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New things at last.fm

First there was audioscrobbler. then they added last.fm, a sister internet radio station that chose tracks based on your audioscrobbler profile.

Hang on Steve, what the hell is audioscrobbler in the first place? Oh sorry. You see how at the bottom of most blog posts, I have a list of what I’ve been listening to, and the word ‘soundtrack’ next to it is in bold. Well that’s because it’s a link. if you click that link you get taken to a page that gives you details of every bit of music I’ve played in itunes over the last year or so. It has charts of who I’ve listened to the most, and for each artist it has charts of how many people are listening to them, what tracks are being played the most, etc.

Anyway, that was the scrob. And they also had last.fm, which had much the same information available on it as the scrob, but in a slightly crappier format.

So the whizkidz behind it decided to combine the two sites, and give the new site a bit of an overhaul. and it’s now last.fm. go and have a look. Do a search on an artist or two. then check out my page – the one that’s always linked from the bottom of the blogs. You’ll see what I’ve been listening to. How clever is that?

Anyway, they’ve also made it much easier for record companies to upload their music for the radio stations. So I’ve just been uploading the Pillow Mountain catalogue. check out the pages there for Grace And Gratitude and for For The Love Of Open Spaces. From there you can preview the CDs, or add them to your last.fm radio station (personalised radio, for free, with no adverts. Oh yes).

All in, last.fm is a music geek’s paradise – head over there, sign up and geek out!

Soundtrack – last.fm solobasssteve radio (you need the Last.fm player and a last.fm account for this link to work)

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Bye-bye, little blue car

Having bought Gareth and Jane’s car from them last week, it was incumbent on me to dispense with my old – and now rather knackered – Ford Fiesta.

It was not without some sadness that TSP and I took it down to a local scrap-yard to head off into a new life as bits for other cars. I wonder if it was carrying a donor card? I’m slightly disappointed to have had to scrap it so soon, given that it’s only done 110,000 miles, which compared to the 196,000 of my last Fiesta is still middle-aged. the bodywork was pretty rusty, and the water-system had developed a fate-sealing leak – it was said leak that lead to the car’s demise as, though fixable, it would’ve cost more than the car was worth to sort out. Not a good investment on a car where just about anything else could’ve gone wrong at any moment.

So after a week of middle classness, we’re back to being a one car family. The insurance has been moved over (with a fairly major hike in the monthly payments! Time to investigate alternatives to the Co-Op for car insurance, methinks…)

Farwell, little blue car – we’ve been through a lot together; speeding fines, driving in bus-lane fines, congestion-charge-flouting fines… hang on, you’ve been nothing but trouble! Good riddance, you rust-bound-dollop of scrap. The £15 I got for you at the scrappies is more than you’re worth!

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the American political landscape post-Katrina

There’s been a heck of a lot of coverage of the battle for the ideological mind of america in its collective response to Katrina. The left have been very quick to target the incomprehensibly slow response of the Bush government, while the right have looked to lay the blame with local politicians and the looters (or at least the black looters, who were overwhelmingly portrayed at thieves, compared to the footage of white survivors foraging for food.. I’m guessing the divide between those trying to survive and those ‘looting’ was not strictly racial…)

However one area that seems to have come up for discussion more than most has been the effect that America’s welfare system has had on things. One article that I had forwarded to me from a few different sources said that what the aftermath of Kartrina demonstrated was that the welfare state had bred an entire sub-society of spongers and freeloaders with no sense of their place within society, who didn’t see hard work as the answer, but instead looked to the government for handouts etc. etc. It was a particularly poorly written piece, heavy on the appeals to America’s pioneer heart and generalisations about the nature of people on welfare, and very light on the reasoning behind the welfare state or any sense of responsibility for the nation’s poor.

On the other side, this article on the BBC website expresses the hope that Katrina will expose the rotting heart of the American social darwinian project, and that Americans will be able to relight the social concience that got them through the depression.

The responses at the bottom of the page are fascinating from the overwhelmingly supportive, to the scathingly critical, to those who just seem aggrieved that any damn Euro-Commie would dare to comment on the majesty that is the USA.

I’ve never been able to understand the American reaction to the notion of ‘welfare’ – surely the word itself is overwhelmingly positive – an institution to look after the WELFARE of the people. A recogntion of our collective responsibility to the people who share our laws and economy. It seems there are many in the US political elite who refuse to recognise the role of the upwardly mobile in stepping on the heads of the poor. The fallacy of ‘worldwide economic growth’ is writ large across the US political scene, with lots of talk of trickle down economics and a rising tide floating all the boats, and all that horseshit. It clearly doesn’t work. The net has too many holes, the trickle down structure isn’t porous, too many people have no boat to start with, so are drowned.

