I don't listen to the words

Spent last Saturday evening with mates, being royally entertained with wine, beer, chilli and excellent conversation as always.

During the course of the evening I happened to mention to Ritchie that I'd been listening to a couple of albums by one of his current favourite bands that he'd burnt for me last time we'd seen him, and that while I liked the music I thought their lyrics veered just the wrong side of pompous for me, being quite overblown and flowery. Trying too hard to be meaningful, if you know what I mean. His response?

"Oh, I don't listen to the words. I'm only interested in the music."

To my further astonishment, almost immediately, Ian agreed.

As someone who not only has had an abiding interest in the words to songs from a very early age (I still vividly remember singing "24 Hours from Tulsa" on my way to school, aged 8, and by that time I already had several years of lyric learning under my belt) but also now writes lyrics himself, I found this more than passing strange. Actually a more accurate term would be incomprehensible. It had literally never occurred to me before that anyone could listen to a song and not be interested in the words. Instrumental pieces, sure. Orchestral pieces, naturally. But the defining part of a song, for me, has always been the lyrics.

Just goes to show how even people you think you know really well can still surprise you.

Weird & Wonderful takes shape

We held our third recording session for the new album last night, and the first where Annie was doing the singing.

We've had a bit of a hiatus since the second session what with one thing and another, but Annie's been busy in the interim with overdubbing, mixing, and adding various other new elements to the music to make it REALLY sing. Those first two tracks now sound awesome, although the first still needs me to fill in the final chorus, which we originally thought we could cheat on, but realised later that it's in a different key to the first.

With two tracks in the can, we had to decide whether to release these or wait until the whole album is finished. In the end we plumped for the more traditional approach, so apologies to anyone who was hoping for a sneak preview of the new stuff, but by way of sweetening the pill we've both been doing some work on our joint venture song-writing website, and you can now stream any/all of the tracks from our first album there if you fancy a listen, as well as accessing the lyrics and reading something about how I came up with the ideas for them.

Last night though, was all about Annie, and we'd chosen what turned out to be a particularly difficult track for her to start with. A real test of the vocal gymnastics, and after what I went through on our first recording, having not done any serious singing for quite a while, I really empathised with her struggles to find *exactly* the right note. We stuck at it though. There was an element of jokey rivalry to it, sure, revealed by her terse reply to my observation that it's not written down anywhere we have to finish a song every night: "You did." So we kept going. Us against the song. And we won.

Well, Annie did. I just ran the desk. Thankfully, it has a "simpleton mode." So rather than getting to grips with the one-hundred-and-fifty-million menus, sub-menus, sub-sub-menus, normalising, compressing, envelope shaping, pitch correction and all the other magnificent gubbins this software is capable of, all I had to do was hit "R" to start recording, and "space bar" to stop. Oh, and scroll backwards and forwards a bit. Simples!

Three down; nine to go. Still more production work for Annie to do on tonight's recording. Adding reverb, six-part harmonies, effects, maybe rerecording the odd bit of backing track or adding another guitar line. She puts hours of effort into the production of each track, but the end result is worth it. Not only is the original material much stronger on this second album - both musically and lyrically - but the things she's learned about production, along with her much greater proficiency with drums and guitar, is promising to make Weird & Wonderful live up to at least half its name!

We're on a roll

Second recording session last night went MUCH better than last week. Whether it's because we're back in the groove artistically, or I was better prepared having listened to the backing track on and off all day, or we chose a slightly more upbeat and easier song to sing, or a combination of all three I don't know, but we called it a rap at 9.30 and I was much happier with the end result even though there's still lots of "producing" to do on it.

We were keen to record this song early in the process but when we were firing on all cylinders, because it's very much of its time. Called 'Spin Doctor' and written, presciently, in March/April 2007, it tells the story of corrupt politicians and people's slavish sheep-like reaction to them before they realise the grim truth, so you can see why we wanted to record it soon and get it "out there" while all the political fall-out is still fresh.

Annie's going to work up a clever video montage of politician clips and out-takes as a back-drop. Expect to see it on a YouTube near you soon!

Good Morning Voldemort!

Listening to Radio 2 this afternoon while painting the study (what else? I'm on the last window! Yippee!) and Elaine Page's show came on. I say that rather glibly but the truth is I never listen to Radio 2 on a Sunday afternoon, so I wasn't aware until today that she had a show. Well, she does. Has done for three years apparently! She plays, not surprisingly, hits from the Broadway and West End musicals, and also from the big musical movies.

Concentrating on my painting, I wasn't really listening to her intros and as we all know, strange things happen to me when I'm not paying attention to sounds in my vicinity. It was with some surprise that I suddenly became aware of a woman's voice belting out the chorus to her number: "Good Morning Voldemort!" she shouted.

