From The Archive - Progress?

We might not have a great deal to show for it yet, but we've been a productive bunch lately. The task that's been occupying the bulk of my time is the mixing of the first half of the songs from the studio album with Hubcap, our superhuman producer. He has reserves of patience that mortal men simply don't possess, he can spend hours working on fixing a detail so subtle that I can't even make it out, his quality control threshold is so high that we've been scrapping mixes that took us hours to achieve and doing them again from scratch, he has the most superkeen ears in the world, a complete mastery of technology and he's making us sound fantastic! Since completing the first batch of album tracks I've turned my attention to finishing off the second four-track kassette, which we meant to have finished in time for our gig with Dutch Husband at the start of May, but failed for lack of time and focus. The work I've been doing with Hubcap has caused me to raise the bar somewhat in terms of my own recordings, and I've been trying to apply his meticulous methodology to them as far as my restlessness and impatience will allow. You'll have to compare and contrast the two sets of recordings when they both find their way into the wild to judge whether I've been successful.
In between working on Betika recordings and rehearsing the next bunch of songs for the album I've somehow managed to find time to be in not one but two other bands. It was with some reluctance that I got involved with projects outside Betika again - the months since the Seemonsters-drumstick-handover that marked the cessation of my extra-betikular activities have been the most productive ever in the group's history, and I was fearful of getting side-tracked and losing focus. But I just can't say "no".
Actually, the first non-betika thing I started doing was mostly my idea. It came up in conversation at a gig about six months ago that Chris Catlin from True Swamp, Mooro from see monsters and I all had Casio SK-5 sampling keyboards. Chris' gets used quite frequently on Swamp recordings, and occasionally live, and mine has found it's way onto the odd Betika song, Mooro's lived until recently on top of his wardrobe. When I found out that we each possessed one of these rare beasts, I came up with the idea of forming an all SK-5 band called, rather cleverly I thought, "The SK-5". The original plan was to play once and once only, unrehearsed and in public, to record our collective noises and disband. A complicated set of rules was devised governing what would and wouldn't be permissible musical activity within the group. After talking about it for a while, I was persuaded to soften my stance and drop some of the dogma, and we eventually started meeting up for occasional sessions- I wouldn't call them rehearsals as such because we never played the same thing twice due to a combination of poor memory and attempts at spontanaety. We recorded these sessions, and we finally did a gig. We meant to record the gig too, but some dorcas forgot to hit the "record" button in his excitement about the imminent cacophony, so those particular sounds were lost to posterity. Strangely, we seemed to go down quite well with the audience, despite the fact that certain things we were doing were done purely for the purpose of annoying people as much as possible, and the day afterwards we got asked to do a set at the new "Pand 'a Flesh" electronica night. So I guess we're gonna do that, and possibly record it if I manage to keep my shit together and remember to hit the button, and then put everything we've done up on the web. And then stop.
The other thing I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into is Sancho. I was involved in the project from quite early on, when Paul got me to play some very primitive trumpet on "Ball o'string", and I'd attempted to re-create the effect on stage with the group (which at the time was called "sea aunts") at a couple of trendy East London booze-holes as girls in wigs looked on, not sure if what we were doing was cool or not as an official proclaimation on the matter had not yet been made by the grand arbiter of these things. (when the proclaimation finally came, it was a year late and thick with ambiguity). I tried to keep my involvement to a bare minimum, because I knew that it would end up swallowing up all the spare time that I only had because I'd given up sleeping. For example, I never actually rehearsed with the band, I just turned up for gigs having learnt what parts I could, and the bits I didn't know I'd just jam along, which was a real education. I had to learn how to play in F# major during a song once.
Somehow, in the new incarnation of Sancho, I find myself playing not only trumpet but also bass guitar, cheesy toy electric drums, the right hand side of Charlie Sancho's drumkit and a couple of weeks ago I even sang a song when Russell couldn't make it to a gig. Chris is heavily involved too, even more so than I, and has been since the first version of the live band. He plays guitar through various effects that make it sound like a bass, a synthesier, a cyclotron and all sorts of other things, and sometimes he squats on the floor to play a very small keyboard. He's also in charge of shouting instructions at the rest of us. We've both taken to wearing our guitars really high for some reason, I thought it might make me look like an '80s session bassist in the "Rockschool" vein, but photographic evidence has shown me that it just makes me look like I have disproportionately long thin legs, like some musical wading bird. I think I'd better go back to the drawing board and reconsider my shapes.

