May 2015: Gigs with the Revisted, Singing Improvements and a Ukulele...

May was a busy – and as it turns out rather affluent – month for me in terms of gigs and music. Here’s how it all went down:

As I mentioned last month, I did a couple of gigs with The Revisited Covers Band while they look for a new permanent bass player. We played shows in the Rock and Fountain in Shrewsbury, and The Western in Leicester. They were good gigs and we were reasonably well-received, however I don’t enjoy playing in covers bands enough to want to commit to The Revisited on a mid-long term basis. It was fine with NQA as we’re all friends anyway, but with the Revisited, I barely know them; it’s a lot of the same covers I played with the previous band, and many more songs that I haven’t got enough investment in to want to commit to learning. I’ll be available as dep bass player if they need me, if not, it was a reasonable way of getting some gigs, so thanks to the band for the opportunity.

I've actually been forgetting to do this a lot just lately,
here's my #viewfromthestage at the Newhampton
Inn earlier in the month.

I am aware that I’m shooting myself in the foot a little bit here because it sounds like covers bands aren’t really my thing, which is true. I’m at the point now where I need something else to keep me engaged. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I was friends with the lads in NQA anyway, and there was a certain amount of fun and regularity with the gigs that made me want to stay with the band long after we’ve essentially stopped being one. And as I talked about last month, there is a certain creative element in The Fakes where we have to work the songs we play around our own limitations of gear and musicianship in order to play the songs we want to play; jamming those songs is actually really good fun. So, as long as there is something else going on to keep me engaged, I don’t mind being in covers bands – but I wouldn’t want to be in one for its own sake.

I also mentioned last month that I was doing a gig with Ellie Hawthorne. It was in the interlude of a quiz night and it went reasonably well, if a little rushed in terms of setting up. However, it did give me an insight into how well my voice has improved over the last year. We played I See The Light, which if you remember was the song that inspired me to pick up the singing lessons in the first place. And I was hitting all the high notes with little to no strain on my voice. I was up to a high G at one point; I’d never have been able to do that at this time last year. So, thanks to Ellie for inspiring me to take up the lessons, and thanks to Vie for teaching me. It’s working!

I’ve also started to play the Ukulele…

Now, I’m not fond of the Ukulele sound at all. I prefer deep and powerful sounds to high scratchy ones; probably one of the reasons I developed an intense dislike of indie music circa last decade. However, I attended a staff meeting with DPA at the early part of the month, where we were joined by our colleagues from Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton, and there was a representative from Birmingham there as well. During the day, data on the popularity of the instrument was brought to our attention, and I’m pretty sure all the other music services are running Uke groups. When I found out later in the month that a student that I will hopefully be taking on next year wants to play Ukulele, I decided that DPA can ill afford to ignore the demand and bought a Ukulele from Stourbridge. I will teach myself to play it over the summer, and hopefully teach others to play it when I return to work in September.

However, I did find myself thinking that now that I have a Ukulele, what if I did like it? What would that sound like? So that’s something I’m going to develop over the next few months.

See you all again in July!

April 2015: New Gigs, NQA's Last Gig and Developing Songs with The Fakes

This month I’ve had much of my time taken up with quite an intense, whirlwind relationship with somebody. Sadly, it didn’t work out in the end, but we’re all still friends and I managed to fit some music around it as well.

The Old Crown, with one of the I think 20 people I know
called Dave sticking his head round the corner.

I had a couple of new gigs: The first was at The Old Crown in Digbeth. I don’t know what it is about playing in Birmingham, or maybe it was because I had some friends coming who hadn’t seen me before, but it made me feel like the stakes were slightly higher that night. I pulled out all the stops and I think I played very well, I certainly made enough of an impression for a re-booking in June. I did take one piece of advice from one of the friends who had come to see me: I’d played Yesterday Went Too Soon by Feeder, because Feeder are the best band in the world and everybody should listen to them. My friend told me that I was really struggling to hit the high notes on that one, and I had to admit she was right. Since then, I’ve played it with the capo on the second fret rather than the third, and it does feel better. (By the way, I know it’s actually on the fifth fret with the guitar tuned down to D, but as it the capo makes the tuning irrelevant anyway I decided long ago that I couldn’t be arsed to re-tune.)

The other one was The Fox and Anchor in Coven. After driving straight past it and checking my phone for the location, I found it to be a pleasant and friendly place to play, and it does food as well. I wasn’t feeling my best that night but I was glad I was able to come out and perform as it always puts me in a good mood when I do well at a gig. I didn’t do anything I hadn’t done before – it was only arranged that afternoon – but I enjoyed it and it was a good ending to what was for me not a very good weekend.

If we're going to go out, it might as well be to a Hen party.
Wait...

No Questions Asked played what will almost certainly be our last gig at The New Wellington in Brierley Hill, with Rich Sadler on vocals, guitar and bass. It was a good night, we played well and had a really good time. I think I timed my view from the stage picture well, as at one point we were joined by a hen party. Another song later and they’d all have disappeared! I’m still technically with the band but all we’re doing at the moment is a jam night on the last Tuesday of every month. Fred, Luke and Dave are keeping busy with various other projects, and Rich is playing in his band The Rollers.

It’s not very often that The Fakes do anything that I’ll shout about on this blog, but I’m actually quite liking the way the band is developing at the moment. There are certain songs that we would like to do, but because of the limits of the instruments and the capability of the band, we can’t actually do them anything like how they sound on the record. For example, we went through several Kasabian songs before we started doing Fire, and that quickly became one of our favourite songs to play. I play the keyboard melodies on my guitar using as many effects as possible, and we capture the essence of the song while injecting it with the attitude of the band. Given that many covers bands won’t touch Kasabian because they haven’t got a keyboard player, I think we can count that as an achievement.

This time, we’ve managed to re-imagine The Chain by Fleetwood Mac. This didn’t start out too well, and I added the peculiar tuning and finger-picking lick at the start to the ever-growing list of things I can’t be arsed with. But when the rest of the band went out for a cigarette, I tried it again using what I thought was a Rage Against The Machine-style single-note riff, but Steve reckons sounds more bluesey than anything else. This worked, and gave the song a new lease of life. We’re still working through the backing vocals, but it’s done the band a lot of favours, as we’re working through a lot more new songs now than we have done for years. We might not always be able to replicate the records, but we now have the confidence to work around it. Let’s hope we get to play them live soon!

I’ve got a few things coming up next month including depping on the bass for The Revisited Covers Band, and playing a show with my old friend Ellie Hawthorne. Always looking forward to it!

Matt and Ellie Don't Stop Believing at the Hare and Hounds, Lye 4/5/2013

One question that I don't get asked very often at all, but I wish I did, is: Do you miss being in a band?

To clarify the position, it's been nearly a year and a half since I've gigged with a band on anything like a regular basis, and that was a joint effort between Natasha and the 82s and Aki Maera that meant I was doing roughly one gig a month. Contrast this with, say, this time four years ago when I was very busy with Crashpoint to the degree of a couple of gigs a month at least, and before that with Jack's Legacy where we'd try at least one a month to keep the momentum going, and you can see why it's easy enough to forget that I am, actually, still with The Fakes - which averages out about one gig a year in this day and age.

Either way, the answer is: I do and I don't.

What I miss most about being in bands is this: it's basically all I've ever wanted to do with my life. I know that, at 27, I should have left the 'Rock Star' dream behind a long time ago, and I'm aware of others thinking the same about me even if they don't say it. And even though the day I give up on it completely will be a very sad day for me indeed, when I consider what I'm doing with myself these days - guitar teaching, war gaming, role playing, my girlfriend - even I have to admit that it might be a little too late. So, the only thing I've ever really wanted to do with my life is out of my reach, probably forever. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy doing what I'm doing now. It's just that teaching guitar to kids in schools is about as good for me as it is ever going to get. Not what I wanted to be saying at 27. So I do miss being in bands because that was what kept that dream alive.

However, a lot happened during the last week to remind me of some of the things I don't miss about being in a band. Last Sunday (28/4) an old friend Ellie Hawthorne put out a call on Facebook asking if anyone would play guitar for her on Saturday night, which I answered. Over the course of the next few days, the following happened:

• Ellie sent me a list of songs she wanted to play. There were 11 songs on this list. I knew one of them. Of the others, two of them were by Paramore - and I used to be quite vocal about my intense dislike of that band, if I am a little more cryptic about the reasons for it. It's personal. But I was not going to spoil it for her by refusing to play them. It's certainly not the first time I've sold out!
• No problem, I thought. If I learn roughly 3 per day and we can get together for a rehearsal then it should be OK. I had learned all of them except one by Wednesday evening when Ellie messaged me again saying it was off because she had to work. (At least, I think that's what she said, but she left out the word 'work' from the message, which thinking about it could potentially have been any verb conducive to the general effect of not being able to do the gig.)
• Thursday night she messaged me again telling me it was back on and could I do it? Well, I'd lost two days practice by then, since I was busy that evening, but there should be no reason I couldn't give it a go. So I said yes, and we'd have to arrange a time for a rehearsal possibly the following afternoon? Ellie couldn't make it because she was working. Fair enough; I've not forgotten what it was like to have shifts on appallingly unsociable hours. We'd just have to wing it on the day.
• 10 minutes later - count them, 10 - my Mom told me that my brother was coming home for the weekend and we were all supposed to be going out for a meal on Saturday night. Sometimes the word 'bollocks' just doesn't cover it. They did at least say that I could do the gig and I didn't have to worry about the meal, but it wasn't a decision I wanted to have to make.
• Finally learning the songs on Friday Night, I went to the gig and found that when Ellie said we were on at 6pm - and this is perhaps the strangest part of all - we were actually on at 6. The result was that I had finished by 6.45, and even though I'm not in the habit of disappearing straight after a gig, I did that day and managed to go for dinner with my family after all.

It took me straight back to being in bands. I remember being stressed out of my mind having to play gigs we weren't even close to being ready for, having to re-arrange shifts at work in order to be able to do it, and deal with fucking arsehole band-mates who would duck out of it at a moments notice leaving me to either re-arrange it or manage without them. You know who you are. And somehow that responsibility almost always fell on me, especially with Crashpoint and Jack's Legacy. I don't miss that at all.

Now so far this post will have come across to many of you as cynical and negative, so let me make one thing absolutely crystal clear: I have no bad feeling towards Ellie at all for what happened in the week. I am delighted she gave me a chance to play live again, and I really did enjoy the gig when we were doing it, more on that later. In fact, I think the fact that I fought tooth and nail to make it happen is indicative of a) how much I wanted to do it, and b) how much I've missed gigging and not realised. So, on the whole it is good to be back.

One of the things that made the gig for me was my new guitar; a Hofner Electro-Acoustic. I'd been saying for years I needed to retire the old Hondo, and now I can plug in a guitar and save all that tedious mucking about with that pickup. Both are there if I need them, but now I have an electro-acoustic that sounded better than I could have possibly imagined. (I had played it before but never plugged it in.) I think what was conducive do this was the fact that I left the pre-amp alone, and let the sound guys do their thing. Sometimes electro-acoustics don't sound all that good, either woolly or abrasive, but mine sounded OK and that was because I decided I'd leave all my EQ controls at a flat level (which is 5, by the way,) increase the volume of the guitar until sound was coming out of the PA and let the sound guy boost the treble and bass if they needed to, which I'm not sure they did. The result was a sound that as far as I could tell was as clear as it needed to be, without getting in the way of the vocals. I'm not saying I'll never mess with my EQ, but after all, the sound guys know what they're after, and I'm usually happy with a sound...

The set list was:

Journey: Don't Stop Believing
Ally and AJ: Someone To Fall Back On
Paramore: The Only Exception
Taylor Swift: Love Story
Adele: Someone Like You
Demi Lovato: Skyscraper
Miley Cyrus: The Climb
McFly: Love Is Easy
Jeff Buckley: Hallelujah
Paramore: Still into you

And then Ellie finished off with an a'capello version of Rolling In The Deep.

It took a couple of songs to pick up momentum, I think, not least because we started with the two I was least sure about, but considering we hadn't practiced any of them before, or even met in person for almost a year and a half, it went as well as I could have expected. There were mistakes, of course - sometimes I'd play the song incorrectly, sometimes Ellie would come in a little sooner than I was expecting - but we managed to pull it back together quickly and we at least ended all the songs together! I think - and I'm not sure, because I wasn't really concentrating on the reaction from the crowd - that The Climb went down the best. Nobody ever went wild for us, but I didn't expect them to. It was what it was - an event in the beer garden of a pub; the crowd only ever half-listens to you and I was prepared for that. I thoroughly enjoyed playing and I could get in to the role as the side-man again; with all the attention on someone else I can do what I want.

So, am I back now? Yeah, I guess so. There were things I wanted to do before this happened. I wanted to lose some weight, but I've been careless and not done it. I wanted to write some new songs but I've not come up with anything particularly memorable yet. But I will try and hit a few open mics in the coming weeks, and see what happens. I might even try one the week I'm in Swindon.

See you all again soon. And thanks for your patience.