Over a year ago now, I was in a band that got together for a gig in Paris which was a line-up of colleagues from work. I have been thinking about our vocalist recently, since she’s from Tunisia and has been very active on social networks following the revolution and helping people connect as regular digital communications were hampered.

This is a track from a time before that… a little bit of nostalgia for me recorded at rehearsal – the first run-through of the Jewel track Foolish Games for which I played the piano. The song itself is a story of unbalanced love, and the single was a big success which was nominated for best pop female vocal at the Grammy awards in 1998.

It was a wonderful moment of musical complicity – it starts off a little weak and sometimes slightly out of time, but somewhere in the middle it all comes together quite beautifully. Nothing like music to take you away from the anguish of existence and just let yourself relax for a few precious moments. Funny how this first run through was never matched afterwards, even though it has a couple of rough edges. Click the title or the “play” icon to hear it.

Foolish Games
V Special Club & Friends
Originally uploaded by simon_music

On this very blog, five years ago, I wrote an article Manhattan 25 Years Ago. Today, it’s now thirty years on since John Lennon was assassinated in New York.

On French radio this morning on my way to work the station dedicated the day to Lennon. Aside from a few errors by some of the guests (mentioning that during Abbey Road sessions, the band played a concert on the roof when in fact it was for the Let It Be sessions) most of the guests seemed particularly knowledgeable and even mentioned that Strawberry Fields in Central Park post dates the song, which was inspired by a Salvation Army orphanage in Woolton, Liverpool – actually called Strawberry Field.

On of my first memories that can be accurately dated is hearing the announcement of the death of Lennon. My son Nathan is now about the same age as I was then. He’s now five; thirty years ago I was five.

Image credit: bloodyjohn

Playing a musical instrument well requires a lot of practice. Motivating yourself is difficult with no goal. When you have other people to play with, and a good vibe between the musicians, and an occasional audience to share the music with, then you might find yourself with good reasons to find that drive. Getting good means spending a lot of time working on ideas and choosing a common repertoire – never easy.

Musical ventures often come to naught. Time constraints, having to rely on other sources of income and commitments gradually take your free time away. There’s no recipe for success or good musical collaboration but one might be to have the social whirl of a life afforded to students, then take a pinch of loneliness, being out of your home country, and having nothing but a CD player and a guitar to keep you company. Two friends from university both found themselves in a similar quantum state at various times during 1995-1996. Of all the times when anything was recorded of their jams, the session when they put down a cover of the track Enola Gay (I don’t remember which other tracks we recorded at the same time) captured some of the keen guitar playing that one of them* was doling out quite regularly on his Squier Strat.

Unfortunately the audio fidelity isn’t great, and the (my) singing that day was pretty awful and mostly flat so I’ve spared you the whole song. I’m interested in the guitar playing anyway, as the amount of jamming that we’d been doing – as evidenced in the photo where we’d even busked at a market a couple of times – meant there was a good musical entente and the lead guitarist was on top form.

The basic track was a custom programmed drum track, a little “bed” of old synth strings in the background and a simple bass line. On top of that, two guitars – both the Squier player – are layered and panned slightly to one side and the other. On the left, simple but solid arpeggios (on the second time around, watch out for a little escape from arpeggios) and slightly to the right, a cleanish solo picking up a variation on the melody line :

Enola Gay Initial Break (click to play)

Later, after the breakdown in the song about two minutes in, there’s an extended outro as the guitar solo started with the lyrics of the last verse but faded to be in the background. The singing on this part is pretty bad though, so I’ve cut this extract to the playout solo where the vocals stop and the guitar comes in, overdriven this time and using a difficult technique to get right : rapid tapping of the frets to get the notes to sound, rather than plucking with a plectrum. It’s perhaps a ever so slightly out of time for the first bar, but when the groove locks in (and the technique transitions to more classic string bending and slides) you have quite a nice lick to take you to the end of the track. The last two bars sit down nicely – remember the solo was the last thing put down, and finishing in sync at the end of the established rhythm track is sometimes a bit of a stress. The guitar is in the groove though and you can hear it’s a perfect landing on the first beat of the last bar with an honourable sustain and no noticeable fade required.

Enola Gay Electric Outro (click to play)

Hope you enjoy listening.

* Paul, as mentioned in the Farmer’s Song and Jamming with the Rosco

Recent reminiscence with friends on Facebook led me to dig out an old CD. The music on it is older than the CD itself, which was burned after copying tapes over from old recording sessions.

The story of this song began some time in 94-95 in Chalon sur Saône, where I lived for a year as an English assistant in a French lycée (pictured). We did some busking there. I had a small room in an outbuilding of the school and we often jammed there, usually playing blues and making up words. The songs were full of private jokes and pointless – often lewd – lyrics, improvised on the spot and recorded onto an old CD/tape combo box I had at the time. One or two songs survived those sessions and were revived in a later session, back in Letchworth, UK, probably in the summer of 95. The lyrics for this one had, for some reason, stuck around in our heads.

