Cover etc

http://www.betika.co.uk/
Our friends The A&E Line have just made a mini-album of truncated covers of songs by bands called "Einen Einfach Fahrkarte Nach Bournemouth", which has a version of our song "Twenty Five" on it. You can download it free from their MySpace page.
Also, following Toupe's "Villains", I have discovered a second song which includes a reference to Betika or me - in this case with reference to a Smiths tribute band that some friends and I were talking about starting a few years ago- "Richard and Dave played guitar / but neither one wanted to be Johhny Marr / Both sang a fine "Girl Afraid" / Rich had the quiff, but Dave sings like that anyway / I hope that it worked out alright". The song in question is "Zammo" by Miniature Pygmies, whose two-album back catalogue I have been enjoying immensely over the last couple of weeks and highly recommend.

The Last Song

www.betika.co.uk

This is The Missionary, the last song to be performed in public by the Modernday Betika. A massive thankyou to Tone from BHone for putting on the gig, to all the other bands who played, and to everyone who came along, and everyone who has lent us their ears over the past few years.



We go studio now. See you next year with the Betika of the Future!

L'autre Betika

www.betika.co.uk

We've been aware of this lady from the Ivory Coast for a few years now, but this is the first time I've heard or seen her. My french is just good enough to recognize that it's being sung in the song, but I can't pick out more than the odd word - can anyone who paid attention at school help out with a translation? (I spent my french conversation lessons talking with my teacher about rugby, in English) I'm guessing from the uncontrollable sobbing at the end that it's not such a happy song....she's not half bad at singing though, and it's one heck of a catchy tune. According to le wikipedia francophonique she's also a film and TV actress and won "best female" at last year's Cote D'Ivorie music awards. And she has an acute on the "e".

Vampire Moustache

www.betika.co.uk

Live Sancho last week, thanks to bh one

The Candidate

www.betika.co.uk

This is a video of the first ever public performance of our newest tune "The Candidate". Second public performance November 3rd...

Johnny and Susan

www.betika.co.uk
A new Sancho song, shot by Tone of BH-one at our recent show with Acoustic Ladyland. I was suffering an uncharacteristic touch of the nerves as Seb Rochford (also of Polar Bear / Basquiat Strings, and all-round drum deity) was watching us from the side of the stage. Not that anything I could have done could possibly have impressed him, even if had I relaxed to the point of being able to play properly...

End of Phase 3 - Party!

http://www.betika.co.uk/
It is with some sadness that I must announce the impending demise of Betika as we know it. Chris and Imogen (the 7th and 13th people respectively to involve themselves in the band, according to our meticulous records) are departing for a lengthy stay in Japan (much to the amusement of the Japanese, no doubt - "Imogen" is Japanese for "Potato person", which is a mild insult meaning "yokel" or "bumpkin", and "Chris" is a street name for heroin. I don't do any better, the closest pronounciation to my name is "Debu", which means "fatso"). They leave at the end of November, meaning that our next show will be our last together. Hopefully not the last for the band, which if all goes well could be functioning in a de/re-constructed form in the first quarter of next year, pending the discovery of suitable new personnel - if you're a bass-playing girl, we'd love to hear from you!
To mark this milestone, we're throwing a party! As luck would have it, the band's dissolution co-incides with the re-opening of The Gander, which seemed to be lost to the town as a live music venue when it closed a few months back. We were just about the last band to play there when we closed the BH One charity all-dayer in May, so it's nice to be one of the first bands to play there on it's reopening, and it seemed fitting that we put on another all-dayer to mark the occasion. So we (I say we, but credit is almost entirely due once again to Tony from BH One) have put together a line-up of some of our favourite bands from home and away that looks something like this:

Betika (home)
Team Cat Rescue (away)
Dutch Husband (home)
Dead! Dead! Dead! (away)
Blind Voyeurs (home)
Littleboat (going away)
Slate Caverns (home)
Creepythinguy (home)

with the best DJ sets imaginable between bands and late into the night. There will be cool freebies (in the form of limited-edition ep's and food) as an incentive for early arrival, probably some kind of raffle and general fun stuff. A large and very detailed flyer will be posted in due course!

