Stabbing a Dead Horse – A review.

Posted on by

Did Prog rock die back in the 1970s? If so, its zombie corpse is alive and rocking in a thoroughly modern way.

On Friday I went to the last night of the ‘Stabbing a Dead Horse‘ tour at the Lexington in London. This tour was a week long affair involving Trojan Horse, Knifeworld and The Fierce and the Dead, that had taken in several cities around the UK and by all accounts been rather successful.

Friday certainly was. I wasn’t able to stay for Knifeworld’s set (which is a shame, cos they’re bloody good on record) but I did catch the other two bands.

Trojan Horse are a four piece from Manchester: all stop-start rhythms, hard-rock, mellotron and lots and lots of facial hair. There’s a danger that prog can be inaccessable the first time you hear it, less immediate than simple four chord rock songs. That isn’t the case with Trojan Horse. The music might have been more complicated than the average rock band but even though I hadn’t heard them before I got it immediately.

The vocals were tight and even contained the odd hook (Yo ho ho!) and the whole set was delivered with such passion that you couldn’t help but fall in love with the hairy scamps. The through-composed, constantly changing structures could have lead to concentrated, introspective performances, but Trojan Horse were having none of that – they played with all the energy and loseness of a three chord punk band, but with none of the pretention.

(Hang…. wasn’t punk supposed to be less pretentious than prog…)

The highlight of the night for me was The Fierce and the Dead. I’ve known Matt Stevens online for a few years but this was the first time I’d got round to seeing his band live (and to discovering that Matt is very tall. People are supposed to be smaller in real life aren’t they? But no, Matt is far far taller than his twitter profile pic would have you believe).

The Fierce and the Dead are somewhere between the Pixies, the Shadows and 80’s era King Crimson. Don’t believe me? Go listen to them, it’s true.

Once again this set completely failed to fit into prog stereotypes. All right, there were twisty time signatures and not a verse-chorus structure anywhere in sight, but neither was there any of the self indulgence the genre is supposed to be guilty of. TFATD’s performance was exuberant and celebratory and all about entertaining the audience.

Stevens has been talking on facebook about the idea of a prog revival – or perhaps some new proggish movement that these sort of bands fit into. This gig supports that notion. The Stabbing a Dead Horse tour filled a London venue with a couple of hundred people and played complicated, silly music to an appreciative audience of couple of hundred.

Which gives me hope as a music fan and as someone who plays music of a vaguely similar bent (indeed the new album is going to be far more rocky than the last two, and I’ll be seeing about finding a drummer and doing some full band gigs next year). If British prog did die back in the 70s (it didn’t) then the Stabbing a Dead Horse tour has Frankensteined it back to life.

Weekend at the Asylum – Steampunk festival gig report

Posted on by

The Steampunk Asylum at Lincoln last weekend was the most enjoyable gig I’ve played for some time.

Here’s some video, courtesy of Mr Andrew Fletcher:

It had looked like I’d have a difficult journey as I needed to get from work in London to Lincoln in only three hours. As it turned out, I had a smooth straight forward journey, arriving at the Charlotte House Hotel at just after 6pm.

My brother Joe, my partner Rachel and our friend Julia left London three hours before me, but arrived only twenty minutes earlier than I did. They claimed the train ahd been delayed, but I suspect they were just getting things wrong.

The first act were Broadarrow Jack, playing their last gig before splitting up. Their set was lots of silly folky fun, including a quite marvellous song about zombie horses. Lots of fun, but sadly you’ll never be able to see them.

Keep an eye out for Crimson Clocks, however which some members of Broadarrow Jack have gone on to perform with.

My own gig was the first with another musician playing my solo songs, as Joe played bass and sang backing vocals.

The setlist included a couple of tracks from Spinning the Compass and the whole of the Miser’s Will from Ironbark.

I can honestly say I haven’t enjoyed a solo gig as much in years. There was an attentive, appreciative audience, no-one through anything and people said nice things afterwards.

The rest of the weekend was having our photos taken by strangers, possibly because of what we were wearing.

All in all, a lovely weekend. It’s also left me itching to play more. I’m sure Joe would be up for playing a few more gigs. Just need to find a drummer. Watch this space, and all that.

 

Freedom Of Expression – Take 3

Posted on by

Last Tuesday I performed at Freedom of Expression at the Green Dragon. Here’s the vid:

Video streaming by Ustream

This is the third time I’ve performed at the same venue and it’s always fun. As they record and broadcast the gig via Ustream it gives me the fun little challenge of perfoming a completely different set each time.

I’ve ripped the audio from the recording above and you can download it for free, along with the previous gig at the Green Dragon, from the fan page.

Also performing were Jeremy Ayre and Ashley Cowan who I particularly enjoyed. Here’s one of his songs:

What am I doing at the top of a list that includes King Crimson and Genesis?

