Tuesday 31 March 2009

I seem to be spending most of today on the phone, and still have a huge pile of email to get through. At least it's mostly about interesting stuff. And spring is in the air: I can open my window and have the birds joining in with Matt's new CD.

I also found time for a trip along the river to the shops on the newly-serviced Dahon, inspired by the thousands of hub-geared bikes in Odense.

There's a very nice review of Alison's solo Bach concert on the South Bank last weekend here.

Monday 30 March 2009
on the train from Odense to Copenhagen airport
It’s 8 o’clock, I’m on a comfortable and quiet train headed through a sunny spring morning. Tini’s already taken Pamela and DG to the airport for their 5am checkin, and Alison and Matt are getting a later train with the Tiger Lillies to their London flight.

Rather than the expected Euro-English, many Danes have got unexpected regional accents when they speak English, depending on where they learned or practised it. So the ever-resourceful and keen Jeppe Broni at the theatre has an Essex boy accent from Harlow (and, he says, a limited vocabulary as a result), Anna’s accent was from her days as an au pair in Milton Keynes, and the receptionist at the hotel this morning switched from Danish instantly into perfect Dublin. Fantastic.

It’s probably best to tell the story of the last few days in pictures, the first five from Claus Buehler’s phone. He meticulously documents every microphone placement and mixing desk, but takes plenty of other shots too.  Meanwhile the friendly Danish efficiency all around us even extended to our hotel and the concert hall being in the same building.  Hang on a sec, this train’s 6 minutes late already and we’ve only got as far as Nyborg … that can't be right.

Hawaiian rehearsal at the Theaterhuset

Alison pleased about something

view from the top of "the orbo"

me with Klop organ and a remarkable Italian harpsichord made by Mathias Kramer for Lars Ulrik Mortensen, which has 2 8' stops and a 16' on the same bridge, for one-handed continuo. It's clearly late in the day as the bar of Toblerone on the organ has been opened. We settled on sixth-comma meantone tuning in the end as the B flats were too far from the piano ones.

guest appearance by Mick Hucknall, no hang on, it's Tomas

soundcheck/rehearsal in the Koncerthus at last

Tomas took this one of us failing to be 20-second sculptures

and this of us in general post-gig exhaustion, in a picturesque bit of old Odense
L-R: Pamela, DMcG, Alison, Matt, DG

DG as a little-known 19th-century Austro-Hungarian composer: 'When I'm not composing my latest symphony, I like to relax with an Odense Classic. Its malty taste helps me channel my soul's inner grief.'

sound supervisor Claus Buehler where I found him on a park bench after the gig

Saturday 28 March 2009
Odense, Denmark
After a long journey, we’re being very well looked after here in Odense by lots of extremely nice and efficient Danish people. After a dodgy start where we chose the wrong Chinese restaurant (very dodgy in fact), we met up with Tomas Medici to rehearse at the Theaterhus, only an hour and half late, although given how tired we were it seemed much later. I was very impressed with the town’s well-organised attitude to cycling, even providing an electric bike pump in the street.

Jeppe, Annaline and their team can’t do enough for us, laying on food, sound, a harpsichord and organ tuned in ¼ comma meantone, and their very comfortable theatre space which has a surprisingly warm and flattering acoustic.

After a hotel breakfast of epic proportions in which I was reminded of what Danish pastries are supposed to taste like – it’s 10 years at least since I was in Denmark - we all headed out on various shopping expeditions. This was my favourite shop sign which is just a really cheap joke made by an ignorant foreigner who sniggers every time he passes a bookshop (sorry). If it was a bog, you could flush your money down the pan by playing the lottery.

The Tiger Lillies made it here from Poland today after a 3.30am start, so it’s amazing they could do anything at all, let alone rehearse a whole show with us. As expected, it’s changed quite a lot in Martyn’s head since last time, but I think we managed to keep up with him on the whole. It’s a lot less confrontational this time round, which will be a relief to anyone who was at the last one in Edinburgh.

When we were done most of us took turns on Adrian Stout’s theremin …

Thursday 26 March 2009

Yesterday went something like this. I sat in a traffic jam on the M8, and was an hour late for the session at Castle; looked down at my hands in our second take and realised my knuckle was bleeding: the sight of blood concentrates the mind beautifully when recording. Drove into Edinburgh, found a parking space outside the bike shop (miracle); they'd forgotten to lower the gearing - it had only been in the workshop for 4 weeks. Left bike behind, headed to the Hub to meet DG who'd just arrived from Montreal; quick rehearsal for Edinburgh Festival launch event (second Bosendorfer of the day), picked up bike successfully, fantastic falafel and houmous wraps in North African cafe. We went on stage to play Mackintosh for 3 minutes, and then (the best bit) somehow managed to fit the following into my tiny car for the drive home: harmonium, harpsichord stand, bike, DG's large suitcase, lots of bits and pieces, DG, me and Andrew. Japanese engineering wins again.

