busybusybusy

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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.

Betika Seated, Badgers again.

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I marked the lawn as my territory in the time-honoured way yesterday, the badgers having further violated the sacred turf in their search for dinner. Unfortunately I only have a standard-sized bladder and was unable to lay claim to a very large area, so they'll probably just dig their holes at the other end of lawn. They're probably doing it right now.

It's been an enjoyable week Betika-wise; I've finished a song that's been hanging around for a while (under the working title "Theme from 'SLAGS"'), I think it's proper title will be "Bad Thoughts" because that's what it's about, or maybe "An Englishman's mind is his castle". I can't see it making it's way into the live set for a while as there's a bit of a backlog of new tunes already.
On Wednesday I went to Hubcap's new studio to have a listen back to the songs from the sessions we did with him and start work on the definitive vocal takes. We didn't achieve very much on this occasion, we pretty much spent the evening singing into various different sized-and shaped microphones trying to decide which one we liked the sound of best. Bizarrely, it was the cheapest one! Work starts in earnest on the singing this afternoon.
The Seated Greater Betika got it's baptism of fire on Thursday night at LIMBS. We set up in a slightly unusual configuration with Rich at the front with his non-drumkit made of an electrified cardboard box and various bits and pieces, and then the rest of us sat in a tight semi-circle around him with Carolyn and I right at the back. Because LIMBS' Alcatraz home is somewhat on the intimate side we had some nice symmetry going on with the front row of the audience sat right in front of us in a semi-circle that mirrored our own. The set we played was "Robot (2)", "I killed a fly", "Love let me not hunger", "Let these things forget themselves", "If you go to work on me I'll die", "We will not know peace", "Girlshaped", "Hunting with dogs" and "Thunderstorm". I think it would be fair to say that we were a bit wobbly to start off with, the first couple of songs contained a certain amount of free-form jazz that hadn't been there in rehearsal, and we came badly unstuck at the end of "I killed a fly". We hadn't bothered to rehearse it for a while because it's the simplest song in the world and we play it quite a lot, it never occurred to any of us that to get the slow-down (rallentando I think is the musical term) at the end of the song right we actually need a fair amount of eye-contact! I was sat behind and to the side of Rich, and he was directly inbetween me and Imogen, so there was no way of co-ordinating what we were doing and the whole thing stopped in much the same way as a derailed express train. Carnage! Luckily for us we had a friendly crowd who let us get away with that kind of nonsense, and that's what really made the night for me- it was an imperfect performance but the vibe was just right. There will definitely be some more Seated Betika in a cramped venue near you soon!

Sooner still, Carolyn and I will be doing an Acoustic slot at Solid Air (the last at Destiny) on Monday next week, and the whole band will be playing standing up at Mr. Smiths on Friday with support from The Marlins. More details are on The Schedule page of the Betika website.

Enjoy the Bank Holiday!
Dave

A spot of clarification

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On re-reading last night's post, it occured to me that it could be interpreted as implying that Sunday night's audience was great and Friday's wasn't. This was certainly not the case- we were warmly recieved on both occasions, and in a way that made me feel all the worse for my screw-ups and the way things went on Friday. I finished the set with the feeling that we might have just squandered a lot of goodwill by not putting in a performance as good as we're capable of, and I felt that it was largely down to me. Hence the angst and hand-wringing.
For a punter's point of view of the night, have a look at this. There's also some photos (the first on the web of the current line-up, I believe) including one of me and Carolyn where I look like a corpse. I am actually doing that deliberately, it's become a reflex reaction for me to imitate the dead as soon as anyone points a camera anywhere near me, especially when under the influence of booze. Don't know why. Many thanks for the pix and write-up Steve!

Autopsies

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We played a couple of very different shows over the weekend - the first we had very high expectations of and ended up disappointed by, and the second we weren't really sure what to expect and it turned out to be fantastic. Whether this is a psychological trick or an accurate reflection of how things went is impossible to tell. Events conspired against us at The Villa on Friday and we didn't get a soundcheck, so the sound guy had to sort out our slightly unorthodox set-up over the first couple of songs, nevertheless we were playing together well and hard- too hard, it would turn out as I snapped a guitar string at the end of "Volkespiotr". That's the first time I've ever broken one playing with Betika, (maybe because I've just started using a different guitar?) and I didn't really have a contingency plan. I had a second guitar with me but it was in this ridiculous open F# tuning that I use for "By Default", so I started worrying about what I was going to do next instead of concentrating on what chords I was supposed to be playing and what words and tune I was supposed to be singing. After that I just couldn't seem to get my head back into the right place for playing. I borrowed Ed Hat's guitar and we finished the set but it felt like the energy we had at the start had vanished somehow and I came off stage really angry at myself for having screwed up and let the rest of the band down. My sorrows were thoroughly and comprehensively drowned at the bar afterwards.
Tonight Carolyn and I did what we thought was going to be a short acoustic set at Le Bateau in Parkstone- when we got there it turned out that not only were we going to be the last band of the night but also a couple of acts had dropped out so we had to play for a bit longer than we thought we were going to have to. We though we were going to be doing four songs, in the end we did "Summers of solemnity", "One day my house will be flooded" (an appropriate song given the appalling weather), "I killed a fly", "We will not know peace", "If you go to work on me I'll die", "Girlshaped", Simon and Garfunkel's "I am a rock", Iron and Wine's "Naked as we came", "Robot" and a super-rare performance of "I've been in an accident", which I make to be ten in total. There was lots on unrehearsed ropeyness on our part but the audience was absolutely fantastic, they were quiet as church mice in the quiet bits, they laughed at the lyrical jokes, they handclapped along during "Robot", they applauded long and hard and they shouted out for more until we played more. A perfect gig, basically! If you were one of those audience-people, I thank and salute you!

There's more live Betika action coming up over the next week or so- Thursday will see the full band playing some of the songs we never usually play using cardboard boxes for drums at LIMBS, the following Monday we'll be doing another acoustic set of indeterminate length and mood at Destiny, and on the Friday (May 6th) we'll be laying the ghosts of The Villa to rest at Mr Smiths full-band style, in the exalted company of The Marlins. That night will also see Nic Rawlins (Sancho cover artist and paper cinematographer) lose his DJ cherry.

The battle with the Badgers continues.

Six items about music and nature.

1. There's some MP3s of The SK5 to download from www.gishsounds.com, along with all kinds of other lovliness selected for your listening pleasure by the boy Gish, late of Miss Black America and Tex La Homa (though not at the same time as me and Rich), currently of My Hi-fi Sister and Sunshine Republic. Click on the "sounds" link on the front page.