"Blimey!" I thought in utter amazement, "that was quick! I didn't even realise they'd written a Harry Potter musical. They've only just got round to doing Lord of the Rings!"

Then reality caught up with me and I started to engage my brain. This can't be a Harry Potter musical - I must have misheard. Sure enough the chorus came around for a second time...

"Good Morning Baltimore!"

(From the movie Hairspray, apparently).

Genesis 2007 - the Turn It On Again tour - Manchester

The day before my 50th birthday last year was a red-letter day. After all the rumours of a reunion and a tour, tickets for the UK legs of the first Genesis live concert in 15 years went on sale and although they sold out in half an hour, I was successful in my purchase, securing four tickets in the North Stand at Old Trafford.

Tonight, eight months later, four of us walked in through door N43 - only the second time I have entered Old Trafford football ground in my life, and the first time in the "new" stadium - and up through entrance N1405 - to be greeted by this sight:


Well, not quite *that* sight, as this photo was taken by my mate Phil who was also at the concert but sat at the back, on the third tier. We were over there on the right, about two-thirds of the way back. On this very special night I didn't want to be annoyed at anything or let the slightest niggle spoil the atmosphere, but it was hard not to be irked by the massive number of cameras present. The tickets and concert promos had made it quite clear that digital recording devices of any kind were forbidden, and we'd played with a straight bat and left our cameras at home. From what we saw way more than half the audience had simply ignored this message and were happily snapping away the whole night. We had to make do with phone pictures, of which Phil's are easily the best quality.

The first thing that struck me was how small the stadium is. Admittedly it was foreshortened by having the stage and all the lighting gubbins at the Stretford End where all the seats were closed, but even so it was a lot smaller than I remembered from the one time I saw a match there, sometime in 1977.

To say I was excited would be the mother of all understatements. Genesis are my favourite band of all time and I've been a fan since around 1972. I'd seen them live twice before, but the last time was well over thirty years ago.

That the tour had proved popular was obvious from the speed of the sellout. The band had allegedly settled on only two UK dates because they were worried about the level of interest and didn't think tickets would sell. However an early press conference tells a different story. Since most of them are now well into their sixth decade, they basically wanted to take it easy and make the limited number of appearances (20 quoted in that interview; 22 on the concert t-shirt) fun for them as well as the fans. A 20-venue American tour will follow later.

We were in our seats easily an hour before the start time (billed as 7.45pm), which gave us plenty of time to take in the stage and watch the follow-spot operators climbing into their gantries just in front of us and to the left. The stage looked incredible. Two oval screens - later to prove to be high-definition screens which looked to be about 20 feet high - bracketed the main stage and were joined by a grey metallic wave. This appeared to be studded with light bulbs but once the show got underway it was obvious that it too was a massive versatile computerised graphics unit which was used throughout the concert to display animations, project band members or act as an adjunct to the amazing array of lights that hung above the stage and around the auditorium.

About twenty minutes before start time the black drapes were removed from the main stage to reveal an intricate series of lights suspended from lightweight gantries, and the famous two drum kits - one for Phil Collins and one for Genesis' tour drummer of 30 years standing, the amazing Chester Thompson. These two kits we knew would be the scene for the well-practiced Drum Duet later in the evening.

Shortly after that we heard a cheer from the crowd as the band left their dressing room and then the introductory music swelled through the stadium, the rhythmic drumbeat shaking my spine as it pumped from the massive speaker arrays all over the stadium. With a whoop and a cheer from the crowd near the stage which rippled back through the audience, changing to a polite round of applause as it went, the band took the stage and launched into the first number: a medley of Behind the Lines; Duke's End; and Turn It On Again.

It was a slow start and as the HD screens flicked through close-ups of each of the band members I couldn't help feeling they looked as if they didn't want to be there. Like a bunch of grumpy old men forced into a day out with irritating younger family members. The soundstage was powerful but this early performance a little lacklustre.

But I needn't have worried. As soon as they hit the next number - No Son of Mine - the old energy returned and the concert started to take off. With only the shortest of short pauses the next number followed right along - Land of Confusion - another rocky one and then we were into the second medley of the night: In The Cage; The Cinema Show; Duke’s Travels; Afterglow which cleverly took the atmosphere from fast hard rock to slow love ballad.

By the time the strains of Afterglow died away, I was a wreck. These lyrics were always beautiful and meaningful, as many of Genesis' songs are. That's one of the things that lifts them above being "just another rock band." But the older I get the more meaningful they
become, and the stronger the effect they have on me.
So as the tears fell, I wiped them away. It was, after all, still light in the stadium.


But now, now I've lost
everything,
I give to you my soul.
The meaning of all that I believed before
Escapes me in this world of none, no thing, no one.
And I would search everywhere
Just to hear your call,
And walk upon stranger roads than this one
In a world I used to know before.

I can't even write them out without feeling the pricking behind my eyes.

