Dave's Gig Guide
EMMA IV 31st May 1997
This event was our first live outing. Coincidentally, it also turned out to be the last in the short-lived series of concerts fronted by the EMMA organisation. I don't know if the two facts are related.
Mick Garlick, of Sequences Magazine, invited us to play this gig in around November 1996. I was thrilled to bits but there were some obstacles to overcome as well as some unexpected bear traps along the way.
Firstly my better half, Jules, was scheduled to have surgery on her knee in March 2007. This would render her immobile for a couple of weeks but the gig wasn't until the back end of May and so we figured we would have enough time to get her sorted out before the concert. Jules, being Jules, was up and moving around within 2 weeks and almost back to work by the start of May.
Secondly, there were some major issues with getting enough time off work, both to take care of the concert planning and to look after Jules in her recovery. I was consistently working stupid hours and the end result was that I was both tired, irritable and constantly fighting against the clock.
By 1997, the band had swelled from a solo outfit to 4 members - me on keyboards and studied weirdness, Jules on keyboards and samples, Dave Wilson on Guitars and Steve Summers on Saxophone and thumb piano. Dave Maughan was the engineer for The Infection of Time and I co-credited with myself and Steve Summers for the track Network of the Heart. Dave was, for a time, a notional 5th member of the band.
We settled down to a pattern of rehearsals and even managed to come up with some new material. There were some interesting experiments too. For effects, we tried some funky vocal stuff with my friend Olga speaking Russian dialogue over some weird sequenced backdrops. We also experimented with ambient, Berlin School and heavy rock in equal measure before settling on a format for the gig. I'd also been working on an ambient album called Ghost and although this project came to nothing in the end, I recycled some of the effects and weirdness into the EMMA set as well as later albums such as The Fabulous Neutrinos.
We split the gig into four sections, The Infection of Time (part 1), The Generator Suite, Steve's Bit and The Infection of Time (part 2).
I wanted to give the concert a definite structure, different sections that would reflect the band's evolution. For instance, Lovesong, The Infection of Time and Tranquillity Bass were all recorded years before the album was ever fully conceived. Network of the Heart and Storm Front came much later and so I decided to split the performance along those lines, leaving space in the middle for the new Generator tunes as well as a diversion from Steve, something that would create a break from the heavy, electronic stuff.
Dave Wilson produced some stunning guitar work for the gig. For instance, the bridge solo on Generator made quite a few jaws drop when he played it through the first time - a bluesy-rock mix of T-Bass and ZZ Top in equal measure. Equally, the rippling half tones produced for the middle 8 on Storm Front were just as memorable and really made the live version stand out.
Steve Summers set about recreating his complex, multi-tracked sax parts from Network of the Heart, a difficult task in that it was originally created by stringing together multiple edits over several sessions on Dave Maughan's computer. Steve managed the feat with ease.
And so time moved ever onwards. We were happy, settled and confident. But then the major bomb dropped.
Originally, T-Bass was known as Tranquillity Bass and how that happened is detailed elsewhere. However, we also knew of another Tranquillity Bass, which was the recording name of Mike Kandell, a Seattle-based musician signed to the Sony subsidiary, Astralwerks. I e-mailed Astralwerks in 1996 to see if there was a problem with our use of the name Tranquillity Bass. One of their minions replied and said that, as far as he knew, there wasn't.
About a month before the gig, an e-mail arrived from Mike Kandell's management. They hit us with a 'cease and desist' notice with respect to our use of the band name and, suddenly faced with a Transatlantic law suite, I went into a tailspin, a flat panic. The concert brochures and flyers had already been printed and suddenly we were being forced to change the name of the band. I told Mick Garlick and he couldn't believe it.
In the end, I contacted the National Band Register and the Musician's Union and they provided some very useful advice. However, both felt that we had to acknowledge that Mr. Kandell had a prior use of the name though they felt that the timing was more than coincidental. Astralwerks had been informed a year earlier so why wait until a month before a major gig? Welcome to the music business.