SK5 Things

www.betika.co.uk
The SK5 have some news! A new track entitled "We speak glue" has come out on "Do not Bend", a compilation of circuit-bent sounds from Tiger Claw Records. The 5 are also very pleased to have been invited to do a session for Resonance FM, which will be recorded at one of their "Scaledown" events on Nov 30th and broadcast I think the following evening. Precise details will follow nearer the time. A week or so later (9th Dec), the 5 can also be seen in Bournemouth at The Sunday School project in Rubyz Hall supporting The Pirate Ship Quintet and Charlottefield. We might see if we can find the time to select some material for a new e.p. from the endless hours we have in the archive to mark the occasion.

Catching up

http://www.betika.co.uk/

It has been so long since the last entry that you would be forgiven for thinking that I'd lost interest in the whole thing - here are highlights of the many things that have kept me from the blog of the last couple of months:
1) Me and Lexi got married! A very happy, if quite wet day was had by all in late July. Here's a picture of it.




2) Betika were lucky enough to be invited to play at the Vale Earth fair on the lovely island of Guernsey. Possibly the best festival we've ever played at, and certainly the best we've ever been treated. Massive thankyou to Barney, Toupe and all at the festival. Some video was shot and will be posted shortly, in the meanwhile, here's a picture of that (courtesy of BBC Guernsey)


3) Those of us in Betika who also play in Sancho have been helping Paul Hanford out with his latest batch of recordings - drums on my part, with guitar from Chris, trumpet from Martin and Caz singing. Apparently the record is nearly finished, but I don't know what Paul's plans are for releasing it are, I'd imagine it'll be early next year before it goes public.


4) I've been working once again with Monkey Head Transplant, a band I last played with way back in 2001. We (that is Mooro, Skott, Klive and I) reconvened following a chance encounter between Klive and I at a Betika gig in Lewisham last year. Our first gig in six years was at Dutch Husband's album launch last week. Here's a song from it - "To Hell with the Architect". I'm not usually the singer in MHT, this clip just happens to be of one of the two songs where I have to juggle lead guitar and voice.



5) Work has begun in earnest on the next Betika album. We're trying to work out a method whereby we can acheive the near-impossible and capture the energy of a live performance in a hi-fi studio way. Preparation seems to be the key, so we're making lots of recordings of rehearsals, the idea being that we will make all the changes to the songs in pre- rather than post-production, which is what we did with "Halflove", so the actual recording process should in theory be very quick, relative to the months we spent tweaking things and re-recording songs for the last album. By the end of the process, I'd grown so sick of hearing the songs over and over again that I couldn't bear to hear any of those recordings for about six months and the words and music had long since ceased to hold any meaning for me. I'm very keen to avoid a repeat of that.


6) As soon as we get the new songs on tape (or more probably a hard disc drive, which doesn't have either the ring or the romance of the older medium) Chris and Imogen are leaving us to spend some time seeing the world, starting in one of my favourite places, Japan. This as you can imagine will leave a gaping hole in our ranks (also Dutch Husband), but it is a hole we will find a way to fill, hopefully in a new and exciting way, though we have no idea what that might be yet. If you play bass, guitar or other "lead" instrument (keyboards or violin could work), and think that you might like to be involved, do get in touch. There's not really any money in it, but conversely we're pretty much self-sufficient so rehearsals and gig transport won't cost you anything. And you'll get into to lots of festivals free, and we try to do a short tour of nice places once a year. A car would be a good thing to have.

Volkspiotr

www.betika.co.uk

Here's another vid courtesy of BHone - it's of us playing "Volkspiotr" on the Curiosity Stage at the Bournemouth Live festival. You may not be able to tell from the clip, but it was absolutely hammering down with rain at the time (hence the duffelcoat), so I have to say a massive thankyou to all the people who must have gotten soaked watching us.


In other news, Gary's wife Simone gave birth to a girl on 21st June - her name is Ameile Jane, and we were formally introduced last week. I was amazed at how tiny and yet how perfectly formed she was - apparently all babies start off like that, but I guess I've never seen one so young before. Mum and Dad looked very pleased with themselves!
In upcoming gig news, Sancho are playing at the newly-refurbished Central in Parkstone this sunday evening, as part of an indoor extension to the afternoon's Grooves on the Green mini-fest, and Betika have just confirmed a support with Vincent Vincent and the Villains, just around the corner at Mr Kyps on Weds 18th July. Somewhere inbetwen we'll be doing the Larmer Tree festival and Littleboat will be playing at Latitude. There will then follow a brief Betika hiatus when we take time out to get married, go on holiday and that sort of thing, returning on 9th September with Glowglobes and Men Diamler @ Fruit.

