28-Jun-07: Local promoters II

Okay, so this is either the Universe playing some kind of perverse prank or a chance of a lifetime. Either way, I think it's best not to contemplate these events too seriously.

Last night, an e-mail from the afore-mentioned promoter dropped into my In-Box. It detailed a gig supporting Satellite Party at the Newcastle Carling Academy on July 5th. Satellite Party are rapidly gaining ground as one of the better live acts around and this gig is one leg of their current European Tour.

Whilst I am very flattered to be approached in this way, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed first. One listen to a couple of tracks from their current albums instantly lets you know that these guys are seriously out of our league. They're superb. Furthermore, we don't sound anything like them. Not even close. Then, of course, there's the issue of attempting to put together a gig, even a support slot, in less than a week.

Initially, I said "Yes!" and then began to regret the decision as soon as I'd pressed Send. Later, I sent a message to the promoter expressing my concerns that the deadline was too close. I've not received a reply yet and, frankly, I hope I don't. Speaking personally, I'm just not ready for this.

That said, I did sit down and work out a live set for both T-Bass and SkinMechanix plus I had a stab at sorting out a set list for Ion but that didn't go too well mainly beacuse they're not enough material from that camp to really go live. I intend to start rehearsing the T-Bass and SkinMechanix live sets on a weekly basis from now on, probably at weekends, so that by the time the winter gigging season kicks in, we'll be in a good place to get out there and start playing again.

 27-Jun-07: Local promoters

An email from a local promoter dropped into my In-Box this morning. This is just one of many and, as with his previous mailouts, he's inviting local bands to participate in a series of events he's attempting to organise, both locally and nationally. Fair enough. This is exactly what the music scene needs - proactive, goal-seeking promoters on the hunt for the next big thing in the ever evolving world of pop music.

Now, I've replied to his requests on several occasions, each time asking for the chance to play, even in a support slot but, alas, every request results in the standard brush off.

A support slot would be cool. Support slots are often looked down upon by bands as the domain of those not yet ready to climb to the heady heights of the top billing. However, from an artist's point of view, support slots are brilliant. Support slots gives you a chance to try out new material without anyone really noticing because the prime focus is usually on the headline act so, essentially, the pressure is off. Perhaps better still, the audience expectations are a little lower too so you can get away with making a right horse's arse of yourself without really screwing with your reputation.

So, a support slot would be peachey. Plus, it's been 6 years since T-Bass gigged in this part of the world so we're fresh to the scene and you might imagine that getting a gig would be easy. Well, it isn't. Not at all.

Why? Well, a variety of excuses have been given - the most recent was "I don't have anyone else to put on with you...", which sounds like a cop-out to me. The afore-mentioned promoter also seemed unconvinced that we play all of our instruments, with only the bare minimum going on backing. In fairness, he's probably been scared off by the legions of po-faced laptop bands currently doing the rounds and, frankly, I don't really blame him. If I wanted to watch three nerds messing about with a laptop, I'd go down to my local Cyber Cafe.

Hey ho. That's life.

Sometime in the next couple of days time I'll receive a follow-up e-mail, which will detail the bands set to appear at the advertised gigs and, as usual, neither T-Bass or SkinMechanix will appear. Simply put, we don't fit the current Indie band mould. We're all over 40 now, and it shows. We're no longer bright young things. We no longer have the look.

But given that indie/grunge has been with us for 17 years now, isn't it time the scene started to look around for something else? Isn't it time that the local music scene started to get over its obvious dislike and distrust of electronic bands which has been so manifestly obvious for more years than I feel comfortable admitting to?

 25-Jun-07: A gig...

Well, I did it. I actually did it. More correctly, I should say "Hey, We did it!".

Yeah, we actually went to a gig.

Big deal, you may say, and maybe you're right but you gotta start somewhere.

I can't remember the date of the last gig I went to. I remember the band very well. They were The Mosiacs and we realised that we were seeing something good within the first couple of songs. Judging by the band's recent success in a couple of national competitions, we weren't alone either.