One of our Edinburgh concerts in August is detailed here. If you search the festival site for 'concerto caledonia' and 'caledonia sessions' you'll eventually find the other three events too. I've put up links from our concerts page.

Tuesday 24 March 2009

Castlesound really is a very civilised place to work. Resident engineer Stuart Hamilton somehow made my harpsichord sound quite spectacular, even though the room's acoustic suited the harmonium much better. How he manages to balance harmonium, pipes and fiddle and keep them all perfectly clear is beyond my understanding.

Stuart contemplates a temporary lack of tidiness in one corner of the studio

We tried harpsichord in combination with harmonium and with piano for the first time - successfully I think - and Mairi provided some very niftily overdubbed fiddles.

Iain surrounded by esoteric microphones 

Now I'm extremely tired, as I've also been tuning the harpsichord all day and driving over 90 minutes each way on the M8 (in teeming rain on the way home). But it's good to be reminded that recording something very well makes a big difference to the end result. There are some things that home-made recordings just can't do.

Monday 23 March 2009

Yesterday I dropped into Castlesound where I haven't been since recording with McFalls in January 2001. Frightened Rabbit were due to arrive soon after me, so I hope they weren't put off working there by finding my harpsichord cluttering up the otherwise immaculately tidy live room. As the harmonium and harpsichord are away, today is piano practice day, when I'm not working out the details of all the things that are to happen later this week. One of the problems of leaving the booking of travel arrangements to a third party (in this case, a party three times removed: another group's agent's travel agent) is that their interests aren't necessarily the same as yours. In this case, I've been booked on a return flight 10 hours later than intended, that arrives in the wrong city. It took me 5 minutes to find a cheap flight at the right time, and figure out how to get to the airport on Danish trains. If I can do that, why can't the professionals? DG's transatlantic flight details looked fine, until we realised that they were booked for the wrong day. 

later
We're told that flights are now booked properly. But why not just get it right the first time? 

There's a revealing sequence newly posted in Robert Fripp's diary here, here and here, in which a potentially exciting project is derailed by pointless bureaucracy. A 22-page contract is eventually reduced to two in an attempt to re-engage Fripp's enthusiasm, but as he puts it, 'we didn't begin here'. Why not begin with the appropriate, rather than having to battle towards it?  For almost all of us who work, dealing with pointless administrative hassle is a part of the job, but it is the enemy of enthusiasm. And without enthusiasm, our work suffers and so do we.  

Friday 20 March 2009

As a welcome break from working on the Tiger Lillies stuff, Iain and Mairi came over this morning to see if we could get harpsichord to work with some pipe tunes. And the verdict is ... that it's pretty good. Harpsichord and smallpipes with a low A chanter is particularly cool. Of course it makes sense: both instruments have no dynamic range, so you have to play lots of wee twiddly notes to make it sound interesting.  Fortunately Mairi is playing fiddle and viola in the middle so there is a real musical instrument in there somewhere holding it all together.

Meanwhile in the back garden, the plum tree is convinced that it is spring.

Sad news of the day is that my beloved 1971 Cannon GasMiser fire in the other room (a design classic) is now beyond repair, after two Scottish Gas engineers gave it their best shot. Aw.

Saturday 14 March 2009

I haven't got a great deal done in the latter part of this week because on Thursday I packed most of my study into boxes in preparation for the chimney being lined yesterday. And then that became rather more complicated when the excellent chimney engineers found that there was an unexpected triple brick wall between our bedroom and the chimney. So until they come back on Monday to finish the job, our bedroom wall is full of holes of various sizes - it looks like it's been the subject of sniper fire, or that it's part of some perverted hyper-chic hotel where the rooms are decorated to look like they're in a war zone, but still have full room service and a mini-bar.  

Nevertheless, I can recommend the exercise of packing a work room into boxes and unpacking it again. It takes a long time, but if you only unpack things that you actually use, you will gain a lot of shelf and floor space. And you have the opportunity to actually clean in all 'those places' that never see so much as a duster from one year to the next. 

But the arrangements for the Tiger Lillies stuff aren't going to write themselves while I'm playing with cardboard boxes. So the one remaining pile of miscellanea will have to wait on the floor for a bit longer.

While the house has filled up with dust and debris, I've managed to do a final mix of our Joe Raposo track, complete with DG's octave violin part recorded on the mic of his MacBook on tour. And on Wednesday, Iain, Mairi and I reclaimed the hornpipe from Handel's Water Music as a pipe tune - I bet it was just another of Handel's many borrowings.  

