I received
a telephone call from Our Glorious Leader on Saturday, welcome not least
because any call from him usually presages larks and adventures to some degree,
but especially on this occasion because it turned out that he had about a
hundred CDs for me to sign as part of the successful Kickstarter-led release of
the fifth Songs from The Blue House album, ‘Live’. We had
always intended the fifth of our releases to be recorded in front of an
audience as this would mean that we could give it a suitably packaged title to
follow our sophomore* effort Too, which was in turn followed by Tree and then
IV. At one point we discussed presenting the CD in a small fruit container to
emphasise that the title was a small play on words, or ‘punnet’. Why my career
in marketing hasn’t blazed like a comet across the firmament is a mystery to
me, it really is.
I listened
to it in the car this morning, and it really is a thing of wonder. I’m as much
a fan of the band as I am a member and although I’m not suggesting this is our
Rock of Ages (the last time we made a reference to The Band a kindly reviewer
helpfully pointed out that we were ‘deluded’) there are real moments of clarity
when the realisation that we didn’t just write these songs, but that we lived them cuts
like a knife. Breaking These Rocks is a genuine commentary on (then)
current affairs which goes where hard science can’t, Song V is a true story set
in root-fifth Cinemascope, counterpart Song III is a three act Linklater screenplay
performed in four and a half minutes. Of course there is shade at the heart of
the performance in that although we’re not quite at the stage of being "Hilton
Valentine’s Animals", over the course of a decade there will inevitably be some
comings and goings – of the original line up Jimmy quit for one, and then Jody
got married – and that the performance we recorded was actually the launch gig
for our previous album gives some clue as to the recent slackening off in our work rate.
As
fascinating to me as its parent album is the associated outtakes and rarities
collection** put together as one of the packages we hoped to entice our online benefactors
with. There is our very first demo version of Bike – sounding pretty much
the same as the version that kicks off the live album. There’s the version of
Fairport Convention’s Rosie which we put together for Ces, that brace of psych-folk
Beatles reworkings, Gibbon’s close harmony-led gospel version of When God Created
Angels, the instrumental from our Steely Dan period that we never got round to
finding lyrics for, the one that, conversely, we had two fully formed sets of words to decide between, the Judas Priest
cover.
As I say,
we didn’t just record this music, we lived it, and there’s a side to me which
is gets more melancholy by each day that it looks increasingly like we won’t be living
it again any time soon. Mind you, one guy did pick up the House Concert option
on Kickstarter. He’s asked if we can do it at his place in the South of France…
You can
find our music at http://songsfromthebluehouse.bandcamp.com/
*Annoying,
isn’t it?
**I’m
fully aware that in terms of our commercial profile, pretty much everything we’ve
ever released is a rarity.
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