Wrong month

I really have to improve my message-taking skills. Due to me being confused by the fact that the 27th days of both February and March fall on a Sunday, Carolyn and I turned up to do an acoustic show last night a WHOLE MONTH early! Man, did I feel stupid. As (our) luck would have it, one of the bands scheduled to play had dropped out, so we managed to sneak onto the bottom of the bill and got to do our thing in front of somebody else's unsuspecting audience. It's good in a way that I got my dates confused, because it meant we had to pull our fingers out and get our shit together a whole four weeks earlier than we would have done, so the six or so hours of emergency rehearsals we did was time put to good use, not least because we made a quick recording of the set in that time. We did it primarily to help us remember words and vocal parts (it didn't work. I sang a lot of "nnnn..mmm" last night where the English language should have been), but it turned out well enough to be fit for human consumption, so I've uploaded an mp3 for your consideration. We only did a four-song set last night, consisting of "Girlshaped" (mp3 here), "Which way will I go" (downloadable as an internet single from here), a cover of Iron and Wine's "Naked as we came" (in a different key and with the boy / girl parts swapped round) and a new version of "We will not know peace" (from Betikassette 2). We're going to be playing a lot more acoustic slots in the coming weeks, partly to force us to practice real hard (and learn some more songs), but equally just for the joy of it......and the love of the sound of our own voices! Having realised that there may be mileage in turning up at venues unannounced, these gigs may happen on a bit of a random basis, but the next one we have in the diary is at "Limbs", the new night from the creator of the legendary "Pand'a Flesh" nights and compilation CDs, which is at Alcatraz nightclub in Holdenhurst Road on Thursday 17th March. Also playing that night will be Imogen's dad, whose folk guitar stylings I've been looking forward to seeing for months, and various other acoustic acts of which I know nothing. As it's St. Patrick's that night, I'd love it if there was some kind of Irish folk session- I've always wanted to join in with one of those, but I've always known in my heart that I'll always be too hamfisted. Perhaps I could persuade them to play very slowly?

Been Cheating

It has been a good week in the world of Betika! It began with the cheers and applause from the gig on sunday still ringing in our ears, and continued well as we found ourselves on the recieving end of more positive feedback than I for one really know how to deal with. It was with heads and hearts inflated by this that we reconvened on tuesday to have another crack at recording "Jeremy Bentham" and "Dormitor", and for the first time I think we managed to capture the energy we play with when we're in front of people, but coupled with the precision and accuracy needed in a recording situation. We were playing together like a five-piece musical machine! (Lexi and Martin will overdub their bits later). We did several versions of either song, then the following evening Hubcap, Chris and I got together to listen back to what we'd done, and edited the very best bits of each take together into uber-versions. I know that this is cheating, but it's a method available to us enabling us to make the best end product we possibly can so I've got no qualms about doing it.
We've got all the instrumental bits done now, bar some bits of percussion and all the fiddly keyboard and wind instrument bits, and after that comes the bit that I always find the most difficult and least enjoyable: The Singing. The bit where not only is there absolutely no room for technical error, but where I've also got to do the whole emotional communication thing. It always seems like I can do either one or the other at any one time. Carolyn and I agreed some time ago that we would start slipping in extra vocals-only rehearslas between full-band gatherings to get us up to recording standard, but we've been a bit slack on that front so far, so we decided to play a few acoustic gigs so we'd have no choice but to rehearse or fall flat on our arses. The first of these acoustic gigs will be at Consortium next sunday and we don't even know what we're going to play yet, let alone got together for a practice. Luckily we do most our best work at the last minute. Strict deadlines are an important thing in the Modernday Betika. I've been sitting around singing other people's songs for my own amusement quite a lot, really just for the singing practice, but there's a good chance we might end up throwing a few covers into our acoustic sets. There's a handful of my favourite ever songs that I've always wanted to play (and I expect Carolyn is the same), so I might well take this oppurtunity to do this.
"Shaun of the dead" is on in the lounge at Betika Towers, so I'm going to watch it.
My darts is getting better.

Something I forgot...

