Heavenly Affairs

Ten years ago to this week there was a charming festival in the Calder Valley, a place very close to Burnley but well defended enough by geography to prevent regular visits from the likes of us. Heavenly Recordings was descending on Hebden Bridge, more specifically the Trades Club, with their entire roster of artists for a January weekend. I like festivals in towns, you get proper bars, proper beds, proper bogs and proper transport. I also like Heavenly Recordings, ever since Jeff Barrett offered to sign the Earlies and then rang a few days later to apologise for being pissed up, saying he had no business offering to sign anybody else that year. I like drunkards who come clean. On the weekend of this winter festival I also happened to be playing with two of the weekend’s acts, Jimi Goodwin and Cherry Ghost.

Both sets happened to be matinees, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. I didn’t hang around doing the whole festival thing as the children were little and an eight mile drive, even if it was way over the border into Yorkshire and back, didn’t seem justification for stopping out all weekend. It’s alright though, I clearly did the best parts of the festival.

John Hall, who sadly no longer lives in our mortal realm, was there filming all weekend. He used to film everything for his website Manchester District Music Archive, I’m not sure about anything to do with the website other than it was important to him that it spelt out MDMA, he pulled that part off. It’s unfortunate that for the Jimi gig on the Saturday the sound was a bit more than his phone’s microphone input could handle, I’ve looked through and this version of the Last Broadcast is the only one that sounds just about passable:

Good to see me plodding along back there with “functional hair” and shopping bags under the eyes of my leathery face. I like what I’m doing on the Moog though, sometimes I surprise myself. We did a couple of covers too, one had something to do with me playing telephone samples and I’ve forgotten its name but the other was Charlie Freak by Steely Dan. It had quite an involved piano part which I enjoyed learning, you really can’t fault Fagan as a player. We ended up doing two versions of it, one pretty faithful to the original and another drone-based spacerock one. Both worked, in large part because Jimi sounded phenomenal singing it. I’m always mentioning this tune to people and I seem to even draw a blank with people who consider themselves Steely Dan fans. So hear it is, brush up on it for next time I mention it to you:

I think by this point we were coming to the end of our time as the Jimi Goodwin Experience but it was a great band to be in and we ended up being a pretty tight effective unit. Odludek was a fantastic and baffling album that I find plenty of people missed. We all miss plenty I suppose, there’s a lot of music out there. You don’t need to miss it forever though, give it a listen. Or better still buy it, I found my vinyl copy the other day and it’s handsome.

My second matinee performance of the weekend was a Cherry Ghost gig and it was a wonderful one. I’d spent a good portion of the year doing little tours with Simon, they somehow managed to weave in and out of the Jimi ones without clashing more than perhaps twice. Simon and me had gotten down a pretty tight two piece show, meaning he was doing his brilliant songs with his brilliant voice and I was noodling around behind him trying not to ruin it. For this gig we were joined by Grenville on drums and I leaned towards a lot more left hand bass on the organ. I even brought a set of bass pedals, let’s not get carried away I can’t play them for shit, but I managed to get some use out of leaning on them here and there. John Hall was front and centre once again, vigorously documenting everything with a phone that wasn’t up to the job. Here’s an overloaded version of Clear Skies Ever Closer.

This was a special gig, I thought so on the day but then a generous round of applause can cloud your judgement and send you home with fonder memories than the show deserves. This one got recorded though, and after someone with faith and patience gave it a listen, someone else gave it a mix and Heavenly released it. Cherry Ghost Live at the Trades Club is the gig as it happened and I still listen to it, dare I say it with pride. It gets off to an ever so slightly shaky start with Drinking For Two, the guitar isn’t quite in tune and our timing isn’t quite perfect. But then with a quick tune-up and the cobwebs blown off we played a Herd Runners that I prefer to the album recording. Fragile Reign finishes with a pretty full out organ solo from me with my foot resting on a G throughout, it’s not the best Hammond playing you’ll hear in your life but it’s very me. Sacremento is an amazing song, who else writes pop music like this? A series of love letters written from Raymond Carver’s wife Maryann to her absent husband, full of vivid pictures of the home town that isn’t the same without him. The album finishes with all the Cherry Ghost classics that the audience came to hear and they really sing. I’m back in that wonderful afternoon every time I listen to it, you know what I’m telling you to do don’t you? Have a listen.

