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'If you get
a chance, keep up with McGuinness's diary - it is as full of insight as it is
contrarianism' Metro
Wednesday
19 November 2008
Just back
from lunch at the Wee
Curry Shop with Alison, where we finally tied down the shape of a potential
ConCal recording that we first planned out about six months ago. Sometimes
things move slowly. A bit like my cycling today: when every road seems to be
covered in a thin film of wet leaves, you don't go too fast in case you can't
stop.
This morning
Barnaby came over for a triplepipe overdub on a tune that's been languishing on
the computer since March. We turned the kitchen into a studio, which
involved unplugging the toaster. If you're in the UK you can watch him playing
the triplepipes in Iona Abbey as part of this
programme.
toaster
unplugged
some
more pipes
in
case you need reminded about Friday
Tuesday
18 November 2008
Today I
wasted 4 hours trying to work out why my laptop was now producing random short
bursts of white noise with certain tracks loaded. Ignoring the advice on one
website 'you have trial version of software loaded', I tweaked every parameter
and clock I could find until eventually tracking down the culprit as a VST
plugin that, yes indeed, was a trial version I hadn't registered since putting
it on the laptop. Fixed in a few minutes. Oops.
At lunchtime
I bumped into Karen McAulay at the RSAMD, which was fortuitous, as I've recently
worked out that because it's 15 years since I tried to do any serious academic
work, all of my bibliographical tools are 15 years out of date, and the
innovations of those 15 years include such helpful delights as the widespread
use of the three w's. Who better to ask for advice than a music librarian who's
writing up her PhD?
Back in
circulation on my iPod after being ousted by all the Maria Kalaniemi albums is
the new one from Flipron, which is
on release at last. Thanks to my soon-to-be-relinquished role as a 'specialist
media tastemaker' (yes, that's really how Music Week described me) I got a copy
a couple of months early. And it's everything I would have liked it to be: funny
and heartbreaking, polished and ragged, and extremely intelligent without being
ashamed to use the word 'arse'. Get it here.
As if that wasn't enough, Jesse has just
admitted to me that his great-grandfather was Arnold
Dolmetsch, and now I'm utterly confused as to whether that explains anything
about Flipron at all. One thing is for certain: this man is no stranger to a
gamba. And my timewasting this morning is best summed up in his final words from
the album: "I've always known the price of each squandered day/I've always
known what each hour cost/Something lost...".
Friday 14
November 2008
Sadly, the Flipron
gig I was hoping to go to on Sunday has been cancelled, but in partial
recompense the copy of Barry Andrews' single 'Win A Night Out With A Well-known
Paranoiac' that I tracked down, has arrived in the post, and it sounds
dangerously like proto-Flipron. As I remember, Annie Nightingale still used to
play it on her Radio 1 show years after it came out. Not bad for a B-side that
was never a hit.
A text
message arrived during the night from Katy Bircher, saying she's in a taxi in
Mexico City and Mungrel Stuff is on the radio. Hooray.
You can
watch DG in his dynamic role as S.M.A.W. (substitute middle-aged weirdo) in Red
Priest here
- especially his rock 'n' roll Tartini Devil's Sonata. And the two of us are
blasting away behind Adrianne Greenbaum on youtube here:
the harmonium is cunningly hidden behind the harpsichord.
Thursday 13 November 2008
BL again, desk 131
I’ve got an unexpectedly free day after what I was going to do this afternoon
got cancelled at the last minute, so I’m back here in the Rare Books and Music
Reading Room with Tuesday’s pile of 18th century tune books. This
is a very nice place to work: it almost makes you proud to be British.
Last
night in
Cambridge
I had a very enjoyable if slightly too
alcoholic evening with old buddy Gordon’s
family and friends, which went well into the night. Some of it we spent in the
sympathetic confines of the Live
and Let Live – you just don’t get pubs like that in
Scotland
.
