Tag: music

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The New Standard…

The New Standard – that’s the name of the show that Julie McKee and I are doing at Edinburgh this year – it’s a show over unlikely cover-versions, where we take songs from all over the musical map, and treat them as though they were ‘standards’ – ie, we just take the melody, words and chord progression and do what we want with them.

We’ve ended up with songs by Stevie Wonder and Slipknot, Curtis Mayfield and The Cure, Green Day, Kate Bush, Gorillaz… etc. etc. It’s a great set, and we’ve done top notch arrangements. If you head over to thenewstandard.co.uk you’ll find yourself on our myspace page, which has four tunes on it for you to have a listen to. They’re just demo live recordings, in my studio while we were rehearsing and working out arrangements. Hope you enjoy them!

While I’m here, here are the dates for this week’s gigs – hope to see some of you there –

Tuesday 20th June – CB2, Cambridge. Doors 7.30pm, tickets £6
Wednesday 21st June – Recycle Collective at Darbucka, with Special guests BJ Cole and Emily Burridge. Doors 7pm, Tickets £6.
Thursday 22nd – Escobar, Market Street, Wakefield, Yorkshire – 01924 332000
Friday 23rd – Oceans Eleven, 1-2 Church Walk Leeds, 07906 140 294
Saturday 24th – (2pm) Riffs Guitar School, Stockport, 0161 484 5208
Saturday 24th (8pm) Iguana, Manchester,0161 881 9338 tickets £3 adv. £5 on the door.
Thursday 29th – Traders, Petersfield, 01730 233 022 £5 adv/£6 door.

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John Lester/Paul Tiernan gig

Headed up to Cambridge last night, to CB2, where I’ll be playing in just over a week with Ned Evett, to see John Lester and Paul Tiernan.

John’s new album, ‘So Many Reasons’ is fantastic, so I was really looking forward to seeing him live again. It’s been quite a while since I was last at one of his gigs, and he didn’t disappoint. He and Paul switched back and forth playing each other’s songs, playing some solo tunes, and a handful of covers, including the only acoustic version of ‘Play That Funky Music White Boy’ that I’ve ever heard.

Paul Tiernan was a revelation – not having heard him before, he’s got a gorgeous voice, like a more intelligible John Martyn. All in all a very enjoyable gig.

John’s album isn’t officially released yet, but I’m sure if you email him via his website, he’ll sort something out for you…

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The Tebbit Test

One of the bizarrist bits of political posturing of the last couple of decades was Norman Tebbit’s assertion that you could judge the level of an ‘immigrant’s’ allegiance to England by asking them who they’d support when their country of origin played England at cricket… did second Generation Bangladeshi, West Indian or Pakistani root for their country of birth or the country of their family heritage?

The problem with this is that it assumes that sporting allegiance is somehow a given expression of national pride.

The problem is, that under the Tebbit test my national identity can be filed under ‘couldn’t give a shit’ or when feeling generous ‘the independent republic of underdog’. I have no sense of association with sports men and women from England at all. The english football team is not ‘we’ it’s not ‘us’, it’s 11 blokes that I don’t know, probably wouldn’t like very much if I met them, who just happen to have been born on the same bit of land as me. So what?

So, in this world cup, I’ll be rooting for Iran, Togo, Trinidad, and any other underdogs.

And as a musician, I’m hoping that England go out in the group stage, just to free up the venues for music again instead of sports on big teles. :o)

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Gig preparations

Just been practicing for tonight’s gig supporting BJ Cole at the Half Moon – I’m still learning the songs from Behind Every Word, trying out some new arrangement things, working out how to make the tunes as good as they can be live.

Support gigs are always interesting because the audience have certain stylistic expectations based on the headline act. Fortunately, BJ’s music background is so varied that anyone going to see him is surely going to be expecting anything from solo steel guitar arrangements of Debussy tunes to full on clubby dance stuff. Hopefully my noises will meet with appreciative ears.

See you there.

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Too long since I last wrote anything…

So what have I been up to, I hear you ask… Well, the usual stuff – teaching, practicing etc. More practicing over the last few days, as I’ve got two gigs this week – tomorrow and Friday (tomorrow is at the Half Moon in Putney, Friday is at The Free Church in St Ives) – need to get the new songs learnt as well as I possibly can!

Also been distributing posters for the Fret Phobia tour at the end of the month, with Ned Evett. Which reminds me, if any of you are anywhere near any of the venues (we’re playing London, Cambridge, Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Petersfield) please drop me an email or a comment and I’ll send you a handful of posters to stick up in music shops/coffee shops/waiting rooms/etc.

Been spending lots of time with the Ginger Fairly Aged Feline, who has made the most remarkable recovery… it’s the second time he’s come back from being that close to death. The vet’s amazed. We’re in Friday morning with him, to see what’s happening with his kidneys via the wonder of blood-tests. But as for now, he’s spending most of his time in the garden, running around (if you’d told us 10 days ago that he’d ever run again, we’d have laughed bitterly at you) and generally enjoying himself immensely. Hurrah for the tiny ginger one (no, not you Jude, the cat.) (well alright, hurrah for jude too…)

Tonight I was going to go and see Orphy Robinson do a solo gig in London, but got back from my postering outing and realised I hadn’t done the food-shopping I’d promised to do. So that took precedence. I was meant to be doing a gig tonight playing bass for a friend, but she’s disappeared off the face of the earth! how odd…

See you at the gig tomorrow!

