Tag: interview

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Dropping bombs on the moral highground…

over in The forum, Cryptic just posted a link to This article in the Independent by Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. He highlights the complicity of the UK government in torture round the world, both by using the ‘evidence’ gleaned in such a way, and by actively aiding the torturers by shipping off suspects to be tortured.

Now, how embarrassed are you to be British right now? This morning I was listening to the radio, hearing Billy Bragg interviewed about a project writing songs with terminal cancer patients – Billy is one of a handful of things in which I take pride as an englishman – he couldn’t have come from anywhere else, and is a national treasure. So I got out of bed feeling better than usual about being from here.

Then I read this article, and it’s catalogue of state-sanctioned abuse, torture and murder in Uzbekistan, with the tacit blessing of the UK government.

That we would be silent on the subject of torture would be a great evil. That there are people actively pushing to change the law in favour of using confessions acquired under torture in British courts is so unspeakably foul that I’m at a loss for how to describe it. And we have the audacity to invade Iraq over claims about Saddam’s human rights record. Yes, he was a sick, twisted murdering scumbag, just like the rest of the sick, twisted murdering scumbags we’re now treating as allies and friends in the ‘war on terror’. It’s unbelieveable.

thank God for people like Craig Murray – his own website looks like a great repository of information on the sickness of the euphamistic crusade that is ‘the war on terror’.

Time to contact your MP?

Soundtrack – Jonatha Brooke, ’10 cent wings’; Dave Matthews Band, ‘Under The Table And Dreaming’ (was there ever a more blatant case of a band getting hugely successful making vibrant interesting music and then going very bland very quickly in a quest for even greater commercial success?? UTTAD is such a lovely record, such an interesting album to listen to, so much going on, and it’s successor, Crash, was pretty damn fine too. After that? Forget it.)

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more search terms

OK, I know I’ve just done one of these, and really it ought to be a month-end thing, but the search terms that have come up for the blog in the last two days are just mad –

1 2 8.70% armstrong
2 2 8.70% crepe crusader
3 2 8.70% strange things
4 1 4.35% bassworld
5 1 4.35% birthdays e-mails
6 1 4.35% do nothing til you hear from me
7 1 4.35% doug lunn
8 1 4.35% francis dunnery the brook southampton set list
9 1 4.35% jeff buckley french government
10 1 4.35% lindisfarne uk holy island
11 1 4.35% michael manring soliloquy 12
12 1 4.35% one quiet night preamp
13 1 4.35% raphaËl nadal photos
14 1 4.35% really cool myspace
15 1 4.35% ross noble interviews
16 1 4.35% steve the racist
17 1 4.35% things to do in december london
18 1 4.35% top banana with timmy mallett
19 1 4.35% video killed the radio star – a protest song
20 1 4.35% work is more fun than fun

Do I really need to highlight any of them in particular that are freaky, dear bloglings?? Good lord, there are some crazy mutants out there in webworld.

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So this is meant to change my mind about Smoking

So the pro-smoking lobby have got David Hockney on side? He’s apparently been making a noise at the Labour party conference about the right to smoke in pubs –

“You cannot have a smoke free bohemia. Without a bohemia you pay a heavy price,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Picasso smoked until he was about 98 and so did Matisse.” – right, and so did a fair few other people. However, millions more are dying across the world of smoking related illnesses. Most of them smoke, some of them don’t. Very few of them would smoke again if they were given the chance to start over. And as for a smoke-free bohemia – I thought artists were supposed to be forward thinking, blue-sky-people, envisaging the world that could be. etc. etc. Clearly Hockney is sold on some cliched view of Bohemia as Paris in the early 20th Century. You might as well say you can’t have a Bohemia without huge amounts of dog shit on all the streets – that’s been a feature of Paris for a long time as well…

Clearly Hockney has no idea what he’s talking about – no medical training, no background in social theory. He’s a painter (quite a good one). This quote from the article is telling –

Mr Hockney was taken to Brighton by Forest, a pro-smoking lobby group funded by cigarette makers. At a packed meeting he attacked the government’s plans alongside Joe Jackson, the 80s singer, and the chef Antony Worrall-Thompson.