Tuesday 11 November 2008
British Library Rare Books and
Music Reading Room, desk no. 106
I made it to London
last night in time to catch the end of a
party at Lucy’s (which I wasn’t expecting) and was surprised to find that I
knew all but one of the people there. That’s the Walthamstow early music
collective for you. It’s always great to catch up with Lucy, and I enjoyed the
benefits of Peter McCarthy’s wisdom too. Peter is that valuable asset, a
musician who has worked out when not to play. In his case as a bass player,
he’s learnt from his research that 16-foot bass wasn’t played that much in a
lot of the repertoire he specialises in, so he’s essentially put a lot of
effort into putting himself out of work. Which I guess isn’t a lucrative way
to make music, but it is an honest one.
I’m
just waiting for a pile of 18th century books to be delivered to the
issue desk, and in the meantime I can enthuse here about what an excellent
building this is. To my shame I haven’t visited the British
Library since it was in the British
Museum, and it’s a deeply impressive place. I’ve just had a rather good
pot of tea and some excellent cake downstairs in the café to help me while away
the allotted 70 minute wait, and passed on some Oswald scores to Maeve’s hard
drive in the foyer. It’s just as
well I’ve finally got myself a laptop as otherwise I really wouldn’t feel
like I fit in here.
Monday 10 November 2008
on the train to St Pancras
Glasgow
airport’s had an internal refit of sorts:
the security hall is a vast improvement, but once you’re through that, every
passenger now has to walk all the way through one of those dismal World Shopping
experiences, a long snaking path through shiny overpriced nonsense. It’s very
ugly and rather demeaning: now that your belongings have been officially deemed
safe, all that you are left to be is a potential retail opportunity. Bleah.
Yesterday
Mark and I had a look at a possible recording venue just a short walk from home.
It has a wonderful bass-enhancing acoustic, and a chamber organ by Neil Richerby
in situ, but it’s a bit heavy on the traffic noise from outside.
I’d had the bright idea in the morning of going for a bike ride,
fuelled by a breakfast of porridge and kippers from Saturday’s market. Five
minutes in when the hailstorm started, I wondered if it was really such a good
idea. And six miles later when I hit a patch of wet leaves and fell off, I
nearly regretted setting out. When I got home I shopped on eBay for Gore-Tex
patches for the resultant rip in my waterproof trousers, and put all my muddy
clothes in the wash. The lump on my leg’s gone down a bit now but last night
it was quite impressive: I probably aggravated it by crawling around on the
floor after our amazingly cute baby niece, who was visiting while her dad was in
town picking up a BAFTA.
Friday 7
November 2008
Returning to
academic pursuits after a break of a couple of decades turns up some nice
discoveries, not least being able to access the British Library catalogue on the
net. Quite a resource. Maybe it's just as well I haven't explored it before, or
I could have wasted countless hours, weeks, and months digging out all sorts of
things.
Of course,
as with mp3 files of all kinds of music now being available for free, when you
have access to absolutely everything it can stop being interesting. At breakfast
in Brighton a couple of weeks ago I suggested that in addition to Radio 3's
programme Discovering
Music, there should be another called Abandoning Music, where a piece that's
been played quite enough over the years gets a final performance and recording
from a BBC orchestra before the score and parts are destroyed. I was quite
serious, but no-one seemed to think the idea had legs. Does the world really
need another state-subsidised performance of (insert your choice of lacklustre
orchestral work here)?
Thursday
6 November 2008
Listening to
this while having a
skype conversation with Catherine Motuz this morning got my brain moving a bit.
The music is carefully worked out, but it still sounds fresh: you get the sense that they're looking forward to hearing how each note comes out.
It's also the difference between knowing how something's going to happen (good) and knowing
what is going to happen
(dull). Having a well defined musical process is vital - it stops you getting
nervous for one thing - but deciding in every detail what it's going to sound
like is not usually helpful.
