George Galloway, in an interview with The Metro in london on Tuesday –
“The Metro – Will Gordon Brown make a better Labour leader?
Galloway – Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are two cheeks of the same arse.”
:o)
Album deadlines – it's all suddenly very real!
The recording part of the album is just about finished (still might do another version of the tune for Eric… watch this space), and I’m onto mixing now. Not only that, but it’s booked in to be mastered on May 10th. The mastering will be handled by the genius that is Denis Blackham – Denis mastered Grace And Gratitude, and he got that gig because he’d mastered Theo‘s albums, as well as Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden. He’s good. Very good. So he gets the repeat gig.
The album now has a name – it’s called Behind Every Word. The title is taken from an interview I heard on Front Row with Guillermo Arriaga. At the moment I’m mixing the title track (which got an airing at the Recycle Collective on Wednesday, but thanks to my having pulled one channel of the Looperlative out, it wasn’t sounding its best…)
It’s amazing to think now that Not Dancing For Chicken was all recorded to stereo! that explains why some of it is rather noisy (so noisy in the case of Jimmy James that I’ve rerecorded it for this album). With being able to separate out the loops from the direct signal from the extra weirdness process is a real treat, and means that I can get better separation between the tracks, less noise, and clearer stereo imaging. I can’t wait to get a production model Looperlative and start doing this stuff with the loops going to 6 separate outs!!! that’s going to be amazing…
Anyway, From today onwards, for the next couple of weeks, there’s going to be a lot of mixing happening. next week I’ll be mixing each morning, and gigging each evening (with a little bit of teaching on Tuesday). All very exciting.
Gimme a day or two, and I’ll get a couple of tracks up on MySpace for you to hear.
What goes around…
Back in ’91 when I left school, I applied for three universities – Middlesex and Leicester to do performing arts and Salford to do Popular Music and Recording. Middlesex and Leicester didn’t even invite me for interview, but Salford did, and I went down to Manchester to check it out. I drove down with my schoolfriend Martin, as Ocean Colour Scene were playing in Manchester that night, so we went down, spent the day mooching around record shops and comic shops in Manchester, I did the audition, we went to see OCS, slept in the car and went back to Berwick.
The audition went terribly – not because I played worse that usual, just because I was rubbish, and didn’t really deserve to even get an audition. Still, the guys conducting it managed to stifle a laugh. The upside was that OCS were outstanding. Those of you who didn’t hear their first two singles will find that impossible to believe, given that they peaked there and by the time their first album came out they were already past their best. But they were fantastic.
What’s this got to do with today? Well, today I was back at Salford, giving a masterclass for their students! haha! fantastic! It was a hell of a lot of driving (410 miles round trip), but a lot of fun to do – the students asked a lot of good questions, and seemed to enjoy it (if you were there, feel free to post a comment here!) – It’s great getting paid to talk about music for a couple of hours, and hopefully give the students some food for thought on what it takes to become a professional musician. Those kind of sessions can go either way, and get deep into the mechanics of playing, or be all about the stuff of living as a musician. This was more the latter, with a few questions about Ebows and looping thrown in. All in all, a fine way to spend the day!
Radio so bad it's worse…
This is how it goes – things can be a bit naff, but bearable enough for inertia to override the desire to switch off. Then they get bad, and you turn off, after that comes ‘so bad it’s good’ in a reality TV kind of way, and then ‘even worse and you want to shoot the presenters’.
The breakfast show on Radio London is about three previously unimagined steps below this last one – Jono Coleman and JoAnne Good are almost without doubt the stupidest, most inane, inarticulate, educationally challenged, culturally bankrupt pair of losers I’ve ever come across, engaging in the kind of conversation that would cause you to withhold the tip from a taxi driver. So unimaginably poor that you can’t even being to fathom the level of dirt they must have on the programming schedulers to be able to get a gig.
It’s like listening to two particularly poorly educated 12 year olds try and sound bright. JoAnne in particular makes Kelly Brooke look like a phd student.
Their absence from the Radio London Listen Again list is not surprising at all.
So it’s time for us to find something else. Anything, the white noise between stations would be better than hearing yet another guest pause mid sentence, incredulous at how these two lobotomised rodents ever ended up conducting interviews. Like Alan Partridge, without the punch line.
So, Londoners, any suggestions? We’ve had a look at LBC, and apart from Jenny Eclair on a Saturday morning, that looks like slim pickings. Is Wogan any good on R2?
