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.)