Thank you to everyone who came to my birthday show on Saturday… it was a gas!
Photo © Christine Keating 2013
Birthday Show
It is my birthday show at the end of this week, a big event at one of my favourite venues, The Dancehouse Theatre in Manchester. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever had a hand in organizing and I do hope some of you can join us on the night. At time of writing there are still some tickets available (you can order them here).
Throughout the night The Bedlam Six and I will be joined by special guest singers drawn from our friends and peers in the Manchester music scene.
Guests include Tom Hingley (of Inspiral Carpets fame), Ríoghnach Connolly (from Honeyfeet), Richard Barry, Hannah Miller (from The Moulettes), Kirsty Almeida and John Robb.
Doors are at 7.30pm and we’ll be starting the show at 8pm. There is no support act, just us all evening!
Tickets are £8 in advance and £10 on the door.
Video with Felix Hagan & The Family
The video for my labelmate Felix Hagan’s song “My Little Lusitania” is now online. In it I guest as a Bronson-esque pugilist loner. It was a lot of fun to make!
I wrote a little article on the project shortly after the shoot. That can be read here.
Scarecrow
It is one of the great pleasures of my life when other people sing the songs I write.
I am absolutely in love with Bridie Jackson & The Arbour‘s recording of “Scarecrow”. The subject of the song suits Bridie’s voice so well – far better than mine!
***
My background is in folk music. Mostly Scottish, Irish, English and North American. They all have their moments of singular beauty, particularly when they overlap, Irish immigrant songs about travelling to America are a good example of this. Tunes about uprooting oneself carry so much emotion, there is a mix of nostalgia for the past and expectancy/optimism/fear for the future. A sense of place is very important, but also placelessness.
When I wrote the song I wanted the geography to be detailed but simultaneously nonspecific (even confused), or possibly a homogenized location drawn from elements of all the aforementioned countries. There are mentions of plants that do not cohabit (fern and long-leaf pine for instance). Fern is special to me as it holds early memories of my grandfather’s house on the Isle Of Skye, where I’d wade through acres of the stuff as a child, its rough leaves coming up to my chest, as exhausting as walking through deep water. Long-Leaf pine is significant as it’s what poor people’s coffins were mostly made out of in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century (I did quite a bit of reading into this while fact-checking my metaphors!). The seasons are also mixed up (it is simultaneously winter and autumn). In the song we find the lost soul of a young bride looking at a scarecrow dressed in her wedding gown. I figured both time and place probably get confused when you’re dead.
The most important thing for me was to write a story where there was no story. Too often folk songs feature characters who are the victims of extreme circumstances, but too often in real life we are the victims of a complete lack of extreme circumstances. This dead narrator was not killed by a jealous lover or a sinking ship or an ancient prophesy or a war. She’s just one of those people who dies of nothing.
I had a school friend who died suddenly aged eighteen. No one knew why. It happened instantly – there was nothing to blame, nothing to hate. It had a profound effect on everyone in my school year. Retrospectively it is where I draw the line between my childhood and adulthood. The moment I heard the news is one I have revisited many times in songs, in all sorts of ways, some direct and some less so. This is the most recent example.
I can’t imagine any singer who can pack all that into a single vocal delivery better than Bridie Jackson. I am very lucky.
Long Black Veil
The Bedlam Six and I have been holed up in our studio house for a week now, making good progress on the new album and having a lot of fun at the same time. I’ve been keeping a daily diary of our work over on the band blog if you’re interested in the process.
During a break in the recording we jammed out this old classic. No matter how loud we can get on stage, our roots are squarely in folk music!
The Difficult Second Album
In late 2007, a year after the Bedlam Six was formed, we started recording an album called Found Drowned. The line-up was a little different then, the dominant sound for much of it was a string section provided by Hannah and Georgina from The Moulettes (a phenomenal band that you should investigate forthwith if you’re unfamiliar with their work). In total there were over a dozen players involved (plus a twenty strong choir of drunks that features on a couple of tracks).
We bit off way more than we could chew. For a start we had no real idea of the kind of band we were then or how we’d evolve in the subsequent years (we were very much a folk band with traces of rock and swing rather than the other way round) but also (and this is the really important bit) we didn’t actually know how to record an album. We recorded thirteen tracks over ten days in the Withington house I used to share with Cleg the Bedlam guitarist (twelve made the finished record). It was a wild and confusing time, very much a do-as-much-as-you-can-and-we’ll-sort-it-out-later process. I remember spending weeks with Dan (our engineer and bassist) chipping away at the post-production, trying to find the songs among the confusion of noises. I think it sounds remarkably good considering our inexperience and the rather impoverished set-up.
