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.