2. Badgers have done an unbelievable amount of damage to the lawn I spent hours mowing last week. I spent this afternoon filling in countless badger-holes, a pointless and sisyphean (sp?) task if ever there was one, I know they'll all be there again next time I look. (By badger-holes, I mean of course ones they have dug in their search for juicy earthworms to eat, not the ones they live in. I haven't been burying them alive!) Apparently the smell of human urine discourages them, so I'm going to make sure and drink plenty of water next time I go a-mowing.

3. I saw the first swallow of summer today, along with some of his swallow mates. He's a good month or so early, I don't normally see them until around May / June time - another symptom of global warming I suppose. On another ornithological note;

4. There are an extraordinary number of buzzards around at the moment, they're not usually a common bird around here but over the last couple of weeks I see one on pretty much every car journey I make. I guess they're getting like foxes and moving into more urban areas where there's lots of whatever buzzards eat, mice, rats and beetles maybe?

5. An opportunity for spotting Betika in the wild will occur in the next seven days when Carolyn and I perform a few of our songs arranged for two voices, guitar and woodwinds at Consortium next Sunday (17th). There will also be two full live bands and probably two other acoustic acts, but I don't know who any of them are as yet but I will post details as I get hold of them.

6. Delicate Hammers (see last post) are confirmed to play with us at Mr. Smiths on Thursday 8th July. This is very good news!

Swamp, Hammers, Kites, Grass

Spent the weekend doing things that were good for me. On friday night five-sevenths of Betika went to see True Swamp Neglect and The Delicate Hammers at The Central in Parkstone. Delicate Hammers were completely unknown to me but Chris Swamp has been raving about them for ages, and it turns out with good reason. It's difficult to describe exactly what they're like, there's elements of hip-hop and soul in there, but their vibe is somewhere between...I dunno, Pavement and Misty's Big Adventure? Entertaining, thought-provoking, toe-tapping and heartwarming in equal measures. If things go to plan, you'll get the chance to see and hear what I'm on about in a couple of months, I've asked them to if they'll make the trip down from Manchester again and play with us in July.
The Swamp themselves were absolutely sublime. The first time I ever saw them was at The Central three or so years ago; that experience was an epiphany for me, and Friday's set was like that all over again. They did very little of the "Sleep Function Lost" material and concentrated mostly on new or nearly-new stuff, as yet unrecorded. Quite early on, Chris dedicated a new song to "the rock band Betika", it transpired on account of the fact that in writing it he took a phrase from the lyric of "We will not know peace" (from Betikassette 2), turned it round, added more much better words and an amazing anthemic tune and threw it right back at me, brass knobs attached. If it wasn't so good I'd be consumed with bitterness and jealousy that it was so good! A stunning set followed, it seemed like somehow all the things that make the Swamp great had been magnified, like somebody had selected them with a mouse and hit the "Bold" button. I spent the whole set at the front grinning like a complete goon.

The sun was shining on Saturday morning, which made a fantastic change from last week's rain, and so those Betikans who had risen late and hungover at Betika towers resolved to go outside and make the most of it. The wind was blowing strong and steady, so Carolyn took Chris, Lexi and I out into the New Forest to fly a kite. Kites have changed a lot since I last flew one. The last kite I flew was made of polythene and balsawood and had a picture of an owl's face on it, and was controlled by a very thin single piece of string. The kite that we flew on Saturday (which belongs to Brad from Brenda, a gentleman of sufficient stature to handle such things) was basically a parachute about as wide as I am tall (3 square metres in area apparently) controlled (!) by four nylon ropes attached to two metal handles. The place we chose to fly the kite was pretty exposed, so the wind was really strong and gusty which Carolyn said might be a bit dangerous. She proved herself correct minutes later when the kite was launched with Carolyn at the controls- it flew safely for a couple of minutes before a gust caught it and she was dragged off her feet and along the ground. That basically set the scene for the rest of the afternoon- we took turns wrestling against the immense forces involved, and being bodily dragged across the field, terrifying picnickers and horses in our path. It was terrifying for me too, but in the same exhillarating way that rollercoasters are. I slept very well on saturday night.

Sunday afternoon was spent cutting my nan's lawn. How rock and roll is that? It took a long time because the grass was about a foot high, but it was very satisfying to have finished and I got hot enough to take my shirt off and get a couple of hours of sun on my pasty white body for the first time in a long time. I've become really apprehensive about cutting long grass since I left a couple of frogs horribly mutilated a couple of years ago when I was strimming the garden at my old flat, I dread finding half a mouse in the grass-basket when I'm scooping the clippings out. Happily as far as I could tell I managed to avoid killing or maiming anything this time, so no bad karma there.

I've finally got back to work finishing off the third Betikassette, something that should have been done long ago but which has been put off since Christmas while we've been working on the album sessions with Hubcap. I'm making no promises, but I'm hoping that Betikassette 3 will be done in time for the gig on May 6th. The tracklisting has changed, owing to me having written a new song that seemed to fit on it better than one of the songs previously earmarked. Now it will contain: "Bob Hope", "You can call me brother", "Robot (2)" and "If you go to work on me I'll die". All the songs will be played at the upcoming Betika gigs this month, which will be taking some different formats- as we've developed as a live band over the last year we've become progressively more and more about playing uptempo songs, jumping around and doing our best to make people dance, which none of us would say is a bad thing, but in our previous incarnation we played very, very quietly using the most minimal instrumentation, and we still have slow, sad, quiet songs from that period ("Heads smashed in...etc"), along with newer songs in a similar vein that we've written since, that just wouldn't work in the standard Betika set. So we're rehearsing a completely different set consisting entirely of those songs. It's going to be almost like a completely different band but with the same group of people playing the same instruments, only quieter, probably sitting down and trying to be as intimate with our audience as decency will allow. The first outing for this parallel Betika will be at the LIMBS night at Alcatraz club on Thursday 28th April. It'll be sad but pretty.

Dave

p.s. Details of this and other forthcoming Betika performances can be found on the SCHEDULE page at www.betika.co.uk

Sick

This is what I get for joking about being bedridden! I'm back in the land of the living for the first time in nearly a week having picked up a really filthy cold just after making my last post. A while back I did something similar, boasting to Carolyn that I never got colds and my immune system was impervious to all disease- on that occasion it took me less than 24 hours to come down with a really hideous throat infection. This time I've been getting dizzyness and headaches and running a temperature and having wierd delusional dreams about maths. It didn't seem like a big deal to start with, so I did a couple of rehearsals with Carolyn for an acoustic slot we had booked for last Thursday, and in doing those I completely destroyed my already raggedy-edged voice, and for the first time ever we had to cancel the gig. Apologies to anyone who came along to see us, and thankyou. In other Betika-health news: I have given Lexi and Imogen the gift of my cold, Rich was still in mump-quarantine last week but should hopefully be safe to attend rehearsals this week, Carolyn, Martin and Chris all seem to be okay.

