Diary: 7th-13th November 2000
Wednesday 7th November
Well, welcome to the Diary, a new part of the website to keep you up to date with what's going on, what I've been doing, and the like.
At the moment, I'm updating the website! If I'd spent as much time playing my guitar as I have playing with the website, I'd be ... well, I'd be better than I am at the moment, that's for sure. Am supposed to be concentrating on doing some new recordings to put on the bleeding website but am stymied (formerly, in golf: put into a position on the putting-green in which opponent's ball blocks way to hole) by continual temperamentalness of my cherished computer home-recording setup. It won't work properly, and it won't be told. Guess that serves me right for trying to "improve" it once it was already working fine. One day I'll learn not to mess with things when they don't need fixing. Ha!
But am I playing my guitar instead, practising for when I do sort it out? Nope, I'm playing on the computer, I'm doing many other things that are not strictly necessary instead. I even plan to mop the kitchen floor! (Actually, that really does need doing, but ...) What's the matter with me? Is practising for a recording suddenly like revising for an exam now? No! So why am I avoiding it? This is supposed to be the thing I choose to do with my life, so, I ask again, what is the matter with me?
Answers on a postcard please ...
Friday 9th November
Well, am feeling a little sore about the head today; went to see Jo Hamilton / Solarflares / Jason Ensa and the Lobsters of Freedom last night at Ronnie's Scott's (Birmingham) - top night, shame about the drinks prices; I suppose that's what you get from a venue that's not so much about music as corporate accounts, presumably on the premise that if you get a suitably overpaid and undiscriminating clientele, and further anaesthetise their blinkered sensibilities with music of a sufficiently homogeneous and anodyne nature (ideally 80's has-beens pathetically peddling their ageing wares, presumably saving their lone top 40 hit 'till last) .... where was I? Oh, yes, presumably, then you can charge people £3.80 a pint or whatever it is with a straight face, because the punters are like, hey, we're at Ronnie Scott's (Birmingham), man, good times don't come much better than this! Herds of them every week, quietly grazing while Mark Hadley or Tony King or whoever sings an ode to their docility and their fat expense accounts. Take a good look, Travis, one day this could be you. Turn back now, before it's too late ....
But I know what you're thinking, I know, "He's just jealous 'cos he doesn't get to play there for a big fat fee"! Damn straight I'm jealous, I would happily play for Satan for a tenner at the moment, in a world that has a million singer-songwriters, a thousand unpaid gigs, and about two that actually stump up cash. And Badly Drawn Boy's getting both of those, so that's that.
Er, anyway, I'd better briefly touch on a few topics that a putative interested party reading this might hypothetically actually want to know about, i.e. to do with music. Well, Mister Fixy the Computer Pixie has given me a magic spell to use on my confused and ailing machine (oh, alright, I got some new software, I don't know why I said that bit before, to be honest I feel rather embarrassed about it, but it's too late now), so I am now back on track with recording my new demos! Wooo! Exciting! All I have to do now is learn to sing .... No, really, I'm not being glib or self-deprecating (well, obviously I am, but not gratuitously, which is the point), but I've realised that the really important goal to aim for in terms of singing is to reach a point where what comes out of your mouth sounds like what you meant it to sound like, like how it sounds in your head while you're singing it. I'd forgotten what it's like, having not really recorded for a year and a half, it's like, I'll do a take, then play it back, and go, who's that singing? Some out-of-tune soulless pub singer has somehow overdubbed his appalling noise over my beautiful, expressive vocal, in between me pressing "Record" and playing it back.
So yes, agenda reads i) learn to sing properly p.d.q., ii) finish vocal on first track (which is a song called When You Smile, which dates from the early Mocca days, when we were called something else, actually a song that Paul started, and then we worked on together, but they don't play it anymore, and I love it!), iii) put it on the website. Coming soon ....
Monday, er, 13th November
Sorry, couldn't remember the date, had to look in my diary. Well, that's what they're for, eh.
Went down to the music night at the Old Mo last night (that's the Old Moseley Arms, Tindal Street, strictly speaking in Balsall Heath - oddly enough, the other Moseley- named music pub, the not-so-old "Moseley Arms", is in Digbeth, not Moseley either. I reckon all the decent Moseley pubs have become so ashamed at Moseley's steady decline into a vomit-strewn, shirt-wearing, fight-starting, second Broad Street (popular Birmingham town-centre destination) - and god knows we need another Broad Street, don't we people? - that they've picked up their cellars and shuffled over the postal boundary. Fair play to them, I say.)