The track was put together with a keyboard backing, with a nice kind of fairground / harmonium organ sound playing cheesy thirds up and down. Paul played a rhythm guitar stab overdub and on the last chorus a second clean guitar was added while I randomly added a manual chorus/vibrato in real time with the tremolo arm a.k.a. “whammy bar” – you can hear it’s way out of tune at the end. We then overdubbed the solo – Paul playing incongruous distorted electric guitar – then each took turns layering in animal sounds (ahem) in the “farmyard break” before coming back to the chorus at the end. I sing the verses and Paul the chorus.

It’s not exactly a musical masterpiece, but it still makes me laugh. Friends at the time found it quite funny too, but then they were easily amused. Click the play button / song title below to hear it.

The Farmer’s Song.

Well hello and I’m a farmer…
Well hello there and my name’s Fred, and I live on a farm
I love organic fertilisers, and all their country charm
And I’ve worked hard all my life, and now I’m 92
So listen here* ‘cos I’ve got a song for you

Chorus
Sheep and dogs and dogs and pigs
And pigs and cows and cows and pigs
And geese and goats, and goats and geese on a farm
BSE and a HGV and a HGV and a JBC** and a JBC and little old me on me farm

Now I’m a farmer and I’ve got a wife
She’s the farmer’s wife, her’s the farmer’s wife
And she loves to cook in the farmhouse kitchen (lovely jubly)
And now I’ve got me combine harvester, and I’ve given her a name
Me combine harvester’s called Nelly

Chorus

Incongruous Solo – Farmyard break – Chorus

*The tape suffered an accident – the erase protection tab hadn’t been snapped out of the tape, and someone accidentally hit record instead of play on the line marked with the first asterisk. I have added back the same part from the second verse to preserve continuity but you can see it’s a dodgy fix. No surviving mix of the full song is known to be extant.

**Yes, we realised very quickly it was JCB and not JBC.

I took a picture of a bookshop that I pass on my route to the offices my company has recently moved to in La Défense. I liked the fact that it was a weathered, old shop sign. No doubt it hasn’t been open for years, though it may be caught in a time warp and still in business. What really piqued me was that the name. Horribly wrong punctuation. No use of apostrophe to indicate possession unless they only sold books about characters called Betty. The whole thing, in two words and one misplaced apostrophe, was a mess.

Having posted the photo to Flickr, a talented musician and songwriter friend of mine (Paul) immediately picked up on the “Betty” reference, it having been part of the title of possible one of the simplest but most effective tracks we ever played together, Sweaty Betty.

A couple of days later, I found an old USB stick which had a random selection of 300 tracks from my mp3 collection. I plugged it into my car stereo and was listening to some old tunes when I heard the familiar riff from the start of Sweaty Betty, and it started right around the point where Betty Book’s (sic) is. Thus the triple reference to Betty – the shop, the comment and the tune – in one short week reminded me that I had always intended to post about it.

Paul recollects this on the songwriting:

The song is basically about a smelly girlfriend. Wrote it in about 30 seconds. The true story is that one day I was walking past Betty’s Bistro [in Leamington Spa, where we lived as students] and saw (what looked like) the owner sweeping up outside. She was absolutely massive and had sweaty armpits so we nicknamed it Sweaty Betty’s.

The song lyrics were finalised just a couple of days before our booked studio time to record a few tracks as a demo EP – mostly as a souvenir of the band, which was forced apart as the three members all changed jobs in the space of a few months and could no longer meet to rehearse easily. The verses are structured around a A – G – Em7 progression, and the chorus is A – Gsus4 which gives it a little edge. The bass line was improvised and built around the guitar riff and progressions, and a breakdown in the song towards the end let me come up with a bass line which drives the song to the finale.

I could even take credit for some of the lyrics. The skeleton structure was improvised and extended during jamming sessions with The Rosco. Paul gave “I don’t really know you, all I know is that I itch like crazy” to which I added “I don’t really know you, all I know is that your dog’s got rabies!”.

Here’s the song, with player courtesy of the WPaudio plugin. Sweaty Betty – The Rosco.

Betty Book’s
Originally uploaded by simon_music.
Sweaty Betty by Evans/White, © 2005 All Rights Reserved

Michael Jackson suffered a heart attack last night (European time), and could not be resuscitated. Wacko Jacko he may have been, but it’s the end of an era. Love or hate him or his music, he’s the biggest selling album artist of all time. His music, his pop videos and his dancing have influenced pop forever, just like the Beatles and Elvis before him. His collaborations with Paul McCartney (Say Say Say, The Girl is Mine) are among my favourites.