We've recorded the last instrumental part on the last song! The last bits we did were Martin's horn on "Dormitor" and Chris and I playing some unison/octave lead/twang guitar on the same song. Now we're going to take a short break to let my voice and everyone's sense of perspective return before doing the final vocals and mixing, hopefully in a couple of weeks or so. In the meantime I'm going to be doing some more SK5 stuff- it's strange, but the four of us have hardly spoken since the last time we played, which would've been before Christmas, we've all been locked away in rooms somewhere working on new stuff with our respective "proper" bands. We're doing a set on Monday 28th at Destiny, completely unrehearsed, which is very much in the spirit of the project, and will attempt to record it as always- speaking of which, we'll have some copies of "Utility Soul Shambles" with us on the night, if you'd like to hear it, come and ask one of us. Chris will be doing his Little Boat thing too.

Getting There and Losing It

The drums are done, the bass is done, 99% of the guitars are done, the flute is done, the percussion is done, the melodica is done, the synthesisers are done, guide vocals have been done, all that remains to be done is Martin's trumpet, some flawless vocal performances and a little bit of tidying up, and the whole recording part of the project will be done. After that will come a short break followed by probably weeks of trying to mix it all. I don't really have the attention span for mixing and having to listen to the same song over and over again for hours on end makes me go a bit funny. I'll end up with a bit of the tune we've been working on stuck in my head for days afterwards, and every now and then I'll start whistling it subconsciously before realising what I'm doing and angrily telling the tune to f-off, normally in a shop queue, on a bus or in some other crowded place. To the casual observer it must look/sound like I have some musical form of Tourette's. No matter what I do, even if I listen to other catchy music, the Tune creeps back into my head every time I drop my guard, which is probably once every fifteen-twenty seconds.

Spring officially begins in one week's time, and not a moment too soon. My songwriting has been exceptionally miserable over the last couple of weeks, and I'm convinced that the blame lies with the almost complete lack of daylight in my life. I've made rough demos of a couple of songs; "ohgodohgodohgodohgod", which is very slow and sad but has a lot of harmonic angles in it, and "Empiness is here again!" which as the exclaimation mark might suggest is actually quite a joyful tune with very miserable words. It's a bit like the Velvet Underground doing mexican kraut-rock at the moment. But not like that at all. It might well be that both of these songs get abandoned forever once the sun starts shining and some seratonin starts circulating around my system again.

I hope Rich has gotten over his mumps. Apparently it can be quite serious in adults, and can cause enormous and painful swelling of the man-parts which can potentially lead to sterility, all of which I'm keen to avoid. There seems to be a mini-epidemic (an oxymoron surely?) of it going around the town's musicians at the moment and I somehow managed to avoid catching not only mumps but also measles, whooping cough and chicken-pox as a kid, which means I'm at risk of catching them all now in their more unpleasant adult forms. But then again, if I was bed-ridden for a while I would finally have a chance to work my way through some of the mountainous heap of unread books in the corner of the bedroom....I'll have to check with Rich how bad it really is...

Rock-baby and Antler-man

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.

Wrong month

I really have to improve my message-taking skills. Due to me being confused by the fact that the 27th days of both February and March fall on a Sunday, Carolyn and I turned up to do an acoustic show last night a WHOLE MONTH early! Man, did I feel stupid. As (our) luck would have it, one of the bands scheduled to play had dropped out, so we managed to sneak onto the bottom of the bill and got to do our thing in front of somebody else's unsuspecting audience. It's good in a way that I got my dates confused, because it meant we had to pull our fingers out and get our shit together a whole four weeks earlier than we would have done, so the six or so hours of emergency rehearsals we did was time put to good use, not least because we made a quick recording of the set in that time. We did it primarily to help us remember words and vocal parts (it didn't work. I sang a lot of "nnnn..mmm" last night where the English language should have been), but it turned out well enough to be fit for human consumption, so I've uploaded an mp3 for your consideration. We only did a four-song set last night, consisting of "Girlshaped" (mp3 here), "Which way will I go" (downloadable as an internet single from here), a cover of Iron and Wine's "Naked as we came" (in a different key and with the boy / girl parts swapped round) and a new version of "We will not know peace" (from Betikassette 2). We're going to be playing a lot more acoustic slots in the coming weeks, partly to force us to practice real hard (and learn some more songs), but equally just for the joy of it......and the love of the sound of our own voices! Having realised that there may be mileage in turning up at venues unannounced, these gigs may happen on a bit of a random basis, but the next one we have in the diary is at "Limbs", the new night from the creator of the legendary "Pand'a Flesh" nights and compilation CDs, which is at Alcatraz nightclub in Holdenhurst Road on Thursday 17th March. Also playing that night will be Imogen's dad, whose folk guitar stylings I've been looking forward to seeing for months, and various other acoustic acts of which I know nothing. As it's St. Patrick's that night, I'd love it if there was some kind of Irish folk session- I've always wanted to join in with one of those, but I've always known in my heart that I'll always be too hamfisted. Perhaps I could persuade them to play very slowly?

Been Cheating

It has been a good week in the world of Betika! It began with the cheers and applause from the gig on sunday still ringing in our ears, and continued well as we found ourselves on the recieving end of more positive feedback than I for one really know how to deal with. It was with heads and hearts inflated by this that we reconvened on tuesday to have another crack at recording "Jeremy Bentham" and "Dormitor", and for the first time I think we managed to capture the energy we play with when we're in front of people, but coupled with the precision and accuracy needed in a recording situation. We were playing together like a five-piece musical machine! (Lexi and Martin will overdub their bits later). We did several versions of either song, then the following evening Hubcap, Chris and I got together to listen back to what we'd done, and edited the very best bits of each take together into uber-versions. I know that this is cheating, but it's a method available to us enabling us to make the best end product we possibly can so I've got no qualms about doing it.
We've got all the instrumental bits done now, bar some bits of percussion and all the fiddly keyboard and wind instrument bits, and after that comes the bit that I always find the most difficult and least enjoyable: The Singing. The bit where not only is there absolutely no room for technical error, but where I've also got to do the whole emotional communication thing. It always seems like I can do either one or the other at any one time. Carolyn and I agreed some time ago that we would start slipping in extra vocals-only rehearslas between full-band gatherings to get us up to recording standard, but we've been a bit slack on that front so far, so we decided to play a few acoustic gigs so we'd have no choice but to rehearse or fall flat on our arses. The first of these acoustic gigs will be at Consortium next sunday and we don't even know what we're going to play yet, let alone got together for a practice. Luckily we do most our best work at the last minute. Strict deadlines are an important thing in the Modernday Betika. I've been sitting around singing other people's songs for my own amusement quite a lot, really just for the singing practice, but there's a good chance we might end up throwing a few covers into our acoustic sets. There's a handful of my favourite ever songs that I've always wanted to play (and I expect Carolyn is the same), so I might well take this oppurtunity to do this.
"Shaun of the dead" is on in the lounge at Betika Towers, so I'm going to watch it.
My darts is getting better.

