What to say about my esteemed MD? Well, there really is nothing like being encouraged to turn up at the rehearsal for 6 o’clock, in order to set up and run through the music, because ‘I’ll be there from well  before that’. How kind, one thinks, as one forgoes tea to get there, ravenous, as part of the greater good.

Was he there? Was he heck as like. No sign until 6.50. Still, at least I’d got set up by then so felt a bit smug, but far more hungry.

There must also be something in my face that just says ‘I’m a drummer’. Because I walked in, asked the sound guy if I was in the right place, and he says ‘yes, you’re the drummer.’ What?!! How do you know?!! I hadn’t carried anything in, the curtains were all closed so he couldn’t see the drums in my car, and I wasn’t even wearing a Zildjian t-shirt! (I NEVER wear Zildjian t-shirts: there are limits.) Most peculiar. Not as peculiar as his accent, though, which as it was broad west-country came as a bit of shock in the middle of brummie-ville.

This place is just a village hall, so it was much to my amused horror that I was told, by said sound man, that there were going to be THREE keyboards playing alongside me. THREE!!! We must bear in mind at this point that there is a minimum 50-year age gap between me and my musical compardres, they’re a bit deaf, and so they turn things up so they can hear themselves, and deafen everyone else. It’s the sort of thing that Marx was getting at, really. So, knowing that: THREE OF THEM?!! In a village hall?!!

Horrible thing to say therefore, but mercifully, one of them was too ill to come. So it was just us. Me, Aggie, and the MD. Sensibly, because there wasn’t room in my folder for all the music, the MD had put it into two folders. This was with the rather brilliant wheeze of putting the fourth piece, on its own, in the second folder. I found this a tad irritating, hurling folders around the room while missing half the music.

Not that I could really hear the music, so unbelievably loud were these keyboards. The MD spent half an hour before we started fretting about ‘one of his patches’ not working. No, get your minds out of that gutter, he was talking about his keyboard. Oh, nothing in the world beats 70-year old men trying to be 25 year-old rock stars in village halls. I’m under no illusions – this is the coalface and its fine, but seriously, these people should know better! Anyway, this is only the first of what will turn into a series and I need to keep some powder dry, so come back tomorrow for more tales from the beat-room.

What a lot of questions. Let’s get down to some proper hardline investigative journalism here – these are, after all, issues that matter – and find us some answers.

Perhaps I’m just prejudiced having played at village hall gig after village hall gig over the last seven years where, with a predictability that would give the atomic clock a fit of the vapours, the MC announces the raffle, then looks over and says ‘just give us a drum roll for this one, pal’.

NO! I’m sorry, but the whole point of a solo drum roll is a build to a climax. Establish tension, raise it, heighten it, release it – crash! – with the cymbal at the end. This is not a sequence that correlates with the drawing of a raffle. There is absolutely no tension involved in putting your hand into a bag of paper cuttings and picking one out. No amount of music would ever create any, either. Bernard Herrman at the height of his powers would have only managed to make a raffle sound like a day out in Congleton.

Talk about feeling like a chump, too. When do you finish? Is it when the ticket gets pulled out? Is it when the number gets read out? Is it when the winner stands up to claim their prize? I don’t know, never have. I know it’s a problem for everyone else in the building too. Sometimes they applaud, but why? There’s no achievement in winning a raffle, it’s pure luck – and you’ve paid for it too. Your prizes tend to be woeful as well. Wine, chocolate, teddys. The chocolate end of that wedge is nearly always Ferrero Roché as well, because let’s face it, no-one on earth actually likes them.

This is a long standing subject of ire, re-pointed to the forefront of my brain by the raffle on Saturday night, which for some reason they decided to do at the very end of the evening, AFTER the flipping gig had finished! Talk about vacuuming the atmosphere. This is why I hate them, they kill vibes stone dead. Be they held at intervals or afterwards, where once people were having fun, afer the raffle it’s wrist-slitting time.

So, I propose a solution. Instead of the raffle, add 50p to every ticket price, then get someone to make six paper planes, chuck them into the audience, whoever they hit gets the Ferrero Roché. Job done. No drum rolls, no time-wasting, no woeful jokes and no room full of annoyed people. This will work, world. This will work.

http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Airline-passenger-eats-winning-scratchcard/article-1871755-detail/article.html

Thanks, Tracy!

