That very nice Ms Kirstie Green has uploaded to YouTube a few choice visuals from the recent acoustic show in Cambridge. Really good quality (much better than the preview images would lead you to believe), so well worth checking out. Here’s a tip for the trainspotters; every time I smile it’s because there’s either a tricky bit of singing or playing coming up. Click here if you want to go straight to YouTube and watch the videos there for any reason.
First up is the second half of Jigsaw Catch.
Next we have the 2nd verse and all of the lovely guitar solo of Missing A Train.
…and bringing up the rear is a minute or two of Missing A Train (again) this time from the soundcheck.
My first stage outing in about 3 years went off without a hitch at The Portland Arms in Cambridge last night. Great atmosphere, sold out venue, loads of friendly faces from Ippo, Narch, London and (natch!) Sandy, Beds. It was wonderful playing with John again after all this time and I think we pulled it off just fine despite a few hiccups here and there (see notes below). Can’t wait to do it again, so get in touch if you want us to play.
Photos and possibly some video footage of the event will be available from here in the near future, but for now here’s the whole set (mercifully minus most of my between-song-banter) recorded by Jacqui on a Sony DSC-T9 digital camera - how the world has changed. Photos by Kirstie Green.
Many thanks to Chris and Ashley for inviting us to play. Roll on the next one!
Anorak Notes: Most of the songs here are faithful to the original recordings, just without the other instruments, but two of them we messed about with a bit. Carousel is in a different key so that I could sing it higher, but this meant that John’s harmony vocal ended up being too high for him. To compensate he’s written a new guitar part and, boy is it wonderful. On Jigsaw Catch I wanted a different feel so we changed both the key and the tempo, so that it sounded more like Tim Buckley’s song, Buzzin’ Fly. On this one too, John has written a kick arse new guitar part that I could listen to all day. This is the one I was most looking forward to playing, but in the event it got screwed up because the acoustic guitar all but disappeared from the monitors for most of it and I spent the first verse struggling to find the right key to sing in.
Paul’s been beavering away over the Easter break battling with discog.com and last.fm to get some info and music content available on those two sites. The Sink & K-Linepages at last.fm are looking pretty good and worth a visit if you’re a last.fm user. Actually, thinking about it, there isn’t currently a lot of K-Line music available on this site so might be worth a visit to last.fm if you want to fill your boots.
More soon about our ongoing efforts getting the back catalogue available on last.fm and documented via discog.com
More details to follow, but John Ruscoe and I are playing an acoustic gig in Cambridge in April. We haven’t worked out a set yet, but suspect it’ll be a mix of Sink and Big Ray numbers with the odd cover and maybe a new song or two. Hoping this will be the start of us doing it as a regular partnership, but we’re both really busy so it’ll be patchy at best. Looking forward to it though. Will post more info as I get it from the guys putting it on.
Not unreleased, but a bit of a rarity nonetheless, this track was taken from a compilation EP put out by record-label-supremo-of-the-future, then singer of Perfect Daze (and also former singer of Sink), Mr Laurence Bell. Laurence asked a bunch of the bands that played together a lot at that time namely, Sink, Snuff, Senseless Things and his own band, Perfect Daze, to record one of each other’s songs for this one-off EP. Great idea and it came out well enough.
Snuff did a Senseless Things track (which they quite neatly segued into a Status Quo-esque version of Sink’s - cough - anthem, Blue Noodles), Perfect Daze did a version of Sink’s Grandma’s Kitchen (check out that version on their MyShit page), Senseless Things did a Perfect Daze track and we did the genuine, no cough Snuff anthem Not Listening. Of course despite the fact that my meagre voice wasn’t entirely up to the job of mimicking UK Punk’s two best singers at the time (namely Duncan and Simon), just doing a straight version of Not Listening would have been easy enough…and certainly good enough. But ‘Mr Creative Pants’ (namely me) had to go and get all ‘Dylan’ on himself again and decided that we should do a slowed-down acoustic version instead. Self-deprecation aside, I’m proud that my approach was always a little off the wall and unpredictable, that I was always looking for another angle etc., but the reality is that frequently the band (including me) wasn’t quite up to the task of presenting my stupid ideas in a convincing manner….and this track is no exception. Download it here:
Don’t get me wrong; it’s pretty good, but it’s just not as good as it should have been. The song’s too slow (my fault), there’s no bass in the mix (probably me again), the drums sound a bit shit and just what I thinking about with the silly extra notes on the lead riff. To cap it all I decided (in my 23 year old wisdom) to change the bloody lyric as well…the cheek of the lad. Indeed. No need for it at all as I can so clearly see 347 years later….”I’m not the ointment for your sore.” steady, Shakespeare In mitigation I can say that while the line is a bit of a pompous substitution for the original, my re-working was almost certainly inspired by the line from Infa Riot’s inclusion of the - 1980’s released - Secret Records 12″ comp, Brittania Waives The Rules, to whit, “Squeeze the boil and suck the pus”. OK, so no direct link, but I do seem to remember there being a connection. Too much info?
OK, I hear you.
Hard facts to end with:
We recorded the track in Huddersfield at the same studio as Another Love Triangle, with the same guy, Pete Whatshisname, producing/engineering.
It was Kermack’s first session as drummer. He did some backing vocals on Another Love Triangle, but no drumming.
We took the opportunity to record a few other tracks at the same time, most of which saw light on the Vega-Tables album…don’t know why they weren’t on Old Man Snake which we released next, but there you go.
One of the unreleased songs we recorded at this session was called Big Ray….that name ring a bell anyone?
I wish John Ruscoe had joined Sink by the time we recorded this; it would have sounded so much better.
BTW, many thanks to Paul Duncan for converting this tracks to MP3 for inclusion on the site. Much appreciated.
In mitigation I can say that while the line is a bit of a pompous substitution for the original, my re-working was almost certainly inspired by the line from Infa Riot’s inclusion of the - 1980’s released - Secret Records 12″ comp, Brittania Waives The Rules, to whit, “Squeeze the boil and suck the pus”. OK, so no direct link, but I do seem to remember there being a connection. Too much info?