Something I forgot...

Here's one for Carolyn to analyse with her dream-book!
Last night I had a dream about two small dogs named Dave and Doug, who were the size of puppies but had the temperaments of old miserable dogs, and who were growling fiercely at one another because each was lying on a letter addressed to the other (this is how I knew their names. I think their full names were something like "Doug III" and "The latest Dave"). They were really angry because they both really wanted to read their letters but neither of them would stand up because they were afraid that the other would get the post that was rightfully his, which would have been even worse than no letter at all.
I wonder what that could mean?

Dave

Specials, downloads

Firstly, a massive thankyou to everybody who lent us their support last night, we had enormous fun playing, we made some new friends and we made a lot of people dance! The Greater Betika is now seven strong again with the arrival of Martin, so the stage at Consortium was pretty crowded and the ad-hoc percussion section (the "Specials" as they've become known) that assembled had to create a sort of orchestra / mosh pit at the foot of the stage. We got off to an inauspicious start when our first attempt at "Bob Hope" descended into chaos in the first few seconds and had to be aborted, but second time around it went off without a hitch, which was pretty amazing as we'd only played it at one rehearsal beforehand. It was really good to be opening a set with a song other than "Jeremy Bentham", which we've played ay every single gig for the past twelve months and I'm getting a bit sick of. The rest of the set was mostly uptempo stuff from the first two Betikassettes (Martin has breathed (or blown?) new life into "Dormitor" with his horn part). We also did "Volkespiotr" (another set staple maybe due for a rest?), "Thunderstorm" which dates right back to "Your soul against the weekend" and is ironically probably the best thing in the set, "Girlshaped" which we've just recorded a killer version of, and "Love, let me not hunger", which is another new addition to the set, and our token effort at playing anything slow or quiet. As owners of "Heads smashed in..." will know, we've got a sizeable collection of slow, quiet songs, but I don't think they really work very well as part of a live set alongside the louder, faster songs. It always seemed to kill our momentum when we slipped "Let these things forget themselves" into the set throughout last year, especially once we'd learnt the secret of making people dance. (To be honest, I don't know what we did to make them start dancing, they just did, and for that I will be eternally grateful). I think that if we're going to play some of the downtempo stuff we're going to have to come up with a completely different set and present it in a different way, possibly seated and wearing cardigans and serious expressions on our faces.
The last couple of shows we've done have really brought it home to me that we're really only ever as good as the sum of the people who come to see us. If you saw us last night please come again!

When we returned from the gig to Betika Towers last night we listened to John Coltrane and drank cup-a-soups (could we get any more rock and roll?), and I played Chris a track from my 22-track collection of offcuts (see previous post), which he reckoned sounded like "the history of dance music in reverse". You can download it HERE to see if you can work out what he meant. The tune dates from 2000 or 2001, doesn't have a title and features some "rustic" keyboard playing on my part. If you can think of a suitable name for it, mail me. Also newly available for download is a quicktime version of the SK5 film "Utility Soul Shambles", the huge file size and poor picture quality of which I apologise for in advance. Enjoy, or don't.

Dave

Songs from the cutting-room floor

It's amazing what you can acheive when you're supposed to be doing something else. I'm supposed to be working on tweaking the current batch of Betika recordings and making demos of a couple of new songs I've got floating around my head, and what I've actually done over the weekend is compile a twenty-two track album of all the random tunes that I've started but never quite finished over the last five years. Many of them are complete songs that I never managed to write words to, some of them are little more than disembodied riffs that never got attached to songs and some of them were written as instrumental tunes but never saw completion because they clearly weren't Betika songs. They do however work reasonably well as a collection in their own right, with a certain amount of tidying up and a few finishing touches, so I'm going to make a few copies of it for personal consumption and for birthday presents for friends. I might put some of the tunes up on the Betika site in the next week or so, I need to live with them for a while to make certain whether they're they're any good or not.

Songs brewing up at the moment include "Pink Hulk" which (wait for it) is kind of a blues-folk / hiphop thing (I realise how crappy that sounds) that came about as a result of listening to Iron And Wine and A Tribe Called Quest in close proximity, and one called "Bent to the timetable" which has a kind of Talking Heads / Broadcast / Neptunes vibe to it. Those two are at the point where the bulk of the lyric is done and I'm trying to fill in some gaps, there's another couple ("Goggo" - flamenco-disco with impossible guitar and "Theme from SLAGS" (both working titles, obviously) which is a bit like a russian folk tune forced into rapid and repetitive slave-labour) which are in desperate need of words to save them from appearing on my next volume of false starts, wrong turns and dead ends.

My copy of the Bloc Party album is still somewhere in transit.

Dave

Rehearsal 15.2.05

AN ENTRY ON BEHALF OF CAROLYN

Tonight we finally broke Imogen… by the end of rehearsal she was literally on her knees, crying from the pain of bass. In other news, we gained a trumpet player (Martin) and played through stuff for the gig on Saturday.

But much more interestingly than THAT, it turns out

! Imogen and Jenko both suffer from sleep paralysis

! Dave had a dull dream about forgetting someone’s surname

! Martin is capable of both being awake AND dreaming as long as he wakes up with one eye before the other

! I had no dreams worth repeating that weren’t about school and body parts

! Chris had no comment but I will be chasing this up

Check back soon for more dream chat, possibly with analysis if I can find my special book!

A productive day and a strange night

Today was one of those days that makes up for all the days of seemingy pointless toil and grind. Hubcap and I have got three songs from nothing to the point of being semi-polished pop music in the space of a few hours, somebody somewhere was smiling on us today. So far we've got five songs from our latest session sounding like the ideas I had in my head, leaving two to nail properly- "Jeremy Bentham" and "Dormitor". We've done a couple of really good versions of both songs, but I still don't think we've been relaxed enough to put accross the energy and excitement we do when we play those songs live. We're going to have another go next week.