In one of the slow-motion replays of Wayne Rooney’s first goal for United against Fulham, looking behind the net at the fans, who, in their reduced speed glory, were rising shank-high in celebration, there was at least one who was watching the entire proceedings through the camera on his mobile phone.

This is bad enough – seriously dude, it’s on television – in itself, but what terrified me was that this bloke didn’t stop looking through the lens of this machine at any point. He jumped up and his face controted into a similar expression of delight to his compadres after the goal was scored, but unflinchingly he was refracting his entire experience through his mobile.

So, there are people now who go to football matches intending to enjoy the whole experience through a pixelated screen, rather than at intimately close quarters with their eyes. I just find it horrible. Experience is nothing if you don’t actually experience it, and this bloke was in the Stretford End, for goodness’ sake. Well I do hope he enjoys the grainy, shaky footage of that moment (he was behind the net as well – so that’ll be in the foreground of every shot), and treasures the memory of filming it. I’d rather have the memory of seeing it to call up again and again though.

What fun the AA route planner (I like to think of this as literally one person, sitting in a portacabin in Snowdonia, surrounded by road maps and fag ends with a big bushy beard and no idea of his own identity) had getting me there! I eschew satellite navigation as the work of egregious Geoffrey Robinson types who suck the fun out of rooms. The great thing about following your AA planned route when driving alone with nobbut a drum kit for company, is that if you haven’t memorised the route before setting off, it’s almost useless. No way can you read the bits you need when doing 50+mph on twisty roads. Instead one has to rely on half-memories and accurate signage. Not a guarantor of success.

BUT, everything was fine until I got to the A41 signposted Wolverhampton (just off junction 3 on the M54 northbound, for when you retrace my journey after reading this). Then, having previously given pretty sensible information with road numbers and signposts and everything, our man in Wales goes native. ‘Turn right onto Rectory Road’, was the next instruction. Didn’t say which right, or how far on it was. So, I, being naive in this way, trusted it meant the first right. This was an error, as I realised quite quickly after driving into RAF Cosworth.

Fortunately, I got out again before being shot, and decided that I’d just go on until the A41 turned into a T-junction at which there was no choice but to turn right onto rectory road. 10 minutes on, I began to suspect that this too was an error. But then, Pyaawwwnnn! Past zipped a sign – ‘rectory road’. Huzzah! I thought, going at 70mph in the wrong direction.

Turn round, get onto rectory road – easy from here I thought – what’s next… ‘turn right onto Newport Road’… ok. Done that. Good! On easy street now… ‘turn left onto Bowling Green Lane’. Which left?!!! So, before long I find myself back at… the A41 to Wolverhampton! Genius! Round we go again… Ah, Bowling Green Lane’s sign only points one way, so you really have to be turning right or a contortionist to see it.

Then old Gwawr of the Hills just starts laughing at me – ‘Turn right, turn left, bear left, turn left, turn left,’ are his final instructions. I got the distinct impression that cartography just hadn’t bothered with Shropshire’s nether regions. BUT I GOT THERE without another hitch! Hoorah. Came within a split inch of murdering a Pheasant as well. They really are bloody stupid creatures.

More tales tomorrow, folks!

In fullness of fairness, mind, St George’s is a lovely place. A converted church with extensive sub-altern public areas (thanks for the Broccoli and Stilton soup, guys), nice line drawings of jazz musicians dotted around the place, nice vibe. It’s nice, kids. Actually I think I may have just made it sound really dull. Oh well.

Doors are fascinating things (bear with me here) when you think about them. Together with the window, the door is the only thing that stops a room from being a sealed box. It is the only thing that lets you both in and out of a place, generally without asking too many questions. They are items that symbolise our transitory existence, being on the one hand ‘open’, and on the other ‘closed’ (if Bertrand Russell is reading this, then see, Bertie, anyone can do it).

They are also some of the more animated of our inanimate objects. Some of them swing both ways, some of them are automated, some of them you push, some of them you pull, but ALL of them, you move. We need them. They keep the cold out in winter, they let a soothing draft in in Summer. They are the only things that allow us to exercise a choice about whether or not we let the Jehovas Witnesses in. The slamming of one has become a rather a potent and instantly recognisable symbol of intense and rubicon-crossing anger (cf: ‘fuck off then’). They are used metaphorically to symbolise opportunity (doors opening) and depressing dead endery (doors closed).