Katrina has placed the faces of the poorest of the poor on the TV screens of america for the first time. The dark underbelly of the American dream, those for whom it’s been a nightmare, are now on the nightly news. A lot of people seem to be alarmed that so many people were without transport to get out, or without the technology to even know fully what was going on. I’d love to know how many of the ‘looters’ had mental illnesses which they couldn’t afford to get any help for.

It truth, I think arguments about the welfare state in relation to Katrina are a bit of a red herring. The lack of funding for the reinforcing of the levees is a far greater question hanging over it. The lack of any coherent disaster plan, the utter confusiong that permeated the post hurricane planning and led to no-one doing anything except bussing people to the Superdome to die. (actually, that’s where the welfare system comes in – with a decent welfare state comes government-paid doctors, locally practicing, who would have had more chance of knowing what was happening with their patients… The image of people in wheelchairs left outside the superdome, many in desperate need of medication, abandoned to die, is one of the most harrowing TV images I’ve seen since the first pictures of Darfur came through. That alone should be grounds for a total governmental shakeup.)

But why the richest nation on earth should balk at the idea of taxation to help the poor is utterly beyond me. A nation that hold claim to a ‘christian’ heritage, but where the christians overwhelming vote for a party of lower taxation and less assistance for the poor (who’s the Good News meant to be for exactly?) It all leaves me rather bewildered. As I’ve said before here, many of my favourite people in the world are Americans, I love visiting the country, and there are things about the american way of life that we in Britain could really do with a dose of, but the political landscape still leaves me utterly bewildered, incredulous that such a country could put up with the festering sore of abject poverty within its own borders.

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You wait for a gig, then two come along at once…

Orphy phones. The gig on the 24th in Chelsea needs to be moved. Fine, when to. Oct 13th. Shit. What? I was going to book you for a gig on that day too.

We chat about whether or not we can do both gigs. Doesn’t look likely – it would involved far too late a start at Darbucka. And, if Orphy can’t move the other gig, it means I need to find another percussionist for Rise’s set at the |John Peel Day gig. Fortunately, London is awash with marvellous musicians, and I should be able to find someone suitably marvellous. Or, hopefully, the Chelsea gig will be moved again.

I’m really looking forward to the gig on the 13th, whoever the percussionist may be – Calamateur is fabulous – I’ve known Andrew (AKA Calamateur) for many many years, and we gigged together last summer. He’s a great songwriter, John Peel was a fan, and his album, ‘The Old Fox of ’45’ was recently voted one of the top 15 greatest Scottish albums of all time!

Rise, as founder, guitarist and latterly lead singer with the Bhundu Boys, is an African music legend – the Bhundu Boys were the first African band I was ever properly aware of, thanks to airplay on John Peel and Andy Kershaw‘s radio shows in the mid-80s.

Rise’s band for that gig will be him and his rhythm guitarist from scotland, Champion Doug Veitch (they recently did a session together for Andy Kershaw’s Radio 3 show), me on bass, the TBA percussionist, and Jez on keys – there was a marvellous moment at Greenbelt when Duncan Senyatso first heard Jez play piano. His eyes went wide and he said ‘wow’ lots of times, and asked me who he was. When I told him that Jez had grown up in East Africa he said ‘ahh, this is how we play piano’ – his delight was at having recognised the ‘African-ness’ of Jez’s playing, even in his jazz stuff. Guess you can take the boy out of East Africa, but you can’t squeeze East Africa out of his piano playing…

I’m not sure which set I’m going to do that night – whether to see if Andrea Hazell is free, and do the Greenbelt ‘Global Footprint’ improv thingie again, with Rise playing Duncan’s role, or to do my Edinburgh set (not having played that exact set in London, or done the audience participation bit), or to do a bit of both – shorter collaborative improv piece, and some solo tunes… hmmm, we’ll see. WWJPP? What Would John Peel Play?

Soundtrack – Rise Kagona (all the tracks that we might be playing on the gig).

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The post-Live 8 debate rages on

Thanks to the London bombings and the tragedy in Lousiana, the post Live8 Make Poverty History debate got, understandably, sidelined from the news.

Today’s Guardian has this interview with Bob Geldof – it’s the first time I’ve heard Bob answer his critics post-Live8, and he does so with his usual brash honesty. I really like man. I think he’s great. I still think he missed the mark with the unconditional nature of his statements after Gleneagles, but I trust him to pursue the cause of the poor first an formost. Of all the accusations levelled at Bob, the least convincing seem to the be the ones that he’s power-hungry and just out to promote himself. I’ve seen no real evidence for this at all.