I'm quite drunk now, I just had a conversation with a taxi driver about the evils of the full moon.

nightnight

D

Ears glazed over

I have to take back one of the endorsements I made in my last post- the one regarding decaf tea. I realise now that while the removal of the caffeine takes with it the mild stimulant effect and allows the late-night tea drinker to get to sleep in the normal way, the diuretic effect remains exactly the same as with standard builders' tea, meaning the late-night tea drinker will be awoken from his or her sleep by an urgent call of nature, sometime in the wee small hours. In future I will be drinking nothing but corporation pop* after 9pm.

Spent several more hours working on the record with Hubcap tonight, and all we had to show for it at the end was two and a half minutes of (flawless) drums and fried brains. A strange thing happens to my ears after a couple of hours' recording- the equivalent of eyes "glazing over" when the brain becomes completely saturated with information- at which point they cease to be reliable listening devices and I've learned not to trust them because anything I've ever done with glazed ears has been bollocks. Normally, when my ears start going funny I know it's time to end the session or take a break for a while, but lately when we've had lots of stuff to be getting on with I've been trying to flush them out by listening to loud white noise (from a detuned radio or TV) for a few minutes. I think it's helping to delay the onset of brain-fade but it's hard to tell. There are too many other variables.

Lexi bought me a magnetic dartboard for Christmas and I've developed a cod-superstitious ritual where I have to throw at least 100 with three darts before I can go to bed each night. I'm not very good at darts, so this normally takes a long time. It's 11.30 and I haven't thrown a single dart yet, so I'd better get cracking.
until next time

Dave


*a Staffordshire euphemism for tap water, used to trick naive southern boys into thinking they're about to get some amazing new fizzy drink.

Thought I'd have a go...

...seeing as everyone else was! 'Tis true, I was not at practice today. I was drawing a graph to show the results of my bean experiment whilst also making pancakes for everyone else. Because it is Pancake Day today.
Maybe because I don't often go to practices, because of my commitment to beans and stuff, explains why during the last gig I played the first song purely on the 'set' function of my keyboard, rather than the 'play' function. This meant that every note I played was an A in a different instrument or noise. Although, I am rather hoping that this will create a new movement. I shall call it Expressionist Keyboarding. You should try it. It's funny. But I think it made Dave cry a bit.
I like pancakes, but decaff tea is too weak for me.

Bye.

Lexi.

Shrove Tuesday

Jenkins the Drums is under the doctor today, as they say across the Bristol Channel, and Lexi had homework to do and pancakes to make so we were only a foursome at rehearsal tonight. We've been playing the same basic set (with a few minor changes here and there) for almost a year now, so it's become a matter of some urgency that we get some new songs into our repertoire before we start going stale. To this end we learned a couple of new tunes tonight; "Love, Love, Love, let me not hunger" which Chris wrote about the trials of intercontinental love, and "Bob Hope", which is one of mine, based in part on a TV obituary of the titular comedian that I saw a couple of years ago (just after his death funnily enough). It's only our second or third song that's ever had a guitar solo, and it's an atonal bastard of one! The guitar break is taken from a tune that we started jamming along to the interference that comes from a mobile phone just before it rings, it's in a completely different key to the rest of the song but it fits in perfectly with the mood of the piece. You'll hopefully be able to hear what I mean if you see us in the near future.

My favourite things in the world today are pancakes and decaffeinated tea, which allow me to go to bed nicely full but not totally wired.
Lent begins tomorrow.

Carolyn and Lexi have started contributing to the Blog!

Dave

Chip, Chip, Chip...

Starting as I mean to go on then...here's what we've been up to;
Work is continuing slowly but surely on the current batch of recordings with Hubcap. The main reason for this slow progress is the ridiculously high quality threshold we've set ourselves- on listening back to the last set of recordings we did together I realised that we'd let too many seemingly inconsequential little mistakes go uncorrected. They were just tiny things - a choked guitar note here, a mis-hit drum perhaps, a fractionally out of tune note on the vocal part- things that would be quite acceptable, charming even, on a record from the sixties, but to my ears (brought up on eighties high-gloss production and used to hearing modern records that have been ProTools-ed to perfection) they sounded like massive unforgivable mistakes. We ended up scrapping half of the songs we recorded, and vowed to be super-strict and utterly unforgiving next time round. In some respects, it feels like it might have been more honest to go with a more lo-fi approach and leave the imperfections as they are, but to do so when we have the skills and technology to fix them seems false in a different kind of way. It would be tantamount to deliberately setting out to make a sub-standard record, which is not what the whole lo-fi / DIY thing is all about, as far as I see it. I've made masses of lo-fi recordings in the past, but not one of them was ever meant to be that, it's just how they turned out due to the limitations of the technology available to me and my ability to use it (and as a musician, of course). At the moment I have access to all the technology and the skills I need to produce a really well-recorded set of songs, and to do otherwise would make me either a flake or a phoney. I have a horrible suspicion that I'm already both.

So far we've recorded all of Rich's drums, most of my guitar and Imogen's bass and sundry other instrumental parts on something like six songs. I think this week is mostly going to be spent working on Chris' guitar parts, and after that we're going to throw a party to record all the hand-percussion parts. Everyone who has ever joined us on stage to shake or hit something is invited, there will be beer and nibbles and maybe some massed singing.

Away from Betika, I'm attempting to read James Joyce's "A portrait of the artist as a young man", but the constantly teleporting narrative requires absolute concentration and I just don't seem to have the necessary attention span at the moment, there's too many things I have to do or think about. I can't see that changing for a while. I've been listening to "Antics" by Interpol, "Thunder Lightning Strike" by The Go! Team and various things I've been downloading from www.showandtellmusic.com . I've been laughing hard at the new series of "Look Around You" (BBC2, Mondays), and desperate not to be disappointed by "Nathan Barley" (C4, Fridays) the new collaboration between Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker (see TV Go Home).

post ends
D von B

First Post

I've started this blog because I looked at the Betika website (http://www.betika.co.uk) this morning and realised that I haven't updated the diary section since March 2004. It worries me that this makes me look like either a very lazy person or one who leads a very dull life, or both. I hope I'm not either. In reality, I seem to cram pretty much every waking hour with some kind of creative activity, musical or otherwise, and the task of documenting this is always the one that is set aside for some future rainy day that never comes. It always gets pushed further and further down the list of priorities until the thing I intended to write about is just a distant memory, or alternatively so much has happened that I can't even think where to start the mammoth undertaking of recording it all. So I'm setting this up and making a belated new-year's resolution to keep it up to date, hoping that the ease of use of the blog will make it less time-consuming than the process of creating, editing and uploading webpages- I'm making it sound like the Twelve tasks of Hercules, but time is my most precious and scarce resource at the moment, and this seems like a good way of making the whole business that little bit quicker and easier.
As with the old diary on the Betika site, the other band members will be posting here as and when they feel the need.
Dave

From The Archive - Progress?