Healthy doses of improvisation
in early music might also help to convince the jazz cats that there are vocabularies to improvise in
other than the 1950s one
... and that going to Berklee to learn how to play in D flat might not be
strictly necessary for musical freedom. Personally I've lost pretty much all
interest in playing in keys that don't sound good in a nice unequal temperament:
these days I like major chords to have credible thirds in them where possible.
I watched Top
Gear the other night, partly to see how offensive Jeremy Clarkson was, and
partly to enjoy watching him injure himself, and was struck by what an
entertaining and generally well-crafted programme it is, and how engaging the
presenters are. Unfortunately, everything the programme stands for stinks: bullying, casual misogyny, cheap stereotypes and pointless
destruction - quite apart from the worship of fast cars. You don't have to smash
things up to have a good time. Then I came in the following day and saw Susie
watching Blue Peter, where they were blowing up a garden shed to demonstrate the
Gunpowder Plot. Now that the IMF is telling the entire country that it's about
to be completely skint, the attraction of smashing things to bits for fun might
wear off.
Tuesday 4
November 2008
Even though
I might make it to the British Library next week, it's good being able to plan
work that doesn't necessarily involve travelling, and it's refreshing to be
planning a recording that might take place in a church five minutes' bike ride
from here. I had to drop some scores off with Mark
O'Keeffe today, so just to make the point that I wasn't in a hurry I went
there on the 1950s Humber bike that I fixed up a few months ago. Brakes and
gears aren't exactly 21st century, but it was still fun and I didn't end up
under a bus. The pannier rack was becoming less than attached to my other
bike, so thanks to the guys at West End Cycles who were standing outside in the
sun as I passed this morning, and fixed it for the princely sum of 20p before
I'd even taken my helmet off.
These
people played a fun session on Vic's radio show last night - available here
for a few days: they reminded me a bit of Iva Bittová, which is no bad
thing. Meanwhile for pleasure I'm still listening to nothing much other
than a pile of Maria
Kalaniemi albums ... I still like Timo A's piano playing as much as ever.
Saturday
1 November 2008
It's my
first weekend at home for two months: when not further refining repertoire for a
future project I've been picking apples (more off the ground than the trees),
and avoiding leaf-raking by using the lawnmower with the blades set high. The
solo harpsichord recital has turned out be a safe 38 hours after thrashing the
Steinway, so that's OK then. I don't think I'm due to go on a stage now for
almost three months, which is just as well as I have lots of catching up to do.
I can see urgent tasks on the list beside me that I wrote down as urgent in
April.
Tuesday
28 October 2008
Now that all
of those concerts have been accomplished, the future can begin to present itself. So
lots of logistical arrangements were underway today, including the possibility
of double-tracked trumpets, the Rezillos meeting the Flying Lizards
(metaphorically), technical riders, potentially sharing a stage with some very
famous reggae musicians indeed, assessing the relationship between an ideal fee
and a minimum fee, and deciding whether it's possible to play a solo harpsichord
recital 14 hours after thrashing a Steinway into submission (I don't think so).
Also today came the extremely frustrating news that Shirley
Collins came to our gig on Sunday, but her bus was late and then she
couldn't actually get into the building once we'd started, and was stranded out
in the pouring rain - argh! So my unspoken wish to post a picture here of me
with Bott, Bowman and Collins was closer to fruition than I'd realised ...
bugger.
Monday 27 October 2008
Sure enough
I ended up in the bar with Kate and Stephen before Saturday evening was out,
taking up Stephen's recommendation of Fever
Tree as the basis of a good G&T, and noting his observation that the
entire population of Brighton seemed to be completely shit-faced. I'd gone for a
walk along the pier for fish 'n' chips and sea air earlier. It was quite windy.