Maybe we should get a DAB and give Phil Jupitus a blast on 6Music…
It’s a shame cos I really like radio London – I love the BBC and I love living in London, so the coming together of the two really ought to be a first class thing. And for most of the schedule it is, particularly the radio masters Robert Elms and Danny Baker. Vanessa’s not bad from 9-12 either. But Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Severe Special Needs really need getting rid of. Broadcasting unworthy of a late night slot on a pirate station, let alone the misuse of licence-fee money.
Expanding the possibilities of solo bass performing
Obviously, with the way I play solo, technology has a big influence on the direction my music heads in. I feel rather pleased that I got the concept right on my first album (at least, right in the sense that I found a way of performing that let me say what I wanted to say), but the limitations at the time were the technology that I had available to me. even that was part-way along a journey that began when I got my first effects unit (a Korg A4) in 1993. Looping entered the picture in about 95 when I got an ART Nightbass, which has a 2 second sample and hold function, which piqued my interest, and which great hugely when I was sent a Lexicon JamMan to review for Bassist Magazine in 1997 (truth be told, the JamMan was already out of production by then, but having read an interview with Michael Manring in ’95, I’d been wanting one ever since, so managed to get the last one that Lexicon had in the UK, wrote a review of it, and created a demand for a product that was no longer available..!)
Anyway, the JamMan had 8 seconds of loop time when I got it – a huge jump up from the 2 seconds in my Nightbass and that provided me with ample experimentation room (if anyone remembers the very first version of my website, when it was on ‘zetnet’, before I got the steve-lawson.co.uk domain, each page had a soundtrack loop, created with the jamman, a CD player for getting drum loops, and my basses, and none of the loops were more than 8 seconds long, cos that’s all I had.
I saved up my pennies and upped the memory in the JamMan to 32 seconds in 98/99, and by the end of 99, played my first solo gig and wrote the tunes that became And Nothing But The Bass, with one looper and my Lexicon MPX-G2 processor. I managed to do some clever things with manual fadeouts (the middle of Drifting on that album has me fading out the JamMan underneath some ambient stuff, then running the ambient loop down to silence for a split second so that I could start looping again to go into the second half of the tune!)
The possibilities with a second looper soon became apparent and a DL4 was procured for another Bassist magazine article. That gave me a whole load more possibilities with backwards and double speed loops, and was used to great effect on Conversations.
The along came the Echoplex – I’d seen Andre LaFosse using one in California, and while not wanting to sound like him, saw what the possibilities were for all those fantastic multiply/undo/substitute and feedback functions. So I got one, and recorded Not Dancing For Chicken with an Echoplex and a DL4 (I think the JamMan was still in the rack at this point, but I didn’t use it). Then I got a second Echoplex, just in time cos my DL4 died… and eventually ended up with four, though I rarely had more than two hooked up at a time. Open Spaces was done with two Echoplexes and the Lexicon (and Theo using a DL4).
The next development stage was an important one – post-processing. With the way I’d been looping all along, the signal chain went fingers-bass-processor-looper-amp. the problem with that was that once it was in the looper, I couldn’t re-process it. I could do some fairly major restructuring of it with the Echoplex, but couldn’t put more reverb on, or delay, or whatever. So I got a second Lexicon unit, and started to be able to route my loop signal, or the signal from the first Lexicon, into it. And that’s how Grace And Gratitude was done – that string pad-like sound that comes in on the title track is me running the loop through a huge reverb and two delays (the Lexicon with my Kaoss Pad in its FX loop).
And that’s how my setup stayed until the end of last year. I started work on a new album towards the end of September, but soon stopped again, when the marvellous Bob told me about his new invention, the Looperlative – Bob had been talking about building a looper for a long time, but now he had the parts and was building his first prototype, and had a feature list, that made it clear that it would completely change the way I was able to perform. the biggest change simply being that it was stereo, so all those lovely ping-pong delays and high-res reverbs would stay intact when I looped them. Oh yes.
The story since then is fairly well documented elsewhere on this blog (just do a search on Looperlative), but the latest developments have been a string of software updates over the last four or five days, that have sent the Looperlative into overdrive. It already has 8 stereo channels, over four minutes of loop time, zero latency and an ethernet port for all those lovely updates, but now Bob has implemented a load of new features, the two best ones being the ability to program up to 8 (EIGHT!) functions to any one midi pedal to happen simultaneously (which means you can have it so that you’re in record, end the loop, reverse it, switch to the next loop, sync it, switch to half time and start recording all with one button push, for example!). The possibilities are enormous. The other great new function is ‘cue’ which arms a track for record, to start recording as soon as any other track is stopped, so if you use the synced stop, you can have it so that you start recording the moment the previous track stops playing, and you can then switch backwards and forwards between them as verse and chorus (or up to 8 different sections to switch between).