We might not have a great deal to show for it yet, but we've been a productive bunch lately. The task that's been occupying the bulk of my time is the mixing of the first half of the songs from the studio album with Hubcap, our superhuman producer. He has reserves of patience that mortal men simply don't possess, he can spend hours working on fixing a detail so subtle that I can't even make it out, his quality control threshold is so high that we've been scrapping mixes that took us hours to achieve and doing them again from scratch, he has the most superkeen ears in the world, a complete mastery of technology and he's making us sound fantastic! Since completing the first batch of album tracks I've turned my attention to finishing off the second four-track kassette, which we meant to have finished in time for our gig with Dutch Husband at the start of May, but failed for lack of time and focus. The work I've been doing with Hubcap has caused me to raise the bar somewhat in terms of my own recordings, and I've been trying to apply his meticulous methodology to them as far as my restlessness and impatience will allow. You'll have to compare and contrast the two sets of recordings when they both find their way into the wild to judge whether I've been successful.
In between working on Betika recordings and rehearsing the next bunch of songs for the album I've somehow managed to find time to be in not one but two other bands. It was with some reluctance that I got involved with projects outside Betika again - the months since the Seemonsters-drumstick-handover that marked the cessation of my extra-betikular activities have been the most productive ever in the group's history, and I was fearful of getting side-tracked and losing focus. But I just can't say "no".
Actually, the first non-betika thing I started doing was mostly my idea. It came up in conversation at a gig about six months ago that Chris Catlin from True Swamp, Mooro from see monsters and I all had Casio SK-5 sampling keyboards. Chris' gets used quite frequently on Swamp recordings, and occasionally live, and mine has found it's way onto the odd Betika song, Mooro's lived until recently on top of his wardrobe. When I found out that we each possessed one of these rare beasts, I came up with the idea of forming an all SK-5 band called, rather cleverly I thought, "The SK-5". The original plan was to play once and once only, unrehearsed and in public, to record our collective noises and disband. A complicated set of rules was devised governing what would and wouldn't be permissible musical activity within the group. After talking about it for a while, I was persuaded to soften my stance and drop some of the dogma, and we eventually started meeting up for occasional sessions- I wouldn't call them rehearsals as such because we never played the same thing twice due to a combination of poor memory and attempts at spontanaety. We recorded these sessions, and we finally did a gig. We meant to record the gig too, but some dorcas forgot to hit the "record" button in his excitement about the imminent cacophony, so those particular sounds were lost to posterity. Strangely, we seemed to go down quite well with the audience, despite the fact that certain things we were doing were done purely for the purpose of annoying people as much as possible, and the day afterwards we got asked to do a set at the new "Pand 'a Flesh" electronica night. So I guess we're gonna do that, and possibly record it if I manage to keep my shit together and remember to hit the button, and then put everything we've done up on the web. And then stop.
The other thing I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into is Sancho. I was involved in the project from quite early on, when Paul got me to play some very primitive trumpet on "Ball o'string", and I'd attempted to re-create the effect on stage with the group (which at the time was called "sea aunts") at a couple of trendy East London booze-holes as girls in wigs looked on, not sure if what we were doing was cool or not as an official proclaimation on the matter had not yet been made by the grand arbiter of these things. (when the proclaimation finally came, it was a year late and thick with ambiguity). I tried to keep my involvement to a bare minimum, because I knew that it would end up swallowing up all the spare time that I only had because I'd given up sleeping. For example, I never actually rehearsed with the band, I just turned up for gigs having learnt what parts I could, and the bits I didn't know I'd just jam along, which was a real education. I had to learn how to play in F# major during a song once.
Somehow, in the new incarnation of Sancho, I find myself playing not only trumpet but also bass guitar, cheesy toy electric drums, the right hand side of Charlie Sancho's drumkit and a couple of weeks ago I even sang a song when Russell couldn't make it to a gig. Chris is heavily involved too, even more so than I, and has been since the first version of the live band. He plays guitar through various effects that make it sound like a bass, a synthesier, a cyclotron and all sorts of other things, and sometimes he squats on the floor to play a very small keyboard. He's also in charge of shouting instructions at the rest of us. We've both taken to wearing our guitars really high for some reason, I thought it might make me look like an '80s session bassist in the "Rockschool" vein, but photographic evidence has shown me that it just makes me look like I have disproportionately long thin legs, like some musical wading bird. I think I'd better go back to the drawing board and reconsider my shapes.

From The Archive - Strike Four / The Greater Betika

I'm so very poor at keeping this up to date! I've got an entire arsenal of excuses for my slackness though, including plain laziness, having had a change of premises forced upon me (the new Betikorp world HQ is shaping up nicely) and being far too busy with the business of writing and rehearsing and recording with and without the band to do anything of sufficient interest to warrant documentation. I did nearly get killed again, some 20 yards from the spot where it happened before- on this occasion it was my fault, having had the cheek to attempt to share a public highway with a man whose Mercedes had come complete with the title deeds for all the roads in great Britain. It's funny, after the last time it happened I thought that if it ever happened again I'd probably have a pretty good go at smashing up either the car or it's occupant or both. The incident made me very angry. But in the heat of the moment, when it came, I found it was all I could do to roar obscenities at the instrument of my near-destruction. And I mean ROAR. There was suddenly this voice that was not mine coming from somewhere deep inside me, like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters. "THERE IS NO DANA, ONLY ZOOL!!" But after that I just wanted to get home and stop shaking.

I've done loads of music since the last entry, and pretty much every last note of it had been Betika based, which is incredible for me. For the last three years I've been active in a minimum of three bands at any one time, and something like seven or eight in total. It's all been very cool, and I've got to do some amazing gigs and been involved with making some fantastic records, but it's all been distracting me from getting on with Betika music. And now I'm in the situation where I can focus solely on that (for the time being) I'm getting a phenomenal amount done. The "Betikassette #1" e.p. was written in a little over a week, largely on cycleback, and "Betikassette #2" is half finished already; I knuckled down and finished off loads of songs that were almost but not entirely complete, and wrote arrangements for them that made them sound like the same band was playing all of them. Redefining the Betika sound has been my biggest stumbling block over the period since we decided to move from being an acoustic quartet to something more ambitious, not from a shortage of ideas but rather a glut of them- I was just too interested in too many types of music at once. And I was spoilt for choice in terms of sounds too- the problem with modern music technology is that every sound you can think of (and plenty more that you can't) is no further away than a magazine cover disk or a sample website, and while having access to all these noises is amazing, attempting to use them all in proximity to one another is something like the aural equivalent of using 256 different colours in one single webpage. It all comes out messy and disjointed, and every song sounds like the work of a different band, and an album of these songs sounds like a slightly schizo compilation tape. I found I could stay on the same tack for about an e.p.'s worth of songs, but after that I'd go off on some waltz-techno-metal tangent. In the end the way it came together was completely organic, and dictated entirely by the things that the other six people brought to the Greater Betika, and after that all I had to do was re-arrange the songs for the big band and bingo! Instant back catalogue of new songs.

