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.
I finally ponied up the necessary and bought myself a decent second hand Denon cassette deck off evilBay. This means I’m now in the position to start working on the slew of unreleased studio demos, 4-tracks, live stuff etc. etc. from the past. Don’t hold your breath though; while I have overcome the technical problem of not having a cassette player, I still have to overcome the less tangible one of not having very much time to dedicate to this site.
However, I have been going through some cassettes over the last few days and discovered a decent radio interview I did for a local radio station way back in the Sink days. It’s actually not too embarrassing. Will try and post it and other rarities (ahem!) as soon as I can.
Never one to turn down a request, here’s the very first BDS demo, Gothic Monstrosities (for James R). Recorded over a couple of days in the basement of a used car salesroom in Kingston in (I think) 1986. The engineer was a lovely bloke called Hick. He even played sax on one of the songs I think. Martin Hawkes (aka Marty Tuff) from the Stupids played lead guitar on a couple of songs (listen out for anything that sounds remotely competent and that’ll be him!). I had no idea what I was doing and relied on Jason and Paul who had both been in the studio already with earlier bands. I’d hung out with the Stupids for a couple of sessions and done a 4-track recording with Frankfurter, but this was the first ’serious’ session I’d ever done. Listening back now I honestly can’t say any of it sounds too clever…in fact most of it’s pretty embarrassing, but I’m amazed at the number of people who like it 20+ years later. To be honest I’m amazed that anyone’s heard it at all.
A lot of it’s punk-by-numbers and influences were very much in evidence. Here’s a rundown of the more obvious steals:
Obsession = London Dungeon by the Misfits.
Dark Knight = Heard It All Before by Stupids (or the Marginal Man track that they nicked it from).
Never So Funny = No More Pain by Embrace (just the intro which is taken from Chris Bald’s bassline)…also a nod to the Stupids again with their song title Always Never Fun (which is way cleverer than my feeble attempt).
NY: Satriani and Eddie Van Halen are genious guitar players. They’re unbelievable musicians of the highest caliber. But I can’t relate to it. One note is enough.
JO: ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ The one note solo.
NY: Oh yeah - two strings, though. The same note on two strings. The wang bar made every one sound different.
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.