But now I am sitting at my desk enjoying a glass of the very cheering new Williams Bros beer 'Good Times', which contains elderflower and meadowsweet. It really does put a smile on your face. The fact that Scott Williams showed up on my doorstep this afternoon with a case of the stuff is not clouding my judgment at all. (honestly)

Also very cheering is this piece by Roger Norrington in today's Guardian. His final question is a very pertinent one. Throw traditional music into the equation, and you start considering the prospect of "evidence-based tradition"(!), or more accurately perhaps, a tradition informed by historical evidence. As any historian will tell you, tradition is seldom very reliable when it comes to understanding the past. 

Tuesday 10 March 2009

Well, I had a day off on the Sabbath, and now I'm starting to get my head around our gig with the Tiger Lillies, listening to the show tape from last time, reviewing the notation for refinements and adapting some of it for a slightly altered line up, which this time round will be DG, Alison and me with Pamela Thorby and Matt Wadsworth - now that's a band! 

Besides that, I'm learning a pile of pipe tunes for a recording with Iain MacInnes. Tomorrow is our first rehearsal with Mairi Campbell (who sings Auld Lang Syne in the Sex and the City movie) and in the meantime my harmonium is having a wee holiday by the sea in Portie - that's Portobello to you. The best word I can think of to describe Iain's pipe and whistle playing is 'crystalline', so I'm looking forward very much to sitting in and playing some tunes.

On my day off Robbie and I went to the ayewrite book festival to see the Beano team do their stuff. Jim Petrie, who took over Minnie the Minx from Leo Baxendale in 1961 and drew about 2000 episodes, now bears a startling resemblance to Minnie's dad. 

It's hard to believe we were fighting through a blizzard to get there, as now the sun is out and I've been cycling around on my errands with no coat on. That'll be spring then. Any day now.

Sunday 8 March 2009

Very tired today after last night's Bongo Club appearance, but what a great audience to play for: the McFall's home crowd.

my lair at soundcheck

The excellent Alex Fiennes was doing the sound, and on his suggestion I propped up my folder of scores with my camera case so that the sound of the harmonium could actually get out: in the photo above (taken beforehand), I'd managed to block most of the crucial long slot above the keyboard. My harmonium case got pressed into service for the first time as a very effective glockenspiel stand too.

Robert has a talent for putting unexpected things together in a very effective way, and before Michael sang The Slave's Lament, Professor Geoff Palmer spoke for a bit about many Jamaicans' Scots ancestry and how it came about - and also how Burns's Ae Fond Kiss fits into the story. The song was written for Burns's 'Clarinda' (Nancy McLehose) before she set sail for Jamaica to find out if her marriage was still really on. And when she got to Kingston, Mr McLehose was already quite happy with his 'ebony woman and mahogany children', thank you very much. I was going to put in a link here to Geoff's criticisms last year of Scotland's Homecoming being marketed almost exclusively to white people, and I found this article - and would you believe it, the first comment at the bottom says 'that's who the diaspora is - white folks'. Well, here's Geoff's piece in scotland.org to correct that misconception. Personally I'll be rather pleased if Scottish musical history can now include Sly Dunbar and Peter Tosh (short for McIntosh, remember?).

I must have been quite nervous about last night's gig as I had some very weird dreams the night before. Alison had dropped in on Friday evening on her way here, so perhaps that explains why in one dream the two of us were playing some baroque piece to an audition panel, despite the fact that we'd already been booked by them to play at their festival (we were even in the brochure). About a page and a half in, one of the two women behind the table stopped me playing and said dismissively 'OK, that's fine, you do realise that in Norwegian music of this period you should be using the [some obscure harpsichord stop, that was on the instrument I was playing].' Uh? Then both of them got up and left for their lunch, Alison said 'I thought you knew that', and I was left feeling supremely incompetent. No more gig in that festival.

Thursday 5 March 2009

Rehearsing with Michael Marra in Mr McFall's front room is a good way to spend a Thursday. He had me multitasking on harmonium and glockenspiel - I've never tried to play those at the same time before - and to my relief, the 'disintegrates into frozen ambience' arrangement of Green Grow the Rashes, with strings and musical saw, went ok too.

a lunchtime outbreak of photography - everyone else was in the kitchen

Mr Marra's photographic expertise is shown to better effect here.

After watching skins (whoa, I got an onscreen credit all to myself), Greg looked in to drop off an electric fiddle for me to deliver to Edinburgh tomorrow. After some Springbank he looked like this.

Wednesday 4 March 2009

Just back from the second day of rehearsals in the excellent surroundings of Mr McFall's Chamber's Morningside home. Unfortunately my masterplan to cycle there from the train every day was foiled by my Dahon still being in the loving care of biketrax awaiting parts. Michael Marra joins us tomorrow, and the gig's on Saturday night at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh: come and hear whether I make a complete arse of Timo's tunes on the melodica. As you can see below, I had a choice of harmoniums today (mine is out of shot, and Robert's is in the room next door): the collective noun for a group of harmoniums is of course 'an embarrassment'. 

the view from behind Brian's newly-restored harmonium

Fitting in a day's rehearsal amongst various domestic educational matters has been difficult enough, but in the middle of all of this we also finally got the go-ahead for another gig with the Tiger Lillies. (hooray) In three weeks' time. (oh) In Denmark. (right) So any free minutes today have been spent in texts and calls to Andrew and Alison co-ordinating lots of diaries and figuring out just how we're going to make it work.  Sadly, Emily can't make it, and as virtuoso sackbut players who also just happen to play the baroque violin are a bit thin on the ground, we're having to rejig things a bit, but I think we've settled on what will be a very entertaining alternative version of the evening's events.

