Busyness

Phew
Phew
Phew
Katy Carr is coming to talk to the students t the University of the East tomorrow.
She is one of the most successful of the students that I've taught over the years and her new album's going to be out on Friday.
here's the video which has just been posted on The Guardian website:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/03/playlist-folk-world-music-youssou-n-dour-steve-earle-lucy-ward
There are lots of other interesting things in the pipeline: watch this space!

Music Entrepreneurship

Some of my most recent research appears in a chapter on audio production in this book, which will be out on 17th December (I thought it wasn't going to be published until August 2016).
It's meant for students on music courses that have a business element; while writing the chapter I got a whole different perspective on approaches to the recording industry.
It's also probably of interest to anyone who wants to go it alone as a music entrepreneur; the ideas are very current:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/music-entrepreneurship-9781472530974/

Gretna Green by Me

Wrote this years ago- first time the recording has worked, thanks to Martin Stephenson:
https://www.reverbnation.com/helenmccookerybook?profile_view_source=profile_box

Sandie Shaw: Always Something There To Remind Me

North Korea's Moranbong Band

Who says there is no politics in pop an more?

The Baby Joke

Once upon a time there was a Baby. The Baby was very happy, living with its Mummy and Daddy.
As the Baby started growing older, however, it's Mummy and Daddy began to get rather worried, because the Baby didn't appear to be learning to speak.
But the Baby was so happy, they thought; but still, they were worried.
The Baby got to the age of three, and still hadn't learned how to talk.
One morning, the Baby was sitting in its high chair, and Mummy and Daddy made some porridge as usual and started feeding the child.
'Oh my God!!! This porridge is absolutely disgusting! What's wrong with it? I've never tasted anything so horrible! Take it away at once!', shouted the Baby at the top of it's voice.
Mummy and Daddy were astonished.
'We didn't know you could speak!' they exclaimed.
'Well, everything's been fine up till now', replied the Baby.

Playing Lucie's Lounge on Saturday Evening

Follow the link, I'll be travelling back for this:
http://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/lucies-lounge-review/?fb_action_ids=10153780531062845&fb_action_types=og.comments

Suzi Quatro

Thanks to Mark Percival for the heads-up about this track which features a bass solo extraordinaire from Ms Quatro. All the best music conferences lead to unusual snippets of information for the academic shopping bag!

Mixing at Gina's

Watch this space for news of Gina's forthcoming installation of paintings and music. We have been mixing this afternoon, and the track we are working on is beginning to sound mighty fine.
It's so interesting moving sounds around and making them speak to each other; that probably sounds mad, but it's true. If you change the volume of one thing, everything else sounds different; we have been making space today.
An added benefit to the afternoon was Gina's youngest daughter's cinnamon pinwheel cookie, fresh from the oven.
Yum yum!

Paean to Pork

British Black Music

Mykaell Riley came to talk to the students at the University of the West this morning. Mykaell is the driving force behind the Black Music History project which documents and promotes the history of UK-based black music. He is a fount of knowledge about sound systems, the cross-Atlantic making of reggae and reggae-influenced music, and the way that British pop artists use and used reggae influences in their music. It was great to hear U-Roy (I used to have one of his albums many years ago) and to listen to the influence of James Brown's vocal explosives on Dave and Ansell Collins' Double Barrel.

I have known Mykaell for years- not while he was the percussionist for Steel Pulse, but after that when he was in a band called Bumble and the Beez. He thought Helen and the Horns was a crazy band, with a vocalist/guitarist and three horn players; but Bumble and the Beez had two guitarists, a violin player, a bass player and Mykaell on vocals, cowbell and bass drum.
The 1980s was the age of the oddball band.
I used to record soundtracks at Mykaell's home studio, and now occasionally I watch him singing with Dub Colossus, the reggae/African fusion big band run by Dubulah (who was in Bumble and the Beez). In between, Mykaell had a band called The Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, who had a hit with Minnie the Moocher.

We are planning on doing something- some sort of event- in the future, that uses the research both of us have been doing, because there are common areas that are very unusual
http://www.mykaellriley.co.uk

Bass

I became a bass player by accident because the guys in the band chose the roles that got the most attention- two guitarists and a lead singer (no drummer yet). I didn't mind. I was just in the same room as them when they told me I'd be playing bass guitar.
To start off with, I borrowed one from Bella Donna who played bass with Poison Girls. She was one of twins, and she had such long hair that it almost reached her behind. The bass was a deep red semi-acoustic that had belonged to one of the Buzzcocks (she came from Manchester).
As soon as we had played one gig as Joby and the Hooligans, we got offered more, and that's when I realised that I was going to be a bass player.
I'd been saving up for a BSA Bantam and instead I spent the money on a tattered, scuffed, torn bass cabinet with one huge speaker in it, a cheap transistor amp top and a cream coloured Jedsen bass with a white scratchplate. I strung it with flatwound strings that were covered in black plastic sheathing, and across the top was a strip of masking tape with our song titles written on it in black felt tip pen.
For an quiet and insignificant girl, the power of the bass was a complete revelation.
While everyone else was showing off at the front, I discovered that I had the power, aided by the bass drum. Boom.
From the strings of my magical, cheap, shiny instrument, through the curly, crackly lead (the wires always broke up inside those curly leads) into the amp and through the speaker, I could shake the very ground that people in the audience stood on, while simultaneously whacking them in the chest with a hefty dose of sound waves. The Jedsen didn't so much boom as thud (it was extremely cheaply made) but the power was there and even when I was too shy to look up at the audience, I knew what it was doing- or what I was doing.
I had never imagined that I would possess or play such an instrument; owning a guitar was and remains a fantastic privilege. The potential of those switches and knobs to make and change sound!
Then there was learning. One of the guitarists had told me that the bass played what the vocalist sang but I knew that wasn't true. Without knowing, I had been listening out for those low tones in every record I'd ever heard, and I knew exactly what to play. I knew nothing about root notes, but I knew what sounded good and I loved low and deep sounds. I headed for the lowest and deepest (this was before The Chefs when I had to learn to play busy lines so we could carry on playing, just the drummer and me, when the guitarist walked off stage in strop).
The next revelation was doing a cover version of Dennis Brown's How Can I Leave. Punk bands like ours weren't restricted by style (we also played Roller Coaster by Jonathan Richman amongst our own noisy and sometime deliberately offensive contributions). But How Can I Leave has a bass groove like no other and what's more, it was simple to play. In my head I imagined a stoned bass player moving his hands to the most convenient places on the fretboard that sounded good, over, back, up, down the neck, moving with the hips, you don't have to look because it's all played in a pattern that repeats and repeats as a satisfying hand exercise as much as it sounds like a great groove. So clever, and yet so revealing to me about how little I knew. Feet and chest, I knew, but hips- that was the new thing and that meant that the bass controlled the whole body.

I don't play bass much any more, although every song I write has a bass line at its heart, a thread that runs through it that the whole song could be sung even if the guitarist in my head walks off stage. I am still a sucker for a sexy bass line in a song, preferably played on a Fender bass rather than a keyboard so that I can imagine my fingers cantering over the strings as I listen.
What brought this to mind?
Talking to Gina the other day just before we filmed our latest musician for the documentary. I will bring news soon of the screening date and place. We are still applying for funding- not crowd funding (yet) as this is being done under the umbrella of the University of the East at the moment. The longer we wait before injecting other people's cash, the more we get to make the film we want to make.
It is very, very important that these stories about women punk musicians are told by women and filmed and presented by women, isn't it?

Leaves, Archway, London

Anita O'Day

Anita O'Day, a trained drummer, was a survivor. Although this is rather an arch performance she has a wonderful voice. The song, of course, is deeply peculiar.

The Bobbettes

Thank you to Barbara Bradby for introducing me to The Bobbettes, a girl group who had a hit with their self-penned song, Mr Lee, written about their school teacher who they detested. Atlantic records insisted that they changed the lyrics to make it a crush-on-the-teacher song and it got to number one in the USA in 1957.
So they followed it up with I Shot Mr Lee at which Atlantic promptly dropped them. They released it on the Triple X label anyway. What naughty girls.

More here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bobbettes