EPI Pictures

www.betika.co.uk

There's some pictures of last week's Betika-curated EPI gig here. They were taken by Tone from BHone.
Big thankyou to the All-singing Razorblades, Dr Joel, Men Diamler and everyone who came to watch!

Betika / Men Diamler Vids

www.betika.co.uk

These are a collection of videos of live performances by ourselves and our good friend Men Diamler, shot on the day after Carolyn's birthday party last year, which was the last and messiest of a long line of messy parties thrown at the old Betika Towers. The gig was in the miniscule basement of Bar Fruit, a space so tiny that we decided that amplifiers and microphones would be unecessary.

Men Diamler - "Gonna feel so much better". This is the song he sang with us at the EPI gig last friday.


Men Diamler - "John the Revelator"


Betika - "Girlshaped"


Betika - "Let these things forget themselves"


Betika - "Twenty-Five"


Betika - "By Default"

All clips shot by John Jeffreys.

The Mouse

www.betika.co.uk

Maybe the mouse had thought it had found a good place to hide; maybe one of the cats had left it for me as a token of affection. Either way, I didn't notice it until I'd run the garden roller over it at least twice, bursting it's little body open in a very unpleasant way.
This week we saw deer, foals, calves, a tiny foxcub and two baby badgers. I didn't burst any of those.

Dormitor

www.betika.co.uk

From BHone website, taken at their magnificent all-dayer last saturday.

I made a friend today.

www.betika.co.uk

He's a cat. I've named him "Mike".

CTVTFAPD rediscovered

www.betika.co.uk

Some four years ago, Carolyn and myself were involved in the making of an album called "Children's television themes from a parallel dimension", which consisted of forty tunes that could have been the themes from kid's TV programs from the '70s, but weren't. They were mostly written and recorded by former Betikan Steve Christie and the release was credited to "Steve Christie and wRong", though I wrote some of them and recorded them at home, co-wrote some of them and played guitar, drums and trumpet on others while Caz contributed some winds, as did Claire Small, also one quarter of Betika at that moment in time. Bizarrely, given the amount of time that has passed, Stuart Maconie has gotten hold of a copy and played a couple of tracks from it on his "Freakzone" program on BBC6music tonight, opening the show with one of Steve's tunes and closing it with one of mine, with loads of interesting stuff inbetween. You can listen to it again for the next few days here if you so wish.

Beasts etc

www.betika.co.uk

I had a couple of interesting animal encounters this week. The first was when Lex and I decided to take advantage of the evenings suddenly being light and took ourselves off for a walk in the woods - within about 50 yards of the house we were lucky enough to spot a herd of deer almost perfectly camoflaged amongst the trees. We must have been as close to them as they'd tolerate, they all stood or lay staring at us long enough for us to count ten of them, mostly bristling with antlers, but didn't make any attempt to move away until we tried to sneak a little closer to them, and then they casually wandered off, not looking particularly peturbed. The second incident took place when I was returning home late folowing an SK5 gig - I turned into a lane to find it blocked by a group of enormous animals with glowing red eyes that looked uncannily like the great big dog things that Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis turn into in "Ghostbusters". My blood froze, and the thoughts that flashed through my head were; a) They must be from space, and: b) the were probably going to eat me. On closer inspection, they turned out to be nothing more sinister than a herd of cows who happened to be staring straight at my headlights. I had a similar experience a couple of years ago on tour with Seemonsters, driving back from Liverpool though the night I pulled in to a service station only to be confronted with what I was convinced was a giant puma. I think extreme tiredness must mess with my sense of scale - in this case I was looking at a perfectly normal domestic cat.
We've been working on some more new tunes this week, including something written specially for a compilation being put together by Bhone in aid of the Julia's House Foundation, which will be available at the all-day gig we're headlining at The Gander on May 5th. All the other bands performing on the day are contributing a song, including exclusive tracks from Dutch Husband, True Swamp Neglect, Mezzotints and Little Boat, so it's shaping up to be something quite special. Our song is called "I cannot just stand idle while you smash the things I love", though this may be changed to something shorter! Other newies we've been giving our attention to have been "Spackattack" (a working title that seems to have stuck), and our first 8-way joint composition, which is called "The National Animal" and is either amazing or really annoying in the repetetive, catchy way - Martin recorded us jamming the song on his phone but I haven't heard it back yet.

