Hello Mr Joplin
The Filthy Spectacula found our way down towards England's south-west corner on Friday, doing a gig in a cramped basement bar, apparently made of Victorian brick, called the Wunderbar in Midsomer Norton (you may well ask 'Where?').
Not quite Wembley either for space or for tech setup (though the latter was, in the end, perfectly adequate – we all had kittens in advance as it wasn't at all clear they had a sound engineer of their own … ). And I have to be conscious of at least one tech fail to do with me (I really must get an XLR lead with a very slightly fatter 'female' end so it can't buzz in the socket of my DI box) and a handful of musical slips from the tiny to the probably readily identifiable from the crowd.
But this has to be seen as one of the more successful Filthy Spectacula gigs – and we have played a lot of gigs and the majority of them very successful.
We were the only band playing, but by the time we hit the stage at about 10pm (on a Friday), the crowd were getting numerous (for the size of the space!) and lairy (in what passes for a good way for our brand of debauched rock gigs). I may have only had about three feet square to thrash around in without leaving the stage, and foot up on a monitor became foot up on a bar stool (I could have reached the bar staff much more easily than bassist The Dreadful Helmsman on the other side of stage), but anyone in the near half of the twisting tunnel-like venue seemed to be hanging on our collective every word and note most of the night and were certainly dancing like puppets in freefall most of the way through.
So what compensates for grubby and minimal tech, occasional lapses of concentration and getting your mike stand kicked over by the crowd (who then very carefully saved the drink in a holder on the stand … before remembering you might want the mike), to produce an outstanding time for all present?
Be like you want the crowd to be, only more so. Shout, swear, be affectionately horrifically rude to each other or indeed complete strangers, drink and encourage everyone else to drink. Act like you grew up with the whole room. Posture like failed Led Zep tribute acts and dance like loons (yes, while holding an indeed playing instruments and, when necessary, singing vocalising into stand mikes); and jump (well, step; it was about 9 inches) off the stage to dance with or at the crowd periodically. Even if you're out of tune and may have momentarily forgotten which chord you're on, look like you're nailing 'Stairway to Heaven' at double speed backwards. And if some of the particularly uninhibited crowd start buying you drinks, at least start drinking them, however scared you are. I still don't actually know what the sweetish strong liqueur / spirit stuff poured into my empty pint glass was, I suspect spiced rum; but it would have spoiled the whole effect to leave it untouched and in the end it went down pleasantly enough. No, it didn't fill the pint glass silly; our crowds aren't that generous. Or that rich.
'That', some of you may well say, 'isn't music.' And you are in a sense right. But it is entertainment. The Wunderbar didn't want a recital. They wanted entertainers. And I rather thank they got them (I haven't been kissed by so many stubbly, dreadlocked men in my entire life; I thought a full-scale stage invasion was starting at one point).
Want to see the results you missed? Easterners, next stop is Brighton for an unofficial steampunk performance weekend next month; on the 26th of March, we follow Professor Elemental on the 25th at the Yellow Book. Westerners, our next gig out your way is a biggie: the Fleece in Bristol (no dodgy leads / DI boxes there!), supporting Voltaire (no, not the philosopher. We tried, but his agent says he isn't touring much at the minute). Sign up to the Facebook event or email the band for one-third off ticket price at the door!
Meanwhile, my personal next outing is in the capital (automatically makes it between east and west, right?) with new affiliation Kindred Spirit, in duo form for a free gig at, appropriately enough, the Ash Tree in Ashford (Surrey, not Kent). See you soon!
A good workman always credits his tools
For the last four days, I've been practising (and doing one rehearsal) on my 'spare' violin bow – a nearly worn out 15-year-old cheap student item, kept in theory in case I actually break the other one halfway through something but in practice more for the roughly one week in a year the main one spends being rehaired.