It's odd being in a seven-member outfit. I haven't been in it for all that long, but I just cannot imagine it being any other way- I saw that Franz Ferdinand video the other day and my immedeate reaction was "But there's only four of them! How are they going to manage?" They looked lonely, like four skinny saplings on a wind-blasted hilltop. I find myself thinking back to bands I used to be in and wondering "who was the cello player in that?", when in fact the band in question was a guitar / bass / drums trio. It's good being in a proper band again though, I've missed the cameraderie and the gang mentality and that sense of being bouyed along by other people's enthusiasm. It's great to be playing in front of people again too, there's no buzz quite like the one you get when you step off stage at the end of a good gig. It's probably something derived from fear, like the thrill of a rollercoaster, but combined with the joy of playing music with friends and the king-size ego massage you get from a receptive audience. The only downside to it is that the buzz doesn't last nearly long enough, and then I tend to get the blues for a couple of days. I can only imagine what it must be like for bands coming off of month-long tours- I've only done a couple of short tours, but the experience effected me in peculiar ways. I came home felling much taller than when I left (the same is can be said of True Swamp- Chris used to be about the same size as me, but after their UK tour with Come Down he was towering over me. Maybe it's just a character-building thing that makes you stand up straight?), and it took me a while to adjust to the fact that I wasn't the focus of everyone's attention for half an hour every night. I felt terribly important, but I didn't know why, and nobody else seemed to be able to grasp quite how important I was, and then when I wasn't getting my nightly dose of endorphines the melancholy started to take over. I can understand why there are some bands who tour pretty much constantly- there must be a point you reach where to stop would be a mind-and-body-buggering shock to the system. Stay in school, kids!

From The Archive - The new lo-fi Benny Anderson?

There was a fantastic quote about us in a review of "Heads smashed in" from Holland the other day; "For certain Betika new indie-lo-fi Abba" (translation via some website). Funnily enough, the band does at the moment consist of a blonde girl (Claire), a dark girl (Caz), a beardie bloke and a clean-shaven bloke (Steve and I are interchangeable in these roles, depending on how hairy we are, but it's most common that I am Benny and he is Bjorn). It's always hard to establish the tone of reviews from overseas, when so much of the nuance of the language gets lost in the coarse machine translation, so I can't really tell if the writer's implication is that we write timeless, classic pop songs that will still be danced to in indie-lo-fi discos by our huge and loyal gay-indie-lo-fi following in thirty years time, or if he believes us to be purveyors of vacuous cheese. I guess it all depends on where you stand on Abba. I have to confess to being unsure myself.
In bits at the moment are;
(1) a Columbus EB-3 bass copy that Mike from My Hi-fi Sister (and ex-Miss Black America) gave me. This is nearly finished, I've had to make a new nut, bridge, and almost all the plastic parts (all in a functional if not particularly attractive way) and it's playable again, but it's as ugly as sin where Mike started stripping off the finish with a power sander but gave up half way (I had a similar experience with some window frames once) and think it's probably going to stay that way as I can't be arsed either. Before Mike gave it to me it was living in his shed, along with the remains of several other guitars that had been sacrificed to the gods of rock and roll by various members of Miss Black America. I've always had a bit of a problem with people breaking guitars, which dates back to when I was about thirteen, when I was saving up all the money from my paper-round to buy my first electric guitar, and I saw that famous bit of film of Hendrix smashing his strat at Monterrey. I don't think I've ever coveted an object so much, or waited so long to eventually get my hands on something, and here on the screen in front of me was this guy wantonly destroying it. Torching and then smashing into pieces my heart's desire. It seemed completely decadent, the most obscenely wasteful thing I had ever witnessed. If he didn't want the guitar, why couldn't he give it to someone who did? I was upset about that for a long time afterwards. It was worse than watching the KLF burn a million quid. Nowadays I've become a pragmatist and a scavenger, resigned to the fact that guitar trashing is a rock-pantomime set piece crowd-pleaser (just like throwing shapes, guitar solos and the earnestly gurning singer who really, really means it, face distorted into gargollic rictus by faux-emotional affectation…..), but if I ever witness it or it's victims first-hand I descend vulture-like on the carcass and try to make off with as many reuseable bits as possible. One day, I'll have enough to make a whole guitar, which I'm going to build onstage at the end of a Betika gig, amid an orgy of construction. And, getting off my high-horse;
(2) a number of Zenit SLR cameras. I've had one or more Zenits for years, my dad gave me one when I was a kid, thinking I'd progress onto something better once I'd got the hang of taking pictures with it, but as I got older I just bought more of them. I used to take lots of pictures at gigs, and as it's possible to pick these cameras up in charity shops for the price you pay for a disposable camera in the high street I don't really have to worry about them getting lost, stolen or broken- but at the same time they're still capable of taking fantastic pictures. I've broken two lately through experimenting with using them in ways which nature never intended, one I managed to fix but the other's a goner.
I've been listening to, amongst others; Steve Malkmus, Beulah, a CD of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a compilation of 'outsider' music called "Songs in the key of Z" (and reading the book of the same title) and some Shostakovich piano music. I'm simultaneously reading "Porno" by Irvine Welsh and "And the ass saw the angel" by Nick Cave, both of which are written in hard-to-fathom vernacular by drug-twits

