Old Festivals and New Music

In April 2005 the Earlies embarked on our year of promotional activity with a string of appearances at the Tryptych festivals in Scotland. I think Tryptych was the event’s name as a clever reference to the fact that venues were spread throughout the three cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Also, having a festival with a “T” in the name was always useful for sponsorship from Tennnant’s who presumably showered the festivals with cash in addition to the cans of syrupy piss that dominated the riders all weekend. Whenever I try to remember the occasion the first thing to spring to mind is warm cans of awful lager rolling around the floor of the minibus, careering into my feet over and over again until I relented and cracked open another little frothing piece of tepid misery.

We stopped at Stu’s Mum and Dad’s after the gigs, certainly after Glasgow and Edinburgh. They lived in some picturesque outskirt of Glasgow and didn’t mind putting up 15 people and making us breakfast. There were campbeds all over the house, in the living room, the conservatory, under the stairs. They’d prepared about thirty bacon butties the night before and then microwaved them for us when we awoke from our slumber. Here’s Berry and Giles enjoying breakfast in a sunny and untroubled Scotland:

And here’s Tom Knott, accompanied by Semay, really grinding out a sun tan. If he wasn’t led on his back with trousers on you could swear he was doing a shit:

They really looked after us the Webb family, gracious hosts saved us once again.

The gigs weren’t amazing as I remember, I think we probably opted to coast through this one without rehearsing or adding any new numbers. I remember our Glasgow gig getting a stinker of a review in one of the Scottish papers, finishing with the criticism that no band needed ten keyboards no matter how vintage they are. I think there were probably more than ten to be fair. Anyway who’s laughing now? Not the Earlies, but probably not anyone who worked in regional print media in the early 2000s either.

One of the best things that happened was that we had a day off in Edinburgh on the day that Kenny had a gig there. I don’t think any of us had been to Edinburgh before, maybe Sara due to her celtic roots, certainly Nicky hadn’t otherwise he wouldn’t have taken so many drunken photos of buildings. We got out for a few pints before Kenny’s gig, here we all are in what looks all these years later like a thoroughly enticing pub:

Nicky wasn’t on his all time greatest form as a photographer that night. Some shots look like this:

Quite a few of them have this kind of feel:

It was a treat for the Earlies to come and see a King Creosote gig, on near enough home turf. He was supporting that night, in a church that I’ll be buggered if I can remember the name of. Nicky got a reasonable snap of him onstage, accordion in hand, with On the Fly lurking behind;

It was a fantastic show, we even knew some of the songs by now, and got stuck in singing along wherever we could. It was the first meeting of the Earlies and the Fence Collective which led to many friendships that have endured through the decades, and even one marriage. After the gig Brandon told Kenny “You have an ungodly range!” That was a complement from Brandon, who I might add also has an ungodly range. I think the song that triggered his awe was So Folorn which never failed mesmerise audiences.

Who would King Creosote have been supporting back in April 2005 I hear you ask? It was Aberfeldy, very much still in their short-lived ascendancy and also enjoying a homecoming gig of sorts. We all instantly fell in love with them and their beautiful, infectious pop songs performed and produced with perfect craftsmanship and endless wit. I just put their first album Young Forever on the other day. You remember it right? The one with a pair of Lions shagging on the front cover?

It’s still gorgeous!

The final gig of the weekend was in Aberdeen at a venue called the Lemon Tree, built into the underside of a railway bridge. The gig was, once again, fine. The best thing about it that I can remember was that it joined onto a record shop next door. Of all the things you forget in life, where exactly you bought a particular album is never one of them. That day I bought two albums that I still proudly own and listen to. The first was Live on Tour In Europe by the George Duke Billy Cobham band, an album recorded in the magical year of 1976 which was also when I was released. My old keyboard teacher at Nelson and Colne college Dave Jackson had given me a cassette of this that I’d played endlessly, I couldn’t believe I was actually looking at a real world copy of it. It was a reissue to be fair, I hadn’t quite realised yet that people were starting to re-press every album that had ever existed so my joy was undiminished.