After desk-work today I picked up my proper violin bow, with new thumbgrip and restrung with what the receipt assures me is 'best Mongolian hair' (?!). The effect on (my impression of) how my practise sounded was almost instantaneous, even though it takes a couple of hours' playing at least for new hair to 'take' with rosin properly and bed in – much more body, more power but also more subtlety and flexibility. Last night I felt like I was clutching the instrument cataleptically (in one of those classic pieces of musical transferral, with both hands), making improvisation almost impossible at the florid, intense speed demanded by the collective style of Kindred Spirit and leaving me in literal need of a break after ten minutes of refreshing my memory of Irish fiddle tunes for a St Patrick's gig with Razzberry Jam. Tonight I played over 2 hours nearly solid, though obviously not all at maximum intensity.
All of which does raise speculative questions about what the impact of equipment on performance is. Our Western culture still has a sort of post-Romantic hangover in which there is an implicit belief in the unstoppable power of the true artist, who could presumably move grown men to tears armed only with a comb and paper. Probably little response needed to that as an explicit point of view.
On the other hand, Kindred Spirit's previous (two) violinists have employed an arsenal of electric guitar-style effect pedals to manipulate and vary their sound, from overdrive, distortion and fuzz to wah-wah and (the only one I actively dislike) digital delays. Hitherto, even in the dirty and theatrical rock-n-roll sound-world of the Filthy Spectacula, effects pedals have largely just not seemed necessary. It's both logical and more or less necessary, given the shoes I'm filling, that I head down the effects road in a fairly serious way this time.
What interests me that is I have a slight aesthetic reluctance to it, besides muttering darkly about the cost of new and additional equipment versus the profit margin on gigs. I think it comes from coming of musical age in the late 90s approaching the millennium, with the sort of 'popular' music you listened to if you weren't in the in-crowd very much standing in the shadows of grunge (or, let's be specific, Nirvana alone) on the one hand and Britpop (in the north-west, mostly meaning Oasis) on the other – two subgenres with strong punk-style DIY antipretention ethics, which extended to generally low-tech sounds, as well as songs your average moderately gifted teenager could replicate in recognisable form round a campfire. The following phase of my rock exploration – dominated by Radiohead and the White Stripes – pushed the other way on guitar widdling and enormous effect racks, though in very different manners, one essentially experimental, the other almost reverential to 1970s heavy-blues-rock; but later strata are hardly ever as solid as earlier ones. Part of my head still has the prejudice wonderfully embodied by Bill Bailey's stand-up segment on U2 technical fails, that players with a sound based around effects are covering up the fact that they don't really play hardly anything.
Which obviously requires correcting. Kit can certainly be abused, and can certainly be unnecessary or even obtrusive. But if something can be used to cover for limited ability, it does rather stand to reason that it can also be used to boost the possibilities of greater ability still further.
I'm very glad to have my rejuvenated bow back. I look forward to it making next month's concert opera leading much more humanly practical and aesthetically appropriate, and boosting the power of tomorrow night's Filthy Spectacula gig to recruit audience for our really big West Country opportunity in May (more on that later). But it should also remind me that it isn't cheating to use an overdrive pedal. Or even a wah-wah.
How do you fake a drunken pub singalong?
Thanks to my professional experience with The Filthy Spectacula, I can now confirm the answer to this:
Feed people red wine at noon on Sunday. Gather a band, their wives and girlfriends, and the sound engineer round one vocal mike. Do not give them the chance to try and learn the 'tune' they're going to 'sing' along to. Then triple-track the results.
https://www.facebook.com/thefilthyspectacula/videos
All this, plus string quartets (three-quarters of them played by me … ), rock organ, handclaps, some genuine harmony vocals and all the Filthy hyperactivity you would rightly expect, now taped for the upcoming album Thr'p'ny Upright (*spelling tbc).
In the meantime, we have a gig out West this weekend, Saturday 27 February at the Wunderbar, Midsomer Norton. See you there if Bristol, Bath or anywhere in between is your neck of the woods!
More studio time than expected
I'm spending quite a lot of time recording at present for someone who often points out to friends outside the industry that 'session musician' is a bad description of what I do.
