Tuesday 29 October 2002

I got up at 4.45 this morning to take David G back to the airport - since then I've spent the morning trying to put away all the detritus that results from 6 days of rehearsals, concerts and recording, and making 24-bit backups of the session tapes from last night (a much easier task than I expected).

So, since I last wrote, we played in Glasgow on Thursday to a small but appreciative audience. There were unusually large numbers of my family in there, so I didn't really relax until the second half, after David and I had thrashed our way through some Finnish tunes in the bar downstairs.  On Friday, after an afternoon rehearsal in St. Cecilia's Hall (and a mindblowing sandwich of marinated smoked haddock on thick wholemeal from the Spoon café in Blackfriars Street) we headed for Biggar, and had an extremely good time in the frighteningly dry acoustic of the Corn Exchange Theatre.  Since David arrived he'd been looking for a D string for his modern fiddle, and we never quite had time to find a shop.  Jim O'Neill, who was promoting the gig, tapped him on the shoulder, introduced himself and said 'I hear you're looking for a Dominant D - do you want aluminium or silver?'.  We were being sponsored by Jim's new mail-order string business stringmail.co.uk ... My favourite audience remark was at the end when someone said to me 'loved the Zappa, if I'd known you were going to play that I'd have brought my copy of Roxy and Elsewhere for you to sign'.

Back to St Cecilia's on Saturday to play for the good burghers of the Georgian Concerts Society.  I had programmed a load of material by members of the 18th century Edinburgh Musical Society, who built the hall, but I'd failed to spot that William McGibbon had died before they built it, so my poignant introduction, telling how he'd spent so much of his life playing where we were now, was complete garbage. Thankfully, no-one pointed this out to me until the party afterwards.  I got to play my favourite harpsichord in the Russell Collection, the 1755 Kirckmann, and we were told that the GCS audience stamped their feet in approval for the first time in living memory, which must count for something.  Marie told me of a lady in her 80s who at the end of the first half had remarked 'who was that man who came on then?' (Steve walked on playing the guitar during Bremner's Old Sir Symon the King), and after the second and an encore of the Zappa had said 'Mmm, I really must go out and buy that Zappa'.  I wonder what she'll make of Penguin in Bondage if she buys the album.

David and I stayed with the wonderful Sheila Barnes (who painted the soundboard of my harpsichord) and the wonderful keyboard collection built up by her and her late husband John.  If we'd not been completely exhausted to begin with, I'm sure we'd have stayed up half the night playing, but we settled for a quick tour of some favourites, then off to Crichton Church to start recording in the morning.  Crichton has (dare I say it) a perfect acoustic for what we do.  The sound is even across the frequency spectrum, the resonance is absolutely huge, but the reverberation time is relatively short.  So we used a grand total of two microphones and that was that.  Great fun, just time to visit the castle in the lunch break.  13 years ago, I nearly got married at Crichton but we decided it was a bit remote (and muddy), and we settled for the more civilised but less dramatic Cranstoun Kirk down the road.

Speaking of weddings and recording venues, my gran got married in what is now CaVa studios, where David and I finished last night, recording some duo stuff with the studio's big Bosendorfer Imperial Grand.  We put some pretty wild stuff down, and some pretty seriously weird stuff too.  Now I just need to work out when on earth I'm going to listen to all these tapes ...