A Lonely Night for my G String at the Robin 2, 25/6/2013

While some run-of-the-mill rapper and his wife who is famous but I really don't know why name their child North West, (Jesus wept,) some real musicians were getting it done at The Robin 2 on Tuesday Night. So I just want to say before I get started on my own performance what a great night it was and how well the other musicians did; I didn't catch all your names but it was a great night from all of you and long may it continue.

I've played The Robin 2 a few times now and I've always managed to feel like I'm punching a little above my weight, playing to a large and therefore not very densely packed room. The audience has always been polite enough, and were quite friendly tonight, but there's always been a feeling like there's a little more at stake here than there were at some other venues.

The set list was:

The Boys of Summer
Zephyr Song
A Lonely Night
Bitterness
Morning Glory
Never Forget You

I have to say I've been doing quite well for songs at some of these open mics! I'm used to getting 3, maybe 4 songs, and the last few I've been doing 5 or 6 at a time. Not bad!

Didn't get off to a flying start tonight though, as I broke my G string (it would have to be) not 2 minutes into the first song. After the obligatory growl of 'Bollocks' to the audience, pulling the string out of the way of the guitar and skewering my hand on it, I struggled through the rest of the song with 5 strings. Thankfully it didn't stop me playing the bit in the middle of The Boys of Summer where I rely on an octave in the 'C' chord shape to try and emulate the keyboard part in the song, but I know from checking my tuning afterwards that my guitar wasn't well in tune.

Thankfully Sam had a spare guitar and I got through the rest of the set with a decent if unfamiliar Takamine (I think.) I needed a few minutes to adjust the strap, and because there was no strap button on the top of the guitar it was secured on with a piece of string around the headstock. This is one of my pet hates of acoustic guitars, and why I did most acoustic gigs prior to last April sitting down. The problem I found with it was the balance of the guitar, I couldn't hold the guitar in a comfortable enough position to play it as well as my own. I did OK with it though.

When it came to playing my own songs I decided not to put the 'Dani California' bit into A Lonely Night. (If you haven't heard the song, after I realised that I blatantly copied the tune in the verse off Dani California from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I decided to be even more cheeky with it and put the chorus to their song just before the last chorus to mine.) Tonight it was because I'd only just played Zephyr Song, and I didn't want to put 2 Red Hot Chili Peppers songs next to each other. But thinking about it, as I'm doing mainly covers at the moment, putting another cover into one of my own songs... I don't know, the tongue-in-cheek humour intended might actually come across more like I'm taking the piss out of myself. I do far too much of that already!

I'm not sure if Sam appreciated me banging on his guitar during Bitterness, but he was clapping along to the appropriate part so that was good as well.

I'm still not too sure about Morning Glory; I played it solidly enough but I don't know whether Oasis has been done to death, or it's just the way I'm playing it because it isn't within my comfortable singing range (actually, very few things are!) I'll play it another few times to try and gauge it; it's a good enough song good and I need to give it a chance. Thankfully Never Forget You never fails to raise a smile, if not from the audience then from me and that's always a good thing!

So all things considered it wasn't a bad set, let down by my string breaking. I shouldn't have let that happen, but because I had some problems with the bridge pins afterwards, if I'd tried to change the strings before I came out then I wouldn't have come out at all. The audience... well, there were about as many people there as I might expect for an acoustic gig, and certainly more of them than some of the audiences I've played to when I've actually been booked to play, but because of the layout of the room, their reaction was difficult to gauge. I did get a couple of guys afterwards though, telling me that I do the 'Angry Young Man' thing very well! As they weren't actually playing themselves, it meant a lot to hear that for people who were just there to see the open mic!

What's next? I think Rich Sadler's doing an jam night for the first time at the Blue Brick in Brierley Hill next Tuesday, so I'm going to go along to that and see what he's got going on down there. I've played there before with The Fakes, and on my own as well if you count the time when the Fakes had actually finished and I got my acoustic guitar out and played a couple of Oasis songs I didn't really know the words to to a few people who's last one should have been about an hour and a half ago, who were only too happy to fill in the words for me.

Let's hope this one stays a little more sober!

Matt

Fly Away On The Pied Piper, 21/6/2013

Having developed a very good working relationship with Sam Draisey over the time I’ve been gigging acoustically, it was always a matter of when, not if, I would turn up to one of his open mics. It seems a lot of the regular ones I used to do had moved on, and for this reason I found myself playing in Cannock for the first time at the Pied Piper…

The crowd wasn’t huge; there were I think about 9 people in the room all night including Sam, but that isn’t exactly unknown and I’ve played to smaller crowds than that with a full band! This being the 21^st of June and with the weather being reasonably nice, Sam surmised a lot of people who would normally come to the pub and listen to some music have got all their barbeques out and stayed at home, and why not? It’s not like we’ve had all that much sun this year. Plus, smaller crowds give me the opportunity to mess around with the set a little bit, since I have a presumption in those cases that there is less at stake.

