Sick

This is what I get for joking about being bedridden! I'm back in the land of the living for the first time in nearly a week having picked up a really filthy cold just after making my last post. A while back I did something similar, boasting to Carolyn that I never got colds and my immune system was impervious to all disease- on that occasion it took me less than 24 hours to come down with a really hideous throat infection. This time I've been getting dizzyness and headaches and running a temperature and having wierd delusional dreams about maths. It didn't seem like a big deal to start with, so I did a couple of rehearsals with Carolyn for an acoustic slot we had booked for last Thursday, and in doing those I completely destroyed my already raggedy-edged voice, and for the first time ever we had to cancel the gig. Apologies to anyone who came along to see us, and thankyou. In other Betika-health news: I have given Lexi and Imogen the gift of my cold, Rich was still in mump-quarantine last week but should hopefully be safe to attend rehearsals this week, Carolyn, Martin and Chris all seem to be okay.

We've recorded the last instrumental part on the last song! The last bits we did were Martin's horn on "Dormitor" and Chris and I playing some unison/octave lead/twang guitar on the same song. Now we're going to take a short break to let my voice and everyone's sense of perspective return before doing the final vocals and mixing, hopefully in a couple of weeks or so. In the meantime I'm going to be doing some more SK5 stuff- it's strange, but the four of us have hardly spoken since the last time we played, which would've been before Christmas, we've all been locked away in rooms somewhere working on new stuff with our respective "proper" bands. We're doing a set on Monday 28th at Destiny, completely unrehearsed, which is very much in the spirit of the project, and will attempt to record it as always- speaking of which, we'll have some copies of "Utility Soul Shambles" with us on the night, if you'd like to hear it, come and ask one of us. Chris will be doing his Little Boat thing too.

Getting There and Losing It

The drums are done, the bass is done, 99% of the guitars are done, the flute is done, the percussion is done, the melodica is done, the synthesisers are done, guide vocals have been done, all that remains to be done is Martin's trumpet, some flawless vocal performances and a little bit of tidying up, and the whole recording part of the project will be done. After that will come a short break followed by probably weeks of trying to mix it all. I don't really have the attention span for mixing and having to listen to the same song over and over again for hours on end makes me go a bit funny. I'll end up with a bit of the tune we've been working on stuck in my head for days afterwards, and every now and then I'll start whistling it subconsciously before realising what I'm doing and angrily telling the tune to f-off, normally in a shop queue, on a bus or in some other crowded place. To the casual observer it must look/sound like I have some musical form of Tourette's. No matter what I do, even if I listen to other catchy music, the Tune creeps back into my head every time I drop my guard, which is probably once every fifteen-twenty seconds.

Spring officially begins in one week's time, and not a moment too soon. My songwriting has been exceptionally miserable over the last couple of weeks, and I'm convinced that the blame lies with the almost complete lack of daylight in my life. I've made rough demos of a couple of songs; "ohgodohgodohgodohgod", which is very slow and sad but has a lot of harmonic angles in it, and "Empiness is here again!" which as the exclaimation mark might suggest is actually quite a joyful tune with very miserable words. It's a bit like the Velvet Underground doing mexican kraut-rock at the moment. But not like that at all. It might well be that both of these songs get abandoned forever once the sun starts shining and some seratonin starts circulating around my system again.

I hope Rich has gotten over his mumps. Apparently it can be quite serious in adults, and can cause enormous and painful swelling of the man-parts which can potentially lead to sterility, all of which I'm keen to avoid. There seems to be a mini-epidemic (an oxymoron surely?) of it going around the town's musicians at the moment and I somehow managed to avoid catching not only mumps but also measles, whooping cough and chicken-pox as a kid, which means I'm at risk of catching them all now in their more unpleasant adult forms. But then again, if I was bed-ridden for a while I would finally have a chance to work my way through some of the mountainous heap of unread books in the corner of the bedroom....I'll have to check with Rich how bad it really is...

Rock-baby and Antler-man

It's been a good and busy week since the last post, here's a quick rundown of what I've been up to...
On Tuesday we got together to do some work on the live set. I'd like to change it quite a bit, and extend our repertoire generally, variety being the spice of life and my boredom-threshold being quite low when it comes to songs. To that end we dusted off a couple of songs that we haven't played for a while- "If you go to work on me I'll die" and "We will not know peace", the latter of which we did a bit of work on the arrangement of to incorporate some new vocal and trumpet parts that have been developed since it's recording for Betikassette 2 last year, and we ran through "Let these things forget themselves" for the first time in a couple of months. This week I'm going to be arriving at rehearsal with a great sheaf of musical scribbles which are supposed to explain how three new songs are meant to go. Normally I'd write parts out and make some kind of rough demo of new songs, but when we learnt "Bob Hope" a month or so back the demo I'd made was too appalling for even the band to hear, so I just wrote out the chord changes and we worked on it together, and it came together much quicker than it normally does- we had it up to performance standard in one rehearsal, which is unheard of, so I'm hoping we can repeat that with the three newies this week. I think the real trick is not going to be learning the new tunes but not forgetting the ones we already know in the process!
On Wednesday Lexi and I went to see the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra performing Stravinksy's "Rite of Spring". The concert was fantastic but sadly seemed to be attended mostly by rude old people. I'm sure that's a false impression formed by the hateful old bastards shoving past me and jabbing their bony elbows into me at the bar, patronising the bar staff and voting conservative, and I'm sure that there were plenty of perfectly nice people in attendance. It's just that I wasn't lucky enough to come into contact with any of them. Nevermind....
Thursday evening I spent alone working on new songs, then on Friday we threw a percussion party where we got as many as we could of the people who have shaken or hit things with us over the last year in a room together and got them to do it again along with our new recordings. Present were all seven of Betika, Gav and Kieron from Perico, Lee from Dutch Husband, Brad from Brenda and Hubcap, which I make to be a total of twelve. There were a couple of conspicuous absences, most notably Rock-Baby and Antler-Man who joined in at the Earthwise festival last summer and who were easily the youngest and oldest semi-Betikans ever, we just didn't know how to get hold of them- both were, after all, incapable of speech. But we soldiered on anyhow, we got quite drunk, and we made a racket for several hours, and then we got more drunk and then we played interminable games of magnetic darts until something like four in the morning. Some hours later Hubcap and I reconvened to listen back to what we'd done, and it turned out that what we'd done, in spite of the booze and the fun we'd had doing it, was unmistakably music. Which came as a relief, though I never should have doubted, we had musical talent on hand by the bucketful. A big Betika thankyou for coming along guys, if you ever need somebody to play rolling pin or saucepan on one of your future recordings just say the word and I'm there. Hubcap and I spent the rest of saturday daytime recording synth parts, Robot Dog has lent me his Moog Prodigy for a few days so we've got some monumentally fat sounds from that on the tunes. Saturday evening I had intended to finish off the soundtrack to Tim Clague's short film "Watermelon" that I've been working on intermittently since the summer, but the night before had left me in no fit state to do anything so I flaked and watched "Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" diagonally with one eye.
Sunday evening Chris and I recorded the last couple of pieces for Watermelon, and also a series of very short free-form impov pieces for two increasingly de-tuned and mistreated acoustic guitars that started out as being something we thought might fit into the film soundtrack but ended hundreds of miles away, brain-damaged and learning to walk again after a nasty accident. I don't think any of them will ever get used for anything, or heard by anyone. In contrast, you can hear the main theme from Watermelon by clicking HERE.