Main Stage Calamity

After a concerted effort to pull an Earlies album together in 2006 things fell a bit flat. We didn’t finish it as quickly as we should and by the time we submitted it we were given a list of times that it couldn’t really come out, along the lines of “it’s pointless to do it in the summer because everyone’s at festivals and then there’s hardly any time in the Autumn before it’s Christmas and nobody wants to be promoting an album at Christmas so it’s best to leave it till next year.” There was some logic to that but it was quite depressing, I’d been telling everyone who’d listen that we’d be releasing our second album in September. As far as I was concerned two years between albums was too long, three was unforgivable. I thought everybody would’ve forgotten who we were after three years and we’d lose whatever momentum we might’ve built up. Actually, I was right.

I’d have presumably spent the summer staring at the wall if it weren’t for King Creosote. Kenny kept me on board for a summer of festivals up and down the UK and I actually got paid for doing them too, I look back and wonder what the hell I’d have been doing without them. We played all sorts of places, the festival scene was blooming everywhere and you really could fill out every weekend of the summer with decent gigs up and down the country. We played at the brand new Latitude festival, which looked like a cynical cultural land grab that was attempting to capitalise on a Glastonbury fallow year. We played to the peacocks at Larmer Tree Festival, we played to the rowdy highlanders at Belladrum festival. We even played to dead-eyed lovers of clean, sober fun at the UK’s largest gathering of God botherers, the Cheltenham racecourse based, booze free, “speak in tongues if the mood grabs you” Green Belt Festival. No swearing please. Mention Jesus if possible.

The one we’d all been looking forward to was obviously the Green Man festival though. We had a nice Saturday evening slot, late enough to be significant in the billing but early enough that we could enjoy the evening. This was not the same Green Man we’d all enjoyed the year before though, Baskerville Hall was no longer the venue and it had moved to Glanusk Park where it remains today. That feeling of knowing everybody and never being far from your tent and the people you came with was gone, it was now ten times bigger than the Green Man we’d first played in 2004. Ten thousand people felt like a lot, there were lots of tents, lots of people, lots of security guards. I instantly didn’t like it as much. Still, we were going to have a good time, the whole KC band were there plus a lot of Earlies came down too, sneaking in through the KC guest list and the fact that JM and Giles were doing an Earlies DJ set. Kate and me drove down in the red fiesta on Friday afternoon full of summery optimism.

I don’t remember a great deal about the Friday night, we all definitely watched the Aliens and were collectively thrilled to see Kenny’s brother Gordon fulfilling his potential again. I remember sitting on the grass watching Donovan and pretty much everybody being annoyed by him, his stage patter in particular. Every song introduction was along the lines of “I wrote this one when I was hanging around with the Beatles,” or “This is one I wrote when Mike Love and I were hanging out in Rishikesh.” The thing is, he really did hang around with those guys a lot at a significant point in his life and theirs, I think Donovan was a bigger influence on the White Album than most people credit. He had every right to mention it but I think the feeling on the ground was that “one simply doesn’t.”

I suppose we’d have all ended up a little drunk on the Friday night, we were all pretty excited to be there after all. I don’t remember it being anything outlandish and we certainly made it back to our tent and slept there. Thinking back it’s definitely Saturday morning where things went a bit wrong. Kate and me got up and went for a little walk, looking for a spot of breakfast and perhaps some gentle music to accompany it. We didn’t have any specific plans but you can only stay in a two man tent for so long. We ended up in the courtyard area and bumped into Billy and his partner at the time Lisa, I think Billy’s brother Scott showed up at some point too. We must have been a little tipsy from the night before as we decided it was a nice idea to have a beer for breakfast. It was too, it always is. I know people associate early morning drinking with a life gone wrong, with alcoholism more specifically, and I won’t pretend there’s nothing in that, but I associate early morning drinking with carefree fun of the highest order, with summer days of freedom and opportunity, with sitting in airports ready for adventure and best of all with waking up at festivals and simply seeing where the drink and the day will take you. It’s usually brilliant and this day was looking like no exception, I didn’t have to be on stage till 5pm so why not?