The other find that day was actually an original copy and a prog masterpiece. If you’ve never listened to Fish Out of Water by Chris Squire you should probably rectify that today lest you come to an unfortunate and untimely end without hearing the best solo offering by any member of Yes. I’d go as far as to say Fish Out of Water is the fourth best of any Yes albums (after Close To The Edge, Fragile and The Yes Album, in that order), it sounds like Yes on their best days and has enough band members helping out to qualify in my opinion.

It was actually Nathan that wanted me to buy this one, he said “will you buy this, I’ll give you the money when we’re back home and then I can keep it”

I still await payment.

Some New Music

If all is going to plan at Friendly Records HQ then my next album Shinbone’s Revenge will be available to buy on Bandcamp next Friday, May the 2nd. I’d love for you to buy a copy, let’s just put that out there. Obviously you don’t have to but it’s pointless pretending that I don’t want you to buy it. I have an ego, just like everybody else. There are only a couple of hundred copies available so I’d like to think I’m keeping my ego on a reasonably tight leash. What’s that, you’d like to “try before you buy” as your funds are limited? That’s fair enough, I’ll let you hear one song this week. This one features Nathan, Dan and Little Barrie and it’s called The Skins, named after an abandoned factory up Burnley Wood where we used to smash things. Enjoy.

Mark and Lard

Gripper, Kate and me went to Lytham on Thursday night to watch an audience with Marc Riley and Mark Radcliffe. It was a lovely sunny seaside evening in a small theatre with a statue of Bobby Ball outside the front doors. I’ve known them both for twenty years now as they were both really supportive of the Earlies on their respective solo radio shows, Marc Riley in particular has become a good friend who I see at least a couple of times a year for pints and hearty dialogue. They’re both such nice, approachable chaps that it’s easy to forget what a cultural juggernaut they were in their nineties heyday, pushing and frequently breaking the boundaries of what was decent and acceptable in daytime broadcasting to a daily audience of 8 million people. Eight million people! Radio will never have a reach like that again in this country, and if by some miracle it did you wouldn’t get a pair of northerners dropping swearwords and sexual innuendo all over the airwaves whilst ripping the piss out of the biggest stars of the day and indeed much of the music they were forced to play. Whilst it was a joyous evening I came away saddened to consider how anodyne and dull broadcasting has become. Who are we so worried about offending? It’s not my generation and we’re the grown-ups who have inherited the earth. It isn’t my parents generation who grew up in the 60s and 70s and are virtually unshockable. If it’s younger people we’re concerned about we should have a bit more faith in them and see if they like having a laugh, I’ll bet they do. There’s a few of Mark and Lard’s shows left, all in the North, you should go if you can. It’ll warm you.

Here’s Marc’s presentation of Mull of Kintyre which I’d never heard before but which folded me in two.

And of course here’s the brutally mean but, let’s face it, breathtakingly funny advert for Tony McCarroll’s Classical Gas. I know he didn’t like it at the time, I’d certainly hate to be the subject of a piece like this, but I think he’s a good guy and I would hope he sees the funny side a little bit by now. It kills me.

Strong Songs

Alex Berry sent me this podcast last week, an hour’s chat about the music of the Muppets. It obviously doesn’t cover a fraction of what they did but it starts with the Sesame Street theme tune and finishes with The Rainbow Connection, two touchstones of such magnitude that it kind of doesn’t matter what else gets missed. It’s made with a genuine love for the music and he repeatedly talks about how the makers of these shows understood that children were much more sophisticated listeners than people assumed. I feel privileged to be of the generation that unwittingly had these seeds sown in our subconscious, the sophistication we all felt we cultivated as adults was handed to us by a frog and his friends without our even knowing.

He touches on some great cover versions that I hadn’t heard of, particularly of the Sesame Street theme. You’ll never beat the original but this Gladys Knight and the Pips one is pretty special:

The guy goes to great lengths discussing Rainbow Connection, calling it an “Ode To Existential Longing.” I couldn’t have put it better myself, and indeed never have. I fully recommend you lose this hour to the Muppets.