Skiffle Listening

I'm listening to the skiffle mixes, the Sam Phillips effect well under operation.
Listening to mixes is a raw experience; you become hyper-critical of your own part in the proceedings without necessarily considering what else is going on. I cringed at some points on first listen- where I'm out of tune, or my voice sounds 'metallic'- but these are first take live recordings of songs hot off the press, and second listen isn't quite so excruciating!
The overall sound is great- just what I wanted- percussive and very much alive. Hats off to the guys for giving 100% energy over the weekend and for being straightforward to work with and very, very talented.
Headphone listen next....

Below: with Colin Mee, rockabilly engineer extraordinaire; in the garden, the instruments get a breath of fresh air; the Geordinaires: John Cavener, Jim Hornsby, Martin Stephenson and Colin Mee; well-earned tea break and Greggs run. Top two pix Juan Fitzgerald; lower two, yours truly.

Grey

What is it about oblong grey rooms? No part of the human body is that shape or colour, unless those features belong to some one that I haven't met yet.
Who invented boxes for people? What science decided that this was the way for humans to function?
Where you have corners, you have places to hide or cower in fear.
You have hierarchies based on proximity to the 'front' or 'back' of the room, or closeness to the door or windows (if you have them).
Is it a way of creating grey thought, with no colourful dissent or ultra-violet... 'thinking outside the box'?
I don't only want to think outside the box, I want to BE outside it.

Book Early for the June Premises Songwriting Course

Skiffle On The Way

I spent Saturday and Sunday in a garage in Darlington recording eleven skiffle songs with Martin, Jim Hornsby (guitar and Dobro), John Cavener (double bass) and Colin Mee (recording device). The door flipped open, we filed in, tuned up and got to work, fuelled by tea and sandwiches. We got some great sounds; Jim found a great scratchy sound on the Dobro for the Anarchy Skiffle and Martin made a percussive scratch for Pioneer Town on his guitar. At the end of day two, we put four- piece male harmonies as backing vocals on some of the songs, an idea I got from working with a group of ten student producers as we did a song writing exercise last year- they jumped out of character and started singing in unison and sounded fabulous. 'I want that sound', I thought, and I got it and harmonies too. We worked quickly: John Cavener's bass added a bounce to everything, and yesterday lunchtime I sat at the kitchen table and scribbled out the lyrics for a song I'd sung on to my phone, never thinking I'd ever use it. My fave is a song called The Bachelor Boys but there are lots that worked out well, including a sort of forties one called Sugar Hill. It's a very happifying thing to do, to  secrete a group of musicians away in a garage with a bit if recording equipment. Next job is whether to plump for a dry mix or a Sam Phillips mix a la Elvis Sun Sessions- and then find a way to real ease it...  on vinyl!

Dog

I'm delighted to say that a dog has started following me on Twitter.

The Robbie Robertson Blues Band at the 12 Bar

I'm not going to be able to name names unfortunately because I haven't got access to the Internet to fact-check, but me and my Champagne Friend had such a nice night out last night that I decided to write about it anyway. We met up in town for a cup of tea at my favourite secret cafe and then went on to the 12 Bar, where Dot, who I met at a conference in Leeds a few years ago, was playing keyboards for the band. They had set off at six in the morning from Edinburgh, and were raring to go.
The 12 Bar is a dear old place. It gets revamped from time to time, lurching from one type of scruffiness to another. The one thing that never changes is the sticky floor (and I have mentioned the sticky stage before, that is so beer-sodden that the prongs of my stool legs got completely embedded in it one time). The other thing that doesn't change is the extraordinary clientele. Everybody is weird. In fact, it's the one venue in London where I feel totally comfortable, which is a little depressing when you come to think of it.
Last night's prize was won by the lady carrying a plank, who was there with a man with a broken foot in a plaster cast. The plaster cast had an elaborate and rather beautiful face drawn on the toe, complete with eyelashes and full, sexy, red lips. The man sporting this elaborate affair looked too grumpy to have such a fun plaster cast but maybe I caught his eye at the wrong moment.
Anyway: back to the music. The singer, Annette Chapman, is a wonderful blonde Scottish woman, who is strikingly tall and who has a disarmingly straightforward stage manner and an absolutely gorgeous voice. She could, I am sure, sing anything that jazz threw at her but she's obviously a total blues fan.
Robin Robertson the guitarist is a seasoned blues player and his fingers charged about all over the fretboard of his Fender with total ease, playing some scorching solos as well as tight rhythm. The drummer, Ruaridh Saunders, and bass player Brian Branford were solid and tight and Dot my girl, you were a revelation! You can more than carry a solo and I do hope your gig went well tonight too!
Both me and my Champagne Friend really enjoyed good powerful music played so close you could touch it. Who cares about Beyoncé and her thousands of dancers, Madonna and her horrible 'sexy' costumes, the silly young 'ins and their desperate need for column inches! There's nothing like good live music played by enthusiasts in a weeny venue with a sticky floor on a Wednesday night. There really isn't!

Sausage Sleep

Last night I slept a night of sausage sleep: late to sleep, early to wake, squashed up and mashed up.
I've already done an hour and a half's work this morning looking at students' CVs.
They are trying to find work placements in the music industry, which at times can feel for all of us like pushing a boulder uphill. A spiky one.
The washing machine is roaring, Offsprog One's complaining about it and I told her to turn the volume down.
There's so much paper on the table that it looks like snow has fallen.