Now the upstairs room at the Old Mo is a really really good room for an acoustic night, and I've had some really good gigs there. I do not count last night among them. I gather that I played OK, but I couldn't really tell through the adrenaline, I was that angry while I was playing. Now I'm used to people talking while I'm playing, which isn't necessarily a good thing (that I'm used to it, I mean), and I don't know if last night people were being unusually loud or ignorant or appallingly rude and disrespectful, but for whatever reason, I was thinking, this is just totally unacceptable. I even said something about it over the mic, which I have never done before, (I guess for fear of it being misinterpreted as "listen-to-me"); but the only people who were listening to what I was saying were the people who had been listening anyway, about five of them, and they applauded my sentiments, because they already have respect for artists and their fellow human beings generally But preaching to the converted achieves very little.
So I seethed a bit, and I seethed some more while the next act played, he was really good, not that I could hear very well over the noise from the morons at the back of the room, and in fact I stayed really angry all night, while other people played, and were in turn largely ignored. What is the matter with people, I found myself asking? Is it just that music is so widely and freely available that people just don't appreciate or value live music any more? I think that may well true around Moseley, there's so many musicians and music nights on. But still, surely the general public are able to differentiate between background music in the pub, i.e. the jukebox, and live music, i.e. being privileged enough to have an artist live on stage in front of you, playing from the heart for your benefit? But no, apparently they're not. And no, it's not enough to talk all the way through someone's songs but clap between them. Your applause is insincere, mechanical and insulting, it doesn't convey a thing, except perhaps to accentuate your ignorance. Okay?
And no, it's not the case that I don't respect people's right to talk in the pub. But if you want to go to the pub and talk, don't go to an acoustic songwriters' night!! What's the matter with you? If you want to talk, go somewhere else! If you feel compelled to talk over music, talk over the jukebox, that way you're not being an ignorant moron, okay? If you really want to talk over live music, (why you should want to do that is deeply mysterious and anathema to me, but I realise that the workings of the human mind are often indecipherable to others), at least go "see" (I should say "go ignore") a full band with a full PA, so that your behaviour will neither stop other audience members from enjoying (or hearing) the performance, nor put off the artist; 'cos believe me, if you're trying to play and you can hardly hear yourself over the mooing cattle at the back of the room, it hardly inspires you to put your heart and soul into it. It inspires you to put a boot in their braying mouths, maybe. So. Don't do it.
So, at the end of the night I had a drink with the promoters, and we came up with a plan. A novel and daring plan, maybe, but also a noble and worthwhile plan. We plan to turn the Sunday night at the Old Mo into a night where people who care about music can go and listen to people who care about music, without either party having to tolerate rudeness or ignorance from people who don't care. This may take a few weeks to establish, to re-train the "audience" (I use that word loosely, I guess "presence" is more accurate), and we may need to, I dunno, put some signs up or something, both to attract the right kind of people, and to deter the wrong kind of people.
So, if you're the kind of person who wants to see artists perform (and that includes spoken word stuff as well as music, by the way), and your attention span is more than ten seconds, please, come down. We need people like you, if only to stop us giving up hope on the human race as a whole (and it's a constant battle not to, believe me). And it doesn't mean you can't say a word to your friends all night, there are gaps between acts, and saying stuff quietly during a performance is fine; all you need is to maintain enough awareness of other people's needs so that you neither interfere with other people hearing properly, or leave the artist suicidal or homicidal at the end of their set. (The latter is a lot easier to achieve than you may think.) And of course, if you're an artist, and you're sick of wasting your time playing your heart out to the indifference of morons, then this is the gig for you. Come down, check it out, talk to Dan or Martin who host the night. We can change the world, albeit just one tiny corner of it one night a week, but you gotta start somewhere. Keep believing, keep playing, don't let the ignorance of the masses mislead you or grind you down. Whatever you have to say is worth saying; whatever you need to express, needs to be expressed; no matter at what stage of development it is, or how happy you are with it at the moment, your art is unique and precious. So don't forget it. Don't let the morons grind you down.