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Paul Simon – Surprise

Just got this through today, and am on my second listen. Paul Simon is in that very tiny group of people who’ve never done a bad album (caveat, I’ve never heard ‘Capeman’, the soundtrack to his ill-fated musical) – most people of his era (Joni Mitchell, Jackson Brown, Neil Young etc.) mad some fairly duff albums in the 80s, but Paul, like Tom Waits and Bruce Cockburn, has remained pretty consistent all along. Which is why it always amazes me when this album is described as a return to form – his last album, ‘You’re The One’ is outstanding! It’s a really great record, with a couple of tracks that would be in my all time Paul Simon top 10, and not a duff track on it.

It was the same when James Taylor brought out ‘Hourglass’ – ‘return to form’ says the press. Huh? His previous two albums before that were ‘Live’ (possibly the greatest live album ever recorded) and ‘New Moon Shine’, a truly beautiful album.

The problem is that critics always want a hook to hang a story on. ‘It’s brilliant, like all his other albums’ isn’t as dramatic as stories about emerging from a creative wilderness or doing your best album for 15 years… maybe I should just pretend that everything else I’ve done has been completely eclipsed by my new album… :o) I mean, I do genuinely think it’s the best thing I’ve done (I wouldn’t release it if I didn’t…), but it doesn’t make Grace And Gratitude look like an amateurish work…

So, my review – the new Paul Simon album is magic. Full of great songs, great playing, and some fantastic sonic treatments from Brian Eno. For the bass geeks amongst you, Pino’s on it, Abe Laboriel Snr’s on it, Alex Al is on it and Leo Abrahams (from the RC gig before last) is on fretless bass on one tune! That’s the kind of calibre of player we get at the RC.

But every Paul Simon album is magic. You really ought to have the set. He’s got a way with phrasing a line that make it feel like a conversation. The melody never gets in the way of the words. Like Joni Mitchell and a handful of other singers, it’s as much story-telling as it is singing.

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MySpace controversy

there’s been a lot of forum activity across the entire internet created by the MySpace.com terms and conditions, with lots of musicians protesting that MySpace are going to be stealing our songs and photos and using them all over the place, selling them on etc.

This is the offending section in the T&Cs –

  • Proprietary Rights in Content on MySpace.com.
    • By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, and (ii) the posting of your Content on or through the Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of any Content posted by you to or through the Services.

(Italics added by me).

The purpose of this bit is to stop anyone from suing them for having their songs played on someone else’s myspace page. It also leaves them free to have streaming audio on the site for ‘artist of the day’ type deals, or even myspace online radio using the tracks that have been posted. Without this clause, they could be hit with royalty claims by God-knows how many shitty indie bands whose mates have put their tracks on their page… It’s an arse-covering clause, not a rights-thieving one.

Think about it – MySpace is currently one of the top three biggest sites on the entire internet. It’s huge, it’s a phenomenon. They really can’t afford to piss people off. They have huge name musicians on there, with incredibly adept legal teams who would fry them alive if they decided to start using MySpace music clips on TV shows or whatever. If they stole some of my music or nicked photos of my site, I’d be onto the papers quicker than you can say ‘any publicity is bad publicity’, it’d be front page news and the site would start haemorrhaging users at lightning speed. Their ad revenue would disappear and the site would implode.

Now, I like most people think that Murdoch is a despicable odious louse on the pubic hair of society. He’s filth and scum of the worst kind. He’s also a business genius. A rancid amoral business genius, but one who really knows what’s going on. MySpace is his latest acquisition and he’s not about to let it fall apart over the licencing of a few tunes. The cost of paying a band to use their music on a compilation album or tv advert or whatever is tiny compared to the legal costs of being sued by Madonna for trying to claim that they have the right to use her tunes anywhere.

So, please, stop fretting about the MySpace T and Cs. Them doing what people say they are going to do would result in such a HUGE own goal for the site and for News Corps on mass, that it’s really not going to happen.

Panic over.

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Debut gig – much fun!

Julie and I got through our first gig together unscathed! What fun! The set list, as I said, was a mixture of jazz stuff such as ‘Like Someone In Love’ and ‘What A Wonderful World’ coupled with a load of less likely candidates from The Cure, Slipknot, Green Day, The Police etc.

There were a couple of expected loop gremlins (first gig going without a hitch? yeah, right.) but nothing that spoilt the gig, and the audience seemed to really enjoy it. A great first outing, methinks. (if you were there, feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section.)

And in other music news, Cd sales are going really well – thanks so much to all those of you who’ve already bought it. The feedback on ‘Lessons Learned Pt III’ is great too, which bodes well for the CD of ‘Behind Every Word’ arriving. (you can post reviews of LL Pt III in the new shop, if you want… or, for that matter, of any of the other CDs – I wasn’t able to copy the reviews over from the old shop database, sadly.

Anyway, keep telling your friends about the new stuff, point them to the MySpace page to hear some tracks from it, and then send them to the shop. :o)

Soundtrack – Jeff Taylor, ‘Demo 2005’; James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, ‘Live, 1971’.

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Gig tonight…

Just about to start rehearsing for tonight’s gig with Julie McKee. I’m so looking forward to this one – I rarely bother to learn other people’s songs, as the only gigs I tend to do these days that aren’t my own music or improvised are jazz gigs where I’ve got charts. But as there aren’t many Green Day, Slipknot, Cure or John Martyn songs in the Real Book, I’ve had to actually learn them.

Please come down if you’re in London at 6pm – it’s at the National Theatre Foyer, free to get in, and will feature much bass and vocal loopage. Go on, you know you want to.

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