Monday 2 March 2009

Lots of practising and diary maintenance today, juggling various activities in the next couple of weeks, and pencilling some in over the next couple of years. As for the practising, perhaps my ambition to play the melodica the way that Maria Kalaniemi plays the accordion, is stretching my abilities just a bit too far. I think I will still be practising tomorrow just before leaving for the first rehearsal. Still, Nicky Grant came over and played baroque viola d'amore in my kitchen this afternoon, so things can't be all bad. And I fitted a handle to my harmonium case yesterday: I have a suspicion that the first time I try and bump it up a kerb, the handle will shear off and dump the harmonium on my leg - the scars from the last time this happened have just about healed.

But enough of this: on Thursday at 10pm you can hear my attempts at playing Debussy in this week's excellent episode (no. 7) of skins on E4, and available to download thereafter at 4oD, and no doubt unofficially on youtube in bits as well. Go JJ!

Friday 27 February 2009

I'd planned to spend today in Edinburgh at the manuscripts department of the National Library, but when I got there, I was politely turned away. Still, at least I'd dropped my Dahon off at biketrax on the way - every bike shop I called in Glasgow panicked at the thought of servicing a hub gear, but these guys didn't even blink. I spent the day in the university library instead, and picked up a different bike from Carl at a different bike shop on the way home.

Just before bike shop no. 2 I stood on the bridge at Queen Margaret Drive and took this photo, as the staircase now exposed on the wall on the right was the route to my attic office when I first worked at the BBC in 1995. It wasn't until I got home that I realised the attic windows sticking up on the left side of the picture belonged to my school classroom when I was 9.

Tuesday 24 February 2009

It's been a preparation day here, trying to fix the handle on my harmonium case and failing (a job for a professional really), sterilising my melodica's breath tube (it gets smelly), and unblocking a harmonium reed (well, to be honest I haven't done that one yet). I also did some proper practice for next week, and fitted in a very interesting chat on matters of mutual interest with Charlie Gore, he of scandalously-out-of-print Scottish Fiddle Index fame.

For reasons best ignored I'm currently in the library - no sorry, the 'Learning Resource Centre' (pause for sardonic laugh) - in the freshly-opened-by-Princess-Anne-last-week new building of North Glasgow College. It would be a very congenial open light space to work in, if it weren't such an acoustic disaster. The 'LRC' is open plan, and it's basically the noisiest place in what's already a very noisy building, full of hard reflective surfaces and doors that bang. Even with sound-isolating headphones on, it's difficult to concentrate for the high-pitched whine of someone cleaning a room in another part of the building. I wonder what it's like when it's full of students.

Monday 23 February 2009

Spring seems to have arrived, along with swarms of tiny but bold and acrobatic long-tailed tits watching my bike maintenance, and the occasional rare visit from a few goldfinches to eat buds off the plum tree. 

Arrangements are done; now I just have to learn the notes. Some melodica and harmonium practice is required. And some concert opportunities are presenting themselves in August and October.

Friday 20 February 2009

I was in Edinburgh yesterday for a couple of errands, and some very useful reading and thinking time on the train. But for most of this week I've been working on arrangements, typing notes into Sibelius here at my desk. We did one of the Michael Marra songs with ConCal a couple of years ago, and my arrangement then consisted of a chart that took up two systems on half a page of A4: everyone just figured out for themselves what to play. This time round I'm working with a group that expects to have rather more to read than that, which means a lot more preparation, and pages and pages of score. In some ways this is a tiresome chore, but on the other hand it does present interesting possibilities that you couldn't achieve by busking from a chart. Nonetheless, I think my natural habitat is working things out with ears, rather than on paper. 

Meanwhile, negotiations towards a firm booking for an entertaining ConCal gig next month (yes, that soon) are still rumbling along. The longer it takes to get a contract, the higher our travel costs become ...

Saturday 14 February 2009

An excellent surprise in the mail today: Timo Alakotila's sent me the scores for a couple of tunes (including Melos, which is on his myspace just now), which will make the task of arranging them less prone to bursts of self-doubt. What a hero. I've been playing with those at the piano today in between dropping Maeve off at the station (she stopped off last night on the way back to London from South Uist) and playing a small role in the birthday party that took over the house this afternoon.

