My New Favourite Love Song.

I only heard this beautifully haunting song a couple of days ago and now I can't stop listening to it. I guess it does have a certain poignancy!

Abba On Steroids?

I quite like this tune. I tried to get into Nightwish a while back but found them just a little bit too bombastic for comfort. Saying that, the singer would still get it!

Blogging is light to nonexistent at the moment as I've recently updated my home studio in a major way and am in the process of recording a 'live' album of old Lovechild tunes by way of a learning exercise, which is very absorbing and takes up most of my spare time. It's also an extremely effective way of keeping the darkness at bay.

Season's Greetings.

I always knew that the acid test of whether writing D&OiS&L had worked (i.e. whether it had exorcised the demons I had intended it to) would be my Yuletide reaction to this song. While I have to admit that it did stir a pot of unpleasant memories when it came on the radio a couple of days ago, I sat through the whole thing with a contemptuous smirk on my face rather than shaking with rage as had happened so often before.

In fact so successful has it been in lancing the boil (and mixing the metaphors) that I can't even summon up the necessary venom to write a blog post about how I discovered that my leading lady (the girl I called 'Sally Spencer') was shackled to a notorious wife-beater - a guy who beat his first wife up on the first night of their honeymoon!
Tell me Sally, does he take care not to mark your face? Do you think that makes him incredibly caring? And do you think you'll ever find a guy who doesn't cheat on you?

The (Mid Life) Crisis Deepens.

 

As I already had some vocals tracks for this tune I thought I’d bung a rough mix up as a taster for the forthcoming Lovechild: Live Again live album (which people are doubtless having sleepless nights in anticipation of). This was actually the very last song I wrote while the aforementioned combo was a going concern although I can’t remember if we ever rehearsed it.
Back in the day I strove to make the lyrics as cartoonishly sexist as possible, purely to wind up our guitarist’s sour-faced, sense of humour challenged, lunatic fringe feminist girlfriend who had forbidden him to sing back up on songs she considered ideologically unsound. A few years later it occurred to me that if I changed the lyrical emphasis in certain areas and got a female singer then the thing might possibly make a passable techno/rock crossover stomper in the vein of Republica or Sunscreem and I duly recruited one  Gemma Greensmith for the job. These are her vocals (albeit time-stretched from the original 139 BPM to a much pacier 152); the music, however, is the way it was intended to be when I first wrote it.

A CD quality copy can be had here (right click and 'Save target as...').

Dirty Old Men: A Working Title, A Manifesto & A Situations Vacant Ad.

During the writing of Chapter 7 of Down & Out in Sheffield & Lincoln (the section about the local music scene) I spent quite a bit of time Googling the old bands and associated personalities just to see if anything useful would turn up. It did, and not just about the Lincoln scene or the combos who operated at the same level of the game as we did. I unearthed a wealth of information concerning those we encountered at Rock City and the Hippodrome and the like who occupied the space between us nonentities and the bands with record deals and actual product in the shops. I was forever coming across websites and MySpace and Facebook pages dedicated to, or operated by, superannuated sleaze rockers who fell into this bracket. People and bands who had had a moment sometime in the mid to late 80s when it looked like they might possibly get a shot at the big time (but didn’t) and had been dining out on it ever since. Heavy metal equivalents of Les McQueen if you like, not so much has-beens as never-quite-weres.

Perusing said web pages it struck me that these people all had one thing in common, something that would have been hilariously funny had it not been so tragic. It wasn’t that they were still playing out, still dressed exactly like they did back in the day and seemed to genuinely believe they had a devoted following. No, it was that they took themselves totally and utterly seriously, presenting (and, presumably, regarding) themselves as relevant, contemporary figures – and without even a hint of irony.

Nowadays, over two decades since Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt et al, well and truly jumped the shark (or maybe ‘smelled the glove’ would be a more appropriate term), a bunch of spunky twenty-somethings could probably get away with strutting around in make-up and backcombed hair and cranking out testosterone drenched, Eighties sounding, heavy metal - music and fashion does tend to pay homage to what was in vogue 20-25 previously* after all - but pushing 50 year old men?

FORGET

ABOUT

IT

Seriously guys, forget all about it. I’m sorry to have to put this so bluntly, but you look and sound fucking ridiculous and the only people who come to see you perform are either fellow saddos who can’t (or won’t) accept that it’s no longer 1987 or else folk who, while knowing who you are/were, have turned up solely to take the piss.

Okay, okay, before anyone accuses me of double standards, yes, I’m also a pushing 50 year old man and  I still crank out testosterone drenched, Eighties sounding, heavy metal. But at least I have the decency to do so in private, between consenting adults and would never dream of exposing children to it.

