Monday, 30 September 2013
How I Spent My Summer (or Happy Birthday, TJMB!)
This time last year, I was a bit nervous. For the first time in a very long time, I was about to gather some folks together and attempt to play music with them. I knew it was time to do it, I had done three years of solo acoustic troubadoring which is all very well if you are well-disposed to doing everything alone, but I'm not. Mostly.
I like my own space as much as the next man, and it's quite satisfying to write a song, sing it, and go "Yeah - I did that," but there's only so long until the novelty wears off. The train journeys with you, two acoustic guitars, a stand and two satchels are only worth doing once. Not the three times I did them.
And aside from anything else, how is one chap on his own supposed to find the time to do decent recordings of his songs that can live up to what's in his imagination?
And while we're about it, how is a lone fellow to get the attention of a crowd when he's playing in support of a band at very busy venue?
These things were rolling around my head after a glut of solo acoustic shows, all of which were fun, but also leaving me with a need for more. I wasn't living the musician's dream, I was half-living it. I wanted to make NOISE, I wanted to prove what sounds I was capable of making when allowed to work with a bunch of musicians, I wanted to plough my musical furrow and give a nod to the artists who had inspired me to stick at it and not give up.
I wanted, essentially, to not be alone in this. I needed the friendship and support that can only come from good people who wanted to do this with me.
At which point Matt, Angela & Paul enter the frame. This summer we've been working very hard at making our debut record, "Unexpected Sunshine". We started it in February, and then had intensive recording periods throughout March, April, June, July, August and September. Not one second of our recording time has been squandered, and we're excited and proud of what we've made so far. We really can't wait to share it with you, either.
There have been laughs and pure joy while making it, such as the really hot July afternoon that saw Matt consume four or five ice lollies and start chucking tubular bells, baroque organ and steel drums across the songs with gay abandon, which promptly caused him to run into the other room, giggling hysterically.
There have been curious emotional eddies tugging at us, too. All too well I remember the sessions that ended abruptly owing to time running out, right after a vocal take of one of the more stirring songs on the record, and not being able to shake off the melancholy that accompanied it. And sometimes we're all trying to reach an end goal and slightly misinterpreting each other, whereupon the mix of noise, heat & creative endeavour means that everyone is on the verge of popping, and a collective silence drops in order to stop that happening.
And it goes without saying that the friendship we've forged since last October means we aren't going to lose our tempers with each other anyway. My bandmates have been there for me when I've had bouts of lowness and forlornitude (no idea if that's a word, but I like it), and I like to think I keep their spirits going when they're flagging, too. We're a good band, because we take care of each other, we care about us, and we put the music ahead of ourselves.
In the middle of this, we have signed up with Neon Tiger Productions (who, as a result, are now our management), we have played shows to full houses, half-empty rooms, and three people. We have played to a beer tent full of dancing people, and also a beer tent with some people in it, three of whom slouched off when Matt joked that I was chatting them up (I only asked them if they were relaxed around the boundaries).
We have worked hard to make songs that scared us become not only an immense amount of fun, but different, challenging and exciting for listeners. What were simple pieces have suddenly taken wing and soared above us, leaving some truly beautiful four-part harmonies in their wake, and as we've played more, we have just started to write and generate material together. I think we have become in tune with each other, musically, which means that it won't just be my lyric book from which new songs emerge, and the songs I do write, I bear my bandmates in mind and think of things that they will have as much fun playing, and will suit their styles.
This is the first year with Paul Hancock, Angela Lazenby and Matt Tyrer. I can't wait to see what the second one brings!
John xx
Sunday, 21 July 2013
Studio Diary, 13th & 14th July...
Hello, folks!
So very much has been happening in the recording of our debut album, and it's about time I gave a few thoughts about our most recent session last weekend. We went into Tremolo with the aim of recording the remaining five songs for 'Unexpected Sunshine', read on to see if we made it!
Saturday, 13th July
Angela arrives at my house at 10:20am, with a car full of drums. I add to the chaos with three guitars and my pedal board. Oh, and me. We get to the studio to find the door locked, which isn't a major shock, as we are a bit early. While we wait for Dan to arrive and unlock, we wander around the neighbouring premises, which are holding a clothing & furniture sale. Paul arrives, and the three of us peruse the items on sale, including a large, framed photograph of a gorilla giving the finger. I expect that got sold quite quickly into the morning.
Angela sets up the drums in the main studio room, Dan sets the microphones up around the drum kit while Paul readies his bass, and I set up my electric guitars & pedal board in the control room. Dan puts a mic & stand out for me, and we start recording drum & bass takes, plus guide tracks of guitar and vocal. We get through three songs, one of which being a last-minute addition to the album tracklist, a song we're deeply familiar with, but spend the longest time doing. (It's always the ones you know the best that catch you out.)
Matt arrives with lunch for everyone, and we eat a hearty lunch of baguettes, salad, salami and crisps, and fruit, followed by some rather delicious doughnuts. ("These doughnuts are gooey," comments Paul, to which I reply "That is because they are full of goo." I am not a food salesman.)
One song left to get the rhythm section down, a song called 'The World Tonight', for which I have set a complicated rhythm, and a potentially fiendish drum part, and is a song Angela has been sort-of dreading taking into the studio, for fear of taking a long time over it & having to keep stopping. She, as always, rises to the challenge, and knocks it out of the park. In only a couple of takes, we have a really solid rhythm section down for the song.
I then go into the main studio room with my acoustic guitar, and we set about dismantling the drums and doing a solo take of 'Imagine If We Fell In Love'. We are still wondering how to tackle this song, and so I will play it solo to a click-track, and we can figure out how to dress it later. While Dan surrounds me with microphones (I think I count six or seven), Paul and Angela go on an ice-lolly run. They walk past the studio door (which is kept open as long as humanly possible, because of the heatwave), and Matt follows them, clacking two coconut halves and galloping. Matt then returns to the chillout room to eat the last nectarine.
I am ready to do a take of 'Imagine If...', which means Dan has to turn the air-conditioning off, because the sound of it would ruin the recording. I do one take, which doesn't feel quite right, and in any case I fumble a verse, and there's a pause while he rewinds the tape reel, and I swig from a huge bottle of water. I do another take, it feels much better, and the air-con goes back on, and Paul and Angela return with lollies! Matt being the only one of us wearing a white linen shirt, he spills a Fruit Pastille lolly on himself.