Friday 13 February 2009

There is a large pile of books on the floor to my right awaiting my attention. Yesterday afternoon I was in Edinburgh to meet Simon and Dave about a Distil-related project for later in the year, and afterwards I made it up to Edinburgh University Library where to my slight surprise they had almost every book related to early Scots fiddling that I was looking for. This was a chance to roadtest my enormous new briefcase (well, it's new to me) which coped fine, but my shoulders didn't. Next time I want to carry a month's reading at once, I'll take a rucsac.

Why all the books? Well, in the early 19th century, Nathaniel Gow led the most successful dance band in Scotland, playing regularly at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. Unusually compared to its London counterparts, the band was prestigious and well-paid: possibly better than their theatre and orchestral colleagues, and certainly well enough for Gow to have the capital to set up shop selling instruments as well as sheet music. But as far as I can make out, we don't even know how many people played in it: we know about the military bands, the Edinburgh Musical Society orchestra, the band at the Theatre Royal - but with Gow, the most celebrated fiddler of his age, son of the legendary Niel, we don't know for sure even what instruments were playing. And this seems to me fairly crucial to an understanding of how the music worked. Maybe there's some information that I've missed, hiding in one of my pile of books. But I suspect that to shed any light on this particular part of Scottish musical history is going to take rather more digging than that.

Meanwhile, various phonecalls and emails have been flying around about a ConCal project next month which is close to confirmation, and yesterday a very interesting proposal indeed came in from Germany. 

Tuesday 10 February 2009

While reading about old Edinburgh music shops, I've been listening to the Pet Sounds sessions album (and a Rolf Harris stylophone demonstration disc) and I noticed this morning that in God Only Knows there's a couple of stinking wrong notes from one of the flutes in the staccato runs after verse 2, that seem to have been ducked out on the final record at 1'07 and 1'11: F sharps where everyone else is playing F natural. Brian Wilson picks up on it 'somebody lags or screws up in the first half of that', and then they play it tighter, but still with the wrong notes ... yes, even 'perfect' records were made by real people.

Sunday 8 February 2009

It's all white outside again. Susie and I made it back down the road from Ardkinglas today before the snow came: we were there to hear Ken Aiso and Annette Isserlis playing in the dining room last night, and to have a very nice time socialising in genial surroundings. Hearing Ken and his rock-solid technique play unaccompanied Bach and Ysaÿe at close range is quite something; it really is him sitting at the back of the first violins on Fiddler Tam. 

I've started putting a folder of notation together for next month's project with Mr McFall's Chamber, and yesterday morning I spent an hour or two at the computer preparing a double bass part for the Dvořák Bagatelles. The harmonium part goes very low indeed, down to C sharp nearly 3 octaves below middle C (a note on no harmonium I've ever come across), which you can just about fake if you're nifty with a divided 16' stop, but on my 4-octave Estey it's completely out of the question. The lowest notes are always doubled up the octave, so I figured I would give them to Rick on the bass rather than miss them out. I wonder if it'll work. 

Wednesday 4 February 2009

I was lecturing at the RSAMD this morning - having painstakingly put all my illustrations into a PowerPoint file, there wasn't any way of showing it and I had to settle for low-res projections of my backup printouts instead. Oh well. But the students were awake and on the whole ready to answer back, which was great. My favourite moment was when I dragged someone out to the front to stand beside me and said 'He's Beethoven, and I'm me. Which of us would you rather hear playing a Beethoven sonata?', to which the reply came 'You; he's deaf.'  

Monday 2 February 2009
on the train to London
Well, of all the days to choose to nip down to London for a quick session in Abbey Road and dive back home again on the sleeper, I pick the day with the heaviest snowfall in England for about 20 years. Last night I checked the Met Office forecast and realised that expecting any airport runways to still be open this afternoon would be foolish, so I booked myself a seat on a train that would allow me an hour’s walk to Abbey Road, even if it got in 2 hours late and London’s transport system had ground to a halt. Sure enough, all the airports have shut, all London buses are off (!), and most trains and the underground are stuffed too, but this train seems to be running only an hour or so late. So far so good. Although I’ll probably make it the 400 miles from Glasgow, the engineer can’t get to the studio from South London, so he’s sending someone else …

typical view from train window

Ah, we’ve just stopped outside Milton Keynes, which means I can watch these people sledging … I wonder if we’ll get any further.

I’ve been able to put the time to good use so far, transcribing a Maria Kalaniemi tune and making a start on re-reading Adrian Scahill’s PhD thesis about the history of accompaniment in Irish music. 

10.30pm

Euston Station, which at this time of night seems to be populated largely by Scottish people like me waiting for the sleeper 

When I arrived at Euston this afternoon, there were plenty of people around but it was strangely quiet. That’s because there weren’t any trains.

I made it along Euston Road to the skins office (Euston Road looking rather strange because there weren’t any buses) ...

