A week today in Brighton!
I'm going to play mostly tracks from my 2017 album 'The Sea', and I'll have the lyrics book (a colouring book with the chords and lyrics) with download codes for the songs- just for a change!
Great bands!
https://wegottickets.com/event/673409
Willie G and me are just putting the finishing touches to our collaboration- I believe the lathe cut version of our release is going to turn up today, and the cover is almost complete. It was a real challenge to not only earn the Gaelic, but also to sing in a more gentle, lyrical way. Cailin Morin Sa has very few recorded versions but Ailein Duinn has lots; the general feel of the vocals in those versions is of keening, and I wanted to make a vocal performance that was more gentle and yearning. I hope it's been successful.
Meanwhile, I've been working on a song about Toadstools. We were out looking for Fly Agarics, the spotty ones, and couldn't find any. They are often late, waiting for rain, but we think that the trustees of the common have mown the grass so radically that they've stopped the toadstools from growing.
I remembered doing a track for a friend of Joby's back in the day at Rick Parfitt's studio in Camden, paid for with an accordion that I bought in a charity shop. Curiosity took me to an old computer, and sure enough I found it. I've been putting vocals on it and experimenting with storytelling. It's nearly finished: the experimentation part was a failure and I have to tame the sound before I send it off.
And today? A song writing workshop with people with complex physical disabilities, the second one I've done.
I have a part-song ready to go and I hope it works!
I spent part of the day recording the choral arrangement for Live Forever for Gina's November support concert with Devendra Banhart at the Union Chapel. It's quite close to the recorded arrangement, but with added call-and-response, which I think will look good.
When my voice wore out (I'm singing 8 parts), I did a little bit more of the cover for Willie G's Synthecosse project. I'm not sure which song is going to be the A-side so I can't quite finish it. It was visually unbalanced so I'm working on balancing it up a bit; I flipped it, and it leans to the right. More heft to the left, dear.
Excellent opportunity to laze about and watch Hamza's Hidden Wild Isles on BBC1, and eat pistachio nuts and mince pies. Tomorrow, life drawing (if I get there). Will I be brave enough to do colour like two weeks ago? It depends on the length of the pose. Last week's longest pose was 25 minutes and shortest was 30 seconds; there were many changes in a two and a half hour session and I felt sorry for the model. It may be that I need to go to a class at another place to draw at a slower pace, but that's OK. Monday evenings are intense and therapeutic- and surprisingly physical. Standing up for such a long time, stretching and looking at a huge sheet of paper is not normal behaviour. It's wonderful to be able to work big. My drawings of working people are A4 sized and each one is done in an hour, listening to Riley and Coe's BBC6 show. I've got larger paper at home I could work on and eventually I'll get round to that too, merging the scale of the life drawings with the subject matter of the photo-based ones. A plan!
Yesterday evening, I ran a song writing workshop for the Antiuniversity at the House of Annetta in East London.
Doing something like this is better if you don't walk in with a ready-made song for people to copy: it's one of those situations where you start the process and only intervene when things get 'stuck'.
It's amazing how far we got: a chorus, three verses and even harmonies. Too much, perhaps: I lost the plot halfway through and insisted that the harmonies went over a chord in the wrong place. Sorry to the participant who called that out!
It was a rousing song in the end, that captured the concerns of everyone who participated, I think. We worked very quickly and everyone put a lot of energy into it so the ideas came thick and fast. At the end it became a song that belonged to all of us, that can be taken away and changed and adapted by anyone who was there and used for their own purpose.
Inadvertent star of the evening was Cat. Cat decided to walk across the table, right across the centre of what the humans were doing. The table consisted of four narrow trestle tables in a square formation with a gap in the middle that was covered by a large white paper tablecloth; of course, when Cat got to that part of the table, it disappeared down the hole in a completely undignified fashion along with a pen or two and all of its self-assurance. Poor Cat.
I almost cancelled the workshop because the remnants of the virus are still punching my body and stuffing my brain, but actually I'm very glad that it went ahead. We wrote a catchy song from absolutely nothing in just an hour, and now everyone who came along knows how to do it themselves.
That's the way to do it!