Matt goes on to have four lollies, and after the tape reels are transferred to digital, the heat mixed with a sugar rush causes him to add steel drums to The World Tonight. He is perhaps surprised that I think they sound perfect. He also plays some spellbinding piano on the last track, which is truly beautiful.
We adjourn for the day, pretty much 8pm on the dot. It's hot, we've worked hard, and there's no need to overdo it. We pop to the Sneyd Arms in Keele Village, and enjoy a nice pint of drink, outside in the warm evening air. A man pulls up in the car park, and asks us if this is the pub that's doing kareoke. We tell him we have no idea, so he goes inside. Two minutes later he returns. It isn't.
Sunday 14th July
I wake up early, and send my bandmates text messages with a link to Queens Of The Stone Age's track 'Hispanic Impressions', with a caption "Imagine putting headphones on an excitable Labrador. Now imagine piping this through them!" Another 11pm start, with a plan to get guitar tracks done in the morning, then do vocal takes in the afternoon, followed by further keyboard jiggery-pokery, then some backing vocals.
Dan & I set up an amp, plug my tuning pedal through the guitar, and start off with re-doing a lead guitar part for 'Yesterday I Was'. It's been on the original demo, and was bugging me that I hadn't tried it on the record. Stoked with success, I get through our last-minute song addition, and also add guitar to Matt's piano part that he did the previous day, not much at all, but it adds atmosphere and makes the song portray the feel of our album cover! Matt arrives, and asks Dan to press the intercom button. Through my headphones I hear: "Don't text Matt an hour before his alarm's due to go off, because then he'll arrive on time!" Oops.
I then move onto 'This Rod I Have Made For My Back', and have little bother with the rhythm part, and I then have an urge to try a guitar solo. I fluff the first couple of attempts, and so Dan suggests that while I am trying to get that right, Matt starts working out keyboard parts for the song. Cue forty minutes of going over and over a lead break while occasionally hearing MAD NOISES coming out of the headphones that I've left on top of a nearby speaker. Matt calls me in at intervals to hear the sounds he's toying with, I give them my seal of approval, and Angela and Paul (who have gone out for a lunch run while I've been locked away in the studio room), return and announce that lunch is served! I insist on getting my lead break down while it's fresh in my head, and after a few runs at it, am finally ready to eat.
We eat a similar spread to the previous day, and it's the best kind of lunch when the weather is how it is. We watch an episode of Adventure Time (the one with the Door Lord, in case any of you are into it!), and I am eager to get the last track done.
I swap my Cort Sunset (which I play in standard tuning) for my custom Fender Squier Telecaster, which I play in DADGAD. As it was the previous day, lunch immediately precedes 'The World Tonight', so I get tuned up and ready to roll. Then the wheels fall off a bit.
Now, when you're on your own in a recording booth, it's really exciting when everything's going well. You race through rhythm guitar and lead breaks (even when you're stumbling a little and re-taking it's okay, because you're working through it), and it's thrilling. When you hit a stumbling block, and everyone's having a crisis meeting that you can't hear, it's a bit frustrating. This is has happened once before, and it's what happens to me now. If you're ever having studio time, get straight to the same room that everyone else is in, it does help to stop you overheating and getting frustrated.
My guitar's intonation, it is eventually revealed, is off, because no matter how much I tune the guitar, as soon as I go up to the 12th fret, it sounds slightly out and spoils the recording. It's not the kind of problem that knackers the guitar for gigs etc, but for the album recording it could do with not having that problem. I have two starts at recording a take, but get no further than the second chorus both times.
I stand stock-still with my guitar while everyone in the control room is presumably saying "Yes, that sounds out, I don't know why," while I am in the studio room, just desperately wanting to get from one end of the song to the other. I can't quite hear the problem with the guitar either, which doesn't help. Dan comes in and fiddles with the guitar a little while I strum chords, I hope to heck that's solved it, do another run and we stop short, even after trying it with another guitar.
I am starting to get a grump on, because I don't want there to be anything wrong with my lovely guitar, and I just want to play my part and have it work the way it has up until now. Dan suggests tuning my bottom D-string to E for the time being, which might feel a bit weird, but it'll sound about right. I do this, it works fine, and my mood eases back up after a stop in the pits.
I work through vocal takes for all the songs we've done, which are completed with minimal fuss (thankfully!), and there is another lolly run. We start to adding more keyboards for several songs, and in a further lolly-induced intoxication, adds marimba and tubular bells to 'The World Tonight', and begins giggling uncontrollably.
We lay on backing vocals to one last song, then are forced to call the weekend's work to halt, mixing down the five songs that we wanted to do (and did get done!), and racing off to The Old Brown Jug for a show headlining Andrew Tranter's Song Club.
What a night! Some great acts playing, including Jim McShee, and Headsticks (of course), and we are more ready to bang a show out than we thought. Two solid days working, laughing, even eating together, have bonded us more tightly than usual. By the time we're set up, we're ready to play the songs we know backwards, and even the new songs, which we have never even gigged. We burn through eight songs, including two of the new studio tracks, and they feel good. Before playing 'I've Still Got Your Blood On My Curtains', Angela gets my attention and says "Really go for it!" and we do. I am jigging and swaying everywhere during the set, more energetic than I've ever been, and the four of us seem to have one, long, out-of-body experience.
The show ends, we pack up, chat to people, we make new fans who happened to be in the Jug by chance and really enjoyed us, and we hug, reflect on the weekend's work, and go home to listen to the mixes and form our plans for the next recording session.
It's good being in this band.
John xxx
P.S: Regarding my earlier reference to 'Hispanic Impressions', it's this:
So very much has been happening in the recording of our debut album, and it's about time I gave a few thoughts about our most recent session last weekend. We went into Tremolo with the aim of recording the remaining five songs for 'Unexpected Sunshine', read on to see if we made it!
Saturday, 13th July
Angela arrives at my house at 10:20am, with a car full of drums. I add to the chaos with three guitars and my pedal board. Oh, and me. We get to the studio to find the door locked, which isn't a major shock, as we are a bit early. While we wait for Dan to arrive and unlock, we wander around the neighbouring premises, which are holding a clothing & furniture sale. Paul arrives, and the three of us peruse the items on sale, including a large, framed photograph of a gorilla giving the finger. I expect that got sold quite quickly into the morning.
