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.

November Gigs

Once again I find myself behind in my blogs, and I've got a whole months worth of gigs to talk about and another two to go. Trying to blog them all individually would of course be more work than fun, apart from anything else some of it was weeks ago and I literally can't remember what happened, so I'm just going to give a quick run down of each one:

5/11/11: The Royal Oak, Amblecote: Another Prickly gig, thanks to Joy for booking me for this one! My guitar actually doesn't sound too bad through an amp. Didn't play so well, unfortunately. I think probably I was distracted with the thought of the fireworks display that I was going to afterwards, and I was on first which would never be my, ahem, 'first' choice. It wasn't bad... but by no stretch of the imagination was it my best one. I said to Amy afterwards, I think I was mistaken in my assumtion that I can play a reasonable show (I did Katies a couple of weeks before,) not play my guitar for a week and a half and expect to be able to play just as good a show when I get it out again. Something to remember for the future, though it will be a while before my next scheduled acoustic gig.

6/11/11: 82s at Just Kroozin Fundraising Event, Four Ashes: Nearly forgot about this one! This was the time where we were trying out our new bass player West. He seems to fit the bill OK and having the keyboards there does fill out the sound quite a bit. We played OK, as ever I did make some mistakes but I was rather more concerned about being upstaged by Almost Easy who were on before! Terrific fundrasing event to raise money for research into Lukemeia, so I was glad to have been a part of it, though it was freezing cold!

12/11/11: The Wharf Bar, Walsall: Regular readers of my blog will know that it is a rare time indeed when I speak kindly of The Wharf Bar. There's never usually anyone there, the whole place smells of sick (which comes from the canal, by the way; it's not actually their fault) and the only people to watch me tend to be the other bands who are either leaving the venue or counting down the minutes until it's their turn to go on. Quite often, the best I can say about it is that at least they do still book me for gigs. So imagine how pleased I was when not only were the modest audience actually listening to me and, as they told me afterwards, enjoying it, but I actually found myself enjoying it as well! That was certainly the best I'd ever played at the Wharf Bar, I've got another one there on the 10th so I'm actually looking forward to it. That's almost unheard of!

16/11/11: 82s: Cover Band Showcase in Cannock: We have - not a deal - but a good working relationship with some booking agents in the area, who invited us to play this showcase to several booking agents who may or may not want us for gigs in the future. We got all our big guns out, which were Word Up, Trick Me and Sound of the Underground. Quite far removed from what we orignally put the band together to do, and I think there is a concern that it's not representative of the set, so you may see some changes with this in the future.

22/11/11 Recording Christmas Song with Sam Draisey: Sam's putting together another Christmas album of original material and I went up today to record mine. I hadn't rehearsed it nearly enough and I know it, the guitar took a few goes, but my vocals I did pretty much in one take. I don't know whether I like the song or not; it's hardly full of Chirstmas Cheer and lyrically it's very lazy, there isn't a single line I haven't copied off someone, not least of whom myself! Still, it will hopefully work for the album, and it will be interesting to see what the other guys come up with this time.

So, there you have it! Aki Maera's first gig is coming up next Wednesday, which will be... interesting. See you all there!

Gigs from 26/8 to 5/9

So this is by far the busiest I have ever been with gigging. I count it 10 in 11 days, and to be perfectly honest blogging up a track-by-track review of all of them would be far more work than it would be fun, even if I could remember what we played! So what I'm going to do instead is give a brief run-down of what they were, where they were, and how it all went down...

26/8/2011
It all started on what I can only describe as a soggy afternoon at the Pulse Festival, just North of Coven, with Natasha and the 82s. This was a relatively short set for us, only 10 songs. I was suffering from having not long changed my guitar strings, and it kept going out of tune in the weeks running up to it and had only just began to settle; not helped by the fact that I hit the thing rather hard! The highlights of the set were definitely Word Up and Sound of the Underground, where I pump up the gain and really let loose on the guitar. The mistakes were there and we knew it, but it was our first gig so we weren't going to be too hard on ourselves.