Not that live is going on the back burner (watch this space for gig announcements concerning Hashtag Opera Co., the Filthy Spectacula, Razzberry Jam, Kindred Spirit and the String Project!). But yesterday saw Elliot Vanderhyde and myself doing a second session for his upcoming folk album (me arranging, improvising and multitracking with viola, violin and mandolin). I think we've now dispatched my contributions to 5 of a projected 8 tracks, so there will be at least one more session for me to do.
This morning, meanwhile, I was following up a sudden flash of inspiration experienced by the man known as Mr E (that's to his friends – his enemies mostly just call him 'Aarghh!') by whipping up incidental string parts to another song from the Filthy Spectacula album. I think that takes it to over half the track list drawing on my arranging skills, parts to be recorded (between myself and the cello playing of Stevie Mitchell) on Saturday. Watch out for something probably called Thr'p'ny Upright hitting your ears soon!
Also been exploring possibilities for a networking-strategic appearance at Truck Studios. Meanwhile, back to practising for gigs …
The boys are back
You might not really have noticed The Filthy Spectacula had been away. But it was a couple of months, and a lot of album work and non-performing admin, since we were last on a stage when we headlined Jamboree on Saturday. And it felt like a bit of a comeback.
We've played there before, last summer, in scorching heat that meant everyone was sweating before we even got on the stage. And I'm starting to get the hang of some of the distinctive things about the place – besides the Old Curiosity Shop-meets-opium den décor, location inside a gated industrial estate in Limehouse and colourful accent collection of the staff.
Most venues that make any effort with their programming (many do not) try and line up acts that do similar things to each other, and put them in ascending order of quality. So acts with a comic-vintage, ska-punk, gypsy or just plain alcohol-adoring tendency are likely as Filthy supports.
Jamboree plan their bills to shift over the evening, and they seem to know their clientele. So their support acts are usually duos, trios or even solo acts, with semi-acoustic instrumentation and a leaning towards the folk-roots-throwback field. On this occasion, the wonderfully laid-back and genre-unconcerned Dai & the Ramblers (just one Rambler for this gig, making them a guitar and fiddle duo), meandering casually from blues to jazz to Celtic folk to unexpected a cappella spiritual. They had a respectable audience of about 40 to 50, who sat down, listened attentively, tried to only come in and out of the loo between numbers, and occasionally drummed on their knees (OK, that might have been mostly me). A good setting for their act, and an appropriate response. I enjoyed them.
In the half-hour or so after they finished, a lot more swarthy 20-somethings, dressed not very conventionally for a London night out, showed up and started ordering drinks in much more rapid succession. The venue, without doing anything except let people in, transformed from folk club to v. alt rock cellar. By the time we took to the stage at quarter to eleven (usually what even we would think a bit of a late start for a semi-pub gig), there must have been more like 150 boozy uninhibited oddballs, willing to pogo, sashay, Cossack dance, chorus line and yell their way through as long a set as we could give them. Quite literally – the sound guy announced to us after Dai finished that they had a late licence till 2, so could we just stretch our set out? Till, maybe, 1am? We didn't manage that, but we did play over 90 minutes straight, missing out just one song of our repertoire (unless we forgot anything scribbling extra titles on the set list). Not bad for an originals band.
This was also the gig where the crowd starting asking for selfies. Quite a lot of them. What it is to be famous. We should start charging. And we should follow up the girl that was considering hiring us to play at her wedding …
Live at Challow Road
(It's actually not called that, though it could be; but Challow Park doesn't have quite the same punning possibilities.)
I was impressed that a good 40-50 people made it through gale-force winds, downpour and rural roads to a location, if not quite as much in the middle of nowhere as some of the London-based performers made out, in semi-open countryside on the outskirts of an obscure south Oxfordshire market town. But really, that was the least impressive thing about last night's concert.
I've already written in probably exaggerated superlatives about Graham Blyth's completed but as yet sans décor basement concert hall and studio complex. It was with the full (20-strong) string section and timpani as well as organ, and the above-mentioned respectably-sized audience, in the hall that its properties really showed, with a lovely acoustic (subtly but helpfully assisted by some electronic/PA trickery that made it sound even bigger!) and the most dynamic range, expression and convincingness I've certainly ever heard out of an electronic organ.
