Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Following in Sheeran's Footsteps

Music in the Park, as we veteran Suffolk fans still call it (despite the relatively recent abrogation of the term in favour of Ipswich Music Day's absorption into the new, exciting - and presumably grant-laden – Ip-Art Festival) kicked off in 1991 as part of a national celebration of music with a show from local band The Caution Horses, probably performing on the very spot in Christchurch Park where frontman Andy “Andy’s Ball!” Heasman used to play footy with a varied collection of us Ippo musicians and other assorted ne’er-do-wells on Sunday afternoons in the post-Italia ’90 surge in gentrification of the beautiful game - it certainly looks like the same area from the photos I’ve seen of great white hopefuls and recently reformed country rockers Buffalo Road who appear to have performed on a couple of wooden pallets serving as a stage and with a borrowed home hi fi shipped in as an afterthought for amplification purposes.
Unlike the rest of the country we in Suffolk persevered with the form in 1992, and the year after, and then the year after that, until the festival became a major fixture in the East Anglian cultural calendar. Last year’s attendance was estimated at over 40,000 people, who were entertained by a veritable smorgasbord of bands on over half a dozen bespoke girder and lighting rig-composed stages, a far cry from the Venue for Ipswich Campaign-inspired trailer upon which I had the good fortune to be able to perform a lengthy extemporisation upon The Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It?” with As Is, one of several appearances I’ve put in over the years*. 
With God’s Kitchen I tried to follow The Dawn Parade’s feather boa-heavy performance of Brit glam pop. On Star Club duties I loaded the gear straight off the stage into a van so that we could re-set up at The Milestone just at the bottom of Woodbridge Road and carry on where we’d left off, in The Picturehouse Big Band we inspired a frugging teenage moshpit frenzy (I know, at our ages), The Perfectly Good Guitars’ cod-American hillbilly accents so incensed one punter that he stomped, not just away from our stage, but all the way out of the park and off to the pub, and under my own name one year I even compered the early Singer-Songwriter session on the BBC stage.
Throughout all of this I have gleaned a modicum (a quantum, one might say) of experience about what goes on in terms of the organisation and the logistical effort involved. Firstly, since no-one gets paid and everyone volunteers, the bands themselves tend to be on the receiving end of the old saw that some people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. I have had stage managers order us off on the dot of the scheduled closing time, mid-song (even though it was them who had spent twenty minutes trying to work out which of their shoddily-maintained cables was at fault before we could start).
I’ve had sound engineers give me the thumbs-up and bid me start playing while I was still holding an unplugged guitar lead forlornly toward them, I’ve had stage monitors so distorted and badly-mixed that we’ve asked them to be turned off rather than try and fight against them, and I’ve hauled a fifty watt amplifier half way across the biggest park in town by hand because of an unfortunate arse/elbow interface which meant that I’d already lapped the circumference of the grounds by road three times looking for someone who may have actually attended a steward’s briefing before putting on his orange fluorescent jacket.
The requested detailed stage plan and DI box diagrams we sent weeks in advance to bestay some of these issues may as well have been blueprints for the directions to Neverland. Once Songs from The Blue House invited the twenty hardy souls who’d stayed to watch us in the pouring rain into the backstage tent where they could at least have a cup of tea in the dry and suggested that we might play acoustically, only for them to be chased out again by an over zealous FOH manager. 
Throughout this, the audience experience has been almost universally positive so, y’know, it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of the vocal mix in the foldback occasionally being a little too heavy on the reverb doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. At least I’ve never been phoned at three in the morning by a stage hire company to be told they’re not coming in the morning after all, as happened to BBC Radio Suffolk’s Stephen Foster one year. 
Applications for the 2013 event are now open, and our local media advises that performers successfully applying to be included in the line up could forseeably follow in the footsteps of Ed Sheeran (tempting, however in my case I’d probably have to take much shorter strides in order to do so) although to be honest you only have to walk out of your front door in Suffolk to be following in Ed Sheeran’s footsteps – the oft-repeated dig that you could find any number of similarly talented young singer-songwriters at open mic nights the length and breadth of the country simply by throwing a stick may well be true but you’d have to go a long way to find many as willing to get off their fat behinds and put in the hard yards that Sheeran has, which may well be what’s made the difference betwixt his career trajectory and mine.
 I imagine that the organising committee are hoping to garner some of the cachet that having hosted the The A-Team hitmaker at a previous Music Day brings. Similarly, last year The Maverick Festival put up some footage of Ed Sheeran performing at their song writing competition slot the previous Summer (he came third). Having submitted an online application this year on behalf of Theodore, the band that Mr. Wendell and I performed with a couple of times last year with Mr. Mickey Trenter, late of Lovejunk and currently of Ippo punk veterans Red Flag 77 on bass and with Mike Summers from the self-same 1991 Music Day performers Buffalo Road on drums. 
A far cry from the early days of when simply knowing who to know was a passport to inclusion, the entry criteria has tightened up considerably to the point where cassettes - even CDs - are surplus to application requirements. To get in these days you need three songs on Soundcloud and your own website. We don’t actually have the latter, but I did include this blog in one of the required fields and so if you’re still reading, designated committee member, we’d love to play, we really would, notwithstanding all that stuff about the organisation in past years I mentioned earlier.