The Castle

www.betika.co.uk

Here's another video shot by the BHone team - they've also posted a review of last Tuesday's show. This song is called "The Castle", and this is the first recorded version of it.

A Betikoverversion

www.betika.co.uk

THIS was recorded at The Fox in Lewisham last September by Simon of Raygun Promotions. It's three covers sort of rolled into one.

How warm is your blood?

www.betika.co.uk

The new Sancho song, live at EPI3, last Friday. Movie stolen from BHone



Fans of bands begining with "B" should come down to Centre Stage tomorrow night (Tuesday 13th), where you will be able to catch Betika, Buswell and (Adam) Boucher.

I like these pictures

www.betika.co.uk

These were taken backstage at Mr Kyps when we played with The A+E Line in December, by a very nice lady named Fiona.

Piano Dancing

www.betika.co.uk

This video was shot while working on the next Sancho record. The thing that I'm jumping up on down on and the others are hitting with hammers and crowbars is the frame of the worst piano I've ever played, which I also had the misfortune to own. I wrote "Dormitor" on it, and probably some other things too, but it was so horrible that I was unable to form any kind of sentimental attachment to it, so when we found we had to vacate Betika Towers, rather than go to the trouble of moving it, it got ripped apart and the bit you see us abusing got used as a sort of natural echo chamber and collaborative percussion instrument, which is what we're doing in the vid.

Evil Betika

www.betika.co.uk

Chris discovered today what happens when you run "Betika" past the spell-checker on a mac...

Sancho LP in shops!

www.betika.co.uk

At long, long last, Sancho's second album "Mystery Year" has been released! All the important stuff about it (where you could get it if you wanted it, what those in the know who have heard it thought of it, etc) is on the Seed Records website. It warrants mention here due to it's high headcount of Betika guest appearances - Caz sings some of the songs, Chris plays guitar on it, and I can be heard straining to force notes out of the end of a trumpet in places. There will be Sancho shows happening in the near future in locations near and distant, I will let you know more about them sooon.

New SK noise

www.betika.co.uk

Here's a couple of bits of video our Martin shot of Chris, Lee, Mooro and me making some startlingly scratty sounds at the most recent SK5 show.


The SK5 - "Slound"



The SK5 - "The Intelligent Mechanick"

Set List from Tuesday

www.betika.co.uk


If you were there and were curious, these are the songs we played;

The Mark - newie with lots of brass and lots of singing. Imogen made her Betika trumpet debut and Lexi and Chris popped their vocal cherries.
Bob Hope - with an accapella introduction caused by unplugged bass. Must tighten up the changeovers!
Pink Hulk - an oldie revisited.
The new shrew - Caz and Imo doing lovely girlie harmonies. Due to be taken to the studio shortly.
Long slow fade - very short new song with big joyous trumpet outburst where the chorus should be.
Dormitor - we really cocked this up due to me trying to be clever. Imogen had cramp in her fingers so I played the first verse v. slow, then we all came back in at the right speed in a way that verged on slick. Opinions differed though on how many more verses there should be and it ended in a trainwreck.
I killed a fly - old and recorded but not yet released. To be rectified soon hopefully.
The Castle - a song we haven't played for probably two years, radically remodeled around galloping rhythm section.
The Missionary - newish, third time out, lots of shouting.
Twenty-five - our friends Frances and Jane were both celebrating, and this is the only song we've got about birthdays.