So the process of writing and arranging solo music just got way harder in one way, and way easier in another. suddenly the technology is there to do much more complex arrangements that I’ve ever done before, in stereo, with minimal button pushing, but I’ve got to conceive of what’s possible, program the box and experiment before the ideas can evolve… I’m guessing that each track will start the way they always did with me – a single loop which I start layering, and eventually realise needs another loop. And I now have a whole other range of options to start imagining as I go on. I’m rather excited about what this means for the next album!
If you’re into looping, you owe it to yourself to check out the Looperlative – there really is nothing like in on the hardware market (and if you’re like me, the temperamental nature of laptops means that hardware is the only way to go. All hail Bob of the Looperlative, granter of wishes and builder of dreams.
Vanity Fair parties like it's 1975…
From Feministe, a critique of the current Vanity Fair magazine, their ‘Hollywood Issue’.
I’m not particularly well-versed in Vanity Fair’s usual output – I’ve picked it up in airports before now, only to put it down due to there being nothing in it worth reading, like almost every other magazine out there (if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to turn me into a tree loving tearful EcoMonkey of the most extreme variety, it’s magazine stands in newsagents – trees being chopped down in their millions to publish page after page of unreadable horseshit… but I digress…)
Anyway, the critique of the gender politics at work in the current issue of Vanity Fair is pretty incisive, though oddly enough it only seems to be shocking because Vanity Fair is less crass most of the time, otherwise they’d be critiquing Loaded/FHM/Maxim and all the other porn-lite that peddles the notion that a clothed woman is unworthy of being interviewed or photographed.
It’s not a new problem, it’s indicative of the relationship between women and print media for half a century, but it just seems to be so stark in that particular issue of Vanity Fair, and the critique is particularly clear (as with about half the stuff on Feministe – the other half being patchy…), worth a read.
Soundtrack – Peter Gabriel, ‘Up’.
forgotten influences…
It’s happening to me a lot of late – hearing things I haven’t listened to for a while, and realising how formative they were in me getting the ideas together to do what I do solo. Hearing Iona again was one, and seeing the Doug Wimbish clinic at the Bass Centre at the end of last year was another.
And now I’m listening to Iona again, and hearing Robert Fripp‘s parts on one track, and having a vivid flash back to his opening soundscape set at the ProjeKct one gig at the Jazz Cafe in London back in, er 98? 99? something like that… Anyway, he came down 40 minutes before the rest of the band, and set up all this soundscaping stuff, overlapping asynchronous loops of mainly synth sounds. The effect was mesmerising, and as someone who was already experimenting with looping (at the time, all I had was my old Lexicon JamMan, and an ART Nightbass processor) it was a big inspiration.
Not long after that I got one of his solo soundscape records, and was a little disappointed. Not in the musical ideas, but in the synth sounds, and it swore me off ever getting a MIDI pickup fitted – I’d had one for a while to demo it for Yamaha, but ended up sounding like a bad keyboard player. Fripp sounded like a much better keyboard player than I, but it still sounded like keyboards a lot of the time, and that to my ears lost much of what is magic about stringed instruments – the attack, the decay, the way we can keep moving the note after it has happened (especially if you’re using an Ebow or the Fernandes Sustainer circuit that Fripp uses in his guitars) – to use that to trigger a synth seemed a little disingenuous.
Still, it meant that I was less likely to end up sounding like him, which was a good thing I guess, but the influence is undeniable, and that gig was a pivotal moment for me. As was the rest of the night – watching the free improv of Fripp with Trey Gunn, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, I got a glimpse of what was to become one of my main ways of making music – just getting up on stage and playing. The sense of each sound evolving from the last, in an instantaneous thought process, with the intentions of the players meeting, combining, clashing and melding into one another. It’s a magical thing, and the direct descendent of that gig (and in no small way, the interview I did with Tony Levin and Trey Gunn after the gig) is the Recycle Collective.
Soundtrack – James Taylor, ‘Hourglass’.
Gorgeous Guitars on Video
Rick Turner just sent me a link to this video clip – it’s a trailer to a film called ‘Gourmet Guitars’ – it’s vol 2 in a DVD series looking at great guitar makers, and of course Rick’s in there. The clip itself makes for interesting viewing, but is even more interesting for the inclusion of Bill Walker demoing one of Rick’s guitars through the Mama Bear processor. Bill’s a fantastic guitar player, lovely bloke, and really ought to be a big star.
It’s also nice to see Rick and his son Elias on the video – the transition back to London life is made easier by seeing my friends on film when I get back here.
