www.betika.co.uk
I wasted the best part of a weekend reading the new Harry Potter book, in which only one thing happens in six hundred-odd pages. Imagine "The Phantom Menace" without the special effects - that's how rewarding an experience it was.
I will never let a book cheat me of so much valuable time again
Monday, July 25, 2005
Monday, July 18, 2005
The Great Outdoors
www.betika.co.uk
Loads of gigs since the last post- firstly with Delicate Hammers, who came down from Manchester to play with us a couple of weeks back and spread some half-hop tinged love around Bournemouth. I'd taken the day off work so I could be at home when the Hammers arrived, and I'd spent most of it pottering around the garden without bothering to switch on the TV or radio, so it wasn't until about 3.30pm that I went to check my email and discovered that the terrorist attacks on the London Underground had taken place. Talk about living in a hole. So I got onto the phone to my Londonfriends pretty sharpish to make sure they were all okay- this was the third time I've had to do this in my life, and the first call in each case has been to the same person, my friend Ali. She was living in Manchester in '96 when the IRA blew up the Arndale Centre, then working just around the corner from one of the nail bombs that were set off in London around '99. Trouble seems to follow her around, but thankfully never quite catch up with her. This time, as before, everyone was present and accounted for. For me at least.
Naturally, the atmosphere at the gig was subdued. Again, this is the third time I've found myself in that situation, trying to play music while feeling strange and slightly numb with shock, to an audience in the same state. The night Princess Diana died I played a gig (with Police Dog and The Elastins), and also in both the 12th and 13th of September 2001 (with Tex la Homa and Betika respectively). It doesn't get any easier, but we all still played our hearts out as best we could. The Hammers were awesome, but for me Betika's set felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, like it wasn't quite real.
A couple of days later we played our first outdoor gig of the year, at Grooves on the Green in Parkstone, which is a relatively small event that just runs for an afternoon in a park. We thought it would be a fairly small-scale do that would ease us gently into the festival season, but as it turned out the weather was glorious and there were probably a couple of thousand people there. Which turned out to be a very good thing. I've had to start changing the lyrics to some of our songs slightly, so as to protect the younger audience-members who are so abundant at daytime festival events from the cussing and grown-up subject matter. I hadn't really thought about this prior to taking the stage at Grooves, so I had to come up with some bizarre off-the-cuff nonsense. Some of it was words, some of it was just noises. One section of "By Default" just went "bimbimbimbim, bimbim bimbimbimbim", though Carolyn, having a filthy mind, thought she heard even worse language in there than there would normally be.
In conclusion, an afternoon of good clean family fun was had by the whole band.
Thursday last week took us to the Larmer Tree Festival, where we were scheduled to play a couple of sets over the first couple of days of the festival - as it turned out we played no less than four! The first one was just before seven on the Thursday when we were the first act on a bill the culminated with a set by Jools Holland and his r&b orchestra (some time later and on a different stage!), then we returned at around 11.30 that evening to play another, more wired set joined by Sancho Paul on vibes and some random strangers on extra percussion. Chaos ensued. The next set we did was Friday lunchtime when we played a few of our quieter songs, kicking off with the first outing of "You can call me brother" which Carolyn and I did with just guitar, melodica and voices, and concluding with "Hatred", which has fast become my favourite Betika song. Having retreated back to camp with Hubcap and Lee and Sarah Dutch, we had a bit of a singalong around what would have been our campfire had we been allowed to make one, and inbetween various Pavement and True Swamp songs (it took all of our collected minds to remember all of the words to "Dear Fingerprint") we worked out some nice four-part harmony singing for "If you go to work on me" (Imogen and Hubcap providing the extra voices), and also a cover of Hefner's "The Greedy Ugly People", which we've been considering doing in our acoustic sets for a little while now, but had become reluctant after having witnessed Darren Hayman's own spine-tingling rendition a few weeks ago. It all sounded rather lovely, so we took it all along to an open mic session much later that evening, where it didn't seem to work quite so well. We'd done several hours of drinking inbetween, which in retrospect probably wasn't such a great idea, and not something we'd do again in a hurry.
The rest of the weekend was spent watching bands, highlights for me were Jose Gonzales, This is Seb Clarke, Otis Lee Crenshaw and what little I caught of Flipron. I'm sure there should be many more, but it's all a bit of a blur to be honest.