... and got a sneak preview of a rough cut of Episode 10 from James before we jumped in a car to Abbey Road. 

Bryan and James on that zebra crossing

Our engineers Chris and Andy looked after us, providing efficiency, calm, tea and vintage microphones, while we just got on with it and I tried not to be intimidated by the fact that quite a lot of extremely famous records were made in this room, by people running up and down the stairs to hear playback as I was. 

Bryan at Studio 2's Steinway D, and the stairs to the control room

Listening to the sound of the room while playing could be quite distracting, as (I don't think I’m just imagining this) it’s recognisably the same room that you hear on almost all of those Beatles records. Having said that, the feeling of being on the studio floor was also reminiscent of the old BBC Studio 1 in Glasgow, which was of a similar size and built around the same time. Abbey Road’s Studio 2 piano certainly isn’t ideal for Debussy – but it would sound thrilling being beaten into submission – so I was concentrating very hard to do something that made sense. 

Chris gave us a little tour before we left, including a quick walk around Studio 1, which is a very nice sounding room indeed, and Studio 3 with its ridiculously huge SSL desk.

And now here I am, rather tired, hoping that the sleeper home isn’t going to leave too far behind schedule. All the pubs are shut (no staff) and the First Class lounge is closed for rebuilding so I’m slumming it in the waiting room, but at least there’s no muzak and I still have a flask of tea left. This morning I packed enough supplies for getting snowed in somewhere near Crewe.

on the news screen at Euston - pah, soft Southerners

11.05pm
Hooray, boarded early. Time for a Traquair House Ale from the restaurant car and bed.

Saturday 31 January 2009

This was the scene near midnight last night when I emerged from the Wee Curry Shop as the guest of a splendid bunch of BBC employees. Yes, these people are responsible for spending your licence fee in a creative manner.

Friday 30 January 2009

Like lots of other people today I would guess, I have a pile of John Martyn vinyl by my desk as the soundtrack to the day. I only saw him play live a couple of times, once with his band and once in a typically self-destructive performance on his own, where occasionally he surprised himself by playing something remarkably beautiful. For all the atmospheric acoustic Echoplex techniques in the Solid Air/Inside Out period, it's his One World album that's my favourite, for the dazzling variety of genuinely inimitable sounds in the service of very raw emotion. If anyone else tried to do something similar, whether vocally, with an acoustic guitar, or with an SG, a volume pedal and an a delay, they would just sound like a pale imitation of John Martyn. And unlike Robert Burns, he did actually make it to Jamaica.

I suppose it's too late for me to go to Angoulême: I've just realised that tomorrow's lineup features the following one after the other: Posy Simmonds, Adrian Tomine, Dan Clowes and James Kochalka; and then Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware on Sunday. That accounts for a fair percentage of the books on the shelf in front of me. 

Wednesday 28 January 2009

My son Robbie took this picture of a nearby cycle lane on Monday. At our local hospital the council has instituted free parking but with a maximum stay of 4 hours, after which there is a £40 fine. So anyone working in the hospital, if travelling by car (and given that people work there all night, some of them are inevitably going to) has to dump their vehicle somewhere in the surrounding streets. And not always with consideration for other road users: it was physically impossible even to push a bike past this one ...

I've been mulling over Sunday night's experience, in the context of comment like this. On Sunday Karine sang Burns's The Slave's Lament with Sly and Robbie - and we can guess that Sly Dunbar's Scottish surname was probably given to one of his slave ancestors by a Scottish master. It's not a part of Scottish history that inspires pride. But on Sunday night there was no doubt that it was the Jamaicans who were in charge. They were the master musicians on the stage; we were in awe at being in their orbit, and for that matter playing to their audience. We gave them precious parts of our culture to transform (Burns Night, even Auld Lang Syne) and were utterly delighted with what they did.  This was no transatlantic expression of 'celtic' pride and identity (whatever that is) but something much more powerful, and I'm very pleased to have been a part of it. Playing classical music can sometimes leave you feeling uneasy about reinforcing some of the cultural assumptions that underlie it; this was a reminder that music can send out messages about the world around us with great subtlety. 

Tuesday 27 January 2009

After spending the morning pursuing and eliminating what had seemed like more practical options, today I found myself booking Abbey Road studio two for a session next week. Well, if you're going to book a studio, it might as well be the most celebrated studio in the whole flipping world. I'd better do some practice now: it's all very well expecting some of the magic to rub off on you, but you also have to do the preparation. When I mentioned to one perfectionist engineer colleague that I'd eventually just given in and booked Abbey Road, his text response was 'Should be just about usable, even if their experience is a bit limited', and it took me a clear two seconds to realise that this was a joke.