Speaking of which, here was the set:

• Morning Glory
• Zephyr Song
• Go Mr Sunshine
• Storm from the North
• Hall of Mirrors

The first three were the three songs I learned for when I started gigging again, and what I found was that playing them in my bedroom and playing them in front of a microphone are two very different experiences. Given how low my voice needs to be to effectively sing all three songs, I’m not convinced I was cutting through too well; what sounded good at home I think sounded rather weak. That having been said, I got through them all well enough and with few mistakes.

I think, of the three, I probably played Zephyr song the best. That’s an interesting one to cover, since the Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics that I’ve heard tend to be quite abstract, that is to say the songs appear to be about everything and nothing at the same time. So, because I can’t say for definite what I think the song is about, I find it harder to remember the words because I’ve got nothing to give context to the song! I ended up doing it in the end by looking at each individual line, picking out the noun from it and picturing the image in my mind, that would help me remember the words. E.g:

“Can I get your hand to write on,

Just a piece of lead to bite on,

What a night to fly my kite on

Do you want to flash your light on?”

I picture a hand, a lead rod, a kite and a flashlight. That helps me to remember what’s supposed to be in each line, so even though the song appears to be somewhere between an acid trip and complete bollocks, I can at least sing it!

Following it up with Storm from the North was a wise move, because I found for the first time that night I actually sounded like I meant it. I’d never even played that song on my new guitar so I had no idea what was going to happen. I remembered all the words OK, although I fluffed the chords at some point and made horrendous error of calling myself on the mistake straight away. But of all the songs I played that night that was probably the best one. Funny how I learned a bunch of cover songs, but it’s my own stuff that’s arguably going down better, simply because I’m playing it better!

After some good-natured Britain’s Got Talent-style piss-taking from the friends of one of the other lads who played that night, I played Hall of Mirrors by the Distillers. I love the song, but it is my thing to try to capture the essence of the song on an acoustic guitar and with that particular song I reckon I’ve always fallen short of the mark. Then again I don’t think I’ve played it at all for two and a half years, which probably had a lot to do it.

Now I might come across as a little hard on myself at this point, and I don’t think it was exclusively because I was playing covers because thinking about it, the covers I played a couple of weeks ago at the Copcut Elm actually went reasonably well. But as I’d known how to play both Boys of Summer and Never Forget You for 1-2 years by then, it was a different matter entirely. And both of those songs were new once as well. My point is while I don’t think I played Morning Glory, Zephyr Song or Go Mr Sunshine particularly effectively this time, that doesn’t mean I never will. I’ve just got to keep playing them because I’m going to learn more from doing that than I ever will from playing those songs in my bedroom.

This is with the possible exception of Go Mr Sunshine, which I think will lose something without the backing vocals no matter how well I play it.

So it was a valuable experience, if not my best performance. I probably won’t experiment that much again in front of anyone other than Sam, and even then it would only be in a smaller setting like that, because at all other times I need it to work

Not sure what’s coming next, I’ll see what’s going down next week…

 

(Copyright to the Lyrics to Zephyr Song belongs to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and are published on this blog with no permission whatsoever.)

Hardly A Lonely Night at the Copcut Elm, 9/6/2013

So after a long break that I made no secret about, I decided to make the first night I played live for myself again at the Open Mic Night at the Copcut Elm. I've been to the place before and did a 'battle of the acoustic artists' style gig there, I didn't get through but it's probably the fairest I've ever had one decided. That was a couple of years ago. Quite why I felt I had to go all the way to Droitwich to start gigging again was a matter of timing rather than design, but it was a largely unfamiliar crowd - I'd only met the promoter Ben Vickers before - so it was a good a place as any to see how it got on. The people were a bit thin on the ground to begin with, but by the time I went on there were about 40 people in the room so that was good.

The setlist (quite long for an open mic!) was:

• Boys of Summer
• Get Out Of My Head
• Bitterness
• Never Forget You
• A Lonely Night

However that was not the original plan. I had wanted to go down there and play three songs I've never played live before, all covers. I spent the entire car journey singing all three songs to practice them, but I hadn't even got halfway through the first verse to the first song when I forgot the words. More practice needed on that one, I think!

I played the rest of the songs well though, and pulled it back. One or two people were singing along to Boys of Summer, which is always a nice feeling. I'm still in debate about whether or not to sing the first verse of Get Out Of My Head without the guitar, tonight I chose to do exactly that and it was quite an experience when I got to near enough the end of the verse and the entire bar had fallen silent listening to me. That's what I've missed about playing live!

Other highlights? Getting to play A Lonely Night was a welcome but unexpected bonus, and someone out one of the other bands that was on after me told me that she thought Bitterness was hilarious. I told the story before I played the song about the profile I found on the dating site which inspired the song, and I think giving it a bit of context helps, though I should be careful how often I do this. I'll only get away with it as long as people are listening to me.

It's a balance, thinking about it. On one hand, when I have the audience engaged, it can really work to give my songs context, to give the audience some idea of what I'm singing about. On the other hand if I do it too many times I'll deprive the set and therefore the audience of any momentum, so I should probably do it only once every couple of songs. It would be worth planning in advance what I'm going to say about what song, and at what point in the set they are going to come up.

Anyway, after a shaky start, that was not a bad return at all, and I am going to check out a new Open Mic at the Pied Piper in Cannock on Friday so we'll see how that goes down.

See you all there!

Matt