Lots of new songs being rehearsed at the moment, look out for a couple at this week's Betika gigs;
Wednesday @ o'neill's - with Dutch Husband and One Shade Lighter
Sunday @ Le Bateau - me and Caz doing acoustic stuff.
Loads of gigs since the last post- firstly with Delicate Hammers, who came down from Manchester to play with us a couple of weeks back and spread some half-hop tinged love around Bournemouth. I'd taken the day off work so I could be at home when the Hammers arrived, and I'd spent most of it pottering around the garden without bothering to switch on the TV or radio, so it wasn't until about 3.30pm that I went to check my email and discovered that the terrorist attacks on the London Underground had taken place. Talk about living in a hole. So I got onto the phone to my Londonfriends pretty sharpish to make sure they were all okay- this was the third time I've had to do this in my life, and the first call in each case has been to the same person, my friend Ali. She was living in Manchester in '96 when the IRA blew up the Arndale Centre, then working just around the corner from one of the nail bombs that were set off in London around '99. Trouble seems to follow her around, but thankfully never quite catch up with her. This time, as before, everyone was present and accounted for. For me at least.
Naturally, the atmosphere at the gig was subdued. Again, this is the third time I've found myself in that situation, trying to play music while feeling strange and slightly numb with shock, to an audience in the same state. The night Princess Diana died I played a gig (with Police Dog and The Elastins), and also in both the 12th and 13th of September 2001 (with Tex la Homa and Betika respectively). It doesn't get any easier, but we all still played our hearts out as best we could. The Hammers were awesome, but for me Betika's set felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, like it wasn't quite real.
A couple of days later we played our first outdoor gig of the year, at Grooves on the Green in Parkstone, which is a relatively small event that just runs for an afternoon in a park. We thought it would be a fairly small-scale do that would ease us gently into the festival season, but as it turned out the weather was glorious and there were probably a couple of thousand people there. Which turned out to be a very good thing. I've had to start changing the lyrics to some of our songs slightly, so as to protect the younger audience-members who are so abundant at daytime festival events from the cussing and grown-up subject matter. I hadn't really thought about this prior to taking the stage at Grooves, so I had to come up with some bizarre off-the-cuff nonsense. Some of it was words, some of it was just noises. One section of "By Default" just went "bimbimbimbim, bimbim bimbimbimbim", though Carolyn, having a filthy mind, thought she heard even worse language in there than there would normally be.
In conclusion, an afternoon of good clean family fun was had by the whole band.
Thursday last week took us to the Larmer Tree Festival, where we were scheduled to play a couple of sets over the first couple of days of the festival - as it turned out we played no less than four! The first one was just before seven on the Thursday when we were the first act on a bill the culminated with a set by Jools Holland and his r&b orchestra (some time later and on a different stage!), then we returned at around 11.30 that evening to play another, more wired set joined by Sancho Paul on vibes and some random strangers on extra percussion. Chaos ensued. The next set we did was Friday lunchtime when we played a few of our quieter songs, kicking off with the first outing of "You can call me brother" which Carolyn and I did with just guitar, melodica and voices, and concluding with "Hatred", which has fast become my favourite Betika song. Having retreated back to camp with Hubcap and Lee and Sarah Dutch, we had a bit of a singalong around what would have been our campfire had we been allowed to make one, and inbetween various Pavement and True Swamp songs (it took all of our collected minds to remember all of the words to "Dear Fingerprint") we worked out some nice four-part harmony singing for "If you go to work on me" (Imogen and Hubcap providing the extra voices), and also a cover of Hefner's "The Greedy Ugly People", which we've been considering doing in our acoustic sets for a little while now, but had become reluctant after having witnessed Darren Hayman's own spine-tingling rendition a few weeks ago. It all sounded rather lovely, so we took it all along to an open mic session much later that evening, where it didn't seem to work quite so well. We'd done several hours of drinking inbetween, which in retrospect probably wasn't such a great idea, and not something we'd do again in a hurry.
The rest of the weekend was spent watching bands, highlights for me were Jose Gonzales, This is Seb Clarke, Otis Lee Crenshaw and what little I caught of Flipron. I'm sure there should be many more, but it's all a bit of a blur to be honest.