The audience
at the Silas Benney theatre got us off to a good start yesterday by laughing
heartily at the news story about Peter Mandelson from the Radio 3 feed before we
went on air. I'm not sure if I covered myself in glory in the broadcast
playing Cavalli arr Leppard, a Dowland song, and then completely fouling up the
intro of the Handel duet I was reading off the full score, but the concert
afterwards was good fun in a suitably bizarre way. And in the audience was
someone who'd been at our Dundee gig a few weeks ago, and Maeve, going for the
audient award for maximum coverage of the UK. She hadn't made it to the British
Library on Saturday either.
My broadcast
career really isn't going as well as it might this weekend, as I'm told CBC also
broadcast me yesterday sight-reading my way through Paul Halley's music like a
rabbit caught in headlights at Boxwood. Oh well.
later
Isn't YouTube wonderful? Now you can see this
(the first four minutes are just a silly but entertaining gag), and this
remarkable abstract guitar duel complete with string break (Mary was a
pretty tidy player too, though the Gibson Les Paul with the 50s dress now looks
weird - in a good way) followed by this
completely surreal bit of lipsync, with the broken string still hanging there.
My gob is smacked.
Also on
YouTube you can contribute to an (almost) private joke by clicking here.
Saturday
25 October 2008
on the London-Brighton train
I’m on my way to tomorrow’s Early Music Show/Brighton Early Music Festival
gig, enjoying the luxury of a whole evening off with nothing but a room in the
Grand Hotel to look forward to (well, I might have a beer with Kate and Stephen
if she gets back from her gig in Chichester in time).
Yesterday’s
rehearsal with Ms Bott and James Bowman in a basement was very entertaining in
lots of ways. Any rehearsal with Kate is entertaining, and James’s legendary
near-constant stream of filthy gags keeps everything moving along very
effectively indeed. Even with a Kawai grand piano, the Dowland song we ran
through suddenly reminded me that this voice singing to me was the one that I
found so arresting, singing lute songs on a record I borrowed from Glasgow’s
Mitchell Library when I was about 14.
I
was staying at Alison’s place in London
last night while she was in Paris
rehearsing with Emmanuelle Haïm.
I’d planned to make her some supper when she got back on the last plane out of
Paris, but her train to Charles de Gaulle was late
and she missed it, so I ended up booking her onto the (very) early morning
Eurostar and looking up hotels while she got on a train to Lille. Then that Eurostar got cancelled, so the
supper which was briefly going to be breakfast became lunch, before she headed
to her concert later on in
Wales.
I
made good use of her piano anyway: I’d planned to go to the British Library to
get a reader’s ticket for the first time in about 20 years, but doing some
practice for tomorrow seemed more important, and I’ll be back in London
again soon anyway. And I’ve spent the last
two hours in a café with Barb Jungr
getting some ideas in motion that might start to take shape in the future …
I’ve
also been completely enthralled by a 90-minute
film about Les Paul which I downloaded from the BBC last weekend. I suppose
I’d always assumed that his records with Mary Ford were clever novelties,
never having listened to them properly, but I was utterly amazed at how good
they are. If you’re going to invent multi-tracking, home recording, and the
solid body electric guitar you might as well get all of them spectacularly
right. And the results are more unashamedly pop than those of his fellow genius
musician-inventor Raymond Scott.
The
documentary also showed him in the 30s playing in a hillbilly band with a cello
in it rather than a double bass. Nowadays
we’re conditioned to hearing 16 foot bass on everything, and not just in early
music. I really think that it’s
only in the last few weeks that I’ve properly recalibrated my ears and brain
not to think that there’s something missing when it’s not there. I’m still
listening to Maria Kalaniemi records when I can, and knowing most of the tunes
from the peerless Tokyo
Concert recording which is just accordion, piano and guitar, now hearing
the original studio versions which have more instruments seems wrong: What is
that bass doing there? It’s too low! It doesn’t sit in the track, it’s in
its own frequency space! Join CANLOB, the Campaign for the Abolition of
Needlessly LOw Basslines. You know it makes sense.
Monday 20 October 2008
Next Sunday
I have my last gig for quite a long time, at Brighton playing in this,
and then a little cabaret with Mr Bowman and Ms Bott afterwards. It should be
fun, even though I've never exchanged more than a quick hello with James Bowman.