Here's one for Carolyn to analyse with her dream-book!
Last night I had a dream about two small dogs named Dave and Doug, who were the size of puppies but had the temperaments of old miserable dogs, and who were growling fiercely at one another because each was lying on a letter addressed to the other (this is how I knew their names. I think their full names were something like "Doug III" and "The latest Dave"). They were really angry because they both really wanted to read their letters but neither of them would stand up because they were afraid that the other would get the post that was rightfully his, which would have been even worse than no letter at all.
I wonder what that could mean?

Dave

Specials, downloads

Firstly, a massive thankyou to everybody who lent us their support last night, we had enormous fun playing, we made some new friends and we made a lot of people dance! The Greater Betika is now seven strong again with the arrival of Martin, so the stage at Consortium was pretty crowded and the ad-hoc percussion section (the "Specials" as they've become known) that assembled had to create a sort of orchestra / mosh pit at the foot of the stage. We got off to an inauspicious start when our first attempt at "Bob Hope" descended into chaos in the first few seconds and had to be aborted, but second time around it went off without a hitch, which was pretty amazing as we'd only played it at one rehearsal beforehand. It was really good to be opening a set with a song other than "Jeremy Bentham", which we've played ay every single gig for the past twelve months and I'm getting a bit sick of. The rest of the set was mostly uptempo stuff from the first two Betikassettes (Martin has breathed (or blown?) new life into "Dormitor" with his horn part). We also did "Volkespiotr" (another set staple maybe due for a rest?), "Thunderstorm" which dates right back to "Your soul against the weekend" and is ironically probably the best thing in the set, "Girlshaped" which we've just recorded a killer version of, and "Love, let me not hunger", which is another new addition to the set, and our token effort at playing anything slow or quiet. As owners of "Heads smashed in..." will know, we've got a sizeable collection of slow, quiet songs, but I don't think they really work very well as part of a live set alongside the louder, faster songs. It always seemed to kill our momentum when we slipped "Let these things forget themselves" into the set throughout last year, especially once we'd learnt the secret of making people dance. (To be honest, I don't know what we did to make them start dancing, they just did, and for that I will be eternally grateful). I think that if we're going to play some of the downtempo stuff we're going to have to come up with a completely different set and present it in a different way, possibly seated and wearing cardigans and serious expressions on our faces.
The last couple of shows we've done have really brought it home to me that we're really only ever as good as the sum of the people who come to see us. If you saw us last night please come again!

When we returned from the gig to Betika Towers last night we listened to John Coltrane and drank cup-a-soups (could we get any more rock and roll?), and I played Chris a track from my 22-track collection of offcuts (see previous post), which he reckoned sounded like "the history of dance music in reverse". You can download it HERE to see if you can work out what he meant. The tune dates from 2000 or 2001, doesn't have a title and features some "rustic" keyboard playing on my part. If you can think of a suitable name for it, mail me. Also newly available for download is a quicktime version of the SK5 film "Utility Soul Shambles", the huge file size and poor picture quality of which I apologise for in advance. Enjoy, or don't.

Dave

Songs from the cutting-room floor

It's amazing what you can acheive when you're supposed to be doing something else. I'm supposed to be working on tweaking the current batch of Betika recordings and making demos of a couple of new songs I've got floating around my head, and what I've actually done over the weekend is compile a twenty-two track album of all the random tunes that I've started but never quite finished over the last five years. Many of them are complete songs that I never managed to write words to, some of them are little more than disembodied riffs that never got attached to songs and some of them were written as instrumental tunes but never saw completion because they clearly weren't Betika songs. They do however work reasonably well as a collection in their own right, with a certain amount of tidying up and a few finishing touches, so I'm going to make a few copies of it for personal consumption and for birthday presents for friends. I might put some of the tunes up on the Betika site in the next week or so, I need to live with them for a while to make certain whether they're they're any good or not.

Songs brewing up at the moment include "Pink Hulk" which (wait for it) is kind of a blues-folk / hiphop thing (I realise how crappy that sounds) that came about as a result of listening to Iron And Wine and A Tribe Called Quest in close proximity, and one called "Bent to the timetable" which has a kind of Talking Heads / Broadcast / Neptunes vibe to it. Those two are at the point where the bulk of the lyric is done and I'm trying to fill in some gaps, there's another couple ("Goggo" - flamenco-disco with impossible guitar and "Theme from SLAGS" (both working titles, obviously) which is a bit like a russian folk tune forced into rapid and repetitive slave-labour) which are in desperate need of words to save them from appearing on my next volume of false starts, wrong turns and dead ends.