Why am I writing this nonsense? Because on one of the Fire Doors at St George’s in Bristol, was a sign that I have seen elsewhere too: ‘THIS DOOR IS ALARMED’.

It’s a wonder to me that we’re not burning books about this already. If the doors are alarmed, what hope the rest of us? We need them onside, these creatures of the frame. To that end, I suggest we treat them a little more carefully. Pull them less vigourously, shut them less angrily, stop taking the Italian Job approach, in fact. Because it’s a short step from fear to anger, and if the doors get angry, we really are going to be boxed into one very uncomfortable corner.

Flitting lightly over the year that’s elapsed since last a fresh word was printed on here, let’s go bananas for a superlative gig down in Brizzle last night.

I don’t think there can be much question now (there isn’t in my head, anyway), that the most interesting jazz is emanating from the Northern end of Europe these days. Ceaselessly inventive, infused with a latent melodic understanding that somehow circumvents the absence of any actual melody, combined with a willingness to experiment aurally in a manner that seems oddly beyond the new British and American stuff that’s come past my ears, it is brilliant.

Nothing different from Nik Bärtsch’s five-piece band Ronin, direct from Switzerland. On a mini-tour that takes them to each of England’s four corners (Bristol, Gateshead, Manchester and London – catch them if you can), last night at the converted St George’s church they unleashed a torrent of rhythmic inventiveness. Paul McCartney’s concerts are considered value for money partly because he plays around 30 songs at each one. Ronin played 4, but then the shortest of them was twenty minutes long. and in each there was enough material to justify the £17 ticket price four times over.

Beginning with the other-wordly percussion scrapes of Andi Pupato, we were toured through a soundscape that touched on EST, Weather Report, Röyksopp, Air and Marlene Dietrich (well, perhaps not her). Pulsing, slapping, tickling and girating with his bass, Björn Meyer provided the firmest of foundations for everything else throughout the evening. Bearing a passing resemblence to the Addams’ family’s Lurch, he was clearly having a whale of a time. Lovely to see.

Meanwhile, sitting stage left, bolt upright and quite surreptitiously, Bärtsch set about creating riff after riff afer riff, rolling around all the other parts with a quality that somehow managed to be ethereal and utterly grounded. Kaspar Rast on drums managed to get over the fact that he looked like he could kill with his bare hands to play very mimimal drums, which never landed on the beat you expected, but which, combined with Pupato’s fantastic array of instruments, locked the most consistent series of grooves frimly into the boogie muscles’ of all concerned. Many a head was bopping in the hall. 

The final piece in the jigsaw was the gloriously named Sha, playing sax, and bass and contrabass clarinets. The latter two created extraordinary effects. At times the bass and he were coming out as one, which lent the whole thing a quite unique timbre, quite difficult to describe, but impossible not to feel.

It feels a bit pointless trying to analyse each piece. You sort of just need to take it on trust that it felt amazing. Well worth a trek South West on a Thursday evening. Indeed, given how short a time they’re spending here, it’s a privilege to have seen them. I may even feel slightly smug about it.

All of which brings me to Heston Blumenthal. My friend Pete, who is too polite to make direct reference to my ultimate fate, reckons Blumenthal is a genius, and says my diminishing future would be better spent getting down to his restaurant rather than reading Tristram Shandy. I have never been fortunate enough to enjoy the great man’s cuisine, in which respect I differ from the supporters of AFC Wimbledon to whom he fed pigeon pies in his highly diverting Medieval Feast programme on Channel Four last week. The pigeon pie was his take on the four and twenty blackbirds of the nursery rhyme, blackbirds now being a protected species. “Where better to get pies back to their best,” asked Heston, “Than where they are at their worst, at football grounds?” So he hollowed out a football ground pie and replaced the brown, vaguely gravy flavoured, slurry that makes half-time such a gustatory wonderland with a subtle blend of herbs, spices and pigeon GIZZARDS. (My emphasis).

“The only person who ever got anything done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.”