The performance deserves real credit as well. This was what might be termed a semi-amateur concert, and the process was rendered more interesting by rehearsals of London Repertoire Orchestra (usually a drop-in, play-through affair) and of the circum-Wantage guest players taking place separately, so although I was leading 2nd violins, I only got to meet and play with most of my section on the afternoon of the concert!
For that size and ostensible level of ensemble, this was a really impressive concert. The Elgar String Serenade had the balance of pastoral lightness and restrained Romantic fire that is essential to the piece and yet I have heard missed by higher-aiming and higher-reputed performers. From the point of view of a player with a part in front of me, the Poulenc organ concerto, closing the first half, perhaps lost a little accuracy to demob-happiness, but it certainly did not lack spirit (and a great variety of spirit is required for this extraordinarily condensed piece from a wide-ranging master). I was utterly amazed, even having just rehearsed the piece in the afternoon, by the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony. This piece (better known in its original incarnation as the 8th string quartet) demands utter focus, precision ensemble, technique and a high degree of emotional resilience from performers, and there are some senses and parts in which it is probably more difficult in Barshai's string orchestra arrangement. I do not think it would be an understatement to describe this performance as an epic journey for all concerned.
All in all a more than could have been expected rewarding (as well as challenging) gig. My attention's now shifting forwards, with the Filthy Spectacula's return to gigging after album sessions, a St Patrick's Night guest spot, Hashtag Opera's Anna Bolena and my first performances with Kindred Spirit all on the radar …
Let's be honest, it's not that often you get to see your band's name in the same contents list as Eric Burdon's:
http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Article/8187/Interviews/String-Project-Interview
Look at the 'current magazine' links top right if you don't believe me!
Of my work on Elliot Vanderhyde's upcoming album 'Celt':
https://soundcloud.com/vanderhyde/halloween-song
You can even pre-order the album, though at least half of my contribution is yet to be recorded so I can't tell you too much about it yet …
Or new block under the kid, depending on where you're looking from. Either way it's official and going out to followers of my new outfit Kindred Spirit:
http://www.elainesamuels.co.uk/news.htm
Anyone for a game of spot the biog difference?
My first gig with Elaine will be on 5 March and with the full band on 9 April. For details of these and many more upcoming appearances, see the Kindred Spirit gigs page.
Sunday was a fairly musically quiet day as my recent weekends go – I only had one work appointment, and that only three hours of rehearsal.
However, a freelance musician's life is nothing if not interesting, and there were still a few surprises in store from the afternoon. Chief among them being the venue itself. To someone passing, or indeed looking for a scratch orchestra rehearsal, Challow Park Studios looks like a decaying manor house on the outskirts of Oxford market town Wantage, generally only remarkable for being the birthplace of King Alfred (and therefore naming everything possible after him), with enough of the building site about it to suggest it's either being turned into something else (probably flats) or knocked down.
What lurks within the house I'm still not quite sure, though I think it contains a recital room as well as being actually lived in. However, the real gem is underneath – a top-spec classical recording, rehearsing and performing facility, with three live rooms, two control rooms (!) and the space we were using, a chamber orchestra-sized performance room with a 4-manual custom-self-built electronic organ.
All of this is the brainchild of Graham Blyth, the soloist in the concert we were rehearsing – who turns out to have started Soundcraft; like you do. (If this doesn't mean much to you, say it to a sound engineer. You may need to stand back.) He is joining a body of selected string players to perform the 'Albinoni' Adagio, Elgar's gorgeous String Serenade, the Poulenc Organ Concerto and Shostakovitch's Chamber Symphony Op 110a (a string orchestra transcription of the monumental 8th string quartet).
Which leads me neatly forward from last weekend to next. If you want to discover this literally buried gem (only metaphorically, but appropriately, a gem), the concert is also there, 7:30 on this coming Saturday 6 February. I'm assured Challow Park Studios shows up on Google Maps in its own right so you can find it!