But since then we’ve been trying to perfect the way we record. Trying to catch the live chemistry whilst simultaneously adding the kind of subtlety not available when stomping about on a stage. We’ve used professional recording studios and we’ve recorded live concerts; both have their charms and advantages but neither are ideal when attempting to make something a bit, well, special.
Last year we decided to go back to basics and follow the lead of our heroes The Band, creating our very own Big Pink – a house on the south coast of England far away from the distractions of our Manchester lives, a place we could all live and work in, somewhere we wouldn’t have to watch the clock, where we could relax and focus solely on the project at hand. That’s where we recorded our EP “Memoir Noir”, in my opinion the most honest record we’ve ever made. It is what I think all records should be: a moment in time.
So we’re going back there. Indeed, we are back there now. Today is the first day of a three week stretch in which we intend to record our difficult second album, five years after our debut. We know each other a lot better now, I’d even go so far as to say we know ourselves a lot better now.
There’s a lot of debate about the relevance of albums now that the way in which people consume music is changing so much. But as long as there are people who still favour the Long Player format then we’ll keep making them. I like albums. Everyone in the band likes albums. There is a peculiar majesty to a good album that exists far outside a simple arrangement of songs.
So now we’re locking the doors and closing the curtains on the outside world, when we come out again we’ll hopefully be clutching a piece of work that we all really like. And hopefully you’ll like it too.
You can follow our daily progress on the band blog at http://www.bedlamsix.tumblr.com (we’ll be posting photos, video clips and a diary of sorts). Here’s a video montage from last year’s recording session…
New Article: “Music As Currency Not Culture”
Last month one of my articles was published in The Cultural Value Initiative. It wasn’t until they got in touch that I realised “Cultural Value” was a subject I’d been writing about regularly since 2010 (I just thought I was venting some spleen).
Maybe the reason that particular article was picked up was because I finally found the courage to talk about the internal battle raging (in varying degrees of fury) inside all professional and semi-professional musicians: Art versus Money.
A Landmark Birthday and a Big Theatre Show
It’s my thirtieth birthday next month. I don’t tend to make a big fuss of birthdays (I have long been at an age that permits me to drink, vote and wed whilst simultaneously being ineligible for the train and bus discounts that would make getting to the appropriate venues a lot cheaper).
But this is one of those big round birthdays that can mean only one thing: if I don’t make a fuss of it, someone else definitely will. And one thing’s for sure, I’d rather play a concert than be subjected to a surprise party.
So I got together with the band and told them what kind of show I’d really like to put on. Then I made a mental note of how many of them responded by rolling their eyes (all of them) and interpreted that as incontrovertible proof of their boundless enthusiasm.
I’m almost always relatively unsatisfied with the amount we can achieve at a show (beyond playing the songs as well as we can). So this is the gig in which I am going to put everything I have into creating as much spectacle as possible. Yes, most of the time the main limiting factor is money but often it is simply a matter of time and preparation (when one is on tour there is rarely much one can do about stage lay-out etc beyond the tech spec sent to that venue months earlier). In terms of location I now have a pretty realistic idea of our reach, I know that if we booked Manchester Arena for this show we’d be pretty embarrassed by the turn-out (and besides, it lacks a certain magic anyway). That’s why I opted for the Dancehouse Theatre. Not only does it look the part with its red curtains, art deco design and deep stage but it’s a good medium sized room that seats 415 (with no restricted views anywhere) and has disabled access (unlike so many rock venues). Also the last time we were there we sold it out so I know that whatever fantastical ideas we come up with to make our show as ridiculous as possible, at the very least the event will have a strong foundation in realistic expectation.
I am delighted that heading up the set design team are two critically acclaimed visual artists: Mari-Ruth Oda (who currently has an exhibition on at the Central Gallery in Manchester) and Kirsty Almeida (who recently got rave reviews as part of Manchester Art Gallery‘s Paper Installation for Weekender Festival). The three of us had a look at the space last week and came up with some big ideas. That’s the only brief: BIG!
As for the content of the show, I looked to the past (after all, isn’t that what birthday’s so often do?).