With nothing better to do than become immersed in the entire Saturday newspaper, virus-calibrated cogs of my brain worked like a slide rule to juxtapose articles I'd been reading into strange configurations.
An article on copyright and artificial intelligence, calling out big tech for stealing absolutely everything from absolutely everyone to 'train' AI, merged with one by a TV writer bemoaning the fact that her now-grown children had left home, and there was now nobody there to 'inspire' her scripts. Nobody there to steal from, she meant.
It's not an enormous conceptual leap to land squarely in the lap of songwriters, plundering our private lives for our lyrics. Our ex-partners anxiously scan the words of our songs to see if they are there (often they are not: who wants to give them additional publicity?). Sometimes our songs explain things to us that we didn't know: we think we are writing about one thing, and year later we realise we'd been articulating something else entirely.
Our 'secret' method of communicating in lyrics and music still involves the plundering of episodes that half-belong to other people. One side of a story becomes a story; one person holds up a mirror to the other, but it's a mirror that they made themselves. A bit like A1 reflecting the interests of the tech bros, or rather, the self interests. An avenue of fairground crazy mirrors, it twists the way we'd like to see ourselves into something hideous, which perhaps we are.
Oh, now it has become too complicated. I'm going back to sleep.
And do you think all those badly-spelled, badly-punctuated 'working class right wing' tweets and postings are created deliberately to make people scornfully share the message, and therefore gain more clicks?
Moan, moan, moan: I am ill with a horrible virus that isn't Covid (so the test strip emphatically says) but might as well be. It's wracking my lungs with coughing, something I'd be really worrying about if my head wasn't on tour of outer space), it's hurting my throat and mouth, my back, and my feet (even my feet!). Every couple of hours, the virus has an idea and decides to attack another limb or body organ in a new and painful way.
I've had to cancel the week: no heading to Huntingdon to mix the Gaelic tracks with Willie G, no Tate Modern catch-up with my pals. I've been asleep for hours on end, only waking to read cruddy crime novels and make tea.
I'm supposed to be arranging vocals for a superstar choir for one of Gina's forthcoming gigs in London, but that idea is resting for now. I also have an idea for a little graphic story that ca't come out of my head on to the page until I feel better.
My computer is of only fleeting interest. I did hazily amble through eBay, and found this toy that we used to have when we were little. It looks as though the felted feet of this one came off, just like ours, and the paint job on the face was just as rubbish. The only nice thing about it was the feel of the spiky mohair in your hands. McMum used to regularly give away (and throw away) our toys, and I guess that's what may have happened to the monkey. Part of me, guided by my brain soup, wanted to buy it for nostalgia's sake, but the other part of me said there was a reason that McMum got rid of this one.
A song in an hour
Wednesday evening, near Liverpool street Station, London
https://festival.antiuniversity.org/event/$RsmlFmo8ML5CXtjjXLY_bj0tXleqZh4hFdNroWaLsP0
I think I must have bought the very last ticket for this concert after baulking at the price and tussling with indecision, then deciding to go with it. I never saw Orange Juice back in the day: we were having a parallel modest career with Helen and the Horns, and unless we were sharing a bill with someone, you rarely got to see any contemporary pop musicians gigging. But of course I bought that album and delighted in the language and seemingly careless construction (or rather deconstruction) of the songwriting, and Edwyn's casual, insouciant singing style. That bass-y chest tone came naturally to him, and his pitching was almost like a Highland road through a mountain landscape: rolling, forging, trembling and faltering. Falling and Laughing!
They had a reputation for drinking that echoed across the UK as the splaying routes of touring artists spread and intersected: "Guess who we had here last week! Guess what they did!', said the social secretaries of colleges and the promoters of small venues. But at the same time, Edwyn's star began to rise. His songs became popified both through collaboration and through his increasingly-honed writing skills, and they started to become polished vehicles for his singing style.