There was no respite from the emotional charge as the band followed up this medley with Hold On My Heart but then came the part of the concert where, had I needed to take a comfort break, or if I was one of those really strange people who seem incapable of sitting through a concert without sucking on a bottle of beer or fetching themselves a cup of tea, I would have gone and had/fetched one. For this was Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea from the self-titled 15th album, released in 1983. And now it's confession time, because despite being a life-long fan of Genesis music we had a falling-out around the time of Duke/Abacab (I thought they were pretty crap at the time, and still don't like Abacab much) and then when they released another live album (I've always hated live albums for some reason) I stopped buying their music altogether, so I'm almost totally unfamiliar with tracks recorded in the first half of the eighties.

Things picked up again though with the sing-a-long single Follow You Follow Me, but surprisingly we hit the doldrums again with a VERY disappointing Firth of Fifth. When we noticed this was in the set list we jumped about like excited kids. As it turned out we were not to be treated to the whole number but to a bastardised version consisting mostly of the guitar solo. Now don't get me wrong Daryl Stuermer is an excellent guitarist. On a good day he's almost as good as Steve Hackett and that is praise indeed. But this was a Genesis concert and you can't get away with playing half a song. Especially not when the song you choose to butcher is Firth of Fifth.

Ah well, no time to dwell on it as the strains of the Firth guitar solo drifted into Genesis' first single release - I Know What I Like - closely followed by the weird and wonderful Mama.

And then...and then it was time for some more magic. I said I hadn't seen them live for thirty years and that was the Trick of the Tail tour. And here they were playing Ripples.
One of the most beautiful songs on an album composed entirely of excellent songs, this time round Ripples was accompanied by an eerie watery-themed backdrop that perfectly captured the mood of the song and transported me back to the summer of 1976 as I sang along to the well-remembered lyric..."it's the last time you'll look like today..." Passing swiftly over Throwing It All Away and Domino (both from the Invisible Touch album which marked the end of my falling-out period with them) we reached longingly for what we expected to be the penultimate high-point of the evening: the Drum Duet.

Way back when, this was a drum DUEL, with Phil Collins and Chester Thompson taking it in turns to try and outdo one another with their percussive prowess. Nowadays they're a little (a lot!) more mature and the drumming is complementary but no less complex. Starting on a pair of leather stooltops and progressing after a few minutes to their respective kits, these two masters regaled us with a combination drum solo the like of which I haven't seen since Greenslade's performance at the Nottingham Albert Hall.

Fabulous in its own right, the drum solos then segued seamlessly into an energetic performance of Los Endos which brought the entire 60,000-strong crowd to its feet in rapturous acclaim.

Inexplicably, we then made a return to the Invisible Touch album for Tonight, Tonight, Tonight (admittedly a crowd-pleaser) and the title track, before the usual temporary interruption to proceedings with the traditional "end of the show" followed by raucous clapping and shouts of "Encore!" Having seen the set list, I knew there were two more songs to come so I didn't partake of this bizarre ritual and eventually the band returned to close off the evening with I Can't Dance and Carpet Crawlers.

Now again, this was a disappointment on two counts. Carpet Crawlers may well be my favourite Genesis track of the lot. It certainly makes the top five. But did they start at the beginning? Did they heck. There I was waiting eagerly for "There is lambswool under my naked feet..." and instead what I got was " The crawlers cover the floor in the red ochre corridor." They started with the second verse! So that's two of my favourites butchered in one night and on top of that, Crawlers doesn't actually make for a very good finale. It kind of fizzles out, leaving you listening to a lot of empty air and some half-hearted clapping as people start to realise they're done.

We all agreed Los Endos would have been a far better climax to the concert. They could easily have swapped the encore with the drum duet and Los Endos and ended the show on a real high note.

But these are small niggles really. In the end it was a cracking show, pyrotechnic fireworks at the end and musical fireworks all the way through. They might be old but they proved they can still rock, and so can we.

And now, live from Chorlton...

We write songs, you know, Annie & I. For the past year or so, Annie has been living opposite a bar called Revise, which holds a live "jam session" on Sunday nights. Open mic, all artists welcome, singers, musicians, original music, covers, whatever. A couple of weeks ago, she arranged with the organiser to let us do a short set of our own songs, live, backed by the resident house band.

I don't know what I expected. No, that's not true. I expected to have A BLAST. I've only sung through a professional PA once in my life: when we attended a Beach Boys fan club evening and they left the tribute band's PA up for us to sing karaoke through. That was *fab* so I expected, with a live band, it would be even better.

Annie had given copies of the original MP3s to the band early and being "proper" musicians they'd turned the music into real tabs and annotations for keyboard, lead and bass guitar and drums.