I had a copy of Thriller on vinyl, and I’ll always remember the day I was at Auntie Val’s and we put on the first side. The needle dropped on the record and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” started up… I must have been about 8 years old at the time. There goes another part of my childhood.

[update] There are a few articles around now that are covering the story of Michael’s life and death with a bit more depth; notably the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman with “This is not a Diana Moment” and an excellent article over at Urban Semiotic, “The Veneration of Michael Jackson begins“. As for the cause of death (direct or indirect) news is emerging that he may have been addicted to Demerol or Morphine.

Image credit: stylespion

Many times I’ve been lonely but never when I’m in front of a piano keyboard. I’ve gone out of my way to ask to play pianos in hotels in New York and Dallas when travelling in the States – the former specifically to play “New York State of Mind” while in New York, which I managed to do even though I was only there for 24 hours. I’ve played dodgy pianos in pubs and got job offers because it keeps people in the bar – I’m not that good so mostly the offers were for payment in beer.

Fewer and fewer places offer you the chance to be able to just sit down in public and play, because there just aren’t pianos around any more except auto-playing ones in aseptic hotel lobbies. I’ve been refused more often than accepted when I’ve asked to play piano in those kind of places. Then again, I’m not a virtuoso, and sometimes I’ve asked at times which might well be inconvenient for the gathered public.

For some time I’ve wanted to record a quick film of my piano playing. After learning the recorder at junior school at around 7-8 years old, my next instrument was the piano. I always loved playing keyboard instruments, and had lessons on classical organ, pop organ, and piano. The piano is one of the best instruments to play solo, because it has a large range. The 88 notes on a full piano keyboard represent the range of most instruments in an orchestra – much more than a guitar. It’s also an instrument which lends itself to playing several notes at once, to explore harmony, counter-melody and playing interesting left hand bass accompaniment to all sorts of melodies. It’s harder to accompany yourself and sing with a piano, I think the guitar better lends itself to that. But the piano by itself is really versatile and a great instrument which adds to many musical styles.

So here’s a single-take shot of me playing a piano solo of a composition I wrote when I was 16 as part of my coursework for GCSE music – it’s called City Nights. It is a little bit changed from the original version, but the melody, structure and sequence is the same. I’ve just added in a few variations in a repeated section to make it last three minutes. I passed the exam with flying colours, by the way.

Three related photos are on FlickR.

Nobody is going to buy a video recorder based on the VHS format this Christmas. Everything will be MiniDV (camcorders), DVD and hard drive based.

In the US, the VHS format was recently declared dead. That’s perhaps a bit premature, it’s rather more of a retirement. VHS tapes will still be active for some years to come as old tapes with treasured memories or cult films will still be rewound and played through every now and then.

From the article linked above:

After its youthful Betamax battles, the longer-playing VHS tapes eventually became the format of choice for millions of consumers. VHS enjoyed a lucrative career, transforming the way people watched movies and changing the economics of the film biz.

VHS is a media which has survived 30 years, and over the years I have owned (and lost) hundreds of tapes. In the early days, the quality wasn’t very good, but improvements in image processing circuitry (VHS HQ) drove a nail into the Betamax coffin and made VHS ubiquitous.

The same kind of tension is apparent in the market now – regarding downloading films – as there was when VHS became popular. The cinema industry was frightened that tapes you could view at home would have a negative impact on their revenues. In fact, VHS became a money-spinner in it’s own right. Film downloads could be just the same, if legal download sites get their acts together. People want to get hold of DVD quality content from the comfort of their home office chairs and living rooms. They also want all the accompanying bonuses and language options. You can download almost anything illegally, but this is less of a problem than the studios make out. Just like the risk of VHS copyright infringement didn’t stop massive studio sales of popular films, or people going to the cinema. The only difference is that it’s quicker to copy a DVD than a VHS tape. But it will always take 2 hours to watch the film, which rather limits the interest of mass copying to rogue market traders and their ilk .

Anyway… with no good download solution most new recordings I buy are on DVD. Those I make myself are recorded directly on a 1Gb memory card. You can get more storage on that square centimetre of media card than you used to be able to get in a very expensive hard drive. In fact that square centimetre at 1Gb can hold more information than a 3 hour VHS tape, and at superior quality, using XviD and MP3 compression.

Back when VHS was big, editing home movies together meant two VHS decks, and if you had the money, an editing console to automate the start/end points for you. With a digital source you can use VirtualDub or Windows Movie Maker and get it done for free, in much less time.

I invite you to embrace the digital age for it allows us all to do things more quickly and cheaply. It means we can be creative and share our creations with people who share our interests all around the world. It doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly a major copyright infringement case. Goodbye VHS, I have fond memories of bookcases full of tapes but I’ll stick to a 250Gb hard drive and my DVD shelves, where I have far more films at higher quality and in far less space.

Image credit: A. Carlos Herrera.

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