Adding a remix to the mix

These weeks between kitchen construction phases, and especially between painting phases where we wait (almost) patiently for the last coat to dry well enough to hold masking tape without causing more damage, are beginning to drag a bit, but it doesn't mean we've been idle.

I can't believe it was (*checks*) last July (!) when we began the process of re-recording and remastering our first album Suburban Nostalgia, but it really has taken this long to find enough spare Thursday evenings to record the ten tracks over again with the key changes, vocal warm-up routines, and additional harmonies, and for Annie to lay down the new backing tracks, add new instruments, and generally spiff it all up.

Having only formally released one album (our second) for digital distribution way back in March last year, I had to refresh my memory of the process, but I'm happy to report that it all came back to me eventually, and I soon had the song files and the (slightly amended) album artwork uploading to the distributor.

The new tracks are already available for streaming from our website, so you can hear the difference right now. Official release of the remixed version of Suburban Nostalgia to iTunes and other online retailers will follow shortly as soon as the distributors have done their thing with all the material. Whoop!

The remastering starts

Having spent almost five times as long on the recording of our second album as we did on the first, and being much, much happier with the result, we decided it would be a good idea to go back and apply all the lessons we'd learned in the last five years to the older work and bring it up to the same standard. Remastering is, after all, a well-tried activity in "proper" music circles, and as that first album never enjoyed an official public release we figured we'd prefer to make it as good as it can be before letting it loose.

Suburban Nostalgia contained 10 tracks written by Beresford & Wallace, but we also each did a cover of a Genesis track. Retaining these covers would lead to all sorts of copyright complications and royalty payments (which we avoided first time round by not selling any of the small number of physical CDs we created for family and friends), so the remastered album will only contain our original work.

I've already redone the artwork in preparation for the new release and tonight we got together at Annie's place to start re-recording tracks, beginning with one of the ones I'd always been least pleased with. Old Love was written with a key transition in the middle which really stretched my range. Half of the song was either too high or too low, depending where I started, and the result that made the final cut of the first album sounded painfully thin and reedy in places. Happily, with new vocal warm-up techniques and some minor transpositions, the new recording is much stronger and includes some nice harmonies too - something Annie is becoming famous for. I have to admit I totally hate recording the harmonies. Although my musical memory has improved over the months, it still takes me several... takes... to "get" what she's trying to achieve. There's no denying it makes the final sound much richer, so it's something I have to put up with, but I don't have to like it!

Anyway, one down and nine to go before Suburban Nostalgia is re-released - this time for digital download.

Pimp My Hotpot: Final Night & BBQ 2010

A pretty hectic day for me yesterday, as the final night of the Hotpot show clashed with the annual street barbecue. So it was up with the lark to prepare the usual salads (always such a popular item I'd been asked to make the same three for the third year running), cut the new neighbour's grass (she moves in soon and it was looking like a bit of a jungle out there), and pull the garden chairs out from the depths of the shed.

BBQ started around 3pm and for once - unlike the last two years - the day was glorious. We'd had fabulous weather last weekend and the forecast in the early part of the week suggested we were in for a repeat of last year, missing the good weather by a week and being subjected to a downpour. Instead the bad weather slipped back a day and left us smiling under the sun while chomping on our toasties.

I should give the toasties a special mention this year, as it may well be the last year we enjoy them. Torsten & Keeth are set to emigrate to Portugal by the end of the summer, and their special contribution to every year's barbie will be greatly missed. Someone was supposed to watch the assembly of these delights this year so the tradition could be handed on, but no-one turned up and now they might be lost forever. I think I'll be popping down the road sometime soon with paper and pen. A street barbecue without toasties is unthinkable.

At 6.30pm, in the middle of the first quiz, I had to duck out, change into (one of) my stage costume(s) and drive over to the hall in preparation to open the final show. Even though I knew I had that monologue in my head, I didn't want to be blasé about it, and still repeated it to myself a couple of times before taking the stage. It all went very smoothly (although a slightly smaller audience than last night owing to the good weather) and pretty soon I was changing out of my tux into the black jeans and T I've been wearing all week for Beresford & Wallace's interval set.

On balance I think our performance last night was the best of the three. Not surprising, I guess, as it was the one we'd had most practice for, and I think we both (or all three of us if we include our guest artiste Becky Hodges who played a flute accompaniment to More Than Just Your Face) felt totally comfortable with both the material and the performing of it. But although it may have been technically the best performance I didn't enjoy it quite as much, both on account of knowing it was the last one, and because Nikki, Nat & Blythe weren't there as they'd been the night before. We did have a couple of friends in the audience, but it wasn't the same.

Coming off stage around 9pm I grabbed my other costume and headed back to the street BBQ, where the Chocolate Game had just finished and people were once again sitting around chatting. We had a very short gentle shower which caused us to move the chairs into a quadrangle under the gazebo, where we lit candles and enjoyed a couple of rounds of the Story Game (everyone in turn says a sentence to carry the story on) and Mafia (rules too complicated to relate but can be found here for anyone interested - although we didn't include the Nurse role mentioned there.) before moving inside, when the rain became more persistent, for another round of Mafia and more drinking (!)

Shortly after midnight most of the family had had enough so we left the remaining dozen or so revellers to their fate and wandered over the road. I picked up some more beer and headed off to the after-show party (another barbecue!) at Annie's - luckily only a short walk away. The rain had, mercifully, passed off a couple of hours before, leaving the night fresh and warm, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours munching on more BBQ food, sipping on a couple of ales and chatting with fellow members of cast & crew. It was also the first (and probably only) time I got to enjoy the Aftershow Awards ceremony that is a Chorlton Players tradition. Great fun. When I got home shortly after 3 I was more than ready to crash, even though dawn was already faintly visible over the roofs of the houses.

Pimp My Hotpot: Two Down!

It's frightening how much I'm enjoying this - and last night was the best yet. What made it so special was having family and friends in the audience. As I said to Natalie on the way back to the car - it's a kind of payback for all the wonderful concerts I've been to over the years when she's been performing. I think I'll need a few more outings before we're all square but hey, it's a start.

I managed to join the family table for the latter half of the show before diving back to the green room to join the queue for the curtain call. Luckily myself and one of my fellow compères were the penultimate cast members to take the stage, so my timing was spot on.

If anything this experience has confirmed my long-held opinion that I have absolutely no interest in treading the boards in an acting capacity. Opening the show as compère can't be called "acting" IMO. It's more like doing a presentation (only without any slides) and from day one I've found it no more nerve-racking than any presentation I give as part of my day job.

And the singing is really not that different to the karaoke I've been doing for almost ten years. Except the songs are our own, and we don't have to keep stepping off the stage to "let someone else have a go."

But having mentioned karaoke, I should just add that if it hadn't been for my past experiences, gaining confidence in singing in front of an audience, I would never, ever, have been able to step up on stage and give a performance like I did tonight. A certain person who shall remain anonymous laughed at me when she first learned I'd started singing karaoke. But say what you will, everything happens for a reason, and starting out on that path all those years ago has led me to last night - one of the most fulfilling experiences I've ever had and a buzz that can't be easily explained to anyone who hasn't done it, or matched by much else. Laugh all you like, but if I could change anything at all, I would only want to have started sooner.

Pimp My Hotpot: Opening Night

So, what was it like for you?

In the end, I was nowhere near as nervous as I expected to be, but on reflection that probably has something to do with confidence that I knew my lines, the fact that there were only 2 minutes-worth  rather than a whole play, and that it wasn't *really* acting. Being a compère is more like doing a presentation, which is something I've done dozens of times, to much bigger audiences.

So that part went pretty well. Got a few laughs, even. The worst part was the heat. I picked a really bad night to be wearing a tuxedo and bow tie. Later there was a brief panic when we thought we'd lost the laptop with our music on it, and then I was nearly killed by falling scenery while we set up the mikes for our interval slot. The movable wall, used in the previous sketch, was in a slightly different position than it had been at dress rehearsal. As the half-tab curtains were pulled across the stage they caught it and toppled it over.

Luckily I spotted it out of the corner of my eye in time to move out from under it, but it was a peripheral vision test I could have done without at that particular moment.

As predicted the audience were preoccupied with conversation, and getting on the outside of their food, during most of the first number, but we were pleased that they soon realised we were worth listening too, and by the middle of the second number we had everyone's attention. I don't think the sound of my stomach reacting to the smell of chilli as it wafted onto stage was audible over the singing.

And then, suddenly, it was over. First night was behind us. In the bag. A success, albeit with a pitifully small audience (on account of the good weather, we decided, along with the fact that the local paper let us down and didn't include our press release in last week's edition).

The post-show beers have never tasted so good.

Reality check

The dust has settled after Monday morning's revelation of the UKSC results for 2010, and - with the help of a distant friend from the Pacific Northwest - I've gained some perspective.

Give myself some credit, she wisely wrote: it wasn't so very long ago that I hadn't written a song in my entire life. True, that. And now I've co-written not one but two songs which have received the accolade of being "good songs that almost made the semi-final" in one of the most prestigious songwriting competitions in the world. So yes, maybe that's not so bad after all.

I've been thinking a lot today about the source of my reaction to bad - or should I say "not glowing" - criticism. I've decided it comes from a long way back, from the time when my mother used to tell me "don't be an also-ran, John." Unfortunately her parenting skills only stretched as far as sharing aphorisms like that with me. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, neither a borrower nor a lender be, you know the kind of thing. While she was off congratulating herself on what a good job she was doing bringing me up, I was left to wonder (a) what an also-ran was - I was very young at the time - and (b) how to avoid being one.

What she meant, I soon realised, was that she wanted me to be a winner. What she wasn't able to do much of was give me, or help me find, the skills to become one. I was on my own with that one. And what she clearly was never able to grasp is that there's one thing worse than being an also-ran, and that is to never run at all. Which is what most people do, and, to a very great extent, what she herself has done. At least we *entered* the contest in the first place. We set ourselves up to be measured. We ran the race. And if it wasn't for "also-rans," there wouldn't be a race to win.

So thanks Mum, but I'll take also-ran for now. In fact I'll revel in it. And while we're at it, if I wasn't a borrower I wouldn't have a house to live in, and not checking those gift horses' mouths just gives people free rein (see what I did there?) to dump a load of old tat on you.

I'll let you know when I think of one of those hackneyed old parental phrases that was worth listening to.

UK Songwriting Contest results

The results of the 2010 UK Songwriting Contest were posted early yesterday morning.

We had two songs in the competition - Spin Doctor and More Than Just Your Face - in the "Pop" category. Deciding on the category to enter was almost half the battle, since most of our music straddles the divide between folk and pop, with occasionally a bit of (very) light rock thrown in. Still, we figured Pop was close enough, and any claim to be entirely folk may have been met with derision on the part of the judges.

This did, unfortunately, put us into the fiery pit of hell as far as competition was concerned, as "pop" is probably the most oversubscribed category in the whole thing. This year there were over 5,000 entries in the overall competition, and judges commented that they had all been much stronger entries than in previous years.

So, I guess, on balance, with that level of competition and given that it was our first attempt, we should be fairly pleased with the results. Both our entries received a "Commended Entry" Certificate, and both received scores of 5. The scoring is explained on the UKSC website like this:
"A score of 4 or 5 indicates that this is a good song and it will receive a Commended Entry Certificate. A score of 5 indicates that the song very nearly made the semi finals. All songs with a score of 4 and 5 are considered for the semi finals."....

At the moment I'm still flipping between being happy that we did as well as that (and that we even bothered to enter, which I guess is something), and disappointment that we didn't make the semis. Being able to badge our songs "UKSC Semi-finalist" would have been really something. Commended doesn't have anywhere near that same cachet. But I always was my own worst critic. Some people would put the maximum possible positive spin on this, whereas I'm struggling to see it as anything other than another comment that my work is good, but not quite good enough.

What was that about killing the radio star?

I better keep an eye out for that video, because last night at 6pm for a little over half an hour I, along with my partner-in-crime (well, songwriting) Annie, became a radio star.

We'd been invited in to Chorlton Arts Radio - an Internet-only, temporary radio station set up in an empty shop in the precinct to promote Chorlton Arts Festival - to do a bit of an interview and play a few tracks on Mike Bulfield's "The Festival" programme.

We had no idea before we arrived what form the slot would take, so we'd sat down together on Saturday and come up with a simple schedule of enough tracks and what we wanted to say about them to fill just over 30 minutes. We'd have been quite happy to fill the half-hour ourselves but as it turned out Mike had also prepared a few questions, and did an expert job of dovetailing his questions with what we wanted to say, giving us time to plug the website, and our forthcoming live gig at the Hotpot. During one of our off-air chats while our music was playing he congratulated us on being the most well-prepared interviewees he'd ever worked with.

Sorry if you missed it. No idea if they repeated the show at all (they were a bit short of content at one stage), but the entire radio station will be gone by the end of the week anyway. I'm told we'll have access to a recording of the show in due course, so I'm sure it'll end up being featured on one or more of our websites eventually :o)

Anticipation

There's a definite warmth to the air this afternoon. A suggestion of incipient summer. A cursory check of the weekend weather forecast suggests it will hold nice all day Saturday and most of Sunday, so maybe we'll get our asses in gear and start the serious gardening of 2010, after last weekend's brief sojourn outside to complete The First Cut of the Year, and trim back the rampant hedge which had once again spent the winter encroaching on the path.

It's been a quiet week mainly, apart from Wednesday when I hauled myself off to the Spread to attend auditions for this year's Chorlton Players "hotpot." Normally a sketch show, this year they're having a vaudeville theme, so I thought I'd chuck my name into the hat for the position of MC.

In the seven or eight years we've been helping out with the Players I've never felt the urge to tread the boards, but I do have a track record (well, to be accurate, one previous outing) as MC in the style of Leonard Sachs, so I thought "why not?"

We're also up for singing a couple of tracks off Weird & Wonderful during the show, which should be a laugh. If I can stop shaking, that is.

Weird & Wonderful available to buy

We've just received confirmation from our digital distribution partner cdbaby that our album is available for download. How exciting is that? You have to go direct to them at the moment, but iTunes, Amazon, and other digital retailers will have it available in a few weeks.

Anyone in the UK reading this and wanting to download it PLEASE wait until we know whether or not we're going to be selected as one of the 40 acts taking part in Storm the Charts. If we make the final 40 we'll need as many downloads as possible in June.

But if you're outside the UK and you'd like to buy it, be our guest! :o)

We're up!

After a trepidatious few days between me sending off the "for your consideration" email, and said email rising to the top of Wes's (probably absolutely overflowing) inbox, Beresford & Wallace finally made an appearance on the Storm the Charts Livejournal list of artists. At number 215.

That just means we're the 215th to apply. It's not a rank.

You can see the whole list here: http://stormthecharts.livejournal.com/

I plan to listen to every track posted. I'm not naive enough to expect everyone will do the same - I guess most bands will only be in it to promote their own work - but if only a small fraction of the thousands of group members plays Spin Doctor we'll have reached many more ears than we ever expected.

Storm force

Storm the Charts - we're on again, thanks to Wes and the gang changing the rules to mean we don't have to be downloadable by the application deadline (March 23), only the download deadline (June 5).

Still no guarantee of being chosen, of course, but hey - at least we're in the game. And the boost to our online profile can't hurt either. At the time of writing the Facebook group has 12,000+ members and there are 130 bands/artists registered. You've got to believe that a fair proportion of the group members - who all get to vote on which songs make the shortlist for the top 40 attempt - will listen to as many tracks as they can before they make up their minds - and at least some of them might like the music even if we don't make the shortlist.

It's a wrap!

With a remarkable lack of ceremony, the last song seemed to take almost no time at all to record and our second album, at least in terms of recording, was put to bed last night. This extract from the Weird & Wonderful cover seems particularly apt!

Not that the ease of recording made for a short evening's work. Oh no. Annie had discovered a couple of minor problems with earlier sessions, which meant going back to two of my previous recordings and re-doing a few harmonies in one case, and a final chorus in another.

On top of that there were decisions to be made. What should the track order be? How many copies of the album are we going for as a first print run? What kind of promo are we going to be doing? What's the best local venue for our first live gig? All in all, there was more talking last night than singing, but it's all good; we're still on track for a Monday (March 1) release. It's easy for me to say that though - it's not me doing all the post-production work!

Because it takes time (two weeks on average) for new material to appear on iTunes, the release date will be for "streaming only" at first. That is, you'll be able to hear the songs on one of our websites, but not download them onto your iPods or PCs for a couple of weeks. And even though we have the much-adored and commented on front cover, we're still working on the artwork for the rest of the CD, so anyone wanting a physical copy will have to hang on a little while longer too.

Only one to go!

We recorded the penultimate track to Weird & Wonderful last night. The last-but-one to be recorded that is, not necessarily the last-but-one on the album - we still haven't finalised the order of tracks.

This whole thing has been a learning experience. Sometimes it's Annie learning a new production trick, or - as I mentioned last time - realising that it would make sense to write the music in a key we can sing, rather than having all the work of transposing it into the right key post-hoc.

Last night, the lesson was for me. Because quite a number (*checks* - six) of lines in this song, my last, begin with "It's." It sounded great in my head when I was writing it - the perfect way to describe all those little things that add up to a great relationship, which is what the song's about. But you try singing it. "It's" is not the easiest word in the world to articulate clearly when you're also trying to hit the opening note of a line, and follow it up immediately with two more words when you only have half a beat in which to sing them.

So my lesson was, in the same way as there are notes that are harder to reach, there are words that are harder to sing. When I'm writing, I'd damn' well better sing it out loud, not just in my head.

Weird & Wonderful artwork

As the excitement mounts in the run-up to the release of our second album, one of the MOST exciting parts is the arrival of the cover art, which Natalie volunteered to do. My only involvement was to add the lettering to the final version - and in the very early stages to help develop the idea - and then to (try and) sit back and not nag too much, what with this being her finals year an' all, to get it finished.

And here it is. I love it. It's exactly what I wanted. No, it's *better* than I wanted, because Nat has added her own artistic flair, invention and imagination to the remit and come up with something that exactly captures the essence of "Weird and Wonderful".

Our first album was produced in something like a cottage industry, with me burning CDs and printing off the covers and the infill. It had a definite homespun feel to it, and we posted off physical copies to all our family and mates. Now, only a handful of the original copies remain, and being burnt onto CD-R has meant that some of those copies no longer play. We decided we needed a better, more professional approach this time round.

One big difference that's occurred over the last five years is that iTunes, the iTunes Store, and digital music in general has entered the public consciousness in a way that had really only just got started back in 2005. So for Weird and Wonderful we're going for a digital release, with streaming media on our websites for a casual listen, and paid downloads for those who want a personal copy. Anyone needing to get their hands on a physical disk will still be able to order one, through a collaboration with a site called CDBaby - more details on that once the album is released. At the moment, we still have two songs to record and one or two other small tasks before we can put the album to bed. Little things like deciding on the order of tracks.

Tenth song in the can

Tonight's song - the penultimate one on Annie's sing list - is a pleasant little ditty about the girlfriend of an axe murderer whose head is so messed up she doesn't really know whether he's killed her, or she's killed him.

You begin to see why I picked "Weird & Wonderful" as the title of our second album.

Anyway the interesting thing about this number, for us, is that it's one of the ones that highlighted a slight problem with the way we write songs. Annie gets an idea - it might be a bass line, or a beat, or a melody - and she builds on it until she has a complete tune, which will probably have many of the elements of the final version in terms of the instruments used, etc, and it has a definite melody line, but often will still need some work to polish it into the final version.

At this point she hands it over to me and I give it a listen. Many listens actually - over and over again - which is why I need to be alone for this part, or at least wearing headphones! Eventually the song begins to speak to me, telling me the story it wants the waiting world to hear. All I do is write the words down. Simple really.

But at that stage, we haven't decided who's going to sing it. And there's the rub. Because not only has the tune not been written with one of us in mind, up to now it's not actually been written with either of us in mind. And just occasionally, this has meant that neither of us can sing it. I mean, I'm an OK singer, and Annie has some professional training from her years at drama school, but there's only so far up or down you can make your voice go.

For our first album... well, we were *so excited* to be recording music we just knuckled down and got on with it. And struggled in places. Listening back to that album now, one or two of my tracks are at the limit of my range and sound a bit painful. Definitely wanted to avoid that this time round, and there have been a few tracks in danger of the same problem. This one being the case in point.

Usually, she can solve the problem with a bit of clever transposition. This time round, after half an hour of trying to hit the high notes in the middle eight it became obvious that wasn't going to be enough. But hey, when you're an accomplished musician, that's no problem. After five or ten minutes at the keyboard Annie had rewritten the offending four lines and we were off and recording again.

We're hoping this kind of emergency measure won't be required in the future. With neat biro marks on her keyboard denoting our upper and lower ranges from now on she'll be writing nothing but notes we can reach. The songs might be about murder, but at least they won't sound like they've been murdered.

Ninth recording

A late start, a late finish, but my penultimate track on our long-awaited second album - Me & My Girls - is in the can, leaving me with one more to record, and Annie with two.

It's getting quite exciting for us now, knowing the release date is in sight and pretty soon you'll all be able to hear what we've been working on for the past few months (in recording terms - the past five YEARS if we take all the songwriting into account!).

The pipes, the pipes

It's been a while since I related how we're getting on with album #2 - Weird and Wonderful - although progress continues to be reported over at our other home. I say progress, but it's been a bit sporadic of late, what with one thing and another.

As predicted, we only managed one recording session last month, but we started well this month - on Wednesday - both in terms of it being the first Wednesday in October and in respect of the quality of the singing. By far my best number so far, the performance was helped firstly by the song being right in the middle of my range, and secondly by taking a few minutes out to do some crazy warm-up exercises that Annie passed on from her experiences at drama school. I wish I could let you hear the difference between the first take of the first verse (pre-warm-up) and the second take (post-warm-up). It actually sounds like a different person is singing, and the added depth to the sound really took me completely by surprise, as well as it being a whole lot easier to deliver.

Well hey - athletes warm up their muscles, right? I know at least one reader who'll be slightly exasperated (a) at my surprise and (b) that I wasn't warming up before. What can I say? Sometimes you just have to learn the lessons for yourself!

Song 4 wrapped

It's been a bit quiet on the music front, in case you were wondering. Our last recording session - September 9 - was spent re-recording one of the vocals we weren't happy with, which didn't really count as progress in my mind although the result was much better, and since then we've been on another mini-hiatus what with one thing and another. Sore throats, other projects and commitments have conspired to mean the September 9 session will be the only one this month, and an autumn release of Weird & Wonderful (the title of our second album) is looking increasingly unlikely.

On the upside, it's given Annie the time to concentrate on production, and last night she announced that she'd finished work on our fourth recording: Sovereign Stranger.

All this is relatively relaxed and comfortable, but that's about to change. In an effort to promote our stuff, Annie recently suggested we do a local live gig. Chorlton is a thriving centre for live music. Mainly artists building a reputation by gigging their way around local pubs and clubs but it also has its fair share of famous names - the Bee Gees and Badly Drawn Boy to name but two. So with that in mind she's approached one of the bars which regularly hosts live events to see if they'd be interested in putting us on.

Have to admit the thought of it gives me a clenched sphincter. Apart from the odd karaoke session (a relatively safe environment with the words scrolling up right in front of you) I haven't been on stage since I was 9. I've determinedly - and so far successfully - avoided being roped in to any of the Chorlton Players productions during the nine years I've known them. Now it looks like I won't be able to avoid the spotlight. Assuming bars have spotlights.

Don't go running off with the idea that I can remember the lyrics to our songs just because I wrote them. Unfortunately it's not that easy. MUCH practice will be required!

July Wednesdays. Number 4: A recording session

I didn't know when I arrived for our fourth recording session that the switch to Wednesdays was going to be a permanent thing. We'd moved it for this week on account of Annie's committee meeting tomorrow, but as of next week she's going to give aquaerobics a shot, and that's on Thursdays. Could be a good move, cos I'm pretty sure that's something Nikki would like to join in with, so Wednesdays it is from now on.

Apart from any Players dress rehearsals and book club nights, obviously.

Fourth song, and another one of Annie's vocals. When I recorded my first two, I found the second session went much more smoothly than the first, and the same thing happened with her. Almost as if that first session scraped the rust off one's pipes leaving them smooth and shiny for the second session. Whatever the reason, things rattled along much easier than last week and before we knew it another main vocal was wrapped.