Saturday's adventure involved a trip to The Caroline in Hetton Village to see My Latest Gadget. This isn't Jules favourite pub, mostly because it's a long way to walk (uphill) and the toilets don't have doors that lock. I like it because the landlord is keen to promote live bands and doesn't make a distinction between those who write their own material and those who play covers.

Saturday's set from My Latest Gadget was all covers with a fair selection of tracks from Alanis Morrisette, Susanne Vega et al - that sort of mid range, easy listening soft rock.

The drummer was good and solid and added a lot of nice flourishes and touches to the set with just a modest kit. The guitarists were exceptional, both of them, and played their instruments with a kind of effortless ease that made our jaws drop. However, the singer deserves special mention, mostly because I fell completely and utterly in love at first sight. I wondered if a marriage proposal during the half-time break would look uncool but frankly, I didn't care then and I don't care now if it looks uncool or what. I'm in love. She can't half sing too.

We'll be back up at "The Caroline" next weekend to see "The Mosiacs". Looking forward to it already.

 21-Jun-07: Another day, another album

Yesterday, I completed yet another milestone in the on-going music project - a demo disc featuring a collection of ambient and space tracks that I've been working on for the past couple of months. The true intention behind the disc was to find a new set of sounds and atmospheres for the next T-Bass and SkinMechanix albums and, to that end, it was sucessfull. I gave the disc a temporary title, "From the Tea rooms of Mars... to the mud baths on Callisto", which obviously indicates that it isn't a serious piece of work and, in truth, it may never see any life beyond the confines of these four walls. Indeed, I may never listen to it again. Ever. It's complete. Finished. Sorted.

Rather than get all misty-eyed and mindful of the passage of time, I can't wait to get down to work on the next project. Compare and contrast this new attitude with the rather sorry state of affairs very much in evidence this time last year.

About a year ago, I looked at the pile of DAT tapes lying around the studio and wondered if I would ever release an album again. I had writer's block and a bad case of it too. I just couldn't see or hear inspiration any more. I couldn't focus, couldn't motivate myself and, on the rare occasion when I could hear something in my head, I just couldn't get it out and into the big, wide world.

Then things got bad. I would avoid going into the studio. I would avoid talking about the studio. I would avoid thinking about the studio. I started to use the studio as a good place to store stuff, usually bits of sequencers and magazines, junk and the general detritis of home life. When I did go into the studio, it was to test a new instrument and that excercise became the reason for keeping the studio instead of just flogging the contents on eBay.

But I would also imagine all of the possibilities that I was missing out on - all of the concerts, the friends, the energy that comes from playing music, even if it's to just a handful of people in a seedy bar in Leeds. But, most of all, I missed the special feeling that comes from assembling a collection of unrelated fragments and building something entirely new, something that nobody on the planet has seen or heard before. That's a special feeling. You can't buy it, can't bottle it, can't sell it. If I was to get really deep and philosophical, I'd say something like "Only those that create know that feeling", but I don't want to disappear that far up my arse.

What changed? Well, I'm not entirely sure but I just decided, one day, that I'd had enough of the situation and that I needed to get back into the studio and start creating again. Otherwise, I would probably just degenerate into a shambling, scruffy mess, swigging from a beer bottle in a municipal park somewhere near you. I promised myself that, no matter what, I would just go into the studio once a day, switch on a keyboard, and just play the instrument. It took a major act of will power to do so and I resisted a great deal in the early days. I don't know why I resisted. Fear of failure? Fear of not being able to produce anything worthy of the time and effort? If you have an idea then please let me know.

It was something of an uphill struggle but the desire to create again was stronger and so here I am, a year later, looking at another finished disc and I'm happy. Very happy. Of course, there are also all of the other possibilties to consider. For instance, I have another element to add to my on-going library disc project. I can now make a fair old stab at doing space music. I can join the Ian Boddy's of the EM world and do weird stuff. Some of the new material could be classed as Berlin School or at least it has mildly teutonic leanings. Great. That's something else to add to the melting pot, another flavour in this musical Vindaloo.

