Saturday, December 06, 2008

Long-Winded Posting to Avoid Learning Lyrics

There is another review of Poetry and Rhyme in Collected Sounds, an American blog dedicated to female music, by Amy Lotsberg.
It's a really interesting publication, as Amy reviews everything she is sent and actually listens to them all.
http://www.blog.collectedsounds.com/?p=3158

Meanwhile, i am trying to learn the words of Christmas Queen for my gigs this week. I just haven't had the time to get the he-mails and she-mails choir together, which is a real pity. I have a darker Christmas song to sing as well, based on a true incident that happened a few years ago.

I can't believe it, but Helen and the Horns will be playing on Paul Davey's birthday in our original form. Tony has come out of hiding, and Dave Jago, who was ill, is going to be better in time. I will have to blow the dust off the horn parts, which are buried in the oak-pannelled archives of this crumbling mansion, along with a Blue Peter time capsule and a set of false teeth for the future.
I hope I can persuade someone to video it! I can remember the songs as clearly as daylight; I suppose we must have played them all hundreds of times. I'll spend Saturday morning making a thousand plates of cheese straws before M25ing it to McSis's side to help set up the hall. It's gonna be a weird weekend as the next day I'm busking the Christmas Vintage Fair and then playing at the World's End in Finsbury Park in the evening. Luckily my vocal cords are made of a combination of thrice-tanned leather and tough sisal gardener's string. I will be selling the leftover cheese straws for charity at the vintage fair, and for my own greedy self in the evening.
If you believe that, you'll believe anything, mate.
Oh God, that's just reminded me of the time Tony, a very heavy smoker at the time, cleaned out his trumpet in the dressing room, for the first time ever after years of playing.
It was SO disgusting... green, grey, yellow, wobblyjelly slimy grobblies... UGH UGH UGH!
It says a lot about how much we liked Tony that we were Still His Friend after that episode.
Tomorrow, my home factory gets into production, to make CDs for the Barnet Hill Song Club Winter Festival Song Choir. It's just one song, and I was going send off for CDs for the whole school but then I realsed it would be better to run another songwriting project there in the summer as the dear little school is closing down forever. I have run songwriting projects there for about thirteen years, first in class and then after school, so it will be the last ever Song Club. I see some of the children walking round town as adults now, and even the not-very-nice ones with fags hanging out of their mouths kicking the bus shelter stop what they are doing and say hello. It's amazing that they're not embarrassed actually!

I do need to find a new studio to work in; that will have to be the January project. I can get so far on Garageband, but it's actually the excursion to the studio that I like. No cats walking across the computer keyboard, no automated phonecalls ('Do you realise that customers all over the UK...'), no baby next door with loud voice having tantrum, no upsetting emails from work, no housework begging to be done with sad eyes! Just pure, clear, concentration time and a feeling of making progress.

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