This Is Tonight And It's Free!

Names... Crash!

Late last night I went to Passing Clouds on Dalston to try to catch the Axiomites, one of my friend Dubula's many bands. Dubula was a founder member of Transglobal Underground, before breaking away to form Temple of Sound. In the 1980s he was a member of Bumble and the Beez, a band started by Mykaell Riley, former percussionist/vocalist with Steel Pulse. Mykaell's ex-partner used to be my manager, after doing press for The Chefs (and The Associates, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stray Cats and many others).
Phew, what a name-dropping exercise that simple introduction turned into!
Mykaell used to chat to me about Helen and the Horns. 'You've got some nerve, getting up there with just a guitar and three horn players', he would say as the band leader of a band that featured two rock guitarists, a classical violin player, a reggae bass player (Winston Blissett, best in the country) and himself on cowbell, bass drum and vocals!
Anyway, Mykaell was singing with the Axiomites last night and as he has a beautiful voice and I had been really looking forward to it. A swift call from the Edinburgh train revealed the fact that they were playing so late that it might be worth going to see them.
I shot over there in the red convertible (ahem) and hung out for a chat; Mykaell said I'd just missed some Swedish acapella folk singers.
Time passed.
What a shame, really... promoters know that people will wait for ages to see a band and go to the bar and spend lots of money while they are waiting. So keep them waiting... and waiting...
If you are me, you don't drink and you still pay to get in, and of course you notice the time passing because the alcohol-clock ticks a lot slower than the real-time one.
It was lovely to see Dubula and Mykaell and to chat with them, and eventually to imagine what the band would have been like with their singers and brass section and all of that jazz; I couldn't just wait and wait.
It is a lovely place, but I was so disappointed.
Another time, I'm sure!

McMum

Happy birthday to McMum, see you later!

Sheffield Greystones

Here are the Daintees sound checking in Sheffield last night. They did a great show especially this bit, where they played acoustically. That's Kate second left, playing a Cahone that sounds just like a full kit. I was their support act last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed it; what could be better than to support my favourite band? Mike and June were there doing the CDs, Andrew Bailey of the Guitar weekends showed up and so did David Lelievre who runs the Eyre Chapel gigs.
I love Sheffield, it's a great city to wander about in with some nice caffs and a TK Maxx! Martin and I had a lovely day wandering around and exploring. The audiences for music are always really welcoming too and the band stayed in a really quirky B&B with huge antique baths with giant's brass taps and massive beds, and an academic living there who works with sound technology who was recording the band as I left, alas, for work! They are playing at the Greystones again tonight and I hope they have just as nice an audience again. I had a sunny drive back, writing two songs in my head, a weird one and a cheesy one, and did a seminar this afternoon with two very enthusiastic MA students. Tomorrow morning, I have four hours of tutorials, after which I shall slink out as a shadow of my former self and make some revisions to a much-revised document before returning home and slumping in front of Poirot on Channel 10 as usual. I can honestly say that Poirot has been a lifesaver this autumn, bless his little black moustache. Is it made from the carapaces of shiny black beetles, d'you think?

Sparkleshadow

futureradio.co.uk

Richard Penguin's playing The Song of the Unsung Heroine today, plus a Raincoats track and lots of other good stuff- 2-3 p.m.
www.futureradio.co.uk

Valves

Even more noise for my neighbours: the mystery of the silent trumpet has been solved thanks to the chaps at Liberty Hall Music who turned the valves round so they were in the right direction.
I tried to play some notes.
A giant who had eaten nothing but tins of beans and cabbage for six weeks farted into a massive tin lavatory, no matter which note I tried to play FPPPPPHHT! FFFFPPPPHHHHT!
That's my aim of the week- to play a note that sounds like a note!

Bass

Watch out neighbours! The Harman Kardon speakers are out of the secret cupboard and boosting the bass! What fun! I am dancing round the front room instead of doing the housework!