 
*Having subsequently checked the invaluable online resource provided by James Partridge regarding As Is chronology, I see that this wasn't actually an Ipswich Music Day performance, nevertheless, it was in the park.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Advertorial

‎Hello Readers - now, I know how much we all enjoyed the publication of (and subsequent critical acclaim afforded) my musical memoirs 'Do You Do Any Wings?' and 'All These Little Pieces', but sometimes an actual physical book can be a hindrance - when traveling say, or relaxing in an airport, or even sound checking! With this in mind I have lovingly compiled* the most popular entries over the past couple of years into this snug and handy eBook, which you can furnish to your electronic devices at very, very little cost - (mind those Kindles though - I don't think you can load to them due to the ongoing intercenine e-reading technology turf wars. There were always going to be victims). 
Among the celebrity cameos within are such luminaries as Gretchen Peters, Boo Hewerdine, Peter Buck, Neil Finn, Brooks Williams, Mark Ellen, Rose Cousins, Otis Gibbs and BBC Radio Suffolk's Dave Butcher. He's in it quite a bit.  
Please come this way, and prepare to enjoy the highlights of the past couple of years' bloggery.
http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/i-didnt-know-i-was-waiting-for-you/13579681

*cut & pasted. There were some formatting issues yesterday, but they should have been sorted out by now.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

"Hope you like our new direction..."


To lose one group member may be regarded as a misfortune, however when we in Britain’s finest East Angliacana beat combo Songs from The Blue House decided to regroup, refresh and start warming up for our scheduled date at The High Barn in April with a series of limb-stretching casual get-togethers, two of our constituents decided that they would rather not be considered for selection for the forthcoming series.  The disaffected duo, Fiddly Richard and Gibbon, have been with us since our very first tentative moves into recording – Gib as founder member and de facto contributing editor of the original triumvirate and Fiddly, among his many other treasured contributions, as fellow musical bodhisattva, somehow trying to join the dots between Bobby Valentino and Bob Mould.

To try to encapsulate the joy that they have brought me between them would be pointless and unworthy – a glance back over prior blogs will reveal innumerable mentions of both their names in connection with some dry observation, a baffling non-sequitur, or an unexpected pleasure connected with some in-transit musical treat delivered between chocolate bars and smoking in cars. Gib’s remains one of the few collections which will swoop between the Scylla of King Crimson and the Charybdis of Plan B without necessarily pausing for breath, and Fiddly remains a host of unrivalled generosity whether by dint of sharing his shed-based rehearsal facility or the comforts of his table. Musically, of course, their contributions remain unrivalled. Gibbon, for whom rehearsal was generally anathema, is capable of pulling breath taking improvisations out of nowhere and Richard (for so long the polar opposite, wedded on stage to his faithfully transcribed arrangements) composed the most beautiful parts for our recordings and then learned to bluff solos for a bewildering number of outrĂ© requests thrown carelessly his way by us at the front. He also remains beloved of sound engineers across several counties for his bespoke stage amplification and monitoring system based, it is rumoured, on the original blueprints for the CERN Large Hadron Collider, not least in terms of its scale and complexity.      

With SftBH, of course, no door becomes irredeemably closed – as an institution we have more in common with the Hotel California than we do The Sugababes, on many levels - however this latest opening of the shutters and beating of the carpets gives us a wonderful opportunity to explore some of those other ideas we’ve had. At The Luton Palace we were talking about a musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper, for example. People should envy us. I envy us… 
  
You can hear Fiddly doing the solo in the middle of our version of (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, which also features Gibbon on harmony vocals (it’s essentially a duet) here - http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/track/dont-fear-the-reaper