Anyway, we need to keep the pressure on in the run-up to the UN talks in New York this week, and the WTO talks in Hong Kong in December.

It’s odd, given that the WTO in its present form has no business existing. It’s never going to work properly appealing to agencies like the WTO, World Bank and IMF for reform when they are the problem. It’s like asking the Government to vote themselves out of power. So we need a two-pronged attack – one that carries on appealing to those pernicious bodies to reform, acting as a thorn in their side, building up the pressure of global public opinion, and the other calling for their scrapping, offering suggestions for alternatives, and resourcing leaders in the developing world in building their own economic power-base to bargain from.

Soundtrack – VOL, ‘Audible Sigh’.

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A note to all the MySpace people with the really cool background images

OK, so you’ve learnt some rudimentary HTML skillz and have added a huge background image to your MySpace page – well done, it now looks like like a crappy mid-90s Geocities Friends-fan-site by a 12 year old from Idaho.

Seriously, make your site readable, you losers. At least change the colour of the pic so the text is readable over the top. Better yet, don’t use background images at all unless you really know what you’re doing. As you clearly don’t, don’t bother.

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Blogging infidelities…

Oh yes, I’ve been unfaithful to my lovely blog – I’ve just registered a MySpace.com page under the name ‘solobassstevelawson’ – it should have been under the name solobasssteve, like so many other things I do, but I registered that, then realised that I’d registered it as a general account and couldn’t see a way to transfer it to a band account… so for now, it’s solobassstevelawson.

The interface at MySpace is unfeasibly complex to navigate – it looks like it was designed as someone’s GCSE project. no obvious link to an ‘edit me’ bit of the site, you just have to bookmark things as you stumble across them, and hope they have static URLs and you can get back there.

There does seem to be a heck of a lot of music stuff on there which is good, and some bands seem to have done v. well out of it. It’s nice to have a shop window beyond my own site, so we’ll see if it extends my reach.

It’s purely a marketing thing – I’m not about to start blogging there instead of here (it doesn’t look as nice as this anyway), so we’ll see how it goes.

Soundtrack – Talking Heads, ‘Stop Making Sense’; Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’; Seth Lakeman, Kitty Jay’; Renaud Garcia-Fons, ‘Entremundo’.

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Closer To The Light

As usual, Bruce Cockburn sums up how I feel just about as well as I ever could. This song was written for Mark Heard, a singer/songwriter who again died way too soon.

Closer To The Light – Bruce Cockburn (from the album, Dart To The Heart)

There you go
Swimming deeper into mystery
Here I remain
Only seeing where you used to be
Stared at the ceiling
‘Til my ears filled up with tears
Never got to know you
Suddenly you’re out of here

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light

Walked outside
Summer moon was nearly down
Mist on the fields
Holy stillness all around
Death’s no stranger
No stranger than the life I’ve seen
Still I cry
Still I begged to get you back again

Gone from mystery into mystery
Gone from daylight into night
Another step deeper into darkness
Closer to the light

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Some thoughts about Eric

I first heard of Eric when he was teaching at the Musicians Institute, when it was above the Bass Centre in Wapping. I’d seen his name on their literature, and had various people come up to me to tell me about this amazing guitarist they’d heard. Not long after that (late 90s, I guess?) I heard him play at a trade show, doing his arrangement of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (bassline, chords, melody ‘n’ everything on acoustic guitar, and managing to not make it sound like a gimmick) – it was obvious from that that he was an amazing musician, but trade shows back then for me were a blur of running from one Bassist mag event to another, demoing gear (like Eric) or doing on-stage interviews with the various celeb bassists that had been booked (without any thought for what they might do when they got there).

It was quite a few years before I got to meet Eric properly – he turned up at a gig of mine in California, with our mutual friend Thomas Leeb – I’d met Thomas through Ashdown and he’d been telling me loads about Eric as well. We chatted briefly at the gig. We met up again a couple of months later at another music trade show in London, where Eric was feeling pretty rough, but we spent more time talking. We pretty much instantly hit it off, as we were in a similar place – solo players who taught and wrote for magazines. About a week later I found out that Eric had be diagnosed with Cancer for the first time. No wonder he was feeling rough at the show.

Very soon after that, Muriel Anderson was coming over for some gigs, and she knew Eric from booking him for her All-star guitar night at NAMM, so the two of us went up to see him. The conversation at Eric’s house that day was the one that showed me what a strong character he was – he talked with great honesty about his hopes and fears following the diagnosis, his concern for his family (his partner, Candy, was pregnant with their second child when the first diagnosis came through) and the way it had made him focus on what was important in life.

We swapped CDs, and it was clear from listening to his latest album, With These Hands, that that depth of thought was already there when making the record. It’s a beautiful record, moving in parts, funny in others – the guitar playing is outstanding, but the music and Eric soul shine through. (later on he told me that he had me in mind for one of the tracks on the record – Deep Deep Down – but producer Martin Taylor wanted to keep it all solo. Listening to the end result, I agree with Martin, though it will be a source of eternal regret that Eric and I never recorded together).

After that we kept in touch via email, text and phone calls as his treatment progressed, through the hell of radiotherapy to the joyous news of his first ‘all clear’. After that came plans for a tour together, recordings, all the usual muso stuff – none of it felt urgent, Eric was well again, and we had plenty of time for that.

Met up again at the birmingham music show in November – Eric was not long out of radiotherapy but was playing so well (the version of Bushwhacker – an anti-GWB track – was incredible). After the gig we were chatting and mucking around while Eric signed things, and one guy came up and said ‘what would you say if I asked you to sign this?’ to which Eric replied in his dry caustic way ‘I’d tell you to fuck off’. The reply from the guy (clearly phased by this) was ‘I’ve been praying for you’ – Eric then recognised the guy, who he’d met before, and was mortally embarassed that he’d offended the guy, even in a joke. He’d commented before about how moving it had been for him when people who knew he was ill came to pray for him after gigs. Eric was a Buddhist, and a seeker after truth – that was another connection we had, music with a spiritual meaning.

He came to see me play in Colchester with Michael Manring a couple of weeks after the Music Show. I was so pleased to be able to tell the crowd they should buy his CDs, to put him in touch with the guys running CAMM – a local college where he could have started teaching again (he’d been head of guitar at the ACM in Guildford, but living in Cambridgeshire, the drive was beyond him now), to introduce him to the venue for a possible gig.

NAMM in Anaheim this last January was the last time I saw Eric, and it’s another huge regret of mine that I didn’t spend enough time with him there. I spent AGES dragging everyone I knew to come and see him play – he was on a punishing demo schedule for Avalon guitars, playing on the hour every hour, and I must’ve watched him play 20 times over the weekend, but we spent nowhere near enough time talking. I introduced him to friends, made everyone I knew stop by the stand to hear him. He was playing well, though as usual at tradeshows, he was amplified and cranking the top end just to cut through the hubbub of the hall.

When I heard that Eric’s cancer was back, and was inoperable, I couldn’t believe it – Eric, strong, spiritual, clean-living, had beaten it. Surely that was it? The conversation where he told me about it, where it had spread to, what the docs had said was one of the saddest phone conversations I’ve ever had. But he was still so positive. Scared, worried for his family, desperate to keep playing and meet his gig commitments.

Our jam never happened, nor the gigs, nor the recording. I’ll forever be thinking what it would’ve sounded like. We had very similar ideas about the purpose of music, about why we did what we did.

All in, I didn’t spend that much time with Eric. Nowhere near enough. His impact on me was huge, due to his beautiful music and his inner strength when facing his illness. He was an inspiration, and I was really pleased to be able to play my tune for him each night at the Edinburgh festival, pointing people to his website and recommending his music. It made me even more pleased that it was most people’s favourite tune on the gig. He never got to hear it.

I’ll miss him, I’ll miss the possibility of him and I’ll regret that we didn’t know eachother better. He left behind three CDs and a live DVD (I need to get the DVD) – the first two CDs are really good, but it’s With These Hands that is his masterpiece. It’s beautiful. Deep Deep Down is one of the most beautiful instrumentals I’ve ever heard. That he thought of having me play on it is one of the biggest compliments I’ve ever been paid as a musician.

Go and buy his CDs. Please. You’ll get some amazing music, his family will get the money. I can’t imagine what his family are going through now. My thoughts are with them – no matter how much the sense of loss that one has for a friend and musical inspiration, it’s not even close to the pain of losing a husband/dad/brother/son.

Rest in Peace, Eric. Thanks for the inspiration.

Soundtrack – Eric Roche, ‘Spin’.

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Home now

Back from Edinnburgh, with new car. Will post more stuff later on.

For now, have a read of the mini-obituary of Eric Roche on his website. I’ll write more about Eric later. I still can’t quite believe he’s gone, even though it was pretty much inevitable after his last diagnosis. He had such inner strength that there was part of me that thought he could beat inoperable cancer… Sadly I was wrong.

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