My copy of the Bloc Party album is still somewhere in transit.

Dave

Rehearsal 15.2.05

AN ENTRY ON BEHALF OF CAROLYN

Tonight we finally broke Imogen… by the end of rehearsal she was literally on her knees, crying from the pain of bass. In other news, we gained a trumpet player (Martin) and played through stuff for the gig on Saturday.

But much more interestingly than THAT, it turns out

! Imogen and Jenko both suffer from sleep paralysis

! Dave had a dull dream about forgetting someone’s surname

! Martin is capable of both being awake AND dreaming as long as he wakes up with one eye before the other

! I had no dreams worth repeating that weren’t about school and body parts

! Chris had no comment but I will be chasing this up

Check back soon for more dream chat, possibly with analysis if I can find my special book!

A productive day and a strange night

Today was one of those days that makes up for all the days of seemingy pointless toil and grind. Hubcap and I have got three songs from nothing to the point of being semi-polished pop music in the space of a few hours, somebody somewhere was smiling on us today. So far we've got five songs from our latest session sounding like the ideas I had in my head, leaving two to nail properly- "Jeremy Bentham" and "Dormitor". We've done a couple of really good versions of both songs, but I still don't think we've been relaxed enough to put accross the energy and excitement we do when we play those songs live. We're going to have another go next week.

I'm quite drunk now, I just had a conversation with a taxi driver about the evils of the full moon.

nightnight

D

Ears glazed over

I have to take back one of the endorsements I made in my last post- the one regarding decaf tea. I realise now that while the removal of the caffeine takes with it the mild stimulant effect and allows the late-night tea drinker to get to sleep in the normal way, the diuretic effect remains exactly the same as with standard builders' tea, meaning the late-night tea drinker will be awoken from his or her sleep by an urgent call of nature, sometime in the wee small hours. In future I will be drinking nothing but corporation pop* after 9pm.

Spent several more hours working on the record with Hubcap tonight, and all we had to show for it at the end was two and a half minutes of (flawless) drums and fried brains. A strange thing happens to my ears after a couple of hours' recording- the equivalent of eyes "glazing over" when the brain becomes completely saturated with information- at which point they cease to be reliable listening devices and I've learned not to trust them because anything I've ever done with glazed ears has been bollocks. Normally, when my ears start going funny I know it's time to end the session or take a break for a while, but lately when we've had lots of stuff to be getting on with I've been trying to flush them out by listening to loud white noise (from a detuned radio or TV) for a few minutes. I think it's helping to delay the onset of brain-fade but it's hard to tell. There are too many other variables.

Lexi bought me a magnetic dartboard for Christmas and I've developed a cod-superstitious ritual where I have to throw at least 100 with three darts before I can go to bed each night. I'm not very good at darts, so this normally takes a long time. It's 11.30 and I haven't thrown a single dart yet, so I'd better get cracking.
until next time

Dave


*a Staffordshire euphemism for tap water, used to trick naive southern boys into thinking they're about to get some amazing new fizzy drink.

Thought I'd have a go...

...seeing as everyone else was! 'Tis true, I was not at practice today. I was drawing a graph to show the results of my bean experiment whilst also making pancakes for everyone else. Because it is Pancake Day today.
Maybe because I don't often go to practices, because of my commitment to beans and stuff, explains why during the last gig I played the first song purely on the 'set' function of my keyboard, rather than the 'play' function. This meant that every note I played was an A in a different instrument or noise. Although, I am rather hoping that this will create a new movement. I shall call it Expressionist Keyboarding. You should try it. It's funny. But I think it made Dave cry a bit.
I like pancakes, but decaff tea is too weak for me.

Bye.

Lexi.