Soundtrack – right now I’m listing to an NPR recording of an interview/performance by KT Tunstall – KT’s just about the best thing to happen to pop music in the UK in years – in a year that gave us the rancid whinging loser that is James Blunt and a load more Pop Idol one hit wonders, KT has the skills and the songs to be in it for the long haul. Hurrah!
art vs totalitarian religion
I’ve just been listening to a fascinating interview with comedian Stewart Lee, on BBC Radio London – Stuart is the writer of Jerry Springer The Opera, a stage show that had a hugely successful run in the west end and then became the biggest watched opera or music in the BBC’s history when it was shown on TV. It also racked up 67,000 complaints from lots of people who hadn’t seen it and probably wouldn’t have understood it if they had.
The controversy arose from the supposed depiction of Jesus in the show – Jesus being a guest on the Springer Show, dressed as a baby. So the show was accused by a few people of blasphemy, and as the church loves a good scandal, an email campaign was started which lead to tens of thousands of complaints to the beeb and threats to the writers and members of the cast (oh yes, how marvelously Christ-like).
Anyway, Stuart on the radio made a very apposite observation, the the effect that ‘Good art is about questioning everything and then leaving those questions open to the interpretation of the audience. Bad or repressive religion is about absolutes and certainties’.
Which is true – I’ve been around a few repressive religious scenarios where questions and doubting were seen as dissent of the worst kind, and blind faith was encouraged. If you’ve got a question, just ask the leaders and believe their response, however bizarre it may be.
Conversely, I’ve also been around a lot of good people of faith, people who see the life of faith as a journey not a destination, one on which we have to constantly reassess our take on things, to question everything, to leave ourselves open to questioning and scrutiny, and keep searching, open to the possibility that we might be wrong. And I’ve met people like that from a whole range of faith traditions, be they christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist or agnostic/athiest. Whatever it is that you place your faith in has to be tested and questioned.
Which is where art like Jerry Springer The Opera comes in – satire is a very powerful tool in asking questions, a great way to expose elements of belief systems that require exposing, and should be a debate starter not a debate crusher. One of my favourites of late is the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster – a spoof religion set up to counter the decision of the Kansas School Board’s decision to teach 7 day creationism as the alternative to Darwinian evolution. It’s hilarious, both as a pastiche of religions in general, and in its treatment of its main target.
The problem, of course, is that you end up in a situation where the two camps are polarised and the more mystical middle ground is ignored – either you believe that the world is 4000 years old, and God is the supreme bull-shitter who made the world look like it was a lot older just so he could send a load of people to hell, or you reject any notion of there being a creator who was involved in the development of the universe. The evidence for evolution in the trad darwinian sense does have a few gaps in it, but is nowhere near as impossible to grasp as the notion that the world was made 4000 years ago! But neither are where my head is at. I don’t see Genesis 1 and 2 as supporting a literalist interpretation of the jewish creation myth, but neither do I think that all of this could happen by accident.
Ultimately, if your faith in either god or there being no god is reliant on the veracity of the jewish creation myth, you really need to get out more…
Anyway, back to Springer the Opera… So they are off on tour – I’m told the show isn’t actually all that good, but I still really want to see it to support people who are asking questions, to have my own faith challenged and see where the answers sit. I missed the west end run, sadly, but will see what I can do to get to the stage show. And if I’m offended, so be it – it does us good once in a while to have our sensibilities scandalised. I can’t quite imagine what could be in it that would offend me though…
Heroes in unlikely places
Was watching a great programme on tele this evening – Dickens In America, presented by Miriam Margolyes. It was a fascinating premise anyway, following Charles Dickens’ journey into the heartland of America in the mid 19th century.
But the best thing about it was the presenter – I was reminded again why Miriam Margolyes is one of my heroes, and in my ‘most like to meet’ list along side David Attenborough, Billy Bragg and, um some other people (Peter Ustinov was on the list before he died… if the list were just a fantasy one, he’d still be on it…)
There’s just something about Miriam that I warm to, that I admire greatly, and that makes her seem like one of the most marvellous people on the planet. Every time I hear her interviewed she makes me laugh uproariously, she’s got a fantastic grasp of the english language and revels in the art of speaking (her recording of ‘the queen and I’, in which she plays every member of the British Royal Family is the biggest-selling audio book in the world).
It’s all a bit random really – most of my big heroes are political and spiritual figures – MLK, Mandela, Gandhi – same ones as everyone, really. But there are a handful of people who make me feel like Britain isn’t such a dreadful place after all, that there’s something uniquely wonderful in our heritage here, and Miriam is one of those people.
So raise a toast to La Margolyes!
Soundtrack – Abraham Laboriel, ‘Guidum’.