Despite writing the words for all our songs I've never performed them live, and in the case of the one I sang tonight - Dance of the Lonely Old Man - I hadn't looked at the lyrics since we'd recorded the album in the autumn of 2005, so I knew I needed to practice. And practice I did - about a hundred times over the past 3-4 days. In the car, in the garden, in the bath, until I was word perfect and had the timing down too.

Stepping up to the mic this evening I didn't *feel* nervous. I even managed a brief intro and told the audience what songs we would be singing without my voice audibly wobbling. 'Lonely Old Man' lends itself to a rolling introduction and this is what the band played behind my chatter, so as soon as I'd finished talking I waited for the next bar and launched right into the song, hoping they'd just pick it up. And they did - it worked really well - but after a few seconds I realised I was singing a lot higher than the band were playing. Sounded like half a tone to me (Annie said later she thought I was singing the harmony - three semi-tones higher than the melody) but whatever it was, it wasn't quite right, and with the monitor speaker out of action, I couldn't hear myself well enough to correct it.

The muscle memory of my days of practice carried me through - I remained consistently in (my) key throughout the rendition - and once I'd finished and sat down quite a few people congratulated me on the performance. Not being familiar with the song, it may have sounded OK to them: it didn't to me. Later a post-mortem with Annie revealed a further problem. The "perfectionist" band member, whom she'd assumed was a guitar player, turned out to be on keyboard. Great for her number - Home Town - which is mostly keyboard, but a disaster for Dance, for which the melody line is played on guitar. I'd effectively been struggling on with no monitor AND no melody and honestly? I'd been too hyped to notice.

Having had the chance to listen to the original track on our album again, I'm now convinced that I was in the right key, and it was the band who were too low, but whatever the truth and however it came about, the end result was not quite the perfect performing experience I'd hoped for, but with no opportunity to practice with the band beforehand, not entirely surprising.

I was pleased to have been able to sing the song through without a cheat sheet (I pinned it up, but didn't use it) and gratified that I'd had the bottle to go through with it. Whether we do it again will depend on being able to grab some practice time with the band and also sorting out the instrumentation.

The best part of the experience though was getting the band's feedback on our music. Friends, family, loved ones can all say how nice it is, but this is hardly independent feedback no matter how honest or well intentioned. To have other musicians tell you that you've written some really good songs is ... a vindication.

The language of love

Yesterday, after Phil & Vicky had left, we caught up with all the soaps we'd missed while I was away last week. As a result I'm still thinking about Valentine's Day, which was at the heart of many storylines last week: some people trying to ignore it because it's a rip-off; some because they're just too selfish to do anything nice for their partners; others making a really special effort (and some of those being rebuffed); people on the periphery, without partners, feeling left out - the way many people feel at Christmas when the whole world seems to be celebrating.

So I thought it would be a good time to post this love test that I found on the blog of a friend of a friend. It lets you check if you're speaking the same love language as your beau or belle. Haha! Just had a funny thought about that. Yanno when you accidentally overhear people making out?Is that the sound of beau belles?

Anyway, I digress. Not sure I agree with the "love tank" theory expressed below, although if it means you have to feel good about yourself to be in your best giving state I couldn't argue with that. If you have aching ankles, a headache, you've been put upon all day, everything's gone wrong and you just found out you have an important deadline you'd totally forgotten (or not been told) about, that's probably not such a good time for your partner to expect to be serenaded or given a foot massage.

I'm not particularly surprised by my results. I already knew time together and touching were at the top of my list. No, it doesn't have to be that kind of touching! A tender touch when you least expect and most need it can often be enough to move you to tears.

By a strange coincidence when we were in HMV on Saturday I bought a remastered CD of one of my favourite bands of all time - Caravan. This was a continuation of the (slow!) process of replacing my vinyl collection and the first Caravan CD I'd bought, so it was a hard choice which album to go for. In the end I plumped (obscure Caravan reference there for other fans) for Waterloo Lily, primarily because it contains one of the most evocative lyrics of my youth. The first two verses of The Love In Your Eye:

In dreams of you I wish a song on everyone
A gift of love to fill your eyes, to fill your eyes
And if I turn your head awhile, my heart will sing
Thunder songs of love to make you smile

I've travelled far in search of things I didn't know
I could have found as well at home as in the skies
There's so much time misspent in dreams of wealth and fame
When all you need is love in your eye

(Lyrics by Pye Hastings). Those words echo across the years to me now. Now that I've spent the thirty-odd years in between travelling far in search of things I didn't know, and which I could as easily have found at home. At least I remembered the last part, and didn't waste my time on dreams of wealth and fame. Here are my results in the love language test, and a link for you to take it for yourselves:

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Quality Time
with a secondary love language being
Physical Touch.

Complete set of results

Quality Time: 10
Physical Touch: 9
Words of Affirmation: 7
Acts of Service: 4
Receiving Gifts: 0

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don't understand our partner's requirements, or even our own. We all have a "love tank" that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz