Woodwide Web in the Woods

 

From 'And Now, The Weather' Last Night

Three cheers for Kevin Younger and this partner Xtina Lamb for organising these monthly online cover version events. They have been saving graces during lockdown for a lot of isolated musicians while our active communities have been curtailed. There have been some fantastic performances and videos (Tiger Feet is number one at the moment). Here is mine from last night. I have no video skills, but I do have paper!

Bands and Music and People

You get used to not seeing friends who play music for long periods of time because the nature of making music is that it's episodic. You have intense, focused relationships with other creative people, you make a tour or a gig or a recording. You share jokes, you eat together, travel together, get on each others' nerves. You need clean clothes or you should have had a shower. Things that are not funny seem hilarious because they... are. Collectively, you meet people at venues and in audiences. If you're lucky you become part of  a loose network of people who will say 'yes' to anything musical in any of it's forms. Amongst you there are people of supreme musical talent, people with basic skills but who always turn up on time (so valuable, those people!), people who know how to bring an audience, and people who seem to who entirely consist of ideas, mostly really good ones. Some people can read music, most can't. Some people's egos overflow out of a room and hallway to pour down the road: others are so self-effacing they seem barely there, until they pick up an instrument and let rip so uproariously you wonder where they were keeping all that energy.

So many people you come across, in a lifetime of making music. You get used to saying 'See ya!' and then it's a year, five years, ten years. You meet again and everything is the same because you have been bonded by all that I've just written about. It's called 'knowing the score' in slang that everyone uses but because it's music, it really is a score, only not the one on paper with dots and instructions about sound that people generally associate with the word. The score is not something you can teach at any of the University courses I've lectured on over the years. The score is to do with being able to recognise an experience almost before you experience it, to understand not only what your role is, but also what your more-than-a-role will be. To see the gap in a group of people that exactly fits your shape and sound, and to alight there with a feeling of belonging.

At Nick's funeral on Thursday, this is where I realised all this. Some of us have known each other musically since our very early twenties, others later. We had all connected through one musician, and we were knitted together by those experiences so a deluge of memories rained down. A group of us even laughed, when the very loving and solemn formal part of the afternoon was over.

Nick was very brave. At the end of last year he must have been very ill, but he still did the 'voice of Fatberg' and didn't say what was happening to him. He probably never heard the finished track, although I sent it to him. I was sure I'd see him again, just as so many other people at his funeral were. He was a big part of our musical landscape, our musical peoplescape. 

Personally, I've never regretted the diversion into music that punk knocked me into. I looked round at all those characters on Thursday, who were also looking round at each other, and thought just what a turbulent and volatile 'career' you have as a creative person. Money evades you (it always seems to be being counted in the next room, and escapes like a shot as soon as it moves into view); fame lasts as long as a tissue in a washing machine. Your skills vanish unless you constantly refresh and rehearse them. Your playing is replaced by someone more competent on a record. Music industry people tell you to sack your band (has happened twice). People claim credit for your music (has happened countless times). 

But it's a world that I understand, that has given me adventures, that is exciting, that has great and lasting camaraderie, understanding, laughter, and most of all, constant variety and change. The meaning of all this flies beneath so many people's radar, in particular that of powerful people in the music industry for whom the meaning of life is money and cocaine. It flies beneath the radar of the political class, until it's convenient to call it 'the creative industries'. It evades definition and the scales and measures used to quantify and qualify value. 

They just can't put their finger on it all. 

Good, because if they could, they'd squash it.

Storm in a Teacup Continues

 

Making Props And Mini-Scenery

 

Recalibration

Something we all have to get used to: things changing all the time. Thanks to Boris Johnson, the Austrian Government has banned flights from the UK. We were/are supposed to be playing there in July. We'll just have to keep our fingers crossed. I almost bought the flight tickets last week, but was waiting to see if it was three gigs or two. I am trying to give up being annoyed with the Government. It's an utter waste of time and energy engaging with mass psychopathy, especially when it's been voted for. They will all destroy each other in time, because psychopaths only care about themselves and regard anyone who isn't them to be an inferior being. I just hope the destruction of other people's lives stops sooner rather than later. I know that sounds trite under the circumstances, but I can't express in words the disgust and anger that I feel.

Sunday in Stockton

It could have been a disastrous journey, if I hadn't checked the Transport for London website half an hour before I was due to leave and discovered that there were no tubes at all running on the Northern Line branch from High Barnet that I needed to travel on to King's Cross. I hopped on bus to Arnos Grove, that 1930s-splendiferous tube station, and travelled without incident all the way to Eastcliffe, where the promoter Stephen Harland picked me up and drove us to the venue. The NE Volume Bar is small and perfectly formed, and was just perfect for a socially distanced gig on a Sunday evening. Charlotte Grayson and Steve McCormick were the other artists playing, and after the soundchecks we tucked in to Wendy's vegan hotpot and (wait for it) Blue Ribands! I didn't know they still existed.

Charlotte is 21 years old and has a worldly wise way with lyrics. She is already recording her second album and she is confident, with a classic Sixties-style voice that will take her far. Steve is a self-confessed stomper, singing sunny good-time songs that warmed up the room no end. Good job- the dressing room was chilly, and I was a bit worried about having a repeat performance experience of the St John's gig where my fingers were so cold it was like playing with Twiglets instead of fingers. By the time I went on stage the audience were well-lubricated, but not so much that they weren't listening to the lyrics- there were a couple of guffaws at points in the songs that people don't always get the twists of. And of course, there was the burp that I mentioned in yesterday's posting! It was a very friendly and lovely crowd, and I was massively flattered by Saskia Holling and her partner Russ Wilkins, two Medway scenesters, travelling down from Dumfries in their camper van for the gig. Of course we had a bloody good distanced yak, partly about Kevin Younger's monthly cover versions gigs, which we all do.

There could not have been a better gig to emerge from lockdown into. Stephen and Wendy are so interesting to talk to- they have promoted so many different gigs, often people that I really like: the Nightingales, Vic Godard, and of course Pellethead, the local heroes. I couldn't stop smiling. It could have been difficult- at one point I thought I was going to lose my voice because of all the chatting but all those months of four-seminar Tuesdays saw me through.

The green Goddess also behaved, and did not give me too many bad chords. If I don't treat her right, she sulks and throws the spanner in the works. I have realised though, that she is bloody heavy to carry around to gigs if I'm travelling by train.

Anyway- Steve and Wendy very kindly put me up, and I met their two rescue labradors, the boisterous one and the quiet one, before conking out entirely. It was a long way to travel for a gig but it was so worth it. The gig the night before in Beverley had been cancelled because the venue wasn't ready to open, so it was a bit of a punt to travel so far just for a one-off but I'm so glad I did. I am still buzzing today and had to go for a long walk to come down to earth again.

Heading home... after spending half the train journey listening to a distressed woman describing her boyfriend's cocaine-induced seizure at the wheel of his van, fighting the staff at A&E, being constantly drunk, borrowing money off her friends and relatives, and spending the money she was working 15 hour shifts as a nurse to save for their holidays on taxing the van he'd just crashed, I decided to take earplugs next time. She was travelling to see him after taking a day's holiday from work, and it was so tempting to tell her to turn round and go home immediately!

Suddenly being social is intense, isn't it?

TBC

I'm too tired to write about yesterday's gig at the NE Volume Bar at the moment- I wish I'd taken photographs, but it's hard at a social distance and my phone kept crashing anyway. But it was lovely, the best way of coming out of lockdown you could possibly imagine, even to the loud pissed burp from an audience member at the end between songs. Stephen Harland and his partner Wendy are great promoters and the atmosphere was perfect- the bar staff were amazing and so was the sound guy, Dave. More tomorrow when I've recovered from carting the very heavy Green Goddess up the steep bank from the tube station on the way home!

More Recording

Today is vocals day for Femme Fatale. I've just remembered that I haven't really eaten anything today so I suppose I'd better do that first. I've already rehearsed half my songs for tomorrow night in Stockton and I'll do a bit more of that later.

It's daunting, the idea of replacing all the gigs I had to cancel from last year, and once everything seems to have settled down I'll get to work on that. Everyone's a bit shell-shocked still, but I can sense people coming out fo hibernation. Part of it's the travelling: living under house arrest, or at least town arrest, for a year is a weird thing.

There's not much to say. I'm just writing this because I'm waiting for the potatoes to cool down to make potato salad with, and I've read the newspaper from cover to cover. The house needs cleaning, but that honestly doesn't appeal. I wonder if I could persuade the garden snails to do it?

Fatberg Video Nominations

The Fatberg video by our genius film maker Ruth Tidmarsh has now won three nominations for music video festivals! Eurovision here we come! Kind of. 

Music Afternoon

I braved the bluster this morning, walking four and a half miles there and back for vaccine number two. I pretended that I was in Ullapool and lo, when I returned home I had a shiny Ullapool windface!

Somehow I found pelicans on Youtube and spent about 15 minutes being really disappointed in their behaviour. Because I like them so much, I expected them to be nice, but they're not. Every video was called 'Pelican swallows.... whole' or something like that. In one, a brave little cat got very near to the deadly beak, but shot off at a rate of knots very close to being eaten alive. One pelican was trying to eat a capybara alive and didn't seem to realise there was no chance. It had a bloody good go at it, though. I have no idea how I got lost down this wormhole, apart from clicking on a vid of a capybara farting in the bath last week. Oh how to waste time.

This afternoon, I'm going to mix in Ian and Robert's vocals to the Femme Fatale recording, and also do some work on mine and Robert's songs. I've literally been waiting weeks to do this, but there has been so much marking to do that I haven't had the opportunity. Headphones at the kitchen table three days in a row! How extraordinary!

But first, a good read of the newspaper and a cheap sell-by-date lunch. I'll miss out the first few pages because I'm heartily sick of mawkish royals moaning about everything in the middle of a global pandemic. Talk about choosing their moment! There is nothing more completely tedious that narcissism, unless it's people who pander to it and keep it going. Best cure is to go into a hospital and work there: I think that might inject a little reality into things for them.

Recording Femme Fatale

Spirit of Nick, it's 8 p.m. and I've been editing and recording most of the day and part of this evening. I have a decent backing track demo of Femme Fatale with some guitar overdubs that are slightly out of time but (I might completely change my mind tomorrow) in a really good way that might become permanent. Very Velvets-sounding.

Tomorrow morning early I might put a guide vocal on it for my (male) backing singer(s). I hope to have two but I might ask more: I've only asked one so far. This moment has come around quite quickly.

I'd meant to do more rehearsing today for the gig in Stockton on Sunday, but I can do that tomorrow and Friday and Saturday.

On the cassette that I was digitising this morning I found fifteen anti-advertising feminist jingles that I wrote in 1983. They are strangely relevant right now, which is a bit depressing. Listening to all the tracks we did I can hear Simon Walker talking in the background between tracks, and imagine us all there at Elephant Studios in Wapping with the engineer Simon Tassano behind the desk- he actually showed me what it did, which was great because I was so curious. We had big glass panels dividing us to separate the sound, and endless tea and coffee from the ubiquitous stained mugs that still collect in studios and reproduce silently when no-one's looking.

I remember at one point, when the music was finished, walking down Coldharbour Lane in Brixton with two grand's worth of tapes in a supermarket carrier bag. That was a genuinely surreal moment: a whole TV series worth of music on quarter-inch tape reels carried by a scruffy twenty-something who lived in a semi-squat. The glamour!

Archiving

I have dug out a cassette of music from a documentary series called Pictures of Women that a whole bunch of us made in 1983. It was made by a women's film collective and provided satellite employment for lots of young film and arty women in our Camberwell community and beyond. At a party, I'd said 'Yes' to doing the music, and from then on began a journey of what is commonly called a 'steep learning curve', writing the music, finding people to play it, and ultimately overseeing the recordings, something that I believe is commonly called 'production', although if anyone had described what I was doing as that at the time, I would have fainted with surprise.

Alas, the cassette has deteriorated a bit and there's some odd phasing on the drums, but I'm going with it because on a lot of the tracks you can hear Dubulah's guitar parts. And Lester Square from the Monochrome Set, for that matter, and Mike Slocombe who currently drums for that very band, plus Simon Walker on fiddle. We were a bouncy lot, full of youthful energy and you can hear it in the music.

I've definitely NOT got archive ears, which you really need to engineer these things properly. I'm running it from a knackered Sony tape machine too. Probably I should take the original masters somewhere and get them converted, but at the moment my budget is covering the future, not the past. I'll put these on Soundcloud later this week, just for the craic. And I'm also going to put our version of Leavin' You Baby up there too- just for the energy blast!

I've missed Bargain Hunt because I was so absorbed in what I was doing. I thought it was going to pour with rain this afternoon but it's not looking like that. However I'm also going to do what I meant to do, which is record a version of Femme Fatale for a Mexican fanzine, and rehearse for Sunday's gig in Stockton. The studio tan is well on its way but who cares? I got to hear my pal again and I have to say that I don't think any of us have lost our bounce, and Nick definitely didn't. I'm so glad to have him as the voice of Fatberg!

Just posted on Soundcloud:

Leaving' You Baby

A Day Out

It was so exciting! An actual day out! I met Gina at Tufnell Park tube station, just like in normal times... except we were wearing masks. We went to see Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy just like in normal times, except we were wearing masks. 

It felt like an entirely new experience, to be in an art gallery. All that space, and all those paintings. Gina showed me some of her own work when we were having coffee in the courtyard before the exhibition, and I could see the correlation: the idea of nakedness and exposure of women not for the male eye, but from the female feeling and experience. Taking back control mate, innit?

I worked out that Tracey Emin works on some of her paintings upside down, which was intriguing. I do a similar thing, though not the same, with drawing. I particularly liked seeing the different pressures of the paintbrush on the canvas. And the most amazing thing? It wasn't mediated through a screen, and the paintings were big... huge, some of them. Even the smell of the gallery, and the sound of the gallery attendant humming, and it reverberating gently around the space and merging in with the quiet chatter and clumping footsteps. An art gallery, and art. Real.

I'm listening to Gideon Coe at the moment and have been moved to tears by hearing him play a Dub Colossus track. Such strange times of illness and death, yet Spring has arrived and is paying no attention at all. Everything outside is green and rainy and fresh and exuberant. I have planted courgette seeds, and they have positively burst into life out from the constriction of their husks. Out of prison, no longer confined! I know just how they feel, actually.

Review for 'She's At the Controls' in 'The Wire', June Issue