'Urbane' track by track - 05_ Brits in exile...

This song was inspired by last year's holiday in Greece. We go to a place called Fiscardo which is a (now) rather poncified fishing village right at the top of the island of Cephalonia. It's a beautiful place - lots of orginal Venetian houses massed around a stunning natural harbour, loads of pine forests spreading over the surrounding hills. The place we stay at is a lovely old three storey house with about 8 rooms, right on the waterfront. There's a big terrace at the rear (from the street) of the building so if you're lucky enough to have one of the middle floor rooms, you can just stroll out through your french doors, glide past a few sozzled bathers crashed out on their sun loungers and dive into the harbour and watch the squadrons of swallows flitting and soaring about above you. We've been there many times and it feels rather like a second home, so I can understand people feeling somewhat proprietorial about the place. But last year there were a group of three senior British folk - two ladies and one gent - there who really did seem to think that they owned the place. They were perfectly nice, but there's just something about some British people when they're on holiday - as if they bring some of our normal weather induced gloom to even the sunniest spots. They'd venture out occasionally but would spend most days getting quietly sozzled on the terrace, a little slice of rainy old home amongst the majesty of the rugged haze of the Ionian Islands. Musically I'm indebted to last year's Marbella Sessions compilation. I don't usually listen to a lot of dance music but this stuff is perfect sun/sea/sand holiday listening - quite transcendental in fact, when consumed with light flickering on water in the daszzling sunshine. There's a cultural debt too - to TOWIE, which is where I probably heard the Marbella stuff in the first place. I love the show - no idea why, I just do. So I suppose lurking behind those old gits on the terrace are the bright young things of Essex, bronzed and eternal, also banging 'em back in the brilliant summer sun.

'Urbane' track by track - 04_Hipster on skidrow...

Great thanks and accreditation are due to Mr. Caspar William Charles Sewell on this one. He took what was basically an amorphous whine of atonal strings and a vocal and gave musical flesh to the song's otherwise disembodied narrative. Without his contribution, the song would still be as badly in need of help as its narrator. Thank you.

'Urbane' track by track - 03_ Buddha on the bus...

This is pretty much a companion piece to 'Welcome to the world of spirits'; another flashback to the days of slumming it on the bus. My coping mechanism for the rigours of the hour and fifteen to two hour bus journey (each way) I did most days was to meditate. So this is the glory that is TfL's 222 bus route as experienced by the would-be zen master. I was reading with interest the views of a prominent TfL bod recently. He basically said that due to the Coalition's policy of cleansing the inner city of its poor (so that the rich have less far to travel to make themselves richer still, presumably?) we are storing up potential riots and future social disorder (is there any other option?) as those who've been banished to the furthest reaches of the metropolis - Tolworth, West Drayton et al - find they can no longer travel back towards the centre where any notional work might be. Like most so-called public policy (i.e. the public is its last consideration, if we're even considered at all) this is insane. If the song has a 'message' at all I suppose it's that even the Buddha would struggle to maintain His equanimity amidst all the social decomposition he'd be exposed to on the average London bus journey. The TfL bod went on to outline the need for even more infra-structure projects such as a massive underground dual carriageway network for public transport and goods vehicles only, of course - we can't be encouraging people to drive their own cars, can we? Of course, all this infrastructure doesn't come cheap, so the end result? Higher public transport fares, Morlock commuters hidden from the darling Eloii, packed like sardines underground, and no doubt just as much gridlock and pollution up above. Who'd be poor in London?

'Urbane' track by track - 02_Shirley Trampled...

This song was sparked by one of those rare and odd moments where you whizz pass someone you don't know while you're on a bus and their whole life flashes in front of you. The Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow mentions are less cultural reference points than suitably hurried attempts at description. I had, for reasons beyond my ken, pinned her as a travel agent, and that was the (presumably complete) misapprehension out of which the song developed. From there, it's a short imaginative leap to the rest of her life conditions - she spends most of her waking hours immersed in the minutiate of other people's happiness. So what better mindset from which to speculate upon the philosophical nuances of the annual British holiday?