Having said that, he came along to one of our gigs in 1999 with Linda Ormiston,
and sang along enthusiastically in the chorale of a Bach cantata, to the great
surprise of the people in the row in front. He's also on one of my favourite
records ever, Simon Preston's 70s recording of the Handel Birthday Ode for Queen
Anne with the AAM, on which his account of the opening 'Eternal Source of Light
Divine' is quite stunning.
So I'd
better learn the notes: everything from Cavalli and Handel to Noel Coward and
Flanders & Swann. The failure/success parameters are rather complex.
Strange
things happen in BBC buildings at night: things like this.
Sunday 19 October 2008
When we
first started going on holiday to the west of Scotland and its islands, you
would habitually see wonderful seafood being landed, but you couldn't buy any of
it as it was all being boxed up and sent to Spain. If you went to the local cafe
or pub, it was frozen scampi and chips on offer. But now on
the harbour at Oban, there are several kiosks touting for business selling
fantastically fresh stuff from the sea - my scallops in hot garlic butter
yesterday lunchtime were terrific. And we managed to stop the shamelessly greedy
seagulls from stealing any. Then we passed three car
accidents in the 30-odd miles between Oban and Tyndrum on the A85: sunshine and
showers look great, but they don't half make the roads slippy.
But anyway
... while climbing up the hill at Lismore Point yesterday I got the news that
I've become a great-uncle, so a big welcome to Beth Rachel Lawson. Hooray!
Wednesday
15 October 2008
Isle of Lismore
view
from the laptop
The
other (possibly more important) thing about playing classical music is that it
sets out clear failure/success parameters. If
you’ve played Mozart badly, or in a mediocre fashion, it’s very difficult to
have achieved anything other than mediocre Mozart, or getting it wrong.
But when you’re making music without direct reference to an event or a
composition in the past, then sometimes (in fact often) when you get it wrong,
the end result is far more successful than what you had originally intended.
And who’s going to tell you you’re doing it wrong? The early music
police? Don’t think so.
Other
bits of today… I saw an otter playing on the rocks and swimming off, from the
living room window this morning. Tonight I cycled to Port Ramsay in the dark: no
streetlights, no road markings, just an occasional sheep jumping out of the way,
and a cattle grid. Unsportingly, the moon stayed behind the clouds, but cycling
across the island alone under the hills in the quiet feels good. For reading
material I’ve moved on to the Acme Novelty Library 18
(Building Stories rather than Rusty Brown), which takes some digesting but
repays the effort. And tonight with the laptop at the kitchen table I’ve also
been learning my way around Steinberg’s Halion sampler.
Monday 13 October 2008
Isle of Lismore
The total lack of phone signal on stage at ABC2 meant that I couldn’t call
Catherine for her sackbut solo after all, but Robbie recorded a spoken message
on my phone for me to use instead. What
the set lacked in technical cohesion it made up for with spirit as expected,
including such bizarre additions as a mutated theme from Here
Come the Double
Deckers making it into Daniel Johnston’s Mountain Top: Raymond Macdonald
came up with a stonking Roy Wood-type sax riff for the intro, I said ‘that’s
the Double Deckers theme’ and Duglas ended up singing ‘Get on board the
Future Pilot’ if I remember rightly.
What was less chaotic was doing a couple of songs with Alasdair Roberts –
Sushil invited the audience to join in the campaign to rescue Ali’s song Coral
and Tar from its destined resting place as an obscure B-side. Come to think of
it, we saw a whole new side to Ali when Finlay didn’t make it to the
soundcheck and he stepped in on drums, transformed from his usual quiet
mild-mannered self into a wild grinning animal on a determined mission behind
the kit.
We
weren’t the only bizarre set of the night: King Creosote was on after us and
he sang the ‘La-Di-Da’ song that I first heard on a Francie and Josie LP we
had on reel-to-reel when I was about 7. Now that was weird.