Angela sets up the drums in the main studio room, Dan sets the microphones up around the drum kit while Paul readies his bass, and I set up my electric guitars & pedal board in the control room. Dan puts a mic & stand out for me, and we start recording drum & bass takes, plus guide tracks of guitar and vocal. We get through three songs, one of which being a last-minute addition to the album tracklist, a song we're deeply familiar with, but spend the longest time doing. (It's always the ones you know the best that catch you out.)
Matt arrives with lunch for everyone, and we eat a hearty lunch of baguettes, salad, salami and crisps, and fruit, followed by some rather delicious doughnuts. ("These doughnuts are gooey," comments Paul, to which I reply "That is because they are full of goo." I am not a food salesman.)
One song left to get the rhythm section down, a song called 'The World Tonight', for which I have set a complicated rhythm, and a potentially fiendish drum part, and is a song Angela has been sort-of dreading taking into the studio, for fear of taking a long time over it & having to keep stopping. She, as always, rises to the challenge, and knocks it out of the park. In only a couple of takes, we have a really solid rhythm section down for the song.
I then go into the main studio room with my acoustic guitar, and we set about dismantling the drums and doing a solo take of 'Imagine If We Fell In Love'. We are still wondering how to tackle this song, and so I will play it solo to a click-track, and we can figure out how to dress it later. While Dan surrounds me with microphones (I think I count six or seven), Paul and Angela go on an ice-lolly run. They walk past the studio door (which is kept open as long as humanly possible, because of the heatwave), and Matt follows them, clacking two coconut halves and galloping. Matt then returns to the chillout room to eat the last nectarine.
I am ready to do a take of 'Imagine If...', which means Dan has to turn the air-conditioning off, because the sound of it would ruin the recording. I do one take, which doesn't feel quite right, and in any case I fumble a verse, and there's a pause while he rewinds the tape reel, and I swig from a huge bottle of water. I do another take, it feels much better, and the air-con goes back on, and Paul and Angela return with lollies! Matt being the only one of us wearing a white linen shirt, he spills a Fruit Pastille lolly on himself.
Matt goes on to have four lollies, and after the tape reels are transferred to digital, the heat mixed with a sugar rush causes him to add steel drums to The World Tonight. He is perhaps surprised that I think they sound perfect. He also plays some spellbinding piano on the last track, which is truly beautiful.
We adjourn for the day, pretty much 8pm on the dot. It's hot, we've worked hard, and there's no need to overdo it. We pop to the Sneyd Arms in Keele Village, and enjoy a nice pint of drink, outside in the warm evening air. A man pulls up in the car park, and asks us if this is the pub that's doing kareoke. We tell him we have no idea, so he goes inside. Two minutes later he returns. It isn't.
Sunday 14th July
I wake up early, and send my bandmates text messages with a link to Queens Of The Stone Age's track 'Hispanic Impressions', with a caption "Imagine putting headphones on an excitable Labrador. Now imagine piping this through them!" Another 11pm start, with a plan to get guitar tracks done in the morning, then do vocal takes in the afternoon, followed by further keyboard jiggery-pokery, then some backing vocals.
Dan & I set up an amp, plug my tuning pedal through the guitar, and start off with re-doing a lead guitar part for 'Yesterday I Was'. It's been on the original demo, and was bugging me that I hadn't tried it on the record. Stoked with success, I get through our last-minute song addition, and also add guitar to Matt's piano part that he did the previous day, not much at all, but it adds atmosphere and makes the song portray the feel of our album cover! Matt arrives, and asks Dan to press the intercom button. Through my headphones I hear: "Don't text Matt an hour before his alarm's due to go off, because then he'll arrive on time!" Oops.
I then move onto 'This Rod I Have Made For My Back', and have little bother with the rhythm part, and I then have an urge to try a guitar solo. I fluff the first couple of attempts, and so Dan suggests that while I am trying to get that right, Matt starts working out keyboard parts for the song. Cue forty minutes of going over and over a lead break while occasionally hearing MAD NOISES coming out of the headphones that I've left on top of a nearby speaker. Matt calls me in at intervals to hear the sounds he's toying with, I give them my seal of approval, and Angela and Paul (who have gone out for a lunch run while I've been locked away in the studio room), return and announce that lunch is served! I insist on getting my lead break down while it's fresh in my head, and after a few runs at it, am finally ready to eat.
We eat a similar spread to the previous day, and it's the best kind of lunch when the weather is how it is. We watch an episode of Adventure Time (the one with the Door Lord, in case any of you are into it!), and I am eager to get the last track done.
I swap my Cort Sunset (which I play in standard tuning) for my custom Fender Squier Telecaster, which I play in DADGAD. As it was the previous day, lunch immediately precedes 'The World Tonight', so I get tuned up and ready to roll. Then the wheels fall off a bit.
Now, when you're on your own in a recording booth, it's really exciting when everything's going well. You race through rhythm guitar and lead breaks (even when you're stumbling a little and re-taking it's okay, because you're working through it), and it's thrilling. When you hit a stumbling block, and everyone's having a crisis meeting that you can't hear, it's a bit frustrating. This is has happened once before, and it's what happens to me now. If you're ever having studio time, get straight to the same room that everyone else is in, it does help to stop you overheating and getting frustrated.
My guitar's intonation, it is eventually revealed, is off, because no matter how much I tune the guitar, as soon as I go up to the 12th fret, it sounds slightly out and spoils the recording. It's not the kind of problem that knackers the guitar for gigs etc, but for the album recording it could do with not having that problem. I have two starts at recording a take, but get no further than the second chorus both times.
I stand stock-still with my guitar while everyone in the control room is presumably saying "Yes, that sounds out, I don't know why," while I am in the studio room, just desperately wanting to get from one end of the song to the other. I can't quite hear the problem with the guitar either, which doesn't help. Dan comes in and fiddles with the guitar a little while I strum chords, I hope to heck that's solved it, do another run and we stop short, even after trying it with another guitar.
I am starting to get a grump on, because I don't want there to be anything wrong with my lovely guitar, and I just want to play my part and have it work the way it has up until now. Dan suggests tuning my bottom D-string to E for the time being, which might feel a bit weird, but it'll sound about right. I do this, it works fine, and my mood eases back up after a stop in the pits.