One of my favourite films is Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz. I’m a huge fan of The Band and have even visited Levon Helm’s house in Woodstock (for his New Year’s Eve party in 2005). That film about the group’s (supposed) farewell concert was a huge inspiration to me. It made me want to form a band like that, a band that could have a strong identity of its own whilst channeling very old influences, a band that you’d recognise the sound of even when they’re playing another artist’s songs. Once The Bedlam Six had been on the circuit a while I drew inspiration from the film again, this time in the range of special guest performers The Band managed to entice to join them onstage for the concert. We formed Debt Records out of a desire to create a label based on that idea of creative cross-pollination, of artists working together (officially and unofficially), informing each others’ material and generally having a great time playing music.
So that’s what we’re doing for my birthday. We’ve approached some of our favourite performers that we’ve encounterd since the Bedlam Six started and asked them to join us for a song or two, some duetting with me on things I’ve written, some playing their own stuff with The Bedlam Six as backing band, some doing unlikely covers. It should be a really fun night. We’ve not announced the guests yet (indeed, I think we may keep that part a secret) but the audience won’t be disappointed. I’m already pretty astounded by the response from our mailing list and social media, some people have written to tell me they are driving the length of the country to be there, while others are flying over from places as far away as Ireland and Germany. I’m really touched.
I think this may be my best birthday party ever!
***
Tickets are available in person from The Dancehouse Theatre box office plus selected outlets in Manchester City Centre. If you’re booking online the cheapest place is, as ever, the Bedlam Six online shop.
For those who can’t make it, the event will be filmed and released in late March as a live DVD to coincide with our next European tour. We may attempt to live stream it too. Not done that before. We’ll see what’s possible…
God Rest Ye Merry, Bedlam Six
The Bedlam Six and I have recorded an arrangement of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” for the Debt Records Christmas Compilation, raising money for the charity Music In Hospitals.
I’m not a religious man but I do have a soft spot for certain carols (especially when performed by brass bands at dusk, the steam rising from the bells of their tubas and trombones). This song is probably my favourite. I didn’t want to mess about with its form too much (though whenever I sing anything it tends to bring a certain sleaze to the lyrics) but we have added a slight swing that isn’t there in the original.
We hope you like it. Please do go over and have a listen to the other tracks on the album, there are some superb versions by my wonderfully talented label-mates at Debt. It’s available to stream and buy here.
Posing
The first article I ever wrote about “the music industry” (the quotation marks have become increasingly necessary) was about the phenomenon of BAD BAND PHOTOGRAPHY. The piece is here if you’re interested.
In it I try to identify the most common mistakes that bands make when getting press photos taken. I also list my favourite clichés (the most common being sulky youths inexplicably surrounded by urban decay). One of the things I find most interesting is that, regardless of props or visual context, you can always immediately identify a band photo – something about the unnatural proximity of disinterested persons.
It’s an article close to my heart mostly because it was directly responsible for my close friendship with Joe Sparrow (A New Band A Day, Hype Machine), a man who gets sent so many press packs he knows more about band self-sabotage than anyone I know. He read the piece and told me he liked it, then we met soon after to discuss a plan to co-author a book about naff band publicity (we never wrote it, that’s what happens when all your meetings happen in the pub).
Anyway, The Bedlam Six and I had a few photos taken recently. We’ve got plans for a big photoshoot after Christmas (involving all sorts of fancy tableaus and clever lighting) but were in need of something vaguely current to send out to 2013 event programmers that have been on my case recently (our last shoot was in 2010 and a lot has changed since then).
So we spent half an hour with Ian O’Brien backstage at a gig and took some generic band shots during which we succeeded in breaking most of the rules I’d laid out in that article (standing in a line, looking in different directions with different expressions… all that’s missing is a derelict mill in the background). The picture above is one that I almost scrapped upon first glance. Drummer and lead guitarist are pulling the same silly face; bassist has just been startled by the fooling of trombonist and the pianist appears to be either mid-yawn or mid-complaint. And yet, it’s my favourite of the batch, perhaps my favourite photo of us EVER. I don’t know why but I really like it. There’s something really honest about it, there’s character there but minimal pretentiousness. A strange balance.
Being in a band can be a bizarre life choice. Most of what we do is utterly needless and often completely ridiculous. I think this photo sums that all up rather well.
If you’d like to see a few more from the shoot there’s a handful on the Bedlam Six Tumblr