Issues and Things: Jumblethoughts

I have been dodging Big Issue sellers; I always buy one but for the last two weeks the sellers in Barnet have become so assertive that they call across the street or come running up. I haven't always got 2 quid to give them and it's quite embarrassing sometimes. I know these are desperate times for all of us and I even paid the guy when it was the David Cameron issue but didn't take one (whose silly idea was that to put turnip-face in charge for a week?). What stopped me (it's only temporary, I promise) was the same seller standing in two different places and selling me the same issue twice. Grr!
After the mid-week crash in mood, things have looked up. I went to John Lewis (the Church of the Moneyed Middle Classes!) to buy McMum some fancy shower gel for her birthday, and the shop assistant at the till told me she liked my style! I thought I had been stumping about like a sad and bedraggled frump, so naturally I was delighted, especially since I was entirely dressed from Charity Shops; I told her that I was dressed in second-hand clothes.
'Vintage', she corrected me.
I have now officially re-branded myself as a vintage lecturer, songwriter and artist, 'cos it sounds good!
This morning I sent 14 CDs to Miguel in Madrid. I hope they (a) get there and (b) aren't smashed to bits if/when they do. I am still reeling form the loss of a £50 dress that I sold on eBay and that never arrived. A book that I'd ordered from Amazon never turned up either and I became convinced that there is a light-fingered post-person somewhere  in the area. What can you do? Write a song about it? Ha ha! Say your prayers when you post it and be glad you won a tenner on the lottery last week (I did! How exciting!).
And Andy Cairns has sent a DVD of Helen and the Horns (and I think The Daintees?) at the Jazz Cafe. Thank you Andy, I shall watch it tomorrow and listen to your music too.
Right  now, it's the housework to the soundtrack of the 'Complicated Music' playlist I made yesterday. I have just started properly listening to music again. being a music lecturer is similar to being an A&R person at a record company, I think: you listen to music, music, music all the time, often not what you have chosen. But somewhere in between creating playlists for students to listen to and discovering the lost Michael Garrick track, I've fallen in love with recorded music again.
Strangely, a perfect recall of the original BBC session of Galilee has kicked in; the bass line has changed considerably and also some of the lyrics. I am tempted to reconstruct a cover version using the original double bass line and lyrics to see what happens.
Oh Norma Winstone, please read this and send me a recording of the original session!
Finally, I think I am almost ready to start recording another album. Tomorrow I will rehears some new songs and try them out at the Sheffield gig (Greystones, supporting The Daintees on Tuesday).
Phew! Slippers on, hoover out, dust in eyes: housework time.

Being 'Better'

There's nothing like feeling ill to make you appreciate feeling better. Today has been a lovely day, just because I haven't felt like I did yesterday. I have been bouncing around, trying to avoid work emails (that's something I'm going to work on) and in the afternoon, spending some time song-writing with my pal that I'm helping, which is a good way to spend an afternoon.
I had been going to go out to see Kath Tait play tonight but decided to sit in and work out some mysterious guitar chords from a recording of Songpal's that she had done with another guitarist. I like puzzles like that and I think I have almost cracked it.
Probably about time I wrote some more songs myself but I am stuck on the song Feathers, which I can't stop playing because it is actually written about a person who has been disempowering and insulting people. I have never met them, but every time I think of them I get cross and have to sing the song again!
So no going out tonight.
I just had to imagine Kath's gig in my head; she's a mistress of funny songs, rivalled only by Liza P. In the days of the Desperado Housewives I had hoped that she would join us: but Hyde is rather a long way away...

Subtracting

Dropping in for a visit to Myspace, I discovered that the Visitor Map has been subtracting places that people have 'visited' from .
Does this mean that some places have vanished from the face of the Earth?

MSG

OMG
Been unwell
MSG
In the sweet'n'sour sauce
Too sick
To go upstairs and sleep it off
UGH!

