Archives for September 2014

All posts from September 2014

Broken Hill Hotel

Wednesday 24 September, 2014
Tags: broken hill, northern rhodesia, pamela shurmer-smith, remnants of empire, zambia

Today is my mother’s birthday. I’m a hopeless gift-buyer. Actually I’m a hopeless anything-buyer. Most shops fill me with a kind of weary dread; I tend to end up emerging with an item bought out of desperation rather than intent. Add to that the fact that I’m currently on tour abroad so can’t even drop by with a bunch of flowers and I suddenly make a pretty promising candidate for Disappointing Son.

But I have written a song for the occasion.

It needs a bit of explaining though.

My mother has just written a new book – Remnants Of Empire – a culmination of years of research and travel and general head-scratching. I’ve been doing some copy-editing and proof-reading over the past few months so I know it pretty well now. It’s really good. Part anthropological study, part archive, part memoir; she has tracked down hundreds of ex-inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) collecting stories of pre and post independence, exploring issues of class, race, imperialism and, perhaps most interestingly, memory – both collective and personal. This is not a cold piece of data collation, my mother grew up in Broken Hill (now Kabwe) so the dust of Africa is very much in her blood (a favourite go-to cliche of many interviewees in the book). Plenty of writers have talked about the British Empire – some celebratory, some apologetically, some nostalgically – but not much has been said about Northern Rhodesia (not in comparison to, say, India), with most accounts centring on the copper industry rather than the everyday comings and goings of the people who lived there, be they native inhabitants, imperial fortune-seekers or just folk trying to find a niche for themselves and their families.

After I read the final draft I wrote this song inspired by some of the accounts in the book, particularly to do with the self-glamorising of one’s memories. My mother has always been fond of the Bedlam Six’s Theban Sacred so I tried to go with a similar blues feel, tuned down to D with a heavy stomp to the rhythm.

So here it is… Broken Hill Hotel.

Happy Birthday Mum.
x

Writing For Others

Friday 19 September, 2014
Tags: becca williams, snowapple

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of songwriters refer to their songs as babies. “Oh no, of course I don’t have a favourite, they’re ALL my babies!”

Though I’m as protective over my back catalog as the next writer I don’t think of my compositions in those terms. To me they feel more like foundlings and strays, lost dogs that I’ve given a bath and haircut to. I certainly don’t think I’ve birthed any of them, the raw ideas drift in from who-knows-where and then I scrub them up with a few fruity metaphors, the musical equivalent of teaching an orphan table manners in a Victorian novel before it turns out they’re actually the long lost heir of a viscount.

In the end, refer to these little creations how you will, it all amounts to the same thing. Despite the dubious sense of misplaced ownership one has over any artistic product derived from myriad social factors, there is an inevitable sense of pride and protectiveness over anything one has composed. For me the greatest sense of achievement is when a song goes off on its own path. When they are adopted by other performers, in whatever style, it’s such a thrill to witness a song filtered through another person’s outlook. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

This emotion has a nervous and unpredictable twin though. One that accompanies a burgeoning desire to will these covers into existence rather than simply letting them surface unbidden. More and more I feel compelled to write for others as I become increasingly frustrated with my own limitations, boxed in by gloomy premonitions of how certain species of song might develop under my sole guardianship. So I picture another artist and write with them in mind. Sometimes this sense of distance perversely brings a song even closer (for instance I wrote “Tonight” for Liz Green but rarely omit it from my own live performances, indeed it’s The Bedlam Six’s regular soundcheck tune).

But terror comes with the reveal. Approaching a band or artist with a song you’ve written for them evokes the same emotions I used to feel as an adolescent asking a girl to go out with me. One feels decidedly prone. What if they don’t like it? What if they think you’re a creep for doing that? What if the whole wretched ordeal is something you can never get past, always skulking in the background of any future projects, the embarrassing rejected song – irreversible and unwelcome.

I decided I wanted to write a song for Dutch band Snowapple, a group famed for their amazing vocal harmonies who joined the Debt Records roster last year. My own vocal style naturally lends itself to rapid consonants so I was particularly keen to incorporate more lingering vowels and a sort of tidal urgency pushing at an overall slowness.
The song is called Widow. Widow is a beautiful word if one dissociates it with the morbid connotations. If you can. (I can’t)

I was overjoyed when they told me they liked it (the blushing teenage version of me nervously proffering a bunch of flowers mercifully unspurned!). They decided to record it with Becca Williams (another singer I’m immensely fond of) and the result is an absolute dream come true for me.

Here is the result:

Knowing When To Quit

Friday 5 September, 2014
Tags: bedlam six

It’s foolish to try and pinpoint a single trigger for a human being’s desire to be or do something, there’s usually a smorgasbord of ever-swelling factors vying for attention. But if there was one deciding influence that drew me away from my chosen field of academia and towards a life on the road in a touring rock band it was Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz.