A Valentine's Thing

www.betika.co.uk

This extremely pink flyer (created by our friend Frances aka Animal Magic Tricks) has written upon it all the important details pertaining to the gig we're doing on Wednesday next week, which also happens to be an important day for greetings card manufacturers, florists and chocolatiers. Curious about St Valentine and what he did in order to become patron saint of greetings card manufacturers, florists and chocolatiers, (oh, and "secret admirers" (stalkers)), I looked him up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that not even the Vatican knows exactly who he was (he could have been one of three people) or a single thing about him (regardless of which of the three he actually was), leading me to conclude that it is far and away the most tenuously over-commercialised of the formerly religious feasts. I'm not at all against the whole love and affection thing, just the idea that we should feel more loving and affectionate on an arbitarily chosen date, and demonstrate this with the purchase of certain traditional tokens at artificially inflated prices. You should treat your significant other the best you can every single day. So cancel the supposedly romantic dinner you had planned at a restaurant that crams doe-eyed couples in like battery hens and bring the love of your life along to see us and the other fine bands! And if the poster is to be believed, a squirrel and a shrew slap-fighting each other to the death! We will be trying out a few new songs; we have one about a biblical curse, one about the ever-present threat of demonic possesion, and one about things getting better. We've also been working on a couple of songs dealing with triumph in the face of disfunction, and I've foolishly begun work on a song written mostly in phrasebook Japanese (with at least one line of German), to be sung in four-part harmony. I can't see the band thanking me for that one.

Last night we saw a male and female deer, and about thirty seconds afterwards a pair of Barn Owls. This morning we saw a five-car pile-up.

Gary's Dream 2

www.betika.co.uk

"OK, I've had another strange musical dream, I'm getting worried now. This one was a gig in a small venue with a balcony. On stage were the Greynotes making a strange un-describable sound, followed by Swamp,whose performance consisted of them appearing individually one after the other singing and playing guitar. Meanwhile a few people led by Chris (Reed) were jumping from the balcony onto the floor and running back up the stairs to do it again. When I tried it I really hurt myself, and Chris showed me these nearly invisible elastic fibres they were attached to which explained why they didn't hurt themselves.Carolyn was wandering around the top section looking for a book amongst the bookshelves that were in the bar.Outside the venue I was attacked by a man with a golf club who was trying to steal some of the bricks from my dad's house, which was next-door to the venue."

Gary's Dream

www.betika.co.uk
This arrived in my email yesterday;

"I had a very strange dream last night that Betika were playing at a festival which was in a huge arena. I was late for the gig, wandering around the site, which was like a supermarket, trying to find my gear. I was held up by a bloke who was looking for a strap for his bassoon.

For some reason I was playing bass on the first song, but when I looked at the set list I didn't recognise most of the songs. Some of the song names contained characters that are not of the English language. Chris taught me the first song as I arrived on stage and it consisted of me playing b-flat constantly while everyone sang 'chick....chick.....chick' like a chant.

There were tv cameras everywhere, and cables like trip wires all over the stage. I remembered I hadn't tuned the moog, and I was relieved to find it in tune when I started playing it.

Does this mean anything to anyone else?"

We start work on the new songs for '07 tonight. Lots of new idea, new instruments and people doing new things. Lots more singing.

Fans of David Bowie who have a copy of "Lodger" and access to software which can reverse audio might be interested to hear what happens when you listen to track 3 backwards...

New Year News

www.betika.co.uk


Hello! And a slightly belated Happy New Year!
I've a couple of newsworthy things to report that are of a personal rather than a musical nature: firstly, Gary is due to become the first Betika parent - with a little help from his lovely wife Simone - when the fruit of their loins is brought into the world sometime around June; secondly, after some five years of sinful co-habitation, Lexi and I have decided that the time has come to tie the marital knot in an attempt to regain some respectability within our ultra-conservative peergroup. The big day isn't until the summer, but will hopefully involve small children dressed as vikings.

In Betika-the-band news, we're planning on keeping our collective heads down for a short while (until we've learnt some of the gothmetalgypsydiscojazzsludge I've been writing) before resuming our attempts to push ourselves and our record into as many strangers' faces as possible. Things aren't 100% confirmed yet, but we're hoping to be able to announce our first venture overseas shortly. I'll say no more in case I jinx it.
No gigs for a little while then, but I'll be taking the stage for the first time this Friday (5th Jan) with The Greynotes, who are essentially The SK5 with a different name and a few more instruments. About an acre of instruments, actually, as we found when we got together for a jam last night. As with The SK5, everything we do will be improvised, recorded, and if it's any good edited down into a record at some point. It may take a while before this happens as we still have several hours of SK5 material in various stages of completion to work our way through first. This flyer explains all of the many things that are happening as part of the gig of which we are a part. Our projected visuals will be made in real time by Nic Beard and Imogen of The Paper Cinema. If you're having trouble with the tiny text, click on the flyer and it should become larger.
Silver Apples are amazing! Thanks Rizlo!

Halflove on iTunes