Double Trouble

A coupe of contrasting gigs for your humble narrator since the last posting :-

Saturday night it was time for The Uppercut to return to The Misty Moon in Bethnal Green. As Roger (drums) and myself pulled up outside we saw the two Terrys (vocals and bass) talking to a young man in a suit - Terry the bass greeted us with the words 'double booked' which are never good words to hear when you arrive at a venue. It turned out the young man was Ian March and it was indeed his name on the poster on the pillar which presumably holds the pub up; a quick conversation between Terry the voice and Gerry the guv'nor ended with the news that both acts could play 'on full money'. Oo-er! Oh well - this should be an interesting evening...

We set up in the alcove as we normally do then Ian set up his P.A. and MiniDisc player in front of our gear. The pub has a 1.30 a.m. licence so it was decided that Ian would do 45 minutes from 10 o'clock then we'd go on for the same length of time; he'd then do another set with us finishing the evening. As we got ourselves some drinks we noticed that there was a poster advertising future gigs - we're due back there on October 15th but, you've guessed it, it wasn't our name on the poster, it was Nataya... Terry came back from another conversation with Gerry saying 'he's not got his laptop with him, I've got to call him Monday'. Hmm... by now Ian had started - there are a few likely lads who look and indeed behave as though they've been drinking all day, dancing comically in front of Ian as he forces a weak smile in their general direction. His Buble - inspired act goes down well enough with the barflies although he looks as though he'd be happy to be virtually anywhere else in the World.

We start our first set with '(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay' to general indifference - we sound good but somehow different to the other times that we've played there. I'm wondering if it's because I'm using my spare amp (a Fender Blues Deluxe) as Roger the amplifier repair man hasn't been able to look at my main amp yet, but it's the overall sound that's changed... eventually we realise why - there's a curtain around the alcove that wasn't there before (presumably to keep the sound in the building rather than it escaping and annoying the neighbours) and it's deadened the sound considerably, with Roger being particularly bemused by the 'new' drum sound. Still we're playing well although no one seems to be interested in our antics. Nights like this can be very hard work, although sometimes they improve for no apparent reason - sadly this wasn't to be one of those nights, and I reach the end of the show without breaking sweat. I don't like it when that happens, it feels like I've not tried as hard as I can and that's a bad feeling to have. Still, I guess you can't win 'em all.

Last night's show on the other hand couldn't have been more different, when the Chicago Blues Brothers visited The Queens Theatre in Hornchurch. A nearly-sold-out crowd saw a nearly-the-A-team band (Matt and Mike as Jake and Elwood, Squirrel and Marc on bass and drums, Tracy on vocals, Ian on keyboards and Dave on vocals with Ian depping on sax for Richard being the only interloper) deliver an energetic show which definitely made me sweat. That's more like it! And if that wasn't good enough I noticed when I walked along the High Street that the Hogshead pub was advertising ROCK 'N' ROLL BINGO - you can imagine the caller can't you? Well I can - U2, Alabama 3, Mega City 4... excellent!

See how I suffer for my art!

Well I thoroughly enjoyed my time on Music Scene Investigation, and I'm pleased to say that I will hopefully be appearing again later in the year. (Well, fairly obviously I won't be appearing again earlier in the year but you know what I mean.) Ian, Tom and Rich were all very helpful, I managed to work Skype correctly (and what an amazing thing that is!) and if you didn't catch it then click here to see me wearing unfeasibly large headphones and sounding almost as though I know what I'm talking about. Excellent!

And apologies for the Warhol-esque nonsense above; having had one of these MacBook thingys for Gawd knows how long I've only just worked out how to take pictures with it!

In the meantime that was my first weekend for a while without any gigs (bah!) and although I never think I'm particularly busy I've just had a look back through the last few months worth of postings and considering these dark days of recession and depression I've not had a bad run overall. I've spoken to quite a few musicians lately who have had nowhere near as much work so I'm not going to complain (for once!) Still it's got me thinking about the nature of what it is that I do...