I had in mind an update of the Pistols' 'Holidays in the Sun', but the musical palette - despite tantalizing whiffs of mid-90s Brit Pop (Pulp's 'Have You Seen Her Lately?' and Blur's 'Girls and Boys' - or was it 'Boys and Girls'?) it ends up sounding more like Pistols contemporaries Magazine - doesn't move it on all that far I suppose. But then it's almost an ancient (in pop terms at least) trope - from Cliff's 'Summer Holiday' to Weller's 'thinking 'bout your holidays', it's another to add to the above and the song's main contention - that the great British getaway is less of an escape and more another form of incarceration is equally hackneyed. The vacation as not so much relief from as reinforcment of the workaday horrors of the rat race is probably just about redeemed by genuine concern for Shirley's need for a holiday: we've all, to varying degrees, felt that same desperation at some point I should imagine.

I'm assuming that it's her own 'two weeks in a dancefloor hell' that she's imagining - perhaps not; maybe Shirley's is just a general meditation on consciousness? A teeny suspicion of class consciousness peeps through towards the end and I think perhaps Shirley shares my disdain for all those 'Keep calm and...' t-shirts/baby grows/topiary effects etc. My favourite is suitably subversive: a poster put up by a fiery Roman work colleague - 'I can't keep calm, I'm Italian....'

'Urbane' track by track - 01_Welcome to the world of spirits...

This one dates from my time on the buses. I drive now, so there's a lot less inspiration on the way to work. Maybe there's a 'cars and girls' LP in me somewhere though - we'll see. Probably more 'Autobahn' than 'Highway 61 revisited', but you never know... I like the spooked, husky-blue-eyed-soul-voice-put-through-a-fuzzbox, auto-out-of-tuned effect on the vocal. It's the noisiest vocal on the LP but I think any quality issues are worth it to get the effect I was after - a dirty, grizzled tramp with a drunken jazz saxophone, fizzing away in the corner of the underground - playing a song that no one knows anymore, nor cares about. It's typical me really. This is one of the first things I recorded with the lovely new Audio-Technica microphone my other half had got me for my birthday. The first thing I do with the lovely clean ne vocal sopund? Drown it in effects! It catches the desolate mood of the narrator though, I think. He's just come back, perhaps, from a tour of duty somewhere and doesn't recognise the London he sees. There's an echo of 'The Wasteland' - 'a crowd swarmed over London Bridge...death, death, I never knew death had undone so many...' Yes, we've all come undone, post 9-11 I suppose. And now the soldiers from both sides are returning, spooked, shell-shocked, bitter and disconsolate. We're in for a few more years of disorientation it would seem. There's a video of this one too that I'll post up soon. It's a visual counterpart to this song's musical debt to Byrne and Eno's 'My life in the bush of ghosts' - still a touchstone, still breathtakingly fresh nearly 35 years on. 01 - Welcome to the world of spirits

Open Mic Night, Thursday 18th September 2014, The Rifleman, Fourth Cross Road, Twickenham...

Yes folks, it’s that time of the week again (….well, it will be on Thursday…)

That’s right – Thursday night is Open Mic Night at The Rifleman Pub Twickenham and this week, as Scotland decides whether or not to vote for independence, we’ll be bringing you an extended Referendum special, drinking and singing long into the wee small hours of Friday morning celebrating the plucky Scots’ lucky escape from the horrors of Coalition Britain/commiserating with the bleary eyed, urine-soaked Yes Campaigners as they face up to their continued sufferance under the yoke of English imperialism, in particular the annual torture that is Jools Holland’s Hogmanay Hootenanny Hoe-down. In honour of the potentially nation changing events that will be unfolding on the night, we’ll be getting our host of regulars to customise some of your favourite old Scottish ballads in order to present a topical set list inspired by the auspicious events taking place north of the border. Lost John and Julia will duet on a specially rewritten version of the old Bob Dylan/ Johnny Cash number – ‘Girl from the north country’. We’re so lucky to have such a great Johnny Cash sound-alike in our midst. It’s just such a shame that Lost John sounds nothing at all like Bob Dylan. Then again, on second thoughts, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing… Peter London will be symbolically changing his name to Peter Edinburgh just for the night – although he still refuses to give up his jump on/jump off route-master bus or to take off the Boris Johnson wig for that matter. Someone really needs to buy that man a new pair of long johns. Wee Mandolin Jock says he will ‘Walk 5,000 miles’ to keep Scotland in the UK if he has to – a feat in itself, never mind that he’ll be wearing a specially constructed pair of tartan platform espadrilles at the time. (We’ve no idea what he’ll be singing by the way, but we’re hoping he’ll at least be able to give the ceiling a quick wipe while he’s up there…) Finally Caspar ‘och aye, the noo’ Sewell and John ‘see you, Jimmy’ West will be resurrecting their old Andy Stewart and Moira Anderson tribute act. ‘Andy’ has been readying his diamante sporran especially for the evening whilst ‘Moira’ will be unveiling a gravity defying new plunge neckline with matching haggis stole. So join your hosts to Say hello/Wave goodbye to the 5 ½ million. 8.30 for 9ish, on the dot….

'Everything popular is wrong'...

This is the new mantra. It replaces the previous one: 'the only point in building an audience is so that you can lose it'. I came across the new one here in a piece by Berlin DJ and Macro record label-meister Stefan Goldmann. I don't know his work or that of the label, but I agree with every word in his article. It's nice to see such intelligence and considered writing applied to something (pop music) that used to be so important to so many of us. Stefan's contention is that rather than liberating musician and audience alike, the computer revolution in music making has been far more problemmatic for both: it's given audiences a glut of mediocre music and simultaneously made it virtually impossible for any but those already established artists to make any money out of the game. His proposed solution is music to the ears of someone like me: stand out from the wall of samey noise; go against the grain; go to the margins and you will find an audience. I hope he's right. I certainly feel more energised than I think I ever have about the possibilities of making exciting music and moving into interesting new imaginative areas through making noises. But then, I have no expectation anyway of ever making any money from it, so it won't exactly be a sacrifice if I were to not only fail to do that but still never find an audience (or, ho ho ho, lose what little of one I may already have.)

I guess I'm a good illustration of Stefan's thesis. It's taken me about 7 years of not particularly dilligent application to learn enough about modern music production to get - admittedly with quite a bit of help from some far more talented colleagues - pretty close to mainstream release quality. With the freedom and energy of youth, you could, I suppose - with a little judicious web-surfing and a copy of the 'Sound on Sound' special issue on music production techniques and a few late nights and early mornings - be up and running in six months. All the bands I was in were ultimately stymied by the inaccessibility of (to coin a phrase) the means of production. In those days, you had to have either a lot of your own time and money or be signed to a record label if you were serious about a career in music. Nowadays, you need a laptop. But the downside is that just as on every corner the factory gates swing open for the on-rushing revolutionaries, the market stalls collapse under the sheer weight of useless and unwanted tat that they are churning out. 'We never got it off on that revolution stuff....'

I suppose the biggest problem for artists nowadays is the extreme fragmentation of one's potential audience. When I was growing up, there were two music shows on TV - TOTP and the Old Grey Whistle Test. John Peel's radio show was pretty much the only place you'd be lucky enough to hear stuff that was what you could call 'under the radar' of the chart-obsessed record industry. Nowadays, that state of affairs has been pretty much inverted; even the BBC has had to divvy up what was once a stand alone pop station into at least three distinct offshoots, that's before you even start on the internet radio. Then there's Spotify, i-Tunes.... The old binary system - you either had a record deal, or you didn't - has been replacedby the classic Marxian pyramid: you have a small 'ruling elite' of globally renowned superstars. Jostling below them is a 'bourgeoisie' of well-meaning and hard working bands who with gigs and a heck of a lot t-shirt sales and a couple of plays on 'Made in Chelsea' can just about scratch a living. And then there's the rest of us: the lumpen proletariat of mini-midi keyboarders, farting about on our laptops, making bleeping modern symphonies of warp and decay that no one will ever hear. We're the billion droplets in the SoundCloud. We're not so much under the radar. It's just that there are so many of us, the grey-green screen turns white.

Trying to master the 'Urbane' mixes last night, putting the final touches to the finished songs, I find that on one track I can hear all the breathing between the words, only now exaggerated to sound like a bison grunting and smacking its lips together. It's the compression - you use it to make the overall sound a little bigger by reducing the loudest parts - and it can sometimes expose stuff you thought you could get away without tidying up. It's no biggy - you just need to go back to the multi track and time consumingly remove the gaps so that only the singing parts you want to be heard get treated with the effect. The ironies. My stuff has probably never sounded so good since we used to use proper recording facilities, but here I am, quite literally, cutting the life out of it.

L.U.V. on y'all,

xxx