed dynamic control with his voice was ably supported by the rhythm section. A great night out.

If you get a chance to see them play, don’t miss it!

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Comments down…

Comments are down on this ‘ere blog at the moment. Problems caused by the scumbags who keep trying to spam it (the spam gets filtered, but it doesn’t stop them trying 100s of times a minute!)

So if you want to comment/discuss stuff on here, you’ll have to do it over in The forum – the new signup thing there is that you need to put the word ‘MODULUS’ in the space for the VIP code on the signup page. Another measure to stop spammers from signing up automatically…

see you over there…

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Top jazz fact…

Thelonius Monk’s middle name was Sphere! What fantastic parent’s he must’ve had, to name their son ‘Thelonius Sphere’.

And I think therein lies my problem – Steve Turner always said that he’s childhood was too stable to be a ‘proper’ poet (well, he wrote a poem about that, anyway), and I think my name is too normal for me to ever be a jazz legend.

So, a list of possible jazz middle names – tree, crumbs, glassware, trousers, tarmac, risotto, kneecap, jupiter, enema, chimney, armchair, poppins, cuffs, anglepoise, aldi, betamax, combustible, sludge, tabasco, compost, certified….

nope, just going to stick with ‘steve lawson’ for now. though it must be said, steve ‘anglepoise’ lawson has a certain air of mystique…

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Croydon gig

Just back from a lovely little gig in Croydon, at the Freedom Of Expression night down there. Modeled on quality acoustic nights like the Kashmir and The Bedford, Tim Eveleigh has put together a great little gig down there.

I say ‘down there’ – Croydon’s a hell of a long way away! I’m sure I saw signs just before I got there saying ‘you are now entering Mordor – heyre be dragons’ – I felt like Reapacheep in Voyage Of The DawnTreader, getting into my little boat and sailing off to the end of the world…

Anyway. The line up was fab, but the audience was even better – especially one completely nuts woman who spent her entire time there shouting in a really loud and shrill voice at her brow-beaten broken-looking husband. Oh, and at anyone who suggested she might keep her voice down during the music. A total disaster that just screamed ‘mail order bride’ – came across as one of the most obnoxious people I’ve ever seen, but had sadly left before I went on, or we’d have had some fun.

As it was, I realised just before I went on that I’d forgotten the power supply for the Looperlative!! Oh bugger. Not good at all. There goes all the tunes off the new album that I was planning to do.

Fortunately, help came in the form of the lovely Cara Winter, who had been using a DL4 for some excellent vocal loopage in her set, and offered to lend it to me. Yay! It’s a hell of a long time since I last did a gig with a DL4, that’s for sure! But it meant I could do Grace And Gratitude, Amo Amatis Amare, an improv groovy thing call ‘Mail Order Bride’, and in between I did What A Wonderful World, Deep Deep Down (the Eric Roche tune) and Deeper Still. All in all, not a bad set, which was very well received, even by the mad drunk bloke who kept giving me quite positive heckles, but didn’t seem to mind me just referring to him as ‘nutter’.

So, a fab gig – if you live in Mordor, (or even Morden) do check out Freedom Of Expression – it’s every Tuesday night, and I’m bound to be back down there soon…

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Music things over the last few days

How far back are we going? er, Thursday i think – had a rehearsal with Estelle Kokot for a gig in a couple of weeks time – Estelle is a very fine jazz singer/songwriter – rather mad, but very talented. Her songs are a mixture of lovely simply 3 and 4 chord vamps and complex compositions with loads of chords and written bass parts and odd sections. Plenty for me to get my teeth in to. Definitely looking forward to the gig.

Then Thursday evening was back in the Vortex watching Evan Parker’s quartet, featuring Orphy Robinson on MalletKat (MIDI vibraphone) – it was a full on crazy improv gig, two sets of about 45 minutes each, with no breaks mid-set at all, long periods of really full on intense squealing improv. i go to gigs like this every now and again to reorient my ears to the effect that chaotic dissonance has. It’s not something I’d ever want to do for entire gigs at a time, playing fully out stuff in that way, but with a melodic structured counter-balance, I love the effect it creates, and I’m happy to engage with occasional concerts like this as a lesson in what that kind of thing is supposed to sound like, rather than trying to pick through it for what I like and don’t like.

Friday I was back recording Ruthie Culver – the singer I’ve been helping to redo the vocals on her album, recorded in a studio where the headphone monitor mixer didn’t work. This is proving to be a most enjoyable bit of work, and the result we’re getting are sounding great – I’ll definitely be looking for more engineering/production work on projects like this (basically anything that can be done easily in my office – electric instruments, solo voice and guitar, anything that’s multitracked and doesn’t include live drums. etc.)

Then Saturday, and to the picture at the top here – during the week, jim, the Fat Controller contacted me about playing a house concert in Lymington near Bournemouth. it was at the end of a day out for a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20s, and he fancied exposing them to something new, musically speaking. And it seemed to go really well – a most mellow setting, a very friendly crowd, and some rather fun experiments with the vocal looping stuff that I did at Edinburgh last year (record random percussive sounds made by audience members, make a tune out of it). As you can see, it was a v. intimate affair, and this was before another 10-15 people piled into the room…

Anyway, it showed how well my set-up works for house concerts (I’ll have to measure the exact surface area I need to be able to do it for future reference), and if any of you readers are interested in hosting one, please drop me an email to discuss the logistics and economics of hosting such a thing (and if you’re a bassist with lots of bass-monkey or musician friends, it can be coupled with a bass workshop/improv workshop as well.)

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Mac in need of a green makeover…

Greenpeace are taking on Apple over their use of harmful chemicals in the manufacturing process. Click the link to head to the site and email Apple about it.

Apple have pulled off one of the most amazing marketing coups of our time – whilst being a multi-billion dollar company with no independently monitored ethical policy at all, they’ve managed to become the digital accessory company of choice for creatives and lefties and hippies and everyone, just by being perceived as less evil than Microsoft.

So, if they want to keep that image, we need to hold them to the standards they imply, but don’t enforce. Get to it!

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another Behind Every Word Review…

Another review just in of Behind Every Word – this one from Sid Smith on his blog – Sid is the author of ‘In The Court Of King Crimson’, a brilliant book about the entire history of the Crims – a very fine writer and long time supporter of all things Stevelicious.

thanks Sid

click here to read the review – the choice pull-quote from it is “sensuous melodies intertwine and fall away with the intimacy of Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and the cinematic production values of Brian Eno”. Which is nice.

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Clinton at the Labour Party Conference

So Bill Clinton’s been bigging up Blair and Brown at the Labour party conference, describing Blair’s government as a ‘stunning success’, and Brown as having a ‘brilliant vision for the future’.

I, on the other hand, prefer George Galloway’s description of the two from a few months back – ‘Blair and Brown are two cheeks of the same arse’.

I can’t even be bothered to watch the coverage of the conference. It’s all either nonsense about the leadership challenges or it’s labour monkeys telling us not to concern our pretty little selves over the leadership squabbles and to focus on issues.

Well, we are focused on issues – issues like those expressed by the 50,000 people who demonstrated in Manchester earlier in the week, calling for Blair to resign now, and for an end to the balls up in Iraq. Ah, I’m guessing our faux-labour-new-tory chums would rather not talk about those issues… let’s not forget what happened to Walter Wolfgang last year… So instead we can continue to talk like the succession of Blair to Brown is a foregone conclusion.

Two cheeks, bloglings – where’s the left wing option when we need it? Billy Bragg for prime minister?

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