It’s only now I realise how strange this is. After all, it’s a film about endings rather than beginnings, the record of a band’s final show (indeed THE Band‘s final show), concert footage peppered with statements about needing to quit while you’re ahead, not wanting to end up as one of those Rock & Roll fatalities. “I just want to break even” grins Richard Manuel during one of the group interviews – a heartbreaking sentiment if considered with hindsight, this being a man who, less than a decade later (three years after The Band reformed), came offstage at the Cheek To Cheek Lounge just outside Orlando in Florida, downed a bottle of Grand Marnier and hanged himself in a motel bathroom; an act that retrospectively transformed The Last Waltz from an historical artifact into a tragic one, the words “may you stay forever young” echoing out prophetically from the final moments of that concert.

So I suppose among The Bedlam Six‘s very foundations was a ticking notion that such projects are never eternal, that our blueprints contained a clearly marked self-destruct button. I think this awareness is quite healthy, after all it doesn’t take an expert to realise most bands end with either the annihilation of the central friendships or the annihilation of the friends themselves.

We are not done yet though. We had a meeting earlier this year to discuss the future and we decided there is one. But we are going to have a break. Not because we are tired or think we deserve a rest. We simply need to work out what we want from this. Too many bands limp along for years, more out of inertia than dynamism, ricocheting from gig to gig, pinning whatever lingering ambitions they have to the next show… the turning point always just around the next corner. Then, before they know it all their old friends are cooing over grandchildren, while they themselves are still lugging amps up the backstairs of some crumbling mill to breathe in generations of neglected mould spores and subject their ear drums to another senseless battering. (And they never did get round to writing that opera.)

If that’s the way I’m going to go, fine. But I won’t do it blindly. I want to know what we’re all supposed to be aiming for, because I’m not sure I know at the moment. I’m not sure anyone knows.

Right now it’s pure enjoyment, glorious exploration, six guys who still get on playing songs that make people dance. But right now we’re also caught between two worlds and if we don’t pick one then it’ll all start to unravel pretty messily – no amount of disintegrating festival wristbands and old backstage passes will sustain the good memories when tested over decades spent in the artistic wilderness, as the cultural currency of what we do depreciates more with every passing epoch.

Just because singers and songwriters once flew the flag for forward thinking and free expression that doesn’t mean those flags are still flying now. When I meet someone new and they ask me what I do for a living I hesitate. I used to chirpily say “I’m in a band” and the conversation would roll along in little bursts of interest about style and influences. But these days that answer tends to elicit a state of terror in a lot of people, no doubt they worry I’m about to launch into some sales pitch about a Kickstarter campaign or urge them to “like” me on Facebook or join my mailing list. It’s a bit like knocking on a stranger’s door and saying “Have you heard the good news?” – very few are welcomed over the threshold. No, I’m afraid we rock bands are no longer glamorous. Not by default anyway. We are old fashioned, our methods unsubtle, our ambitions second hand. We are not the embodiment of freedom or rebellion or progress, but vanity and wishful thinking. Rock musicians are all too often simply a nuisance. Always spamming, begging, moaning, trying to make investors out of enthusiasts. We were once the escape and now we set the traps. When did it all get so damn tacky?

It’s probably not our fault. These are changing times and we’re caught in a peculiar hinterland between two philosophies. Some cultural commentators say the internet is a good way of broadcasting to EVERYONE; others say it’s a tool to focus in on those who are really interested, a specialisation aid. More and more I’m veering towards the latter notion, yet we must still pay a certain amount of lip-service to the former or else risk eschewing legions of promoters who gauge success with numbers alone. Those dreaded ugly numbers.

As usual I’m over-thinking things, at odds with that Devil-may-care attitude people in bands are supposed to have.

The problem is that we started The Bedlam Six at the tail end of another era, all our role models operated in a completely different set of circumstances and expectations. True we wised up to this relatively early on but that doesn’t alter the fact that most of the time we (and most other independent acts I know) are running to stand still. I’m glad we went down the DIY route, I’m glad it got us thinking, I’m glad we aren’t mindless drug addicts being shepherded about by a greedy manager. I like the way the internet has encouraged a more considered version of DIY with an emphasis on sustainability rather than hedonism (though I must admit the new buzz term “musicpreneur” does cause a certain amount of bile to rise in my throat). We developed on the road, met a lot of fascinating people, found ourselves in some amazing moments and did it all on our own terms. I wouldn’t change a second of it. But I’m curious to know how we’d do things if we were only just starting out now, in 2014 – if we’d gone into all this with even half an idea that our musical peers would one day refer to themselves as “brands not bands” in a completely non-ironic way. Yuck.

So we’re stepping back for a bit. Just to have a think. We’ve got one more full band tour (see gig section for details) then we’ll go on hiatus. We might be gone for such a short time that no one even notices. We might not. There will still be a trickle of music videos emerging over the coming months and I’ll still be playing solo shows (have to pay the bills somehow!) plus my band-mates likewise have plenty of other projects that require their attention (see their various personal websites linked on www.bedlamsix.com for details); but the extravaganza that is The Bedlam Six will disappear behind the curtain for a while. Who knows, maybe it’ll prove to be something of a chrysalis (as biological metaphor rather than 90s indie label reference). We still ain’t done being young… but we do occasionally find ourselves wondering what we’d like to be when we grow up. No doubt we’ll grow down again pretty quickly. We’ll just have to see.

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