Ghost Town

Somehow, my lecture on music and subversion ended up with Ghost Town by the Specials.
I might well have ended at Band Aid and Free Nelson Mandela, if I hadn't started at the Communist witch-hunts, with Pete Seeger and Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill. There wasn't time to advance beyond the 1980s.
Jerry Dammers was interviewed on the local TV programme today about just that song, and the way it was adopted by the ANC: that must have been a thrilling moment for him. He had been campaigning against apartheid since his school days.
I played The Slits' Typical Girls next to Culture Club's Do You Really Want To Hurt Me to show the different ways reggae entered the British music world; and Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff next to Enoch Powell's oops I mean Eric Clapton's. And there was Gil Scott Heron, almost inventing rap singlehanded (with a little bit of help from the Lost Poets).
I have been really enjoying putting these lectures together and I have learned a lot- mostly about Ewan MacColl and his partitioning-off of English/Scottish/whateverish folk music, which stopped anything he laid his hands on from cross-fertilising, which is what pop music does, traditionally.
In isolation, the lyrics of Under My Thumb by the Rolling Stones sound exactly what they are- misogynistic poo. I told the students about Women's Liberationists dancing away to them before realising that it was time they formed their own bands! And there was Poly Styrene, mocking the way teenagers were marketed-to as grubby and in need of a good scrub: Germ Free Adolescents sounded as fresh as a daisy.
You were a poet and a genius, Poly.

Michael Garrick

I have just read the obituary of Michael Garrick.
When I had just discovered that I was expecting my first child, I attended a jazz singing course at the Guildhall School of Music (I was the worst one, rather screechy) where I was lucky enough to have a one-to-one singing lesson with Norma Winstone (who has a fabulous voice and who used to sing with Ian Carr's Nucleus) and also to work with Michael, singing and writing lyrics to an instrumental he had written called My First Born, which naturally meant a lot to me through my daze of morning sickness.
When I was in the sixth form I would sit alone in my room, listening to John Peel and then letting the radio run on to Jazz Club, which is where I first heard Garrick's music. In between the taped reggae and Pete Atkin quirkiness (this was pre-punk, guys), I taped a beautiful Garrick track with Winstone singing it called Galilee.
I could never find it: and now I have just downloaded a gorgeous version of it sung by Nette Robinson.
These things are always a matter of taste, but I think it is the most achingly beautiful piece of music with Robinson's voice soaring like a bird in the sunset over Garrick's shuffling piano rhythms.
Somewhere in this house is a vinyl album of Garrick's very English-sounding jazz. Some of it is disappointing but the best of it has an Alice-in Wonderlandishness about it, particularly when Winstone is singing.
Jazz has always been a bit of a mystery to me but something about listening to this track in my teenage angst and isolation makes it really evocative.

Subversion

Tomorrow's lecture is on subversion, and after a broad sweep of music associated with social agitation, I have of course landed on punk.
I wanted to download The Rolling Stones' Some Girls, but it's just about to be re-released so thankfully I couldn't. I went to print out the lyrics and then decided that they are so utterly offensive that I couldn't read them out in class.
Sometimes people used to ask me why I wrote the song Thrush. After a diet of the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and so on (even Girls by the Moments and Whatnauts), I had no alternative. Time to say it from the girl's perspective, being on the receiving end, so to speak!
As usual I have really enjoyed researching this lecture: I have re-visited Robin Denselow's When the Music's Over, and blended in with Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City, Mark Katz's Capturing Sound, Mark Cunningham's Good Vibrations, Simon Frith's On Record and George Lipsitz's Dangerous Crossroads, I will have visited aspects of 20th century pop and rock from all sorts of different perspectives.
It has revived my interest in very early recordings, in folk music in the UK (Ewan McColl and Pete Seeger tomorrow as well as the SLits and X Ray Spex), and in pre-rock'n'roll r'n'b.
I'm even going to wheel out the hippies tomorrow.
Soft Machine or Curved Air anyone?