As I write, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s truly bizarre sitcom The High Life is being re-run on BBC4. I make a very brief non-speaking appearance in the final episode as a hippy student type (I had long hair at the time, that’s how long ago it was) stranded in Prestwick Airport. The last time I saw it, it appeared unexpectedly on the TV in a hotel room in Copenhagen …

Today I had a long overdue read of Hugh Trevor-Roper's famous 1980s essay on the invention of Highland culture, and have been gleefully consuming Ben Goldacre's riotously cheering and educational Bad Science, which I can happily recommend to all intelligent people working in the arts, who like me have in the past been taken in by spurious pseudo-scientific garbage. I remember an early music colleague once explaining to me very seriously in my kitchen about how important it was to have oxidants and antioxidants and thinking 'You really haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, have you?' At least now we all know that echinacea doesn't work.

Monday 26 January 2009

As places to sing Auld Lang Syne go, on stage between Robbie Shakespeare's bass rig and 1100 people in the Fruitmarket is one of the more visceral. Lots of very happy people in the room ...

Sushil's bass left casually up against the mighty Robbie's cabs at soundcheck

stylophone ready for action, smoke settling in the balcony

There was so much smiley happy music on offer in the course of the evening that we were a bit nervous about going on after Edward II. Still, at least my equipment worked: my only technical failures were the power going down momentarily during Rip It Up on the MIDI keyboard that the festival provided, and my schoolboy error of not plugging the melodica breathtube in properly so that when I picked it up for the first time and blew, it just fell out. Egg on face. We also managed an excellent car crash during our opening number of Moscow but somehow recovered.

Afterwards, Grace took this picture of a happy band very keen to have our photo taken with Edwyn.

Between soundcheck and gig, Alison had the excellent idea of nipping across the road to the relaxed ambience of Babbity Bowster where she had the necessary 25 January dish of MacSween's haggis, and I had an excellent plate of stovies. When I make stovies, the main ingredient is potatoes; Babbity's version is more like a plate of mince with some vegetables in it, but this gives it an undoubtedly West of Scotland sense of authenticity. 

Sunday 25 January 2009

I've spent most of this morning (through the fog of my cold that won't go away) trying to figure out how to get my laptop setup to reliably boot up and work: I'm using it to route MIDI and also to give me delays on a mic for dub effects. After various experiments, I've discovered that I need to switch everything on in exactly the right order, and re-boot one device halfway through the process, otherwise MIDI messages don't get passed along the chain. They never tell you these things in the manual, they just assume that at some point in your life you've got a couple of stress-free hours available for laborious trial and error. 

There was some light relief in the middle of all this when DG called from New Zealand to skype over his fiddle part for the Joe Raposo track. So I should be able to mix that this coming week.

Saturday 24 January 2009

It was getting seriously 80s/90s Glasgow indie-pop in rehearsal today, as at one point we had Edwyn Collins, Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, and Duglas T Stewart from the BMX Bandits all singing. We also stuck our head around the door of Sly & Robbie's rehearsal room next door to see how it should be done. That Bitty McLean can really sing ...

Favourite moments in our rehearsal included Raymond's doubt as to whether he should bring an acoustic guitar for Place in My Heart, to which Douglas Macintyre replied: 'It's semi-acoustic, and it's out of tune, that's perfect!'  Never having really been an Orange Juice fan, these intricacies of music history had passed me by, but I was quite relieved that Edwyn didn't seem to mind me playing stylophone all the way through What Presence.

Friday 23 January 2009

I've had so much to read and do this week, and spent so much time on the phone about various possible future projects, that I haven't had any words left in my brain to write here. I've also been getting ahead with some research, and trying out libraries for a suitable place to park myself for a few hours during the day away from the endless distractions at home. Glasgow University's shelves are stocked with diverting and relevant material, and the view is great, but the air-conditioning is ruthless; the Mitchell Library is less thoroughly stocked, but it offers comfortable surroundings, peace and quiet, and free internet access. It's fun to be working in the same room where I got a lot of my musical education aged about 14, when it was the music lending section. And the photocopying is cheap. I spent over three hours today painstakingly annotating my HMT edition of Mackintosh's 3rd fiddle book from the original, before I realised that I could just have put the entire thing on the self-service photocopier for four quid. Academic libraries don't tend to let you do that with their 18th-century stock.

Alison came over this morning to record the cello part I wrote last Saturday, which was also a handy excuse to try out her Accusound mic before tomorrow's Dub Arkestra rehearsal: it's very good.

Cameron Malcolm took this picture from his and Calum's end of the room at Ardkinglas last week: James is sitting under the lights keeping an eye on the monitor and on me ... 

Saturday 17 January 2009

I spared an hour today for a bit of arranging of our Joe Raposo track, although I really want to get stuck into reading Defining Strains, which I only came across for the first time in the university library yesterday.