From The Archive - Strike Four / The Greater Betika

I'm so very poor at keeping this up to date! I've got an entire arsenal of excuses for my slackness though, including plain laziness, having had a change of premises forced upon me (the new Betikorp world HQ is shaping up nicely) and being far too busy with the business of writing and rehearsing and recording with and without the band to do anything of sufficient interest to warrant documentation. I did nearly get killed again, some 20 yards from the spot where it happened before- on this occasion it was my fault, having had the cheek to attempt to share a public highway with a man whose Mercedes had come complete with the title deeds for all the roads in great Britain. It's funny, after the last time it happened I thought that if it ever happened again I'd probably have a pretty good go at smashing up either the car or it's occupant or both. The incident made me very angry. But in the heat of the moment, when it came, I found it was all I could do to roar obscenities at the instrument of my near-destruction. And I mean ROAR. There was suddenly this voice that was not mine coming from somewhere deep inside me, like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters. "THERE IS NO DANA, ONLY ZOOL!!" But after that I just wanted to get home and stop shaking.

I've done loads of music since the last entry, and pretty much every last note of it had been Betika based, which is incredible for me. For the last three years I've been active in a minimum of three bands at any one time, and something like seven or eight in total. It's all been very cool, and I've got to do some amazing gigs and been involved with making some fantastic records, but it's all been distracting me from getting on with Betika music. And now I'm in the situation where I can focus solely on that (for the time being) I'm getting a phenomenal amount done. The "Betikassette #1" e.p. was written in a little over a week, largely on cycleback, and "Betikassette #2" is half finished already; I knuckled down and finished off loads of songs that were almost but not entirely complete, and wrote arrangements for them that made them sound like the same band was playing all of them. Redefining the Betika sound has been my biggest stumbling block over the period since we decided to move from being an acoustic quartet to something more ambitious, not from a shortage of ideas but rather a glut of them- I was just too interested in too many types of music at once. And I was spoilt for choice in terms of sounds too- the problem with modern music technology is that every sound you can think of (and plenty more that you can't) is no further away than a magazine cover disk or a sample website, and while having access to all these noises is amazing, attempting to use them all in proximity to one another is something like the aural equivalent of using 256 different colours in one single webpage. It all comes out messy and disjointed, and every song sounds like the work of a different band, and an album of these songs sounds like a slightly schizo compilation tape. I found I could stay on the same tack for about an e.p.'s worth of songs, but after that I'd go off on some waltz-techno-metal tangent. In the end the way it came together was completely organic, and dictated entirely by the things that the other six people brought to the Greater Betika, and after that all I had to do was re-arrange the songs for the big band and bingo! Instant back catalogue of new songs.

It's odd being in a seven-member outfit. I haven't been in it for all that long, but I just cannot imagine it being any other way- I saw that Franz Ferdinand video the other day and my immedeate reaction was "But there's only four of them! How are they going to manage?" They looked lonely, like four skinny saplings on a wind-blasted hilltop. I find myself thinking back to bands I used to be in and wondering "who was the cello player in that?", when in fact the band in question was a guitar / bass / drums trio. It's good being in a proper band again though, I've missed the cameraderie and the gang mentality and that sense of being bouyed along by other people's enthusiasm. It's great to be playing in front of people again too, there's no buzz quite like the one you get when you step off stage at the end of a good gig. It's probably something derived from fear, like the thrill of a rollercoaster, but combined with the joy of playing music with friends and the king-size ego massage you get from a receptive audience. The only downside to it is that the buzz doesn't last nearly long enough, and then I tend to get the blues for a couple of days. I can only imagine what it must be like for bands coming off of month-long tours- I've only done a couple of short tours, but the experience effected me in peculiar ways. I came home felling much taller than when I left (the same is can be said of True Swamp- Chris used to be about the same size as me, but after their UK tour with Come Down he was towering over me. Maybe it's just a character-building thing that makes you stand up straight?), and it took me a while to adjust to the fact that I wasn't the focus of everyone's attention for half an hour every night. I felt terribly important, but I didn't know why, and nobody else seemed to be able to grasp quite how important I was, and then when I wasn't getting my nightly dose of endorphines the melancholy started to take over. I can understand why there are some bands who tour pretty much constantly- there must be a point you reach where to stop would be a mind-and-body-buggering shock to the system. Stay in school, kids!