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!