Alison
and Anurudh
I
did make my stage laptop debut though, and with a phone, a harmonium and
melodica, there was a real opportunity to play on stage, although
perhaps Sushil introducing me as the Scottish Brian Eno was taking it several
steps too far. The Phantom Band had two melodicas lying around the stage as
well, but as I didn’t see their set (sheltering from the torrential rain in
one of Sauchiehall Street’s noodle bars) I’ve no idea what they did with
them.
Anyway,
now we’re on holiday: no car, no work, I’m just reading Persepolis
which I finally bought in the comic shop in Boston, and listening repeatedly to
the Maria Kalaniemi albums I loaded onto my iPod before leaving.
I’ll cycle the 3 miles down to the shop
a bit later when the rain stops.
later
The sun came out; it was a beautiful day. I’m running up a tab at the shop and
I just about managed to get everything home in my pannier, except for the cans
of Guinness that fell off and exploded. At least it wasn’t my tyre that
exploded, which is what happened in October the last time I cycled back from the
shop. But I didn’t really mind, as the view up Loch Linnhe when cycling up the
island with the wind behind you in the sunshine is profoundly cheering. And I
went back and got more Guinness later when we all visited the café.
Thinking
about what I wrote earlier, I’ve just realised that what’s still missing
from most of my musical life is play. Here on holiday I still have lots
of things to do, whether it’s the shopping or the washing up, but I now have
some time to play; our kids, on the other hand, are free to play pretty much all
of the time here. It’s not coincidental that we use the same verb 'play' for
making sounds with an instrument, but playing really means being free to mess
around, try things out, have fun, make mistakes and make discoveries. And if
that’s in front of an audience as on Friday night, then even better. There was
a moment in the middle of one song at the ABC when I looked down at my phone
lying on the harmonium and thought ‘Will I pick up the phone, will I play some
chords, will I set off some sound effects, what will I do?’ and the excitement
of being able to play like that on stage was very real.
I’ve no idea what it sounded like but it’s a freedom that I’m keen
to revisit.
The
theme of play comes back time and again in the thinking of musicians whose
thoughts I read, whether it’s Robert Fripp talking about his friend Eno, or
Fred Frith pointing out that an artist is someone who hasn’t forgotten how to
play. Someone like Chris is extremely good at it too. I need to be able to make
the time and space to let myself play, as most of the music-making process for
me is just work, and it’s time I shifted the balance.
One
of the problems with classical music generally and particularly with early music
is that it’s labour-intensive, and especially preparation-intensive. To a
greater or lesser extent you’re involved in an act of historical
reconstruction, so you can’t just pick up your instrument and make music. You
have to do your research, pick the right instrument and get it into playing
condition, learn the notes, and get yourself through a large number of mental
and physical processes before you can set yourself free to actually make some
music. If the music involves a large
number of people then the management of that becomes very complex too.
When there are simpler options available, which offer a more satisfying
and efficient music-to-effort ratio, this form of music-making becomes less and
less attractive.
Thursday
9 October 2008
I'm working
unexpectedly late tonight: having dug out the soundboard recording of our gig
last year with the Tiger Lillies, I'm now doing a quick premaster job on it to
make it presentable enough to send to a German agent.
The set of
guitar strings I bought at the tea break on Tuesday night will have to wait. I
couldn't help gloating that I could buy a set of strings for £5.50 - a set for
Alison's cello is about £140.
Wednesday
8 October 2008
We were
just about to leave for the Future Pilot AKA rehearsal at A-side Studios last
night when I got a skype message from Catherine M asking where the rehearsal was
and if anyone was allergic to squash-related foodstuffs. The upshot of all
of this was that she came along with a sackbut, a pumpkin pie and some icecream.