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The Plantasia Synth

I was charmed by this little video about Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson, and the synthesizer he created it on. Plantasia was a rare album of modular Moog instrumentals, copies of which were given away free to people who bought a house plant from the Mother Earth store. Mort Garson is a gifted composer regardless of the medium, even if you think early synthesizer is gimmicky you’ll still find these melodies beautiful and evocative, but to somebody like me who melts at the sound of these instruments it’s recorded perfection. This video is the kind of thing that Youtube quietly excels at, niche little pieces of journalism and homage that would never be made by an organisation like the BBC, let alone commercial channels. There’s further rabbit holes to go down if you’re captivated, and the good news is you can buy the reissued vinyl again which is tempting because it’s green

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And then there were none…

Obviously we don’t want this to turn into RIP corner but there will be passings that are too great to ignore and Garth Hudson’s is one of them. It really brings home the impermanence of everything to me, all of the Band are gone now. We can carry the flame for as long as we breathe but one day all the people who care about the Band will be gone too. There are still a couple of Beatles, three or four Beach Boys (depending on who you count), a few MGs and a few Stones but the day when all my favourite bands are completely gone isn’t far away. The culture I’ve loved is disappearing so it’s worth a stop and a think. The Band are a thread that runs through me and all my best friends, they’re an inescapable, essential part of all our musical dialogue and we’re all richer for it. To me Garth was probably the most important part of it all because he kept the Band weird, without his layer of unpredictability they could have easily ended up sounding like the Eagles or the Doobie Brothers. They probably wouldn’t have but it’s hard to stress just how unique this man’s musicality was, he really was peerless. You could always hear more than a touch of reverential awe in the way the other four spoke of him in interviews, they couldn’t quite believe that they were in a band with someone of his musical stature, He was also an anti-rock star in ever way you could imagine. He looked like Karl Marx when his band were signed for their first album, ancient and stately, he never got any younger. He didn’t interview well, he didn’t pose for photographs easily, he didn’t branch out into acting or start a wellness website. He was Garth and he spoke music.

You can and should be listening to Music From Big Pink or The Brown Album this week but if you want to take time to live in his musical world a little more fully there are a couple of notable solo albums. The first which I can only find on Youtube is Our Lady Queen of Angels. Sara went to great lengths to get a copy of this for me as a Christmas present back in the early years of this century, I think she bought it off a Scandinavian bootlegger. It feels disrespectful to her efforts to post a Youtube link but here it is:

Apparently it was created for a multimedia event in 1980 to celebrate the bicentennial of Los Angeles, it sounds like the full show would’ve been a fascinating spectacular, featuring poetry by Ray Bradbury and narration by Charlton Heston.

The Sea to the North released in 2001 is worth anybody’s time too, you can hear him lean into his jazz piano quite a bit more on it, he’s as good as anybody at what ever he turns his hand to:

I was sent this clip of him in the nursing home this week, it nearly broke me so sit down. I think it’s from two years ago or so, he was probably 85 or 86. He looks ancient and you wonder if his arthritic talons will be able to produce anything of worth but then he starts wandering, pulling the harmonies out of the air and it’s majestic.

The Band are back together, wherever they are. If I were some kind of omnipotent deity in charge of an afterlife where former humans spend their eternities I would force them back together and tell them they had to play non-stop forever. They’d love it too, the heavenly angels would stop their morbid choral singing and watch with the rest of us, five unusual parts that create the most uniquely brilliant whole. Let’s enjoy them all at their incomparable peak, and let’s remember them for as long as we can.