I work through vocal takes for all the songs we've done, which are completed with minimal fuss (thankfully!), and there is another lolly run. We start to adding more keyboards for several songs, and in a further lolly-induced intoxication, adds marimba and tubular bells to 'The World Tonight', and begins giggling uncontrollably.
We lay on backing vocals to one last song, then are forced to call the weekend's work to halt, mixing down the five songs that we wanted to do (and did get done!), and racing off to The Old Brown Jug for a show headlining Andrew Tranter's Song Club.
What a night! Some great acts playing, including Jim McShee, and Headsticks (of course), and we are more ready to bang a show out than we thought. Two solid days working, laughing, even eating together, have bonded us more tightly than usual. By the time we're set up, we're ready to play the songs we know backwards, and even the new songs, which we have never even gigged. We burn through eight songs, including two of the new studio tracks, and they feel good. Before playing 'I've Still Got Your Blood On My Curtains', Angela gets my attention and says "Really go for it!" and we do. I am jigging and swaying everywhere during the set, more energetic than I've ever been, and the four of us seem to have one, long, out-of-body experience.
The show ends, we pack up, chat to people, we make new fans who happened to be in the Jug by chance and really enjoyed us, and we hug, reflect on the weekend's work, and go home to listen to the mixes and form our plans for the next recording session.
It's good being in this band.
John xxx
P.S: Regarding my earlier reference to 'Hispanic Impressions', it's this:
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
Can You Hear Us?
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| The John MacLeod Band, L-R: Paul Hancock, Angela Lazenby, John MacLeod, Matt Tyrer - making our first appearance at The Sugarmill, the West Midlands' top music venue, Friday 7th June, 2013 |
"Don't it always seem to go / That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone..."That, ladies and gents, is bollocks. Of all the myriad examples that I could pick to highlight my point, I can go for nothing more obvious than the present. I am very aware how lucky I am to be in a band with three caring, funny and talented people, who all want to make music with me, and do this the best we can. I am equally aware of how a shift in the timing of this could have stopped it before it started. We are sturdy, fragile, prone to the whims of the universe, and I know exactly what I've got.
Anyway. Hello. There is music further down this page, after my witterings, but don't let that tempt you to skip all my customary waffle. I'd hate that. It has been a long time since I wrote on here, too busy writing elsewhere, I suppose, that and playing shows in expected and unexpected places (not to mention unprecedented places - more later), piling into our recording studio to crack on with our debut record, or rehearsing at The Garage Of Dreams.
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| Playing a new song, 'Please Come Home', at The Sugarmill, Friday 7th June, 2013 |
It's been all go. When last I spoke, I had just played a solo acoustic set during Burslem Festival, when a wee-stained inebriate stood in front of me, erroneously counting me in on songs he'd never heard, and I was anticipating our first ever set at the Sugarmill. Well, as the above picture may suggest, we did it! It was a magical evening, loading in for soundcheck, working with the very helpful sound technicians to get everything set up & ready for us to walk on, plug in and play (and they did an equally quick job getting Matt's keyboard & synth set up right before our set, as work commitments had meant he couldn't make soundcheck), and the crowd were really with us for the show. We were supporting Junction 16, and we played for half an hour (three different guitars over six songs, folks!), and I am pretty certain that it was the best & slickest show we've played to date. (Also, one has to love Chris Wilson, the booker/promoter for The Sugarmill, whose energy propels him from one end of the building to the other, seemingly in no time at all. One second he's there, the next, a Chris-shaped cloud of dust settles where once he stood. An enthusiastic ball of energy, which suits us well.)
I am finding it very interesting the way that working in the studio informs what you play live, and, conversely, taking tricks you've learned on the stage into the studio. There are songs we haven't gigged yet, and are in the process of putting them together in rehearsal ready for recording, and it'll be through that process that we know what to take to the stage afterwards, yet there are songs such as 'Six Bodies, Strange Noises', which we have played extensively in a variety of different styles & venues, and in our last recording session, re-recorded the last half of the song on my new Cort Sunset guitar to add a cleaner guitar solo and add controlled amp feedback, which I had just learned how to do, two gigs previously!
But my mind is a whirl, tonight. After The Sugarmill, I spent a weekend in Stroud, taking it in turns with Matt to chase a lovable Labrador called Dylan around our friend Ed's expansive garden, pausing only to drink agreeable beers, walk through fields in the dark to find pubs, and play croquet. I felt as damn near civilised as it's possible for a chap to be, mallet in one hand, glass of Pimms in the other, sunglasses hanging off my jeans pocket, black Converse taking in heat like water in the Titanic.
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| John, Paul and Angela, minus a virus-stricken Matt, playing an acoustic set at Moorlands FM, Monday 10th June, 2013. (Taken by Gary Wilcox) |
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| Photos from the drums, taken by Angela & compiled by Paul. At Middlewich Folk And Boat Festival's Alt Folk Stage, at the Cheshire Cheese venue, Saturday 15th June, 2013. L-R: Paul, John and Matt. |
"So what do you play?"
"Our own songs."
"Eh?!"
"Enjoy the set!"
After our set, we watched Giro Junkie play a storming half hour, in some ways literally, as the heavens opened for him, and cleared away almost instantly. I've seen him do a similar show before, but it is truly majestic nonetheless. It includes a loop station, and the addition of all the layers he creates is so subtle that you don't realise he's doing it until this lavish orchestration just appears out of nowhere. It's beautiful.
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| John, Paul and Angela - waiting to be lead into the studio, Saturday June 15th, 2013. (Taken by Matt,) |
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| Matt and John during the interview on BBC Radio Stoke, Saturday 15th March, 2013. (Taken by Angela.) |
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| Listening to Dan Rowley mix down the day's work, Sunday 16th June, 2013. (Taken by Matt.) |
In the meantime, these tracks have been released for you to listen to, and I'm putting them at the end here for you to enjoy. Thanks for reading, and I'll try to write more in future. Also, sorry this has seemed more like a photojournal! Bloggy blogginess will resume asap.
Much love,
John xxx
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| The Sugarmill, Friday 7th June, 2013. A truly exciting moment. (Taken by Angela.) |
Sunday, 5 May 2013
"A university arises..."
Good evening, ladies and gents, I trust you are well?
