Category: music & film

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.

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.
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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 Sa̫ne, where I lived for a year as an English assistant in a French lyc̩e (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 Рoften lewd Рlyrics, 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.

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 Haiku audio plugin.

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