Posted on by

Look at the picture above – I’m legitimately at the top of a list that includes King Crimson and Genesis? How surreal. Of course it’s only because I’m a new artist on Progarchives.com, but it still pleases me greatly even though I wouldn’t dream of placing myself above those artists in terms of quality or popularity.

Progarchives is one of my favourite sites, I’ve discovered lots of great music through there, so to be featured is lovely. There are a couple of reviews of my tracks up, including one of Earthbound that says:

‘…It sounds like it belongs in the dream sequence of an indie film. The vocal delivery is akin to John Wetton, but I am reminded of The Ninth Wave from Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love. It is rare to hear someone do so much with two chords. “Earthbound” generates mixed feelings of being lost but having a sense of calm peacefulness all the same.’

John Wetton is a singer I have a lot of time for, so it’s nice to be compared to him.

Three Rows of Teeth

Anyhoo, what have I been up to? Well the big news is that I’m recording my third solo album. Backing tracks (Drums, bass, rhythm guitar and keys) are pretty much done, which leaves lead guitars, vocals and silly beepy noises to add. After that mixing and mastering, artwork and so on. Probably another two or three months at the very least before it’s finished.

As pleased as I am with Ironbark, my production skills continue to improve and I want to challenge myself to produce a really good indie record with this. It’ll be more electric guitar based than previous albums but still similar to my rockier numbers. The songs from the Mother’s Been Talking to Ghosts Again EP will be reworked to form part of the album, so you’ve already heard some of the pre-production demos as it were.

There will also be a few other numbers – and if you’ve been following the demos on my 52 Things page, (see above) you’ll have heard most of the album in its embryonic form.

I have good feelings about this project – I think it’s going to be my best music yet.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

 

 

Twittery – an audio experiment

Posted on by

experiment1.mp3 Listen on Posterous

I thought it would be fun to play along to a field recording of some birds.

So I atttached my guitar to an old midi module I'd liberated from work (It was going to be thrown away otherwise – superflous technology).

The midi converter, being of the cheap and cheerful kind, did weird things with my guitar playing.

This is what turned up.

Last Night’s Gig

Posted on by

Last night I played at the Portobello Acoustic Sessions at the Metropolitan pub near Westbourne Park.

The Metropolitan is a lovely pub to which you should go. It has a snug. This is a good thing.

The gig was fun too, despite the fact that the audience was small. Besides myself there was the lovely folk-pop duo Jespa, a wonderful jazz duo – Rebecca Heynes and Sam (whose surname escapes me) and a bloke called Pete who's surname I can't remember.

Find Jespa at http://www.jespa.co.uk

Pete was interesting – sub-Dylanesque three chord non-songs that he didn't play very well. He also turned up clearly off his head, broke a string on his own guitar, didn't treat the guitar he subsequently borrowed particularly well, took too long to get off stage and made lots of noise during one of my songs right in front of the stage.

I wasn't a fan.

I became a little disillusioned with the London acoustic scene a couple of years ago because I always seemed to be on bills with lots of acts like Pete.

Thankfully, Jespa and Rebecca and Sam were fantastic – some of the best stuff I've heard on the circuit for a while and the couple running the night were wonderful.

Lessons to learn?

1. I should gig more – it was fun and I went down well
2. I'm enjoying calling the setlist on the fly – I've done that the last few appearances and it's quite fun. I played a song I've never played before and hadn't even thought of for a year or so – I'll dig an MP3 out of the vaults and share it with you at some point because you won't have heard of it.
3. People like knowing what the song is about – a bit of a speal about the song works well – and I do enjoy telling people about the stupid things I write lyrics about.

So yes, yesterday's gig was lots of fun. Next Month I'm at the Green Dragon in Croydon on October 25th.

2 Upcoming London Solo Gigs

Posted on by
29th September:

Portobello Acoustic Sessions @ The Metropolitan

60 Great Western Road, Notting Hill, W11 1AB
London, United Kingdom

Doors 7.30pm Entry Free

25th October:

Freedom of Expression
The Green Dragon Croydon, UK CR0 1NA

Doors at 8pm Entry Free

Hope to see you at both of them. Facebook events and details of the rest of the lineup will turn up shortly.

(Distressingly the other acts on the Freedom Of Expression gig are not easy to find on the web. They are: Eddie's Brother, rUM and Chris Parr. I found a reverbnation page for Chris Parr. The other's might be on myspace, but they don't turn up with a bit of googling. )

On another Live Gigs note:-

Joe 'The Dark Power' Slatter and I are going to put together a little band to play my music with. If you know of anyone in London who plays drums and wouldn't mind dressing up in silly steampunk costume every now and then, please steer them my way.