And I bet I’m not alone in that. Given the staggering advances in, and accessibility of, music and recording technology over the last few years I’ll put a pound to a penny that practically all of us Eighties veterans have some kind of masturbatory, musical vanity project on a back burner. After all, we all thought our particular combo was the really talented one, didn’t we? We all thought we were the ones who would have made it big if only we’d got the right breaks. Consequently it’s only right that our back catalogue be preserved for posterity.

My desperate exercise in retrospective self-indulgence is a ‘live’ album of Lovechild songs which is just waiting for me to find the time to hire a rehearsal room and get my voice into good enough shape for Autotune to do something with before uploading them here. However, I’m nowhere near deluded enough to imagine that anyone outside my social circle (or who remembers/is curious about the old scene) will be the slightest bit interested in listening to them. But I can deal with that, I get more than enough pleasure and satisfaction from the creative process itself to make it worthwhile.

However, the rush you get from performing live (and everything that goes with it) is like an instantly addictive drug and even the briefest taste leaves you with a craving that never entirely goes away. Post youth and the attendant window of showbiz opportunity there are only two realistic options for those who want another fix (albeit a vicarious one) while still retaining a semblance of self-respect. Either set up a recording studio and/or PA hire company or put a covers band together.

The former was the route I was originally intending to take and between 1997 and 2002 I worked every hour God sent in order to afford, and spent every weekend ensconced in my bedroom learning how to use, the equipment and software necessary to do so. But then in the summer of 2001 the malign higher power that dogs my every fucking step, waiting for the most opportune moment to pull the world out from under my feet time after time after bastarding time, decided to visit me with a potentially fatal inner ear infection which, a series of major operations later, permanently buggered up the hearing on my right side.

I did learn to compensate for this but it meant taking three times longer than anyone else to get the same job done and, in such a cutthroat marketplace, effectively scuppered any chance I had of turning my home studio into a paying concern.

On top of that, in late 2003, my (entirely unnecessary) break up with the only one of my near Mrs I genuinely thought I’d end up marrying ushered in Episode Number Four: The Really Nasty One which cost me the best job I’ve ever had, my flat and, consequently, the life I’d made for myself in Sheffield. Once my overdraft bottomed out and I ran out of card guaranteed cheques to bounce (the ordeal of registering for welfare payments was more than I could bear to contemplate at that point) I ended up wandering down to Cash Converters every few days to trade in one piece of equipment after another just to afford the booze I needed to drown everything out. By the time the wheels came off completely and I had no choice but to throw myself on the tender mercies of my parents and move back to Lincoln I was left with just my PC, my Jackson guitar and my trusty Roland JV-1080 synthesiser.

But enough of history, what about that second option, the covers band? Well, I’ve been mulling over an idea for a while now so I’m going to run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

And that idea is to put together a band performing (mainly) Seventies and Eighties classic rock covers, pretty much the same kind of stuff you hear on Planet Rock and aimed at appealing to the same demographic.

Now the selling point. Instead of trying to hide from, or airbrush over, how old we all are we embrace it, we put it right out there (hence the working title for the band) and we have a tongue in cheek, self-deprecating sense of humour about it - although drawing well short of the kind of contrived wackiness I always found so annoying about the recently defunct local band we will undoubtedly be compared to.

That’s not to say we don’t take it seriously, we do and we make damn sure we put on a polished, well rehearsed and, above all, entertaining show. Other details, such as any kind of look we might adopt, can be thrashed out at a later date.

So I need a drummer, a lead guitarist and a bass player – and if one or more can share lead vocals with me then all the better. Of course there are some people I already have my eye on. My number one choice for drummer, for example, checks in here two or three times a week (or at least someone who works at the same place as him does) and if he’s interested then I kind of get the impression he knows a bassist who might also like to come to the party.

A lead guitarist I’m not so sure about. Of the two guys I thought would fit the bill perfectly, one, I’m reliably informed, has a serious drink problem and the other was lukewarm to the suggestion (I couldn’t make my mind up whether that was because he's too much of a family man these days or because he played in a rival band during the Eighties and still thinks he’d be demeaning himself were he to get involved with me).
So don't be shy people, get in touch.

One final thing. While I realise that there is a very limited pool of talent out there and that beggars can’t be choosers, applications are not invited from psychopaths, hippies or fucking jazz wankers. I’ve had more than enough of dealing with those kinds of people to last me a lifetime.

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* My pet theory about this is that contemporary musicians have the music they hear while still in the womb subconsciously imprinted on them.