Right, and what other areas of my life are going to be informed by the three stooges? What on earth have Joe Jackson and Worrall Thompson got to do with anything? I quite like Joe Jackson’s music (recorded, not live), but I’m not about to take tips from him about anything, least of all public policy. Forest are guilty of the most ludicrous of PR faux-pas. Three minor league celebs with no qualification to talk on any subject other than their speciality of art, music or food, pontificating about the right to smoke – PISS OFF, CRAP CELEBS! Nobody cares.

Smoking is rubbish – pointless, damaging, anti-social and expensive. The industry is corrupt beyond belief (it always astounds me when I meet leftie eco-monkeys who smoke – how on earth do they square that one???) and the health effects are a HUGE and pointless burden on the NHS.

Hockney’s comment on this is telling –

Did the artist worry about being hijacked by the tobacco manufacturers? ” No,” he quipped.

“I am glad of the tobacco manufacturers. I am a big customer of theirs. They make a good vegetarian product.”

So no concern about the other environmental effects of the tobacco industry, the human cost, the aggressive marketing to the world’s poorest nations, the covering up of health reports. So long as it’s ‘veggie’. You dickhead.

If I smoked, I’d give up after hearing that, for fear of being associated with a moron like Hockney. and If I owned one of his paintings, I’d probably chop it into 20,000 pieces and sell them.

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Me in Bassics magazine

I posted a thing about this on my NewsFeed page a while ago, but I finally got a copy of Bassics Magazine through today, with the interview with me in it. It’s the biggest interview I’ve done in print (there are a couple of big ones on the net with various e-mags), and looks great. The questions were pretty good so it’s well worth a read if you should see a copy in your local newsagent/borders/barnes and noble/wherever you buy mags.

The cover star of the issue is Michael Manring, so it’s a fine solo bass filled issue. There’s also a track of mine on the cover CD, as well as some video footage, which I’m looking forward to seeing again – the Cheat and I filmed it at St Luke’s at the start of the year. We wanted to do it at St Luke’s cos we could do it in front of the big purple curtains in the main church, but the day we booked it they were installing a new PA, so we had to film it in the back hall, which means the backdrop is a yellow-painted brick wall. It looks like I’m filming it in prison! Hopefully my wikkid skillz will obscure any reservations people might have about learning from a convicted felon serving time at her majesty’s pleasure.

I’ve been a busy boy this morning, putting together the press release for the John Peel Day gig with Rise – click here for the PDF. That’s now been mailed to all the relevant media peoples so now we wait for some coverage and a huge crowd!

Soundtrack – Michael Franti and Spearhead, ‘Everyone Deserves Music’.

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Jazz is dead?

Spent a wonderful evening yesterday with Orphy Robinson – just called round to drop off a CD of the tracks for the gig with Rise on Oct 13th, but as is always the case with Orphy, ended up spending hours putting the world to rights, and listening to some great stories.

Orphy and I have some very similar thoughts on music, and while our own music sounds quite different (he can actually be bothered to write lovely complex through composed music as well as doing the more free improv/spontaneous composition stuff), the genesis of it is similar – both of us have spent a lot of time around people who play ‘proper’ jazz, who studied Bird, learned the omni-book and did what you’re supposed to do – transcribed thousands of licks by your favourite artists. But both of us were turned off by that in favour of looking to the narrative aspects of music, drawn to musicians like Coltrane and Monk who told stories within a jazz framework, rather than just looking to burn their ‘opponents’ in a jam.

Both of us had a fear of screwing up when playing ‘real’ jazz, but when it came to soloing wanting something of ourselves to come out, and so looked to freer improv as inspiration for self expression. I learn so much whenever I chat to Orphy about where his music comes from – he’s been pro for at least 10 years more than me, and having been signed to Blue Note and played with loadsa big names, has a heck of a lot more experience than I.