Hence, we agreed to change our name to T-Bass UK, something that I wasn't happy about but, hey ho, it's only a name. I wouldn't mind so much if Mr. Kandell had actually released something of merit in the last few years but he hasn't, as far as I know. Tranquillity Bass is just as dead as it was in 1997 when all of this kicked off.
With that mindless piece of nonsense out of the way, business returned to normal. As a band, we were well rehearsed and fairly tight. On the whole, we were pretty together as a group of people.
On the day of the performance, the atmosphere was pretty good, quite optimistic and very friendly. Two of our friends had travelled down to Derby to help out - Brian Field, who was our roadie and his wife, Ross, who offered to take care of our stall whilst we were busy elsewhere.
As the performance drew closer, we got ready to sound check and that's when I discovered the first of our technical problems - a fault with the MIDI Thru port on my Yamaha DX5, which I used for controlling all of the other modules in the rig. It had been working 10 minutes before when I'd hooked it all up. I know this to be absolutely true because the sound guy on the main desk still had ringing in his ears when I launched into an impromptu spot of Jan Hammer on the JD990 module.
To begin with, the stage manager, Stephan Whitlan, didn't look very amused when I told him that there was no way we could go on first, according to the schedule, because I couldn't get my bloody rig working. It was dead and the DX5 wouldn't trigger anything. I asked about borrowing another keyboard from Kinetic but they had their own problems and Becki Williams was all ready to go on so I couldn't blag one from her.
Following a spot of quick thinking, I ran out to the promotional area, grabbed our Power Macintosh, which we'd brought down as a way of running a little slide show at our sales desk, and set it up on a chair next to my rig. Ten minutes later, my set up was working, using the Macintosh as perhaps the most expensive MIDI Thru box you've ever seen. However, I was still rewiring our MIDI system as Becki Williams started her set.
Initially, I put the fault down to our over-efficient roadie, Brian, who I suspected had arsed up the cabling. Afterwards, Brian absolutely denied touching the keyboard or any of the other gear. Why would he? And I believe Brian because, as we were to discover later, this wasn't the first time that weird technical problems would affect our performances. In fact, it was the start of a disturbing trend.
This screw-up really affected our confidence and hence our performance. Frankly, I think that was the intention all along.
Back in our "green room", we were all standing around, whispering nervously. Now, in real life, Steve Summers is also a GP and he noticed that the toilet had become the centre of attention, with a queue forming every few minutes. Steve started to explain why we were all so keen to run off to the loo every few minutes. Yes, the answer is nerves - we knew that - but we didn't' really know the mechanics. Steve explained that they make your bladder contract, which means there's less room for the urine, which means you're always hunting for the nearest loo. We all sat around laughing at that one and it was a great way to relieve some of the tension. It still makes me laugh every time I remember the event today.
Outside, things were their usual chaotic self. I'd prepared a selection of slides to go with the performance but the guy manning the slide projector hadn't shown up and so Ross Field jumped in and learned to use the projector in less than 5 minutes flat. Very impressive!
The gig itself was good. I enjoyed it. There were a couple of minor fluffs during the set but they didn't detract from an enjoyable experience. Jules played the chords to Mariner in the wrong key (twice) and I went completely and utterly blank when it came to Tranquillity Bass but it was good fun. Dave had just bought a new guitar specifically for the performance, a Jackson Charvel, I think, which created a massive guitar sound that gave the set real balls and power. Steve contributed one of his own pieces, Sian, which began with a gentle thumb piano sequence and then kicked off into a delicious melody which was completely off at a tangent to all of our other material.
We also debuted three new T-Bass pieces - Generator, which we intended to be the title track of the second album, A Question of Time, and Nemesis, which later became Gazing at the Edge of Forever. All three had been written whilst Jules was in hospital.