I found myself thinking about the odd things that pass through one's mind during those half-hour stints upon the stage, today. I think about those odd things a lot, actually, usually when I'm on stage. You inhabit two very different forms of existence when you're playing music in front of people, where you're living inside the song, and equally aware of what's going on around you. My attention was drawn to this earlier today as I was playing a solo set for Burslem Festival, when what I can only describe as "a piss-soaked drunk" happened upon the outdoor stage, and made varying lurches to and away from the stage. On the one hand, I'm singing a song called 'Change' - a tender song about heartbreak, and a song that can get me a little teary if I'm not careful, and as such, the song is thankfully brief - and on the other hand, I'm watching him carefully in case he makes any move to join me on the stage for a mid-song cuddle.
That duality is precarious, or at least it can be, because at any one time you can weigh too heavily one one side, and either become so engrossed in the song that you don't realise you've fallen off the stage until you're in mid-air, or become so distracted by your surroundings and the people therein that you can't play for shit.
If you were to make me choose between those two states, I would plump for the former. At least if someone gets his cock out during a love song, I'm not going to notice. I have played songs while minor ruckuses (rucki?) have broken out and subsequently extinguished before now, which still doesn't beat the time my parents and their friend John were playing a gig in a pub's snug lounge (out in the middle of nowhere), when a fight broke out in the bar, which ended up with several police vehicles turning up and the rozzers hauling several people out of the premises. Only Dad was placed to be able to see any of this, and so while John & Mum played their parts undistracted from the blind spot, Dad was left to try and get through the lead guitar part to The Shadows' 'Apache' with blue lights flashing in his eyes.*
I don't seem to get too distracted when the band are playing, and walk the tightrope fairly well, I think. I seem to be totally immersed in the music, while also looking around the room and taking in what's happening, mentally looking out for things on which to pass comment when the song's finished. There are slips, though. Sometimes I'm so caught up in what I'm doing that I don't think about the lyrics, and occasionally an entirely wrong lyric comes up. I will either get lines the wrong way around, swap whole verses or a similar word appears on my tongue and nobody notices. The other week we were playing in Birmingham and over the course of the set, all of those lyrical errors turned up once each. The one that stands out to me, was on a song called 'Universe Colliding' where the lyrics runs "There's a lot of things we want to do, but we never get chance / The opportunity arises so I'm gonna stand up / And sing out..." and even now I can hear myself sing "The university arises..." and two weeks later, I am none the wiser for why that happened.
But it's all part of the magic, getting from the first song to the last. Every time it's fresh and exciting, and these days, with the band especially, utterly joyous. It's a genuine pleasure to be on stage with Angela, Matt & Paul, playing all these songs and turning to them whenever possible just to enjoy what they're doing, and share a smile. We played a show at Fenton Manor Sports Complex (in the cafe bar - it was unusual, but actually pretty sublime, like a German TV studio taping) a week or so ago, and we had plenty of room to move about, no one felt like we were going to trip over each other, and it was a pretty relaxed feel. What made it weirder was turning to face the band and seeing people walking around behind us with towels under their arm, ready for a swim. Still, it was good. It's not happened yet where I've been reassuring the band during an instrumental & realised I should be singing, but there have been a few races back to the microphone...
The coming weeks hold promises of joy and treasures galore, with some studio time ready for May, June & July (where we hope to make further significant progress on our debut record, among other things), and where we are also playing shows for the Newcastle Jazz & Blues Festival, at The Rigger and Old Brown Jug respectively, and there are other shows coming up that we're waiting to announce. We'll also be playing at The Sugarmill on June 7th, which is really exciting for me (for all of us!). I have wanted to step onto that stage since I was 18, so I'm very proud to have that chance. We'll be supporting Junction 16, and I hope it's the first of many times we get to play there.
So with all that to look forward to, I'm going to go and think about things, plot stuff, and try and get the image of that bloke with the wee-stained trousers out of my head. Oh yes, and drink some tea!
See you soon, keep behaving nicely!
Love,
John xxx
*It was bloody weird. About ten minutes prior to this, I had left the gents' just as a man with a sharp farming implement walked into the bar. How there weren't any casualties I don't know.
I found myself thinking about the odd things that pass through one's mind during those half-hour stints upon the stage, today. I think about those odd things a lot, actually, usually when I'm on stage. You inhabit two very different forms of existence when you're playing music in front of people, where you're living inside the song, and equally aware of what's going on around you. My attention was drawn to this earlier today as I was playing a solo set for Burslem Festival, when what I can only describe as "a piss-soaked drunk" happened upon the outdoor stage, and made varying lurches to and away from the stage. On the one hand, I'm singing a song called 'Change' - a tender song about heartbreak, and a song that can get me a little teary if I'm not careful, and as such, the song is thankfully brief - and on the other hand, I'm watching him carefully in case he makes any move to join me on the stage for a mid-song cuddle.
That duality is precarious, or at least it can be, because at any one time you can weigh too heavily one one side, and either become so engrossed in the song that you don't realise you've fallen off the stage until you're in mid-air, or become so distracted by your surroundings and the people therein that you can't play for shit.
If you were to make me choose between those two states, I would plump for the former. At least if someone gets his cock out during a love song, I'm not going to notice. I have played songs while minor ruckuses (rucki?) have broken out and subsequently extinguished before now, which still doesn't beat the time my parents and their friend John were playing a gig in a pub's snug lounge (out in the middle of nowhere), when a fight broke out in the bar, which ended up with several police vehicles turning up and the rozzers hauling several people out of the premises. Only Dad was placed to be able to see any of this, and so while John & Mum played their parts undistracted from the blind spot, Dad was left to try and get through the lead guitar part to The Shadows' 'Apache' with blue lights flashing in his eyes.*
I don't seem to get too distracted when the band are playing, and walk the tightrope fairly well, I think. I seem to be totally immersed in the music, while also looking around the room and taking in what's happening, mentally looking out for things on which to pass comment when the song's finished. There are slips, though. Sometimes I'm so caught up in what I'm doing that I don't think about the lyrics, and occasionally an entirely wrong lyric comes up. I will either get lines the wrong way around, swap whole verses or a similar word appears on my tongue and nobody notices. The other week we were playing in Birmingham and over the course of the set, all of those lyrical errors turned up once each. The one that stands out to me, was on a song called 'Universe Colliding' where the lyrics runs "There's a lot of things we want to do, but we never get chance / The opportunity arises so I'm gonna stand up / And sing out..." and even now I can hear myself sing "The university arises..." and two weeks later, I am none the wiser for why that happened.