She's not going to be here for the gig on Friday but the plan is that I will
phone her up in Switzerland from the stage, and she can play sackbut down the
phone which I will hold up to the harmonium mic. This is the sort of thing
Sushil thrives on I think.
traditional
Glasgow diet of roll and crisps,
and Alison's red shoes (that the angels want to wear)
alternative
Glasgow diet of newly baked pumpkin pie and ice cream
It was my
first attempt at using laptop in a live situation and to my surprise it seemed
to work quite well, making a nice contrast with the harmonium, melodica, and
mobile phone held up to the mic. I didn't have any suitable speech recorded on
my phone to replace Damo Suzuki's improvisations on the recorded version of
Festival of Lights, so I just rang up the Orange answering service instead. As
we are playing at a mental health festival, the plaintive instruction at one
point 'for help dial zero' was quite poignant.
my
play corner
I started
the day today with a visit to Bradford's bakery before dropping in on Greg for
breakfast. Is calling a cake a 'Jap Fancy' racist?
Another
moral dilemma: in the latest They Might Be Giants
podcast they've included a rather brilliant cover version from the early 90s of
Hello Hello by Gary Glitter. Presumably detailed news of his recent history is
not that current in Brooklyn. By telling you this and how much I enjoyed it, am
I potentially contributing to 1) his bank account, or 2) his justification of an
indefensible lifestyle? Neither of which I would be very happy about.
If you're
in London on Saturday, go to this!
If you're interested in harmoniums of course. I'm sorry I can't go.
Thanks to
Tim Hamilton in Cambridge, MA who sent me some adverts from 1894 for one of these,
which comes with a 'support et grande branche pour l'adaptation au piano',
allowing the player to play piano and what is essentially a melodica
simultaneously, without precariously balancing the melodica in their lap like I
have to. As it says, 'le même artiste peut jouer l'instrument de la main droite
en s'accompagnant de la main gauche', or in my case do the funky chords with the
right hand and the bassline with the left.
Tuesday
7 October 2008
A very very
wet morning: the kind that presents two options. Either stay indoors and wait
for it to stop, or clad yourself from head to toe in waterproof clothing and get
on with what you were going to do anyway. I chose option 2. Being out in the
pouring rain is no problem, it's great fun. But the transitions from inside to
outside and vice versa are a little problematical. I managed to achieve a visit
to my Iranian barber, the cheese shop and the greengrocers and still be back
just after 11am on my trusty Dahon. But I was the only customer at each
establishment.
While
typing the above I've just managed to get Catherine Motuz picked up at Edinburgh
airport by Andrew, who just happened to be there. Her bus was late and she
missed her flight back to Switzerland ...
Anyway,
Sunday gradually improved in outlook, even if my harpsichord obstinately refused
to stay in tune (which may have been because it was sitting in a sunny window
and had been near an electric heater all night) so that our planned rehearsal
time was pretty much entirely taken up with me tuning the thing from scratch
three times in a row. I managed a short walk along the shore of the loch,
which as you can see was glassy and still. The house is on the extreme right of
the picture.
An
expectant and welcoming audience is a great help to the making of music. An
appropriate setting helps too. And somehow David Sumsion's Muir, Wood & Co.
square piano was still in tune after my visit with DG here in April, so it got
pressed into service in some Alexander Reinagle and a John Reid flute sonata.
Pictured
above enjoying tea and cakes afterwards by the roaring log fire in the dining
room with Chris are Maeve McMahon and Catherine Motuz, who both found novel ways
of getting to the gig. Catherine had come from Basel but was playing in
Shrewsbury the previous night: miraculously her flight to Glasgow got in on time
less than 2 hours before we started, and Andrew picked her up from the airport.
But the prize for sheer ingenuity goes to Maeve, just arrived in London from
Ohio, who got the bus the whole way (from London, not Ohio). With about ten
minutes to go I said to Andrew, 'Well, it doesn't look like Maeve made it after
all', walked out into the hall and there she was.