Shrove Tuesday

Jenkins the Drums is under the doctor today, as they say across the Bristol Channel, and Lexi had homework to do and pancakes to make so we were only a foursome at rehearsal tonight. We've been playing the same basic set (with a few minor changes here and there) for almost a year now, so it's become a matter of some urgency that we get some new songs into our repertoire before we start going stale. To this end we learned a couple of new tunes tonight; "Love, Love, Love, let me not hunger" which Chris wrote about the trials of intercontinental love, and "Bob Hope", which is one of mine, based in part on a TV obituary of the titular comedian that I saw a couple of years ago (just after his death funnily enough). It's only our second or third song that's ever had a guitar solo, and it's an atonal bastard of one! The guitar break is taken from a tune that we started jamming along to the interference that comes from a mobile phone just before it rings, it's in a completely different key to the rest of the song but it fits in perfectly with the mood of the piece. You'll hopefully be able to hear what I mean if you see us in the near future.

My favourite things in the world today are pancakes and decaffeinated tea, which allow me to go to bed nicely full but not totally wired.
Lent begins tomorrow.

Carolyn and Lexi have started contributing to the Blog!

Dave

Chip, Chip, Chip...

Starting as I mean to go on then...here's what we've been up to;
Work is continuing slowly but surely on the current batch of recordings with Hubcap. The main reason for this slow progress is the ridiculously high quality threshold we've set ourselves- on listening back to the last set of recordings we did together I realised that we'd let too many seemingly inconsequential little mistakes go uncorrected. They were just tiny things - a choked guitar note here, a mis-hit drum perhaps, a fractionally out of tune note on the vocal part- things that would be quite acceptable, charming even, on a record from the sixties, but to my ears (brought up on eighties high-gloss production and used to hearing modern records that have been ProTools-ed to perfection) they sounded like massive unforgivable mistakes. We ended up scrapping half of the songs we recorded, and vowed to be super-strict and utterly unforgiving next time round. In some respects, it feels like it might have been more honest to go with a more lo-fi approach and leave the imperfections as they are, but to do so when we have the skills and technology to fix them seems false in a different kind of way. It would be tantamount to deliberately setting out to make a sub-standard record, which is not what the whole lo-fi / DIY thing is all about, as far as I see it. I've made masses of lo-fi recordings in the past, but not one of them was ever meant to be that, it's just how they turned out due to the limitations of the technology available to me and my ability to use it (and as a musician, of course). At the moment I have access to all the technology and the skills I need to produce a really well-recorded set of songs, and to do otherwise would make me either a flake or a phoney. I have a horrible suspicion that I'm already both.

So far we've recorded all of Rich's drums, most of my guitar and Imogen's bass and sundry other instrumental parts on something like six songs. I think this week is mostly going to be spent working on Chris' guitar parts, and after that we're going to throw a party to record all the hand-percussion parts. Everyone who has ever joined us on stage to shake or hit something is invited, there will be beer and nibbles and maybe some massed singing.

Away from Betika, I'm attempting to read James Joyce's "A portrait of the artist as a young man", but the constantly teleporting narrative requires absolute concentration and I just don't seem to have the necessary attention span at the moment, there's too many things I have to do or think about. I can't see that changing for a while. I've been listening to "Antics" by Interpol, "Thunder Lightning Strike" by The Go! Team and various things I've been downloading from www.showandtellmusic.com . I've been laughing hard at the new series of "Look Around You" (BBC2, Mondays), and desperate not to be disappointed by "Nathan Barley" (C4, Fridays) the new collaboration between Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker (see TV Go Home).

post ends
D von B

First Post

I've started this blog because I looked at the Betika website (http://www.betika.co.uk) this morning and realised that I haven't updated the diary section since March 2004. It worries me that this makes me look like either a very lazy person or one who leads a very dull life, or both. I hope I'm not either. In reality, I seem to cram pretty much every waking hour with some kind of creative activity, musical or otherwise, and the task of documenting this is always the one that is set aside for some future rainy day that never comes. It always gets pushed further and further down the list of priorities until the thing I intended to write about is just a distant memory, or alternatively so much has happened that I can't even think where to start the mammoth undertaking of recording it all. So I'm setting this up and making a belated new-year's resolution to keep it up to date, hoping that the ease of use of the blog will make it less time-consuming than the process of creating, editing and uploading webpages- I'm making it sound like the Twelve tasks of Hercules, but time is my most precious and scarce resource at the moment, and this seems like a good way of making the whole business that little bit quicker and easier.
As with the old diary on the Betika site, the other band members will be posting here as and when they feel the need.
Dave