27/8/2011
The following day I was at The Malt Shovel in Great Barr, playing a Summer Jam festival organised by the Kiesters Brown who I'd met in Stafford a few months before. Lots of summer festivals! There was a distinctly 'British' feel to this one, i.e. it was pouring it down with rain. The festival also suffered from a few pull-outs, so there was quite a bit of time between bands which meant I didn't get to see them all and unfortunately I missed the Kiesters. My set went OK, not the most inspired I've ever felt while playing a gig but my song order was by then becoming quite predictable. That being said, it's the best feeling in the world to see your own lyrics being sung back to you while you're playing, and as a lot of the guys with the Kiesters had seen the video of me that we did in Stafford Uni, a lot of the guys knew my songs already! On the downside, I've really got to stop tapping my foot while I'm doing A Little Respect. It hurts after a while!

28/8/2011
After band practice with Aki Maera we went down to Katies to play their summer festival, and despite it happening in the upstairs bar because the downstairs area was flooded, I actually had a really good time with this one. I almost reversed my setlist, instead opening with Girl's Names (I can play it well enough now to put on a far more convincing performance) and enjoyed it a lot more for all that. Also Dale recorded me singing Wide Open Space, and Amy recorded me singing Girl's Names, so there might be a couple of you-tube videos and a duet with Dale in the runnings before too long...

31/8/2011
That was supposed to be it until Friday but it turns out Emma wanted to book me for the Sunflower Lounge again due to another pull-out. I remember feeling very morose for this one because my mouth was in searing pain, and I adjusted my setlist to put all my miserable songs in there. It actually worked quite well because there was some semblance of consistency in my set, and it was nice to play Dear Mr Manager again; I don't often play it but it fit the bill for tonight. I asked the audience at the end whether they wanted a fast song or a slow song to finish off, somebody said 'fast' and I brought it to a close with Bitterness, a good decision because it always goes down well, Mitch liked it and so did the other guy who played that night!

2/9/2011
Another 82s gig, this one was at the Sneyd Inn and was pretty much our first full gig. It went OK, we were playing the songs better than we did the Friday before. There were booking agents there who were giving us some very useful feedback, for which I am grateful, but there are other things to sort out. For a start, if Rich and Sue are going to do a Name That Tune thing before we start the song, it would really help if they tell me and Jarv first, because if your own band doesn't know what you're playing it doesn't bode well for anybody else. But there were a few people there who really enjoyed what we were doing so if nothing else, I know we're playing the right songs very well. Hopefully there'll be a keyboard player pretty soon as well...

3/9/2011
A quick note about Open Mic UK: I was scheduled to audition, and if I pretend that the reason I didn't was for anything other than I didn't get up early enough I'd just be kidding myself. But, given that I had a slot booked at Codfest for 3.20pm, I'd parked my car at completely the wrong end of the NEC and I didn't really owe those guys anything (quite the other way round in fact, given that I had to pay to enter,) I ended up walking out.

So, Codfest. Easily the best of the summer festivals I played for all these two weeks. Sam and his friends had really done a good job getting it all sorted out, and the festival was the most enjoyable day I'd had for a long long time. My set was good; no one is going to go mental for an acoustic set but it was easily the largest number of people I'd ever played to in one gig, and the amount of them who came up to me afterwards and said they'd really enjoyed it was astounding; something I'm really not used to on that scale! I also did a couple of slots at the 'Busk Stop,' singing Disney songs of all things and getting other people up to sing with me, which was a very nice feeling indeed. At the end of the day it had all been one massive party; all the artists were good, everyone knew each other and got on reasonably well so there was no trouble, it was a whole music scene inside one field and one very large group of people that appreciated it. Long may it continue, and well done to everybody involved.

4/9/2011
This gig I was supporting Gwyn Ashton at The Foundry in Dudley. Nice to do a home-town show at last! For me at least there was a feeling of What Goes Around Comes Around, as Gwyn had jammed on bass with Jack's Legacy years ago at The Broadway while they were waiting for me to turn up, and five years later I'm supporting him. I'm also seeing a lot of Emma in In Between Seas, which is hardly surprising as we know the same promoters. It was a good gig all in all, I was probably the least technically able of all the guitarists who played that night but none of them deliver their songs with quite as much venom as I do with Bitterness, once I'd played that the gig was mine for the 20 minutes or so I had left. Only drawback really was the fact that I'd shouted myself hoarse at Codfest the previous day, and it came across in my singing. Oh, and by the way, if you get a chance to go and see Gwyn Ashton play, for God's sake do it. He is incredible.