For quite a few of the shows over the last few months I've been obliged to learn songs specifically for the performance, or to learn different arrangements of otherwise familiar material. This has been both good fun and not a little daunting - I'll say now that the Killers song 'Mr. Brightside' which we played at the York show back at the start of May is one of the most difficult songs I've encountered in ages. It might not sound too hard but the intro and verse chords feature some enormous stretches (have a look at this clip of them performing it and see you'll see what I mean) which have never been a strong point of mine. Their guitarist must have very big hands, or very long fingers, or both! I also learned a Michael Buble song for that show which was easier to play but had the added pressure of being the couple's first dance, with all the scrutiny that that entails. From my point of view this sort of thing normally means a fair bit of time listening to the original tracks, looking at You Tube clips and generally attempting to work out what's going on in the song. There are numerous guitar tablature sites on the Internet, many of which can be very useful and save quite a bit of time although their accuracy is sometimes questionable as anybody can post onto them.

At the other end of the scale there was the Upper Cut gig in Staines a couple of days earlier where we were billed as a Rod Stewart tribute band - faced with a number of requests (!) we busked a reasonable version of 'The First Cut Is The Deepest' which went down well with the Rod fans. Something like that depends on several factors - fairly obviously some songs are easier to play than others even if you all know the song well it can still catch you out; there's also things like how well you can all hear each other to take into consideration, as well as how good the band is in the first place. Then there's how good your ear is - can you anticipate a chord change correctly if you've never played it before? Most of us have good days and bad days at this so you can only hope that it's one of your good days when you need to do it!

And then there was 'The Servant' at last weekend's gig with T.V. Smith which I managed to make a mistake in before the vocals had even started - and we might never play it again so I can't make amends!

So what's the alternative to spending hours in front of a CD player or computer screen? Well for the jobbing rock guitarist there really isn't one. Horn players are invariably excellent sight readers with their parts written out for them - guitar and bass players rarely if ever have anything provided for them, and most of them don't sight read conventional music anyway. I suppose this gives rise to a vicious circle where players don't learn to read music as they're never given anything to read, but parts aren't provided because most players can't read them. A notable exception to this are West End theatre shows and the like, but that's another subject for another time (and let's face it, another guitarist!)

And then there's the question of sound. It's fairly obvious to even the most casual listener that the guitars on a heavy metal recording sound a lot different to those on a funk tune. Playing the correct notes is only part of the story, you've got to sound right as well. Leaving aside the fact that this could be seen as spurious justification for owning a large number of guitars, amplifiers and effect pedals (perish the thought!) there's actually a serious point here - I agonised over which guitar to play at the afore-mentioned York show for quite some time, eventually choosing my SG as it was the easiest guitar to play the scary 'Mr Brightside' chords on. I nearly went for a Stratocaster (I needed a guitar with a double cutaway so that I could play chord high up the neck; there wasn't much in it to be honest) but I think I chose correctly in the end. This might seem like nitpicking but it's something that I find is spending a bit of time thinking about and indeed trying different instruments - the right guitar can make the gig, the wrong one can literally break it.

With regards to effect pedals, I've never owned a great number of these as I like to try to keep things as simple as possible, and the ones that I do have are fairly traditional types like booster pedals (to make solos louder), distortion, chorus, echo etc. I was talking to a guitarist recently who had a huge array of processors on a custom built pedal board because, as he put it, 'I might need play "Livin' On A Prayer" one minute and then "Mustang Sally" the next'. Hmm... I've had to do that sort of thing too but I've still only got a pedal or two wired up at any one time. This is not to say that I'm right and he's wrong (far from it - he's a lot more successful than I am!) but it does indicate a different approach to the same situation. As I say there's no right or wrong here - I just prefer to get different sounds out of the guitar and amplifier. With that in mind I'm starting to realise that I could do with a more versatile amp to go with my Fender combo which are great for clean sounds but not quite so effective on rockier material. Then again I could just get myself a decent overdrive pedal... actually haven't I got one of those somewhere?

Anyway I can't sit here typing, I've got work to do - I'm depping in The Duplicates at the end of the month and have nearly 2 hours of material to learn. The circle is unbroken... better get on with it then!

Holiday weekend?

And so it continues to continue - my brother Terry called me just before midnight last night to tell me that Henry Cooper has died. Somewhere there is a photo that I took of my Dad and brother with Mr. Cooper, he seemed to be a nice chap (we'd gone to see him doing a one man show at The Watersmeet Theatre in Rickmansworth and although Dad and Terry had met him other times as well it was the only time that I spoke to him; actually all our family encountered Our 'Enry at some point as my mum met him at Budgens in Uxbridge back in the early '70's when he opened the store!) and judging by what I've read about him on the Internet today he's being well remembered which is good to see.

