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.