Lots of new songs being rehearsed at the moment, look out for a couple at this week's Betika gigs;
Wednesday @ o'neill's - with Dutch Husband and One Shade Lighter
Sunday @ Le Bateau - me and Caz doing acoustic stuff.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
First Blog in ages
www.betika.co.uk
I set this up a few months back with all the best intentions in the world to keep it regular and up-to-date, and all of a sudden a month has passed since I last posted here. In my defence, I've been keeping pretty busy with work on the record- Hubcap and I have now got our mixing heads on and we're doing marathon 12-hour sessions per song and are slowly but surely parting company with our minds in the process. It's incredibly difficult to stay focussed on what we're doing when the sun is shining outside and there are people to see and books to be read, and mixing is one of those tasks that requires 100% total concentration, otherwise we're just wasting our time. Good results seem to be coming in though - we'll preview some new recordings on our MySpace page in the near future so you can judge for yourself. I don't know when we'll have the whole thing finished, we have a deadline of 22nd of July, which is drawing frighteningly close at an alarming rate, so I'm guessing that we'll have it finished at 11:59 PM on the 21st!
I set this up a few months back with all the best intentions in the world to keep it regular and up-to-date, and all of a sudden a month has passed since I last posted here. In my defence, I've been keeping pretty busy with work on the record- Hubcap and I have now got our mixing heads on and we're doing marathon 12-hour sessions per song and are slowly but surely parting company with our minds in the process. It's incredibly difficult to stay focussed on what we're doing when the sun is shining outside and there are people to see and books to be read, and mixing is one of those tasks that requires 100% total concentration, otherwise we're just wasting our time. Good results seem to be coming in though - we'll preview some new recordings on our MySpace page in the near future so you can judge for yourself. I don't know when we'll have the whole thing finished, we have a deadline of 22nd of July, which is drawing frighteningly close at an alarming rate, so I'm guessing that we'll have it finished at 11:59 PM on the 21st!
Several Happy Betika Birthdays this week - Carolyn's was on Monday (I made her one of my trademark disturbing photo-collage birthday cards, which one day will have a horrible disturbing internet gallery all of their own. But only when there are enough of them.) - Imogen's was on Tuesday (I found a rather lovely semi-acoustic bass in a second-hand shop a couple of days beforehand which I've lent her as a kind-of-present) and Martin's is today. I'm not sure what I'm going to give Martin, but it's going to be amazing.
I've been re-reading the "Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy" quintilogy over the last couple of weeks, and listening to (amongst other things) Raymond Scott's "Soothing Sounds for Baby (vol.1)", Jethro Tull's "Benefit", "Innervisions" by Stevie Wonder, "Music for Airports" by Brian Eno and a disproportionally high amount of Betika mixes. I've been lucky enough to attend a couple of those really rare gigs this week where absolutely everything on the bill was amazing- on Monday we celebrated Caz and Imo's birthdays in the company of Sunshine Republic, Brenda and True Swamp Neglect, each of whom was on absolutely top form, and last night Chris, Caz, Lexi and I went up to Bristol see Darren Hayman (of Hefner fame) and Steveless. The venue they were playing in, The Cube, is a tiny backstreet cinema-cum-theatre-cum-live venue (which has a lovely old-cinema smell and vibe about it), and so it was an all-seater, pin-drop quiet gig, which was absolutely perfect. Steveless, who you may have heard on John Peel's show around about this time last year, did a set of what was kind of misanthropic observational stream-of-consciousness-standup comedy but set to accompaniment from guitar, bass-drum, melodica, accordian and kazzoo and delivered mostly deadpan but interspersed with random YELPS! and SCREAMING! I was grinning like an idiot all the way through. Then Darren Hayman did what was basically a greatest-hits set of Hefner songs, along with at least one song by The French (his post Hefner band) and some stuff from his new solo records. Definite highlight was "The greedy ugly people", which he played on a ukelele (causing me to radically revise my previously low opinion of that instrument). Lexi nearly cried, and so did I. Another beautiful moment occurred during the interval, when a) I discovered that The Cube's bar served tea (I was driving), b) I learned it would only cost me 50p and c) at that moment, the DJ played "Grave Architecture" by Pavement. Sometimes the smallest things can make you very, very happy.
"Hatred" is the wisdom of Lexi set to music.
Look out for Betika and Delicate Hammers at Mr Smiths this Thursday! 8.30, £3.
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