I once spent a very happy couple of hours in the company of the late Sir John Mortimer: Lynne Walker had come up with the great idea of getting him on the radio to talk about the Mozart/da Ponte operas, and once we'd made sure that the studio was easily accessible from the ground floor of Broadcasting House, we arranged a time with him, his driver delivered him to the door, and he was charming, hilarious, knowledgeable, slightly scandalous, and every bit as much fun to be around as you could have expected. He was also already rather frail, so when asked that evening 'What did you do at work today?', I heard myself answer 'I took John Mortimer for a piss', and was strangely proud. I still am.

Thursday 15 January 2009

Recovering from a long and tiring day yesterday, spent at Ardkinglas recording Debussy on the wonderful 1928 New York Steinway A, for an episode of the forthcoming series of Skins. I picked up offline editor James Hughes from the station first thing in the morning and up the road we went, to find Calum and Cameron Malcolm waiting for us with some vintage Neumann valve mics already set up, and Angela ready with a hot water bottle to stop my hands from freezing up (‘I didn’t know what these were until I lived here’).  The piano sounded spectacular: occasionally I got so distracted listening to the fascinating way that low chords resonated, that I forgot to play the next bit.

I’m not exactly a natural Debussy pianist to begin with, and the added demands of playing to picture (with James keeping me right when I drifted out of sync with his editing) meant that the result isn’t exactly textbook pianism – there’s certainly the odd missing note, and some dodgy textural balance here and there – but it was lots of fun to be working with moving pictures in great detail: something I haven't really done since I was last regularly writing music for television 15 years ago. 

Calum’s technical multi-tasking skills were much in evidence as he traced a troublesome creak to the piano innards, and proceeded to take the action out in our lunch break, while I was heating up some soup in the pantry. James sacrificed a bit of one of his socks to make the repair …

We managed to get finished mid-evening just as the wind was getting up and beginning to howl down the huge chimney and rattle the windows (and as the sustain pedal started to develop a squeak), and I drove James back down to the airport through the gathering blizzards, keeping a safe distance behind the West Coast Motors bus whose driver I figured knew the road in the dark better than I did. He made the last flight south with 2 minutes to spare – a grand day out.

Today my right foot has been aching badly all day. I've been raking my brains trying to figure out how I can have injured it, and then I remembered that it was operating the damper pedal of a piano with great care for several hours yesterday. Somehow I managed to limp to the framers to pick up our new James Kochalka painting to hang in the hall - you can see it featured in the final three seconds of this interview ...

Monday 12 January 2009

While learning Pagodes I spotted this ...

Sunday 11 January 2009

One of the highlights of my cultural calendar is (if time allows) watching the BDO world darts championship on telly in the first week of January. I don't generally have any time for watching sport, but darts is much more interesting than most as it's not an athletic contest, and the audience look like they're having a great time.  The commentary is great too. Apparently Ted Hankey did so well this year because he only drank three pints rather than thirteen before playing. 

From Robert Fripp's diary the other day, referring to the Prog Britannia documentary:

It is not possible to record the history of the period without an account of its business practices; and therefore its business practitioners.

Well, Andrew and I convened over the budget for an upcoming project this week, and what had started as 'wow, we can afford to do this, this and this, and we'll all get paid properly' gradually became, 'oh, so we can't do that, and is that all we get paid?'  But most work of any kind suffers from this exact dilemma.  

If our concert diary here on the website looks a bit empty (ok, completely empty), it's not because we've retired: we're just waiting for various things to be officially announcable, or for that matter confirmed. And in the meantime I have some Debussy to practise ...

Wednesday 7 January 2009

I'm trying to juggle budgets, diaries and music for two projects simultaneously at the moment, which is quite taxing: both are urgent, even though one of them won't happen for a few months yet. But one of them is giving me an excuse to listen to lots of Debussy piano music, which is wonderful. I rarely listen to classical music of any kind these days, but French music hits the spot rather well. Somewhere in the attic I have a copy of Jacques Chailley's very enjoyable book 40 000 Years of Music, a history told from a decidedly French perspective, unlike most, which assume that only German-speaking composers really count.  His sarcastic dismissal of serialism and of Boulez is very entertaining, but his challenging of the assumption that classical music has been led by Germanic culture is more vital.

Saturday 3 January 2009

A good new year to everyone. I spent this afternoon rehearsing with the Orange Juice Dub Arkestra, largely as an excuse for me to play the stylophone, which I think sounded pretty good: we'll see if I get booed off on Burns Night. This is the view from behind my keyboard rig, which consists of glockenspiel, melodica, MIDI keyboard, stylophone (hidden) and laptop. Wielding a guitar on the left of picture is Raymond Macdonald, who's more usually seen and heard blowing into something sax-shaped.

When I got home there was a copy of Alasdair Roberts' new CD in its newly-mastered state waiting in the mail. That will have to wait until I can give it my full attention, which it deserves.

I took this picture looking out over the Forth on our new year's day walk. It was perfectly still, so I'm not sure what caused the ripples. 

©2009 David McGuinness
all opinions are those of the author - you don't have to share them