But it's all part of the magic, getting from the first song to the last. Every time it's fresh and exciting, and these days, with the band especially, utterly joyous. It's a genuine pleasure to be on stage with Angela, Matt & Paul, playing all these songs and turning to them whenever possible just to enjoy what they're doing, and share a smile. We played a show at Fenton Manor Sports Complex (in the cafe bar - it was unusual, but actually pretty sublime, like a German TV studio taping) a week or so ago, and we had plenty of room to move about, no one felt like we were going to trip over each other, and it was a pretty relaxed feel. What made it weirder was turning to face the band and seeing people walking around behind us with towels under their arm, ready for a swim. Still, it was good. It's not happened yet where I've been reassuring the band during an instrumental & realised I should be singing, but there have been a few races back to the microphone...
The coming weeks hold promises of joy and treasures galore, with some studio time ready for May, June & July (where we hope to make further significant progress on our debut record, among other things), and where we are also playing shows for the Newcastle Jazz & Blues Festival, at The Rigger and Old Brown Jug respectively, and there are other shows coming up that we're waiting to announce. We'll also be playing at The Sugarmill on June 7th, which is really exciting for me (for all of us!). I have wanted to step onto that stage since I was 18, so I'm very proud to have that chance. We'll be supporting Junction 16, and I hope it's the first of many times we get to play there.
So with all that to look forward to, I'm going to go and think about things, plot stuff, and try and get the image of that bloke with the wee-stained trousers out of my head. Oh yes, and drink some tea!
See you soon, keep behaving nicely!
Love,
John xxx
*It was bloody weird. About ten minutes prior to this, I had left the gents' just as a man with a sharp farming implement walked into the bar. How there weren't any casualties I don't know.
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Tried and Emotional
Evening, blogwatchers,
A fine malaise has settled over me these last two days, which has left me in something of a reverie. There is absolutely no reason for this to be the case, because it's been a perfectly lovely weekend, but I can actually pinpoint a thing as a cause for it - emotional residue. (This is not a physical object, thank the heavens, I'm not sure I would have any idea what such a thing would look like, were it to exist. Differently-coloured candlewax, perhaps? The colour could vary depending on the emotion it represents, couldn't it? Er, anyway, I've drifted off-point.)
The band & I spent a full weekend in the studio, trying to get as much work done as possible on our record. To say we were successful would be a massive blimmin' understatement. Drum tracks, guitar tracks, and bass tracks were recorded for six songs, two of which have also had lead vocals recorded, and one has piano. Things are coming on leaps and bounds for 'Unexpected Sunshine', and all the songs so far are surprising us with how well they are taking shape. There are all sorts of stories I could tell you, but I shall probably wait until we're about to deliver the record to you. That will make a nice parcel of anecdotes (or nonecdotes, as I sometimes call them).
Anyway, Angela & Paul powered through, and we hit target by Saturday night, getting the bass & drums down for those six songs, and then on the Sunday we transferred the analogue tape reels to the computer to begin recording guitar parts, and we also crossed our fingers that we would get to do some vocals. Sadly, Matt didn't get a great deal of a chance to do anything other than a piano part for one song, as he was needed on more urgent business, but he was with us for half the weekend, across the two days. (It's so much fun to watch him fizz with ideas when we're playing back the takes, I think the phase of production where we're adding effects, extra vocals, and who knows what else will be the most exciting part for him!)
The last song we worked on is called 'It Was You', and is a pretty intense song, and after a few takes in the vocal booth, and trying a few ideas to attempt making a vocal take that was equal to how it sounds when we play it live, we finally tried putting the mic in the control room, and have me sing it in a similar way to the way the guide track was recorded the previous day.
I had sung this song about five or six times by this point, and was starting to suffer from the effects of living in the song. When you write & perform a song that was borne of difficult & emotional times, it's initially cathartic. You play the song on stage, and are briefly transported back to those circumstances, but the audience response helps to re-vanquish it, you play another song, and you shake it off. The here and now takes over again, and the past becomes the past. Not so much the case when you are recording, because you are not only striving to maintain the technical quality of your voice, but the emotional weight of what you're singing needs to be at full whack - there's no let-up, it's you and that song, fighting in the vocal booth.
We tried out the mic in the control room, Paul & Angela stayed on the settee at the back - I needed them with me, subconsciously for emotional support, I think - and we managed it in one take (hopefully - we'll know for sure when we hear the rough mixes). I managed to keep myself together, although there were a couple of moments I felt my throat tighten & a couple of tears make vague threats from underneath my eyes, but it sounded pretty good.
Sadly, at that point, time beat us, and it was time to pack up our instruments, bid Dan Rowley (producer at Tremolo Studios) a fond farewell, and be on our way, but there was one thing that I never got chance to do - shake the song from off my shoulders. Its melancholy embrace hung on me, and instead of doing something cheerful to eradicate it and leave it behind, it came with me. And so, as I sit & write this, it remains, and I find myself feeling so proud of my band, so indebted to Dan, really pleased with the progress we are making on our record, but also - at the back of my mind - weighed down in a fugue for things that happened so long ago, and I need a way to shake it off. We have a band rehearsal tomorrow night, so I suspect that will be done then. We'll try and make it a garage party.
That's all I can think to tell you for now, there are gigs coming, which will be announced as soon as is humanly possible (under wraps for now, but trust me - really exciting news!), so for now, I will leave you with a piece of video I made last night, with some footage we took whilst recording over the weekend. Hopefully the first of several, I present 'Studio Stories, Episode One'.
Lots of Love, be nice.
John xxx
A fine malaise has settled over me these last two days, which has left me in something of a reverie. There is absolutely no reason for this to be the case, because it's been a perfectly lovely weekend, but I can actually pinpoint a thing as a cause for it - emotional residue. (This is not a physical object, thank the heavens, I'm not sure I would have any idea what such a thing would look like, were it to exist. Differently-coloured candlewax, perhaps? The colour could vary depending on the emotion it represents, couldn't it? Er, anyway, I've drifted off-point.)
