www.betika.co.uk
It's been a fun- and thrill-packed week for Betika;
On Monday night Carolyn and I did an acoustic set at Solid Air, and a pretty random one at that. We suffered simultaneous mental blockages mid-gig, and couldn't think what any of our songs were called, or how they went, or which one we should play next. We did consider playing a few seconds of all of them, but settled on five arbitarily selected tunes. I can't remember what they were.
Tuesday we had a Betika rehearsal where we finished beating the set for Friday into shape. Things seemed to go pretty well, which isn't always necessarily always a good thing, sometimes a good rehearsal just before a gig leads to complacency and a sloppy performance on my part. Chris didn't attend, he was at the Arts Centre getting angry at Herbie Hancock for playing the wrong kind of jazz.
On Wednesday me, Lexi, Carolyn and Martin did an interview with a pair of nice ladies from www.where-r.co.uk, and then went to see yourcodenameis:milo at The Old Firestation, which was one of the finest gigs I've been to in a long time. It was great for the following reasons;
1) a really amazing band played in my town, which has been a rarity for a long time. The last noteworthy gig in Bournemouth was Brian Wilson last March and before that The Flaming Lips and Clinic way back in 2003;
2) playing live they were as good as, if not better than their recorded output;
3) I had a brief chat with Paul the singer afterwards and he was a really nice bloke.
On Thursday night a bunch of the other Betikans took themselves off to witness what was by all accounts an incendiary performance by Brenda at Rubber Soul, while I spent the evening in Hubcap's studio singing "Robot" over and over again, each time a little better than the last until we were happy that we'd got a pretty decent take of it.
This is getting a bit like the accounts of my weekends that I had to write every monday morning at Primary School- On Saturday I got up and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I went to bed. On sunday I woke up and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I went to bed.
We played at Mr Smiths on Friday night with support from The Marlins and a DJ set from Nic Rawlings. It was one of those magical nights where everything came together and worked just like it's supposed to but so rarely does- The Marlins were fanstastic, they made me feel strangely nostalgic but not about anything in particular, like I was yearning for a childhood that I never lived through and have no memories of...?; Nic played exactly the kind of obtuse-but-fascinating set I had hoped he would (I'll try to get a tracklisting from him at some point); the audience were a good mix of old friends and new faces who seemed to appreciate what we were doing, and plenty of them were dancing and shaking various bits of percussion. Not much more we could ask for really! For the first time ever we had an encore planned, but I was terrified that if we left the stage after "By Default" that everyone would assume we'd finished and leave! Happily, we got called back to the stage not once but twice, ending with impromptu renditions of "He's gonna step on you again" and "I killed a fly".
What was going to be a quiet after-gig drink at Betika towers for those of us who were driving somehow turned into some kind of party. Nic had never DJed before, but he's clearly been bitten by the bug- he was playing us Ivor Cutler and Bonzo Dog songs until about four in the morning.
I didn't want to get up on Saturday morning. I'd had far too much exercise convulsing around the stage for an hour the previous night, and I'd had far too little sleep. But I had to get up and do more singing at Hubcaps, so get up I did. We'd decided a while back to record mine and Carolyn's vocals simultaneously because we do a lot of stuff where we're singing in block harmony and it's nigh-on impossible to get the phrasing exactly the same if we sing our parts seperately. Doing it together has the advantage that we can watch each others lips and get the phrasing absolutely bang-on, but the disadvantage that there's double the chance that one of us (usually me, to be fair) will sing some kind of bum note that necessitates the re-recording of both of our parts. Needless to say, it's a painstaking and time-consuming process, which within a few hours will cause everyone involved in it to lose first all sense of objectivity and perspective, and then ultimately their minds. I'm normally the first to go, but in a rare turn-up for the books Hubcap and Carolyn both lost it long before I had the chance. When we took a break, Hubcap went out into the garden with a video camera and pointed it at a nondescript clump of greenery, adding live narration as he went; "These are my plants..." - long pause - "These are my plants...". Poor fella. Nothing constructive could be achieved after that, so Carolyn and I retired to the Towers to watch Doctor Who and work on a top secret art project about which I can reveal nothing for the time being. All will become clear in due course. Horribly clear.
Next Betika gig is on Thursday 19th May at O'Neill's, Old Christchurch Road.