Saturday 4 October 2008
8.30am
at breakfast
I suppose when we arrived at
1am
last night we should have taken it as a bad
omen that the hotel reception
was covered by full riot-control metal shutters.
A wedding party will still well underway, so the lack of any effective
soundproofing in the rooms (mine anyway) lent the night a near-constant
soundtrack of various guests in assorted states of alcoholic dereliction.
Readers outside
Scotland
may find the notion of the archetypal
Scottish drunk amusing, but the reality isn’t much fun. And I wasn’t asleep
much either.
Still,
things are now looking up, as the chef’s just delivered some Arbroath smokies
to my table.
10.30pm
The Lily
Room, Ardkinglas House: in bed
I seriously unravelled this morning
after having to tune another harpsichord: one of the reasons that I prefer not
to tune if at all possible (we couldn’t find anyone reliable who was free for
these gigs) is that being the tuner as well as a player keeps you away from the
rest of the band. You don’t get to share in the communal pre-gig or
pre-rehearsal conversation, or the food: I had the smokies to myself this
morning. So you can start to feel isolated pretty quickly.
If there's no alternative, I don’t
mind picking up the extra jobs and dealing with this, as long as everything else
is working OK. But when other things start to go wrong and I’m at full stretch
then it starts to become impossible. And today I didn’t deal with the stress
very well at all.
Somehow
despite everything we played quite a good gig, the audience were definitely up
for it, bought lots of CDs, and to cap it all Michael Marra complimented Chris
on his singing afterwards. We were
unprepared for the audience’s enthusiasm though, and managed to get ourselves
stranded on stage at the end without a encore, so we crashed our way through The
Arses set with an air of slightly alarmed desperation.
Simon
Chadwick showed us his amazing harp
afterwards too.
When
we got here we were greeted with an excellent dinner in the dining room with
David, Angela, Isabella (Sophie was asleep) and their Finnish visitors. It's
always a treat to be outnumbered by Finns.
some
views of Loch Fyne in the 24 hours we were there
Friday 3 October 2008
driving to Dundee
about 11.30pm
We’ve just played our first gig
of the week at Mugdock
Country
Park.
I didn’t even know there was a theatre in the visitor centre, but it was a
terrific venue: just enough space for 60 people at the most in comfy seats, but
still room for a Yamaha baby grand and a generous acoustic. Nice audience too. I
borrowed a big stone that was helping hold down the cover on the well outside,
to jam down the sustaining pedal in Dorrington Lads so that I could play piano
and harmonium simultaneously.
cosy theatre inside
tea
and sausage sandwiches outside (I was tuning and forgot to get mine)
Our
gig in
Dundee
is at 11.30 tomorrow morning so we’re driving through there
tonight, Alison and I taking turns at the wheel with Chris in the back.
I
had just enough time this morning to get my head in gear for this mini-tour and
prepare the material for our gig at the ABC next week. It’s rare to have a
series of concerts that I haven’t really had to prepare for at all. We’ve
played all the music before, Chris arrived via
Amsterdam at
8.25 this morning, and we just got ourselves into trio mode and did it. I wonder
how we’ll sound tomorrow morning when the tiredness kicks in a bit more …
Wednesday
1 October 2008
back home
It took me all of Monday and Tuesday just to get through the
accumulation of paper that built up around my desk over the past week while I've
been away, leaving no time for any remotely creative activity. Then today I read
this in Robert Fripp's diary:
As
a rule of thumb, if a Happy Gigster is away for 4 weeks it takes 4 weeks to
catch up. So, if the Happy Gigster is away for 6 months & one week, they
never catch up. Their lives become a mess of stuff that waits to be addressed,
settled & stored. This is a brief description of my life over the past 39
years. The time has arrived when, until the past is settled, there is no
bright & shining future world that can be brought into being.
Time
spent settling the past (or filing it away) does indeed stop the future from
coming into being. It's frustrating. But dropping the past into the recycling
via the shredder is not necessarily wise, however attractive it might
occasionally seem.
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