But first, I have to go and archive off this disc, and the Ion disc too, which means deleting all of the old takes, rending temporary stuff down to just basic WAV files so that they don't take up so much disc space and finding somewhere safe to store everything in case I do need to go back to it. This bit sucks, because it takes so much time and it's time I want to dedicate to the new projects.

Hey ho.

You can't have everything... :)

 13-Jun-07: If I was...

I spent most of last weekend hopelessly lost in Midge Ure's biography If I Was? and, in many ways, it's the reason why this blog was revived. Whilst it's a good read and fills in a lot of the detail in Midge's life that hasn't - to the best of my knowledge - been written about before, Mr. Ure glosses over the much of the evolution of Ultravox, from its inception to its eventual demise, which was my main reason for buying the book in the first place.

Ultravox was one of the reasons why I got into music. They were the ideal mix of power rock and intelligent electronics, one of the first commercial pop bands to really see the potential of the synthesiser as an instrument in itself and not just a gimic. Midge insists that Ultravox wrote miserable music but there were only two occasions when Ultravox made me miserable. The first was when they kicked Warren Cann out of the band and the second was when they released U-Vox, the final album under Ure's stewardship. Otherwise, Ultravox made me seriously happy.

But If I was? certainly made me think about why I got into music in the first place. I was very young, only 13 or 14, when I first started to really hear music. Music was something I could listen to but couldn't understand. Back then, I couldn't hold a tune in a bucket and, truthfully, I still can't. According to my parents and teachers, to be a musician you had to practice, practice, practice. Then you had to learn chords, scales, theory, advanced theory and when you knew the theory, you had to do even more practice.

Being a lazy bastard, I started to look for alternatives. I knew something about electronics and I knew that I could make a little square wave oscillator with nothing more than 2 transistors. The result was a (very crude) organ which was actually little more than a stylophone but it worked and I was hooked. I took this organ to school to proudly show off. I had a circuit that made tunes, which it broadcast to the outside world via a tiny speaker I'd culled from an old radio. When I played this contraption at school, I quickly found that I had an audience, which was more than surprising. Suddenly, I was the popular kid and that had never happened before. Me, popular? Yeah, right. I was the spotty kid with bad breath and no mates who was as thick as a plank. But I was popular.

I added more to the organ - a second modulating oscillator, a bigger amplifier, a crude waveshaper and a better keyboard. I found out that I could make trills and short passages by messing on with the modulating oscillator and the assembly would start to make small passages that bands like Tangerine Dream would later call sequences. Wow. This was fun.

My science teachers were overjoyed. They had found a kindred spirit, someone who was on their wavelength. However, my music teachers, who were still part of the old guard didn't like it, didn't get it. How could the classroom nerd, a science geek, make tunes with just a jumble of wires? This wasn't music. It was just noise. My school report for that year has just one word under music - poor. Written by my music teacher, Miss Lamb, seriously pissed me off and was one reason why, for a time, I quit music altogether. I became a science geek first and foremost.

But then something wonderful happened. Punk.

At 14, I was too young to be a true punk and living under the same roof as my uptight mother and a wannabe member of the National Front made self-expression and the adoption of the punk ethos somewhat difficult. But there was something about punk that I did embrace. With punk, you didn't have to be a virtuoso musician. You could just picked up an instrument and let rip. Nobody judged what you did, except your parents and they were still stuck on Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and The Black and White Minstrel Show. I bought an electric guitar for £15 that was crap but at least it let me work out some tunes. Like I said, I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket so learning was difficult but I persisted. When an accident with a carving knife put a stop to my aspirations as a guitarist, I returned to the synthesiser. Big Time.

Some of my friends were encouraging, others less so. Dick Steele, who was a guitarist stuck on The Electric Light Orchestra, reckoned that there was "no future in these synths". On the other hand, Steve Dolder, a drummer who would later to go to work with some of the big names in the local scene and then into the mainstream business with Prefab Sprout, told me that I was "a natural", an opinion I was prepared to listen to, mostly because I was not a fan of ELO.