The band & I spent a full weekend in the studio, trying to get as much work done as possible on our record. To say we were successful would be a massive blimmin' understatement. Drum tracks, guitar tracks, and bass tracks were recorded for six songs, two of which have also had lead vocals recorded, and one has piano. Things are coming on leaps and bounds for 'Unexpected Sunshine', and all the songs so far are surprising us with how well they are taking shape. There are all sorts of stories I could tell you, but I shall probably wait until we're about to deliver the record to you. That will make a nice parcel of anecdotes (or nonecdotes, as I sometimes call them).
Anyway, Angela & Paul powered through, and we hit target by Saturday night, getting the bass & drums down for those six songs, and then on the Sunday we transferred the analogue tape reels to the computer to begin recording guitar parts, and we also crossed our fingers that we would get to do some vocals. Sadly, Matt didn't get a great deal of a chance to do anything other than a piano part for one song, as he was needed on more urgent business, but he was with us for half the weekend, across the two days. (It's so much fun to watch him fizz with ideas when we're playing back the takes, I think the phase of production where we're adding effects, extra vocals, and who knows what else will be the most exciting part for him!)
The last song we worked on is called 'It Was You', and is a pretty intense song, and after a few takes in the vocal booth, and trying a few ideas to attempt making a vocal take that was equal to how it sounds when we play it live, we finally tried putting the mic in the control room, and have me sing it in a similar way to the way the guide track was recorded the previous day.
I had sung this song about five or six times by this point, and was starting to suffer from the effects of living in the song. When you write & perform a song that was borne of difficult & emotional times, it's initially cathartic. You play the song on stage, and are briefly transported back to those circumstances, but the audience response helps to re-vanquish it, you play another song, and you shake it off. The here and now takes over again, and the past becomes the past. Not so much the case when you are recording, because you are not only striving to maintain the technical quality of your voice, but the emotional weight of what you're singing needs to be at full whack - there's no let-up, it's you and that song, fighting in the vocal booth.
We tried out the mic in the control room, Paul & Angela stayed on the settee at the back - I needed them with me, subconsciously for emotional support, I think - and we managed it in one take (hopefully - we'll know for sure when we hear the rough mixes). I managed to keep myself together, although there were a couple of moments I felt my throat tighten & a couple of tears make vague threats from underneath my eyes, but it sounded pretty good.
Sadly, at that point, time beat us, and it was time to pack up our instruments, bid Dan Rowley (producer at Tremolo Studios) a fond farewell, and be on our way, but there was one thing that I never got chance to do - shake the song from off my shoulders. Its melancholy embrace hung on me, and instead of doing something cheerful to eradicate it and leave it behind, it came with me. And so, as I sit & write this, it remains, and I find myself feeling so proud of my band, so indebted to Dan, really pleased with the progress we are making on our record, but also - at the back of my mind - weighed down in a fugue for things that happened so long ago, and I need a way to shake it off. We have a band rehearsal tomorrow night, so I suspect that will be done then. We'll try and make it a garage party.
That's all I can think to tell you for now, there are gigs coming, which will be announced as soon as is humanly possible (under wraps for now, but trust me - really exciting news!), so for now, I will leave you with a piece of video I made last night, with some footage we took whilst recording over the weekend. Hopefully the first of several, I present 'Studio Stories, Episode One'.
Lots of Love, be nice.
John xxx
Friday, 8 March 2013
CALLING ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS!
CALLING ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS!
We want to collaborate with you! You might have heard from some wanton source that we're recording an album. In light of what we're making, we'd like you to get your nice cameras at the ready and take photos of beautiful sunsets, sunrises, or just take photos that might involve the sun in a surprising way.
Take your photographs, and then get them to us, either by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter, or however you like, and hopefully it won't be too long until we can reveal all. (Also, if you have any photos already that fit this criteria, send them on!)
Thank you in advance, lovely folks, we can't wait to see your sun-based photographs.
We want to collaborate with you! You might have heard from some wanton source that we're recording an album. In light of what we're making, we'd like you to get your nice cameras at the ready and take photos of beautiful sunsets, sunrises, or just take photos that might involve the sun in a surprising way.
Take your photographs, and then get them to us, either by e-mail, Facebook or Twitter, or however you like, and hopefully it won't be too long until we can reveal all. (Also, if you have any photos already that fit this criteria, send them on!)
Thank you in advance, lovely folks, we can't wait to see your sun-based photographs.
Happy snapping,
John xxx
Monday, 4 March 2013
Unexpected Sunshine and Mattress Trebuchets
Arfternoon.
I'm almost a bit disappointed, because I'd managed to write two blog entries on consecutive days, and was really hoping for a third, but it didn't quite happen. I'm the sort of chap that always hopes to get into a good routine - early nights, regular shopping, remembering to do my laundry at respectable intervals - but never quite manages it.
And it's always once I've managed to, say, get up at 7am on two days on the trot that I think to myself "Yes, finally! I've turned a corner! All these unwanted lie-ins are a thing of the past!" and then wake up the next day at least an hour later than I wanted, resulting in a frenzied gallop around the house, grabbing stray pieces of clothing and trying not to fall up the stairs.
I once worked as a senior member of staff in an independent record store, and over Christmas we would pull early shifts in order to get through the backlog of deliveries that used to logjam the staff quarters over the Festive period (there are probably many and varied stories I could tell you about the time I spent working in that lovely old shop - no longer with us and is currently a bland Virginmedia death-hole - but I can't remember any of them right now, so will try and stockpile them for future blog entries). My early-morning shift was due, and I went to bed early with that reverence you can only achieve when you know you are doing a Good And Proper Thing, you know, instead of staying up all night and playing computer games until you can hear the dawn chorus of birds in the park outside your flat (this has happened - again, another story).
That reverence is something else, isn't it? If you really want to be smug at yourself, make a cup of tea to drink in bed while you read a chapter or two of a book. That night, I did all that (I might have been trying to read Lord Of The Rings at the time, I have only ever made it to the end of the second book, and the chances of me getting beyond that have have gone past slim - I console myself by knowing what happens after having watched the films with my folks, but that's a bit like making yourself feel better about not having read Wuthering Heights by saying "Well, I've listened to Kate Bush..."), and I went smugly to sleep in anticipation of getting up early and arriving at the shop at half-six in the morning.
