Messages from the Bus
It Turns Out We’re Good
We had a good start last week with this Jonathon Ross performance and then the tour was underway. Both gigs have been great so far, the second was slightly better than the first which suggests an upward trajectory. Our most scathing review has been a two out of five in the Guardian where the central criticism was that the show was too short. That implicitly suggests that they wanted to hear more because they were enjoying it so much so I’ll take the liberty of upgrading it to a five.
One of the best things about any tour is that you become part of this self contained cultural ecosystem, everybody exchanges music and humour and it stays with you forever. I’ve laughed a lot this last week and most of what I’ve been laughing about will never translate to the world outside this unique bubble, I will however drop a video of Whiplash the Rodeo Monkey here in the spirit of sharing.
On a good tour you always exchange music with each other but on this one we were tasked with making a mix for before and between the acts. We all contributed to a playlist and dramatically overshot the required hour and a half resulting in a fantastic seven hour musical odyssey. It’s been an amazing exercise in showing that you’re on the same page, everybody else was submitting songs that I would’ve put in myself. The whole exercise put me in mind of John Mark’s lovingly crafted Secret Broadcasts which I’m sure I’ll return to at a future point. Anyway, enjoy a seven hour journey with the Liam Gallagher John Squire band here: (I used Kate’s Spotify account, don’t tell her…)
Fred makes art
I decided that Fred Trueman deserved to be involved in the gigs so I inserted a couple of pieces into the evening’s mixes that I hope the army of Stone Roses and Oasis fans appreciated. I took some choice phrases and stuck them over some Moondog and Serge Gainsbourg through a Space Echo. John Squire says he made something similar back in the day with Ted Lowe commentary but it hasn’t surfaced yet so in the meantime why not get high and listen to these efforts?
More Garth
After last week’s Garth Hudson video the machine overlords have been feeding me a steady stream of Garth clips and I’m grateful to my faceless masters. There are hours of his rambling, stream-of-consciousness improvisations out there to prove his genius over and over. It’s really worth spending time on, so much improvisation from humans out there is performance and by extension a kind of showing off but this really is a window into somebody’s naked soul and is utterly compelling. I swear I won’t bang on about him every week but this stuff matters.