But we both see our role as story-tellers, and as such are willing to take from any musical tradition that works for us. Our origins are different – Orphy’s background is Caribbean and its musical heritage. Mine is prog-rock and 80s art-rock/pop. So both of us bring that to the table when we play, and both had a rude awakening into the world of free improv (the first free record I ever bought was ‘Montreaux Suisse’ by Air (not the french pop band), and Orphy had gigged alongside members of the band…!)

And it seems like our journeys are becoming to norm for ‘instrumental improvising’ musicians – that all the interesting stuff is ‘jazz plus’ – taking a jazz framework and dropping loads of other influences in. Whether it’s players like Theo Travis and Ben Castle who bring prog elements to their writing and improvising, or the current golden boys of the brit-jazz scene Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland who bring elements of classic rock, electronica and hardcore to their music, it’s the everything else that is keeping jazz vibrant, vital and renders moot the bollocks talked about Jazz being dead. Wynton has done his best to turn Jazz into a museum piece, and the rest of the world has ignored him, thank God.

And coincidentally, there’s an interesting interview with Brad Mehldau in the Guardian talking about this very thing.

Soundtrack – King Crimson, ‘Discipline’.

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Cliff gives up recording… hmmm

So Sir Cliff has given up recording because radio won’t play his tracks – what a damn stupid reason not to record music! It says a lot about Cliff’s motivation and his relationship with his fan-base, who would buy whatever he put out regardless of the perceived radio-snub.

In general, I have a bit of a soft-spot for Cliff. He’s faintly ludicrous, but whenever he actually speaks or is interviewed, he aquits himself superbly, and is pretty hard to fault.

However, refusing to make records because a handful of style-crippled stations won’t play music by a man pushing 70 is pretty foolish. If he wants to retire from recording, good luck to him, but don’t try and lay the blame at the feet of radio. If that happened to me (like I’ll ever have enough radio play to notice if anyone stopped playing it!) I’d see it as a challenge to make better music, unless it was just that the demographic my music was aiming towards was different from that the radio station was targeting (as is clearly the case with Radio 1 and Cliff).

He’ll keep touring, which I guess is good news for his fans, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional live album came out. I guess that would even give him a way to sneak the occasional new song on there. Although, maybe that’s what this is about – he just can’t be bothered to learn any news songs!

Anyway, it’s a shit reason for not recording, and Cliff should really know better.

Soundtrack – The The, ‘the Singles’.

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This is going to be fun!

I’m so looking forward to this John Peel Day gig with Rise Kagona and Calamateur. I’m chuffed cos we can put on a bill as electic as that and make it work, thanks to Peel’s astonishing programming policy on his show. I get to book two fabulous acts to come and play with me, and I get to play bass for Rise! How cool is that? v. cool indeed, that’s how cool.

And, what’s just as cool is that I’m able to do the ticket sales online. Oh yes – OSCommerce, the online shop cleverness that I use on my site will happily deal with choices for concession priced tickets etc. It’s very cool. We like.

So, now you can head over to the shop and buy tickets for the gig. Go on, you’ll love it! It’s going to be such a great night.

Have a read of the blurb I’ve put on there. Here’s a choice quote from Andy Kershaw about The Bhundu Boys (from this article in the Independent) –

“I first heard them when they put out an EP in the autumn of 1985,” Andy Kershaw recalls. “Peel and I were in the office at Radio 1. We sat staring at each other, thinking this recording was absolutely wonderful. It was the dazzling quality of the music, the harmonies, the sparkling guitar playing. The Bhundu Boys were simply one of the greatest pop groups I have ever heard.”

The following spring, Kershaw adds, he and Peel went to see the group in Chelsea.

“I realised after a few minutes that I had this enormous grin on my face. I was surrounded by kids of college age. They were all grinning too. I turned to look at John, and – Peel being Peel – he was weeping. The tears were just running down his face. It really was a revelatory moment…The band played like they were having the time of their lives. They played like that because they were.”

How can you miss the chance to see the founder of that band, with me on bass???? It’s going to rule.

soundtrack – Alison Krauss, ‘Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection’.

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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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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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