In much the same way that nothing feels quite like that early-night smugness, nothing matches that shot of adrenalin when you wake up and look at the clock, only to discover you should have left the house. It's as if you've actually been thrown out of bed by a mattress-mounted trebuchet. If you've ever leapt out of bed following one of those startling moments, ask yourself how you never actually hit the wall when you got up. I awoke at 8am, a full hour after I was supposed to be at the shop in the first place. I raced around my flat, picking up stray clothes and calling a taxi, with that breathy panic that you know you'll still be feeling long after you apologise to your boss. I was hanging up the phone to the taxi firm (and, unfathomably, trying to pull a sock over my head), when I remembered that my early shift wasn't today. It was tomorrow. It was, in actual fact, my day off.
So there, in three paragraphs, we have covered the key facets of human existence: smugness, panic and relief. I often feel that these three states of being are the cornerstone of humanity. I will quite happily continue to believe this until someone knocks me off my perch, but until then, I will keep excitedly chattering about the record I'm making. (Wow, I didn't think I'd be able to get this blog entry on-topic - miracles do happen!)
The excitement gathers apace. Our producer Dan re-tweaked the rough mixes from what we recorded on last weekend, and I sat down the other night to listen to them. It's all a bit thrilling, to hear someone working on stuff that I've written, to make it sound nice. It makes me think about what's going to happen with it when it's all finished, and what I hope people will think about it when they hear it. It also makes me wonder what I'm going to say about it once it's finished.
I mean, why does anyone make music? At a guess, because they have something to say, and feelings to express, because they want to be heard, because they want to move people in some way. They want to be identified with, to know that they aren't on their own. Music is that thing that, when you hear something that you connect with, makes you feel less alone in the world. That feeling when you listen to a song that makes you think "This is exactly what I am going through now," that puts a spring in your step and gives you the strength to keep moving forward, is invaluable. Nothing matches it.
So we'll keep going until it's finished. And I will keep talking about it. I don't want to give too much away about the record, but if I'm going to tell you anything about it that will leave you intrigued, I will tell you that it's called 'Unexpected Sunshine'. Was that exciting? I hope so. (It certainly bloody was for me, leastways!)
I shall go now, I plan to watch a Rich Hall DVD and get a good night's sleep, as Angela is coming round to practice some songs. Wish me luck, and let's hope I don't need my bed-mounted catapult come morning...
Lots of love,
John xxx
I'm almost a bit disappointed, because I'd managed to write two blog entries on consecutive days, and was really hoping for a third, but it didn't quite happen. I'm the sort of chap that always hopes to get into a good routine - early nights, regular shopping, remembering to do my laundry at respectable intervals - but never quite manages it.
And it's always once I've managed to, say, get up at 7am on two days on the trot that I think to myself "Yes, finally! I've turned a corner! All these unwanted lie-ins are a thing of the past!" and then wake up the next day at least an hour later than I wanted, resulting in a frenzied gallop around the house, grabbing stray pieces of clothing and trying not to fall up the stairs.
I once worked as a senior member of staff in an independent record store, and over Christmas we would pull early shifts in order to get through the backlog of deliveries that used to logjam the staff quarters over the Festive period (there are probably many and varied stories I could tell you about the time I spent working in that lovely old shop - no longer with us and is currently a bland Virginmedia death-hole - but I can't remember any of them right now, so will try and stockpile them for future blog entries). My early-morning shift was due, and I went to bed early with that reverence you can only achieve when you know you are doing a Good And Proper Thing, you know, instead of staying up all night and playing computer games until you can hear the dawn chorus of birds in the park outside your flat (this has happened - again, another story).
That reverence is something else, isn't it? If you really want to be smug at yourself, make a cup of tea to drink in bed while you read a chapter or two of a book. That night, I did all that (I might have been trying to read Lord Of The Rings at the time, I have only ever made it to the end of the second book, and the chances of me getting beyond that have have gone past slim - I console myself by knowing what happens after having watched the films with my folks, but that's a bit like making yourself feel better about not having read Wuthering Heights by saying "Well, I've listened to Kate Bush..."), and I went smugly to sleep in anticipation of getting up early and arriving at the shop at half-six in the morning.
In much the same way that nothing feels quite like that early-night smugness, nothing matches that shot of adrenalin when you wake up and look at the clock, only to discover you should have left the house. It's as if you've actually been thrown out of bed by a mattress-mounted trebuchet. If you've ever leapt out of bed following one of those startling moments, ask yourself how you never actually hit the wall when you got up. I awoke at 8am, a full hour after I was supposed to be at the shop in the first place. I raced around my flat, picking up stray clothes and calling a taxi, with that breathy panic that you know you'll still be feeling long after you apologise to your boss. I was hanging up the phone to the taxi firm (and, unfathomably, trying to pull a sock over my head), when I remembered that my early shift wasn't today. It was tomorrow. It was, in actual fact, my day off.
So there, in three paragraphs, we have covered the key facets of human existence: smugness, panic and relief. I often feel that these three states of being are the cornerstone of humanity. I will quite happily continue to believe this until someone knocks me off my perch, but until then, I will keep excitedly chattering about the record I'm making. (Wow, I didn't think I'd be able to get this blog entry on-topic - miracles do happen!)
The excitement gathers apace. Our producer Dan re-tweaked the rough mixes from what we recorded on last weekend, and I sat down the other night to listen to them. It's all a bit thrilling, to hear someone working on stuff that I've written, to make it sound nice. It makes me think about what's going to happen with it when it's all finished, and what I hope people will think about it when they hear it. It also makes me wonder what I'm going to say about it once it's finished.
I mean, why does anyone make music? At a guess, because they have something to say, and feelings to express, because they want to be heard, because they want to move people in some way. They want to be identified with, to know that they aren't on their own. Music is that thing that, when you hear something that you connect with, makes you feel less alone in the world. That feeling when you listen to a song that makes you think "This is exactly what I am going through now," that puts a spring in your step and gives you the strength to keep moving forward, is invaluable. Nothing matches it.
So we'll keep going until it's finished. And I will keep talking about it. I don't want to give too much away about the record, but if I'm going to tell you anything about it that will leave you intrigued, I will tell you that it's called 'Unexpected Sunshine'. Was that exciting? I hope so. (It certainly bloody was for me, leastways!)
I shall go now, I plan to watch a Rich Hall DVD and get a good night's sleep, as Angela is coming round to practice some songs. Wish me luck, and let's hope I don't need my bed-mounted catapult come morning...
Lots of love,
John xxx
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