I knew that Network of the Heart would be a tough one because Steve had to quickly change from an alto sax to a tenor sax and there was a risk he'd fumble it but he didn't. He did go off onto a minor tangent but we'll put that down to nerves.
We finished with a rocked-up version of Storm Front, with Dave adding huge power chords and that massively impressive middle 8 half tone solo. We went out with a bang with the audience asking for more but maybe not so loud.
After the gig, I spoke to John Christian and Peter Ruczynski of Air Sculpture who were very amused at the precarious way my priceless Kurzweil K2000 had been perched atop a cheap and cheerful keyboard stand and they were taking bets that the whole assemblage would come crashing down as soon as I launched into my Billie Currie impression. It didn't but I made sure that I upgraded that thing in time for our next gig. John and Pete enjoyed what we'd done on stage and even talked about getting together to work on a track at some point in the future. They really liked Mariner from "The Infection of Time" and this is still something I'd like to do one day.
It wasn't all roses though, and we had our critics on the day. One of the "gang of four" said that he thought that our set only got interesting when I launched into a Berlin School bridging-piece lasting little more than a minute. Typical bitchiness, frankly.
The chaos continued. Outside, in the sales area, one of the dealers had decided that he was going to incorporate our stand into his own and was more than reluctant to move, even though we'd just done our thing on stage and had a reasonable crowd standing around, waiting for autographs. A few ugly words were exchanged and, even though we were in the right, we still had to find an alternative table. Welcome to the music business.
Gradually, the fuss died down and the next act took to the stage, Kinetic I think.
Dave and Steve decided to head for home, I think because they both had other gigs to go to that night. Likewise, Brian and Ross skipped off and Jules and I sat back to reflect on the day's events. Jules wasn't at all happy that she'd made some mistakes and offered to leave the band but, hey, this was our first live gig and I expected some problems. I declined her offer.
We sold a fair number of discs that night and made a lot of new friends. The band were widely tipped to be the next breakout act, one of the few like Andy Pickford, Ian Boddy and Mark Shreeve deemed commercial enough to enter the mainstream music scene. I like to think that the EMMA gig helped us a little on that route though, as we were soon to discover, not everything would go according to plan.
Firstly, there was a post-gig post mortem carried out via the several internet newsgroups, in particular the now defunct Goldtri group. Firstly, we were slagged fairly mercilessly for the number of mistakes we apparently made. However, I checked the video of the performance Dave Gurr had given me and I was astonished to find that we were pretty darned accurate 95% of the time, which was especially surprising given that we were playing as much as we possibly could absolutely live. Secondly, we were accused of miming. We weren't. A few pad sounds, some special effects and the rhythm section were on backing but that's all. Truthfully. Finally, some of the critics were unhappy that we weren't playing any Berlin School stuff. That's because we don't do Berlin School stuff. We're not a Berlin School band. Never were, never will be.
This was my first real experience of the bitchiness and considered unpleasantness that some fans are capable of. Most of them honestly don't know what they want. It's your typical tabloid attitude - build someone up and then enjoy the whole process of tearing them to pieces, especially amongst the Berlin School/Tangerine Dream mob. They've never forgiven Edgar Froese for shaving off his moustache.
The audience - just 100 people - was disappointing, frankly, but in context it could have been much, much worse. After all, Kraftwerk had played at the Tribal Gathering the week before the EMMA concert and Jean-Michel Jarre was playing at the NEC the week after the EMMA concert. I think the poor attendance was down to unfortunate timing even though the line-up was quite strong. Previous EMMA festivals had focussed on big acts like Ian Boddy, Mark Shreeve, Andy Pickford and John Dyson and they were a terrific success. Imho, the whole scheme went horribly wrong with the third festival, which concentrated almost exclusively on Berlin School acts and the attendance immediately plummeted. It never recovered. I do know that the organiser took a major hammering financially, which is a massive shame because they went into the project with the best of intentions and got their fingers burned.