Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Music, music and more music...and strawberries (Mmm)

After last night’s miserable failure to rebuild the studio after the visit to Ian Sclater’s on Sunday with the “Crispycat Mobile Facility”, I vowed to do it tonight. And I did…and it was good.

I then worked on the first two of five of Ian’s songs I learned on Sunday. My brief is to produce initial backing tracks that we can use next Sunday. I spent two hours on this, managing a backing track for “Back on the Good Earth” which consisted of just two acoustic guitars, and another which is not quite right yet. I added a quick CBQ vocal to “Good Earth” just to see what it sounded like with a vocal and it was quite good, if I might say so myself.

Then I went downstairs to watch “CSI” but Anne was already watching “Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee” and advised she was taping “CSI”.

So I made us some tea and dished out the strawberries and went back upstairs and proceeded to write the now 10 days overdue review of 05/05/05’s Out of the Bedroom. This took two hours.

It was a disappointing effort as I was struggling to actually remember what anyone had sounded like and it was a bit of a chore to do (ha I remember back to when I did the reviews regularly, I used to really enjoy doing them, even though I’d sometimes take up to four hours to write them).

This will probably be my last review – it just takes too much time and you have to endure the entire evening, no matter how good or bad the performances are (as it turned out, on 05/05/05 there were only a couple of duffers). But it’s a horrible smoke filled room that makes your clothes stink – roll on the smoking ban!! Better to get in, do your set and get home again not too late….

I got a surprise in the post today. A free copy of the new Peri Urban CD “Sugar Junkie”. Peri is the moniker of my old chum Stewart Robinson. I first met Stewart in 1983 when his cat had kittens and we took the runt of the litter. We called her Crispy.

In the mid eighties we had a band called The Dancers of San Martino – we nearly got signed to Virgin but they took on Danny Wilson and The Big Dish instead – more fool them of course.

In the late nineties I recorded around four CDs of purely improvised electronic music with Stewart, in fact our first improvised collaboration from 1996 was the first CD to use the name Cloudland Blue Quartet for my work.

Anyway, I digress – the CD is very good. I didn’t even know he was working on it and it arrived completely out of the blue. He used to do Tangerine Dream like instrumental pieces, now he writes songs and sings them in a gruff American accent like a cross between Alice Cooper and Captain Beefheart. He really is a great musician and I don’t know anyone else who knows their way as well around music software on a computer – his productions put mine to shame (not hard I hear you cry). I need to try and convince him to get out of his house and up to OOTB to do a few songs….

Good on you Stu, I thought you’d retired.

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