And Osama Bin Laden is dead as well - but you knew that already didn't you?

I tuned in at the allotted time to hear Voltarol on the radio (or to be pedantic, on my computer) only to be confronted with this track - my first thought was that he'd cracked up completely although I then realised that my clock was a bit fast... in the meantime it's been 3 busy gigs in 3 busy days for your humble narrator:-

The Uppercut made their first appearance at The Anglers Retreat in Staines on Friday night - as we pulled up in the car park Roger remarked that the pub used to be called The Lord Lucan. Interesting! (It's seems that it was actually called The Lucan Arms although locally it was known as The Lord Lucan. He was in the news a fair bit back in the day - whatever happened to him eh?) The two Terrys met us outside with the news that there wasn't much room but 'at least they've moved the sofa'; they'd actually stood it on one end next to the bay window that we were due to play in, it looked splendidly bizarre as did the huge tiger print chair at the other end of said space. I'd hardly got through the door before a young man came over to ask what type of guitar I played; he later spent our first set trying to talk to Terry while he was singing - why oh why do people keep doing that? - then left at half time in search of 'birds'. I doubt that he found any. Electricity came from a cupboard next to the chair via a lethal-looking spaghetti of extention leads, and we'd just about managed to cram ourselves into place when Terry noticed that we'd been billed as a Rod Stewart tribute band on the blackboard behind the bar. Oo-er... in the event we managed to play enough Faces 'n' Rod-related rock to satisfy the people there who had come to hear it, as well as getting through the rest of our act without getting lynched. We're back there in July - the inter-band 'should we play more Rod?' debate has already started...

Saturday it was down to Poole in Dorset for a Blues Brothers show at The Esporta Sports Centre. Originally intended to be an F.B.I. Band show the group personnel eventually became something of a hybrid between our show and theirs, with Marc (drums) Dave (trumpet) Mike (Elwood) and myself from The Chicago Blues Brothers joining Tony (Jake) Ian (sax) Jon (bass) and Jim (regular dep for Richard on keyboards) from The F.B.I.'ers. I travelled down with Jon and Mike for a journey that included spotting an AA breakdown truck with a speedboat on the back and a car with an advert for PSYCHIC FRAN on it's driver door but was otherwise reasonably uneventful; with everyone present and correct we set up in the foyer in front of the fireplace (!) and ran through 'I Can't Turn You Loose' as a somewhat echo-ey soundcheck. After some food (sausage, chips and beans for them, falafel burger for me) we retired to The Dorchester Suite (not as grand as it sounds!) as the guests started to arrive to get ready. It's a 'V.I.P. Event' which seems to be a 'free-to-get-in-if-you're-a-member' evening with food and a live band, there are a fair few in by the time we get to play and the dance floor starts to fill up from the middle of our first set. I thought we were a bit rough to begin with - too many deps maybe? - but by the end we were playing well and there was plenty of dancing and general merriment. A good gig.

I got in sometime around 2 o'clock on Sunday morning - by midday I was meeting Squirrel (C.B.B. bassman) at South Mimms Services on The M25 to journey North to York for a show reminiscent of last July's Sicilians gig. That was a a birthday party, this was at a wedding and both were organised by Matt (Jake in our show) who lives in the area. After a very straightforward 3 hour journey we sat in for an hour in Matt's back yard enjoying the sunshine, discussing tactics and running through songs; his friend and ace drummer Dion arrived (he's currently touring in the 'Jackson Live' show) and we made our way through some spectacular scenery to the venue, The Wood Hall Hotel near Wetherby. As we pulled into the car park a badger wandered out in front of us, completely untroubled by our or indeed anyone else's presence - excellent. It's James and Sarah's wedding and the mood is good - after a (very) quick set-up we got changed in The Scott Room before myself and Matt began our first set with Michael Buble's 'Crazy Love'; We'd been asked to play it although it hadn't really occurred to me that the couple would be having their first dance to it - as I began I realised that not only were half the guests filming it but that the couple had rehearsed a dance routine to it. No pressure then... fortunately it went well (as usual I wouldn't have mentioned it here if it hadn't) and it set the scene for 2 sets of increasingly well-received raucous rocking 'n' rolling, with Matt at his energetic best throughout. Great stuff - we must do it again sometime.