Complaints Choirs

A couple of years ago my colleague Luis and myself worked with a film maker on a project called The Cleaners' Voice, which was a campaigning song for the London Living Wage. Our cleaners at work successfully achieved their objective, which was wonderful.
Luis invited me along on Monday to work with his students, who had formed a Complaints Choir because they hate working in groups. They had already start working on words and I was invited along to help them make it into a song.
It was really good fun; they are Theatre Studies students and have all sorts of skills that are different to musicians' skills; they can do things immediately and remember really long sequences of words and actions. This group had great rhythm too. Very quickly we had clapping rhythms and the chant had developed into a melody; we had call and response. All this before I even got the guitar out.
The guitar tidied it up which was a good thing and a bad thing. It was fun while it was loose but the mood lifted as it started to materialise into a proper song. We talked, we agreed, we discussed.
As a group.
Towards the end of the session, spirits were flagging. Was this it?
Luis suggested that they lined up opposite each other and walked to change sides as they sang. They went for it and suddenly the smiles appeared with a new element to the song: the sound of stamping feet. The voices were loud and confident; they sang with gusto, they laughed.
The irony of a group who hate group work, working together to create a lovely song to sing was not lost on anybody!

Skiffle

Soon I will be heading to Darlington to record some skiffle songs with Jim Hornsby, John Cavener and of course Martin, at Skip Rat Studios, a proper garage studio with a pink carpet and old Skool gear. We'll be recording live and I'll be playing uke as well as guitar. I'm hoping we'll get some good backing vocals done too.
I haven't been playing the songs live so far apart from Sugar Hill, which I managed only the first line of on Friday before I forgot the rest and had to wait till the end for another go at it. I'd been trying to do a sweet'n'sour Valentine's set in Gateshead at the Caedmon Hall, which is a lovely venue like an upturned Noah's Ark inside, all dark wood and good acoustics.
I was supporting Martin and Jim. Martin chose a lovely set of some of the more laid back songs and the audience were amazing- not least for coming out on such a miserable Friday night of rain and blustery wind. Best song? Maybe Home, dedicated to my Dad as well as Martin's Mum. Jim is a great foil for Martin on stage, keeping him grounded with grumpiness that isn't real at all, and playing subtle guitar counterpoints to Martin's picking. It's always a real pleasure to see the interplay between them on stage.

Page 3

Is that going to hook a bunch of Sun-reader browsers?
Who knows.
I have got to page three of my new comic; there are no topless women- well, one almost, actually, on page two being photographed by a pervy photographer.
One more page to go, then a whole load of tidying up and a trip to the local library to reduce it in size and see what it looks like as an A4.
I'm such a graphic designer type that the only reason I drew the strip (funrrr) in A3 size is because that's the size of the paper I had. So sophisticated, non?
The only think I'm fussy about is that the paper must be smooth, which takes W.H. Smith's sketch pads right out of the picture. They downgraded their paper quality and obviously thought that stupid artists wouldn't notice the difference. It's like trying to draw on cotton wool.
The drawings are resting for a few days, for practical reasons (if I rub out the pencil lines and the ink hasn't dried rock-hard, it smudges) and practical reasons (I'm playing in Gateshead tomorrow evening with Martin and Jim). I'm also going to interview a Geordie for my next lot of research: multicultural, hein?
You might notice that there's the odd French word thrown in here and there in this posting; this is possibly because the story I'm working on is actually called Bande Dessinee, which is French for comic strip.

The Happy End

The Happy End were a fabulous big-band that were around during the 1980s.
There were about 20 of them, male and female, all different abilities; they were a mass of spiky hair, red and black clothes, huge grins and sparkling brass instruments. Their music was big, loud, joyous and rickety, and was always political; it swayed and it swung with the abandon of a children's playground swing.
They were the first people I heard playing Hans Eisler's music; their singer was Sarah Jane Morris, who had a head of russet hair, a skinny dress, big black Doctor Marten's and a voice as big and deep as the Atlantic Ocean.
My favourite gig of theirs was a Christmas gig at the Fridge in Brixton which unusually for them had a layer of camp but it didn't damp their sincerity. They sat en masse amongst a sea of fake Christmas trees and managed to be festive and Left-wing at the same time.
When Sarah Jane left (due to her success with the Communards, I think) I went along to audition. I did Surabaya Johnny, but I knew as I sang that my voice was far too weedy to hack it; but it was still a blast singing with them and they were very nice to me.
Their arranger, the heart of the band Matt Fox, helped to check an arrangement I'd done for one of Chaucer's tales, Chanticleer and Pertelote. I had big ideas of staging it at Southwark Cathedral but I never did that. Matt said the parts were fine; I've still got it all bundled up somewhere. He came and sang on a demo of one of the songs but by then I'd lost the plot somewhat and was using samples from The Slits Cut album instead of brass arrangements!
He was a good natured and patient man, and as I said, the beating heart of the band. I am so very sorry to hear that he has died; I was just thinking about that funny recording the other day and then found out that very day. He can't have been very old; early fifties perhaps; it's a real loss to music. Bless him.

Gateshead on Valentine's Day

Here is a ticket link to the gig in Gateshead on Valentine's Day:
http://www.ents24.com/gateshead-events/caedmon-hall-at-gateshead-central-library/martin-stephenson/3646557

Yakking

Been yakking on the phone and saw my friend who I haven't seen for decades, David Webber, tucked up in his jarmas on Holby City. He starred in the panto version of Titus Andronicus that me and Dave Jago wrote music for and that was put on by the Count of Three Theatre group in the 1980s.
I also missed Helen and the Horns being mentioned on Danny Baker's 1980s show on BBC4; I will have to forgive him for saying that I sounded like Maddy Prior on speed when I was in The Chefs, and watch it on iPlayer tomoz.
It's been all go, tonight.

Background

In the background, DCI Banks (missed episode one so it's not going to make much sense).
In the foreground, page two of a story, a project that should be named Guerilla Drawfare I think.

Hunting

It must be here, on this table... how can it not be? I have the latest release by The Irrepressibles, which I have been wanting to review for weeks. Where is it?