There was another element to this journey. Via Steve Dolder, I started hanging around with other musicians, picking up tips and ideas, going to gigs. Suddenly, I had a social life. At that point, I was just a hanger-on, part of the crowd but I did, at least, get invited to some really cool parties.

Skip forward in time 30 years. Somehow, somewhere, something went wrong. I have a huge home studio, packed with synths and sequencers and computers. Back when I was 14 or 15, I could hardly dream about the instruments that I currently have available. I can create music whenever I feel like it and whenever my mood feels up to it. Everything is automatic, controlled by one computer or another, with me at the core. I can build immense sonic cathedrals, huge tapestries of complex, swirling sounds. Anything is possible. But there is one drawback.

The studio is a lonely place. Most of the time I'm on my own. Our dog, Pooh, is a frequent visitor and Jules occasionally stops by but, mostly, I live in that environment in almost complete isolation.

Reading If I Was? brought this sharply into focus. That's what I miss about being a musician today - the social side of the business. Ure talks about jamming with his heroes, the gigs, the ups and the downs of his career but more than anything, the aspect I find most entrancing is the social life which generates and sustains its own energy.

From my point of view, music is about communication. At its most basic level, it's a way of saying "Hey! It's me! I'm over here. I exist!!!" but how can you communicate effectively if you live in a bubble? Worse still, a bubble of your own making?

So, the next step in this new adventure is to get my lazy fat arse out of the house, get away from that bloody TV and start going to gigs again.

 10-Jun-07: The return of the blog?

Earlier this year, on wet and miserable day in January, I took my blog outside into a quiet courtyard at the rear of Hughes Manor, put a gun to its virtual head and pulled the trigger. It hit the floor with a dull thud, twitched a little and then fell into the great pit of loss we call experience. I killed my blog stone dead and promised that I would never go back to it.

Why? Well, there were lots of reasons but most of all because I felt that I'd disappeared up my own arse. Completely. My blog was no longer about music or my friends or the stuff that I like or enjoy. It had turned into a total rant, a series of lectures which would fit comfortably under the collective title of Dave versus The World. Worse still, I said a whole bunch of stuff that hurt a lot of people and that got some of them pissed off and in some cases, seriously pissed off. Since that absolutely isn't the way I prefer to operate, I decided that the blog had to go.

However, in recent weeks, I have felt that something was missing. Not long ago, I recorded and released an album called Future Forever under the band name Ion. Future Forever is a more mellow incarnation of T-Bass and SkinMechanix, a brief detour down a different set of paths in search of something else. But, critically, I have absolutely no recollection of recording 90% of the pieces that comprise Future Forever. The album came together really quickly, inside 3 weeks in January and February 2007, and I can recall reworking Minerva and loosely recall adding a new intro to The Silent Scream but the writing of the title track itself and especially the pieces Tangents and LogoSphere are just big, black empty gaps in my memory. Where the hell did those pieces come from? I have some entries in my studio notebook. I have a small pile of white labels that are named and dated but little else to show for the whole creative process that led down the path towards the release of Future Forever.

So I find myself strangely disassociated from these pieces. Truthfully, they don't feel like they're mine, which is an odd emotion to feel. They're not part of me in the same way that Neutrinos, Secret Life and Infection belong to me, as creations. Like I said, It's an uncomfortable emotion to feel. I don't understand it.

And this is why I've revived the blog. The blog was an essential part of the creative process when I put together both Rapture and Voltage Terrace because I felt that I had set down a map of those creative journies, adding to them on a regular basis, creating a trail of electronic bread crumbs, so to speak.

I've not restored the previous entries in the blog, nor will I. Ever. They wandered from the point and deviated into areas that were of no relevance at all to the process of creating new music. This blog will be different. It will focus strictly on the music, some ideas about technology and music and occasionally something about my friends and family but nothing else. It will be about the evolution of the next couple of projects and if it doesn't assist in any way then I'll delete it and move on.

So, let's see what happens.