We had a beautiful spot by the courtyard bar and getting served was easy because most people hadn’t started drinking yet. They had Warsteiner on tap which felt unfathomably exotic in 2006, I was delighted to be drinking a Deutsch beer in a British festival situation. We were buying rounds, steadily taking turns between first four of us and then five. We had long meandering conversations about music, politics, life, growing up, being a teenager, being an adult, love, loss, the universe and some other shit too. I was feeling really great, unstoppable even, like every problem that’s ever faced humankind could be solved with simple camaraderie, hilarious anecdotes, laughter and lager. The responsibility of the round did two laps around our small circle without me thinking about it and then it had started its third. Someone asked me if I fancied another and I did a quick sum, we’d all bought two and we were on our third lap. I’d had nine pints and it was four pm, it was arguable that we shouldn’t let things get out of hand, Kate suggested we go and get my keyboard out of the car and head to the main stage and it seemed she had the better grasp of the situation. We set off trudging through the crowds, at some point we passed another beer tent and I suggested some refreshment would be helpful so we grabbed another pint and carried on towards the car. I definitely got the keyboard and headed backstage, I think I bumped in to the gang there. Kenny, Johnny, Gav and Nathan were all fired up for a crucial festival show when I blundered in on them, by now inescapably pissed. I went to the dressing room fridge where our rider of a crate of Stella was struggling to cool. I picked up the whole slab and stumbled off to the stage with that and the keyboard.

I can’t remember it starting as a set, I don’t remember having some pre gig huddle, wishing everyone “all the best” or even discussing a set list. I just remember sort of coming round and being on stage playing You Are Could I with it’s jaunty 6/8 time. I was just staring at my left hand thinking “for fuck’s sake why won’t this damn thing play in time?” I couldn’t lock in, I couldn’t get my limbs to relate to what was happening. I soldiered on but I was just thinking “What have I done?” The answer which I presented myself with was simple, “You’ve made a mistake.”

Still, I had the crate of Stella by my feet and I ploughed on resolutely. It didn’t seem to be all bad, the songs where I played organ worked a bit better because I could hang on a note for a while and gather my faculties. Unfortunately there is footage of it all, taken on phones so prehistoric it has the pixelated look and feel of a game of Manic Miner. The keyboards are loud too, I’m putting this here in the interests of history and transparency but I also I know this isn’t as bad as it all really was. Also it’s worth pointing out that the rest of the band were actually having the gig of the year, it was the prefect slot and the show was something of a triumph if my part in it all is brushed over.

There was a scheduling issue I was hurtling towards and that was the fact that Micah was on directly after King Creosote. I’d already become quite a vocal critic of his by this point but Nathan was still playing with him. I spotted him backstage and pirouetted towards him with a raised hand ready to give him one almighty clap on the back. He visibly cowered and then said something about being in a recent car crash and having whiplash, I think I made some slack mouthed comment about him being soft or something. He then said “Dude! Would you like to stay and play with us?” I assured him I would be playing on his set and that it was my idea and I’d be doing it whether he liked it or not, like I was trying to make an argument where one simply didn’t exist. I was impossible to deal with, to reason with, to transport between stage and backstage, to seat at the organ, to silence between songs. Still, I did indeed stay on, I was actually heckling Micah from his own stage, shouting shit at him whilst he was announcing his songs with all his tortured troubadour schtick. At one point Nathan even turned around to me and said “Look, you’re going to have to shut the fuck up…” That snapped me out of it a bit and I think I behaved a bit better. Remarkably I’ve found footage of this gig as well and it doesn’t actually sound too bad. I have no idea what song we’re playing here, it’s not one I’d heard before and I haven’t heard it since. I’m sounding confident playing on it nonetheless, the organ is the loudest, most relentless thing on there. The trained listener will hear the blaggery though, it’s fairly obvious I don’t know what I’m doing.