Apologies for the digressions, but it's Sunday and I wasn't even going to write about this concert. The tour is going to be well documented, especially by articulate fanes who have been moved to tears by the shows they've been at. Beforehand, I went to Gina's birthday party. I gave her a melodica, because they are such fun. Even early on, her house was filling with friends and pop stars. I had a nice chat with Suzanne Ratigan, and Richard Boon told me about the Buzzcock's Glasgow gig, where a pre-fame Orange Juice turned up at load-in time at the venue to help the band get their amps and drums into the place. Now that's dedication for you! After a couple of hours in great company, I ran to the tube station and then across Embankment Bridge to the Royal Festival Hall.
The RFH was packed and humming. The staff were visibly excited and wanted to talk to the punters, which was extremely sweet. I heard the main support band The Hanging Stars do a great set from outside the door; I couldn't cope with climbing in the dark to the almost-perpendicular seating up there in the Gods. Before that, I'd bumped into Billy Reeves and his pals and had a jolly yak (probably mostly me, actually: I was very excited). Once the lights went up, I was able to climb the seat mountain and took my last-seat-going at the end of a row, just in front of Andy (from David's Records in Letchworth), and his partner.
I'm won't go through it song by song, but I'm going to describe the night.
Edwyn is slow to walk across the stage, with his natty sliver-topped walking sticks. He has an assistant to help him to sit at a small table at the front of the stage and his name is picked out huge in lights behind him, and there are individual lights on stalks stick up amongst the musicians. Patrick from the The Hanging Stars is also in his backing band, and boy have they done their homework. It's not just the musical homework they've done, it's the etiquette. At no point do they worship, vamp-it-up-over, show off about, dominate, or interrupt Edwyn. He is the centre of our interest for the evening; he is a large, wispy presence who makes himself understood, though at times it is clear he still has language difficulties due to the enormous strokes he had several years ago. The band harmonise beautifully and respectfully and play flawlessly; he couldn't have found a better group of musicians to back him.
His voice is still there, powerful and deep. He tells us he is worried about the high notes, and that tonight his son can't be there because he's ill. But the band have stepped in and stepped up, and the high notes are there too. It's only when he stands up to sing halfway through the set that we lose the power of his voice but I think everyone understands how much he needs to do this, just to prove that he can. Here comes Dennis Bovell, shining in a blue suit, to join him in a song. Dennis is clearly delighted to be there. What a collaboration that was! The lady sitting next to me is a mega-whooper and arm-waver and I wish she'd shut up but we all enjoy music in different ways, and gradually I learn to tune her out. There is a magnificent guitar solo by Patrick Ralla. We hear Orange Juice songs and we hear Rip It Up, a song that seems to personify Edwyn's take on life and his music in one glorious snowball of a song. We are all with him, every single person in the huge audience. There are a lot of women who know his material as well as the men, which is possibly quite unusual for an indie artist. Edwyn is self-deprecating, but also full of humour and clearly delighted by his reception. Paul Cook and Vic Godard join him for a song, Vic in his sheepskin bomber jacket, mates from way back; it is a charming moment. we hear songs from the new album, which is so good that I went out and bought a record player just to play it on. Howzat, Edwyn!
Goodbye... I think it's time to go and head for the exit to avoid the crowds. But no! Here he comes for an encore. We collectively will him across the stage, and a member of staff kindly motions me to a fold-down seat by the exit doors where I can sit and watch again. James Kirk and the original OJ drummer come on for Felicity, the former being really the only showoff of the night, but who can blame him? What a great song! And there is a final goodbye song from Edwyn, who has been a steady and trustworthy performer for the entire full set. All of us give him a standing ovation, including the staff.
He thanks his helper, and leaves the stage to go off on the next date of the tour. I leave with the feeling that the energy of the crowd is willing him on every night, fuelling him with love. People have been in tears, and every single song has elicited an intense sort of listening and an equally intense flood of applause.
I think each of us left to go home with a different thought to take with us. Really good music has that effect: it is both personal and collective at the same time.
On the tube platform on the way home, the Edwyn Collins experts were in full flow, Edwynsplaining all sorts of things to their patient companions. I was playing the songs again in my head, marvelling at the audacity of ending a song with the words 'Ha, ha'.
Photo nicked from Robert Rotifer's Facebook page.
It's worth getting tickets early for this, cos our last one sold out!
Something to look forward to in January
https://wegottickets.com/event/678027/