5/9/2011
I wrapped it up with a trip to Katies with the intention of doing Wide Open Space with Dale. He wasn't there, but it's surprising how much of the Katies crowd I have a friendly familiarity with now. All things considered singing Man That You Fear by Marilyn Manson wasn't one of my better moves as it really hurt my throat, but I also gave them Bitterness and We Will Survive, and the guys I spoke to afterwards reckon it sounded pretty good.

So there you have it. Busy busy, but let's be honest, this is what I wanted all along, being able to gig every night. It'll probably slow down a bit now the summer is behind us, but hey, I'll keep doing gigs every week, and there's talk of a recording coming up soon as well so we'll see how that goes, it's about time I got a CD out!

11/7/2011 Natasha and the 82's at Boney Hay Working Men's Club

Just realised I haven't blogged anything about my new band at all...

OK Natasha and the 82's came about as an idea from a former Crashpoint member Richard Shepherd. He's known Natasha, a popular pop/soul/motown singer, for some time, and wanted to try putting a band together for her to perform with. The 82's are therefore Rich on the bass guitar and musical director, myself on guitar and Jarvo on the drums. Over the last couple of months we've been rehearsing a lot of pop songs over the last few decades. The songs we play and the instrumentation of the band allows me to inject our own style into the covers - we can't accurately produce a horn sound with bass, drums and guitar, but we can play the relevant parts as guitar solos instead, or turn up the effects on the bass to fill out the sound if need be. Last Monday we tried them on a stage and in front of a modest audience to see what we sound like on a stage (which is invariably significantly different from how it sounds in a studio, and we know it!)

Being in the band has improved my guitar playing a lot, for a couple of reasons: First, I've had to learn a hell of a lot of songs very quickly, which always does wonders for your playing. And also, this is the first band I've been in for a long time where the members are better than me. Rich and Jarvo are far better at bass and drums respectively than I am at playing guitar, which means I've got to deal with them differently and up my game in order to keep up with them. I'm saying this mainly by comparison to Cj from Aki Maera - granted, he's better on the drums than I will ever be, but there's not much we can take from each other any more. Not being funny, but we were in Crashpoint together for two and a half years; by the time it broke up either we'd learned everything we're going to learn from each other or we'd learned nothing. Playing in the band with Jarvo, who is quite possibly the best drummer I've ever worked with, and Rich, who's one of the better bass players and also has a very clear idea of what he wants his band to sound like, has forced me to be far more disciplined in my playing.

In spite of all this, I didn't honestly feel up to the 'mock gig' we did last Monday. Granted, I practice a lot less than I should, but the fact that we've not been a band for very long at all means that I don't think we're quite there yet with band cohesion. We're still looking at each other far too often for cues, and sometimes in my case chords if I don't know the song too well. The term 'set-list' was severely misapplied to what eventually happened, which was basically we played the songs in whatever order we felt like. There were some mistakes with setting up the sound, which it took some feedback from the audience to rectify.

That being said, kudos to Rich for setting up an environment where we could get away with it, and we did manage to play most of the songs we'd planned to do without stopping and wondering how it goes. (In actual fact this only happened once as I tried to remember how to do Ain't Nobody!) We did receive some very positive feedback from people who were genuinely enjoying themselves as we played. The point of tonight, I feel, was to see how it sounded live and come up with some development points for the band. Probably the most significant ones are:

1. Reduce the volume; there's no need to blow the roof off with this sort of music,
2. Top and tail the songs so that we know where all the endings are without having to look at each other,
3. Come up with a workable set list that will stand the test of a few gigs.

That last one I think will come with gigging experience as much as anything else, because we won't know what works and what doesn't until we've done it; that's part of the reason I keep this blog. But it does tend to get changed around a lot and that needs to calm down before we hit the road properly. We are what we are - a developing band that's still finding it's feet; we're not quite there yet but I'm sure we'll get there soon.

I'll keep you posted!