It isn’t amazingly good, bad or anything in particular, but I’d had ten pints so I think we can all say “fair enough.” Before you know it my two set drunken odyssey was over and I went out to see my group of friends who’d been laughing and cheering throughout the whole calamitous affair. The night would end up with me falling asleep on the floor in the DJ tent, abandoned by everyone and utterly confused, but for now it was joyous. The word had spread of my utter inebriation and people had been watching it like a classic Eddie the Eagle ski jump effort. Everybody was cheering, shaking my hands, patting me on the back. “Well done,” they said, or “I don’t know how you did that, that was incredible!” A lot of people were saying “You couldn’t even tell there was anything wrong, it sounded amazing!” It was a bit like when they all go to the diner in Teen Wolf after he’s just kicked ass as a basketball playing werewolf. It seemed like everybody loved me and I’d utterly triumphed against all odds. Except that in the middle of the crowd throughout this period of unearned adulation and acclaim stood my brother, and my conscience, “Big” Nicky Madden. All the while he was shaking his head slowly and repeatedly whilst maintaining steady, withering eye contact.

“Don’t listen to any of these guys,” he said, “You were fucking shit.”

Van Ronk

I just finished reading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir of life in the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s, during what Van Ronk himself liked to call “The Great Folk Scare.” It’s brilliant and can’t help but make you pine a little for a time when music was so exciting and vital. Van Ronk himself is the perfect guide as he came from a trad jazz background and was personally much more invested in the blues, he sort of fell into the new folk scene as it started to be where the gigs were. This memoir was put together by Elijah Wald based on conversations and interviews that were cut short by Van Ronk’s untimely death. It says on the cover that it’s the memoir that inspired the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, I love that film but the memoir doesn’t have too much in common with it as a story although there are a few recognisable details and images.

He became good friends with Joni Mitchell in the mid 60s whilst she was still hining her craft. I don’t think I ever realised that he’d recorded a version of Both Sides Now before she did it herself. There’s an acoustic version to be heard or this one, which he recorded as part of Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters. He told her he thought Clouds was the better name, Joni disagreed saying it should be called Both Sides Now. Joni was obviously right but Dave compromised and called his recording Clouds (From Both Sides Now). It was making some inroads till Judy Collins released her version and blew his out of the water.

An interesting note in the afterword was that Van Ronk had something of a resurgence in the 1990s throughout Europe after, get this, an appearance on This Is Your Life! This is the bit that I couldn’t have predicted in a billion years of pulling names out, he appeared on the episode dedicated to the life of Scottish lightweight world champion and Sky Sports pundit Jim Watt. Watt was a massive fan so they thought it’d be nice to get Van Ronk in to sing a song for him. The resulting slot apparently got us Europeans sat up paying attention enough that Van Ronk could start earning a living again.

I couldn’t find that episode of This Is Your Life so here instead is an epic brawl between Jim Watt and Alfredo Pitalua from 1979.

Crusader Without Cape

Scouring Youtube for the Jim Watt episode of This Is Your Life wasn’t entirely fruitless though, I was overjoyed to stumble into this episode featuring Prog’s Champion Rick Wakeman, seen here in that difficult 80s period that all of our heroes had to navigate. I know this is probably the 90s, but most people who struggled to navigate the 80s were still navigating their way out of it in the 90s, like a difficult three point turn on a back street. I’m not sure what’s aged worse here, the hideous tory blue suit or being introduced by Jim Davidson. Fantastic to see John Inman singing Do You Believe In Faries? though and it’s worth hanging around for a video message from Jon Anderson in his inimitable “transatlantic berk” accent, accompanied by Steve Howe and Chris Squire struggling to muster any emotional language for the occasion.

Our First Cover…

This is one for Phil Edwards who mentioned last week that he’d done Rainbow Connection at an open mic night. This was our first ever Marc Riley session and it isn’t exactly great but then I suppose it’s “of interest.” It doesn’t quite work in places, there’s a few ill advised notes flying around but then we won’t have played it in this manner anywhere before. Brandon of course sings it wonderfully, shortly afterwards we were in the Lass O’Gowrie with Marc Riley and Mani starting what would become our most successful media relationship. Pints with Marc endure to this day.

Rainbow Connection is so prefect and so beautiful that nobody should ever touch it. Everybody does though, they just can’t resist it.