From The Archive - Chris' postcard from Oz

I think you asked me to do a diary entry for the betika site - is this ok?
The ends of my fingers have started to go hard again now. I've had a good 5 months of not having a guitar to play on and I got pretty rubbish. But now I've got one and things have started to look up a bit. I'm hoping to get some students soon which will be much better than a proper job. I can't tell you too much about betika as I've been in the wrong hemisphere for a while now. It seems like HSIBTBGT is getting re-issued with a couple of new tracks. Dave regularly forwards me the nice things that the press have had to say about it, and I would hope that some of the reviews would find their way onto this site before too long. I received a package from Mr Purse recently - he was kindly sending me copies of Belle & Sebastian/Max Tundra cd’s that cost a fortune in Australia. He also included a cd with some of his new demos that I found a little worrying, sometimes scary, but generally very promising as always. Also in the package was the new press release for “Heads Smashed in…” which alludes to Dave’s state of mind and the circumstances surrounding the recording. I never really thought about how fucked up that little bubble of time was, until now it just seemed normal – at least it proves that dysfunctional people make good music. That press release should be up here, or should go out with the cd or something – people deserve to know the truth! (see the archive!)
I’ve been reading lots of really bad books lately (see “The Death Dealers” by Mickey Spillane), but have also found some great ones like “Life of Pi” by Yann Martell and “The Art of Travel” by Alain de Botton. My favourite records of late have been Manitoba’s “Start Breaking my Heart” and Dntel’s “Life is Full of Possibilities”. I’ve been listening to a great radio station called Triple J that plays Cat Power all the time. New South Wales has a pretty active live music scene and so far I’ve seen - You Am I, Gelbison and Gersey amongst others. For proof of good music coming out of Australia check out Machine Translations, The Sleepy Jackson and Gerling (Who’s ya daddy?) See you soon Chris xx

From The Archive - Playing fast and loose in other bands

We never did find anyone (or anything) to replace Chris, so Betika as a live band is on official hiatus until he comes back. That's assuming of course that he does come back- hopefully the Australian authorities are keeping tabs on him and he'll be summarily ejected when his visa runs out…..In the meanwhile I've been keeping myself busy doing all sorts- I've been finding a sort of despondency creeping in whenever I give myself time to stop and ponder the state of the world recently, like those dark, fuzzy edges that sleep-deprivation gives your peripheral vision, so keeping occupied has been paramount. I seconded myself to the mighty Seemonster for a spell, masquerading as their drummer (previous occupants of this coveted role have included Matt "Tex la homa" Shaw and Pete from The Clams). We recorded half-a-dozen or so songs for their next release, giving me ample opportunity to vent any frustrations that may have beset me, and when these recordings are issued I'm sure I'll go back for another bash when they promote them. I've had my composer / arranger hat on over the past couple of weeks. The True Swamp Neglect boys have asked Carolyn, an as-yet-unmet French Horn player called Chris and myself to contribute some brass sounds to what will probably be their forthcoming single "Slow Fighting". I've been playing the cornet for some twenty years now, on and off (mostly off, it must be said), and have achieved the "clueless, but loud and fast" standard, as anyone who has heard my work on the Sancho Panza 7" can attest, but as it was on the basis of this recording that the Swamp asked me to play on theirs I'm hoping that they won't be too disappointed with something similar. I've also written a few short instrumental pieces for Steve's new wRong record "Children's TV themes from a parallel dimension", and even found the time to knock out ten or so new Betika songs to add to our now quite considerable back(cata)log. Steve shot some video of us rehearsing the new songs, which I might post on the site if it's any good. That's what I imagine bands like Blur and Radiohead do in an attempt to keep the wolf of between-the-albums-listener-apathy from the door. Or I could just attempt a brief description and spare us both the up-and-downloading, couldn't I? Okay; largely slow songs, arranged for classical guitar, church-hall harmonium, flute and voice, a more up-tempo song that currently needs work to make it sound less like we're ripping off Love but is a sure-fire international smash nonetheless, and a sort of hasidic/country song. Some with religio-political overtones, others just the same old boy/girl nonsense. You know the score. I've also been indulging in some electronic whimsy that may or may not ever see the light of day, and Chris, Steve and Carolyn all claim to have new tunes also. Carolyn's been doing happy hardcore for money, but I haven't heard it yet.

From The Archive - Japan / What next?

It's been interesting lately. Obviously, Chris' going away has been a big disruption to the grand Betika plan (one of which there isn't), and I'm giving a lot of thought to what, if anything, should take his place. The 7-piece Greater Betika was just about at gigging standard the last time we rehearsed, and it would be fantastic to get out in public with that band, but doing so would mean having to find another guitarist as good as Chris prepared to slum it musically with the likes of me, if only on a temporary basis, and that could take months, if not forever. So we've been considering various alternatives, from laptops to orchestras and most things in between. Whatever happens, I'd really like to have something ready to go by the new year, I've got new songs that are just gathering dust at the moment, and a renewed interest in the cello, John Fahey and Davy Graham.

In other developments, my own wanderlust got the better of me and I went to Japan for 10 days at the start of the month. The whole trip was something of a life's ambition for me, and I wasn't disappointed. I got to experience some incredible stuff; I travelled on a Tokyo commuter train packed with an impossible number of people (apparently approximately 3 million go through Shinjuku station every single day!), a 12-hour Karaoke marathon, all kinds of food and drink, anime, manga, J-Pop. I sang a Smokey Robinson song with a barman who couldn't speak any english in one place, and I sang something else by the Backstreet Boys with a computer engineer in the smallest bar I have ever been in. Where beers were £12.50. I bought loads of CD's, largely on the strength of the artwork, or the band's name, and I had more fun than I've had on any other holiday ever. If you ever get the opportunity to go, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Cultural artefacts I've absorbed include "McCarthy's Bar" by Pete McCarthy, which was duller than I'd been led to believe, "Great Apes" by Will Self, which I've been meaning to read for years and finally had twelve hours on an aeroplane free from distractions to do it in. I'm currently halfway through Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", which bears uncanny similarities to "Great Apes", especially in the way that both use the greek alphabet and feature sexual promiscuity as a cure for social ills. Things I've heard included "The begining stages of The Polyphonic Spree", John Adams' "Nixon in China" (Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich all seem to be very popular in Japan), Al Stewart, Numbergirl, Acidman, Beat Crusaders, "The Steve Christy e.p." by Olo, and a CD single I bought because I liked the cover, the title of which is "� 9", but, like the name of the band I have no idea how to translate it. It's on Tinstar records, Tokyo, if that helps. I also got a sneak preview of the True Swamp Neglect LP that they've been making with Hubcap. I think it's called "Sleep Function Lost", and sounds fantastic, especially "Year of the Chimp" and "Heavy Music". The only films I've seen are "Laundry" on the plane, in Japanese with French subtitles, and "Battle Royale". Both good.

From The Archive - In Bits at the moment

In bits at the moment are; a Korg Poly61 synth from 1982 that cost me £25, and for a very good reason, and; an upright piano, which I was given. A few weeks ago I had to totally dismantle it in order to remove it from the house it occupied. It had been moved in before considerable building work had taken place, and just wouldn't fit through the gap at the bottom of the stairs, so I had to strip out the keyboard, mechanism and facia until I was left with a frame, a soundboard and some strings, all on four small castors. It's taken me a little while to get it all back into working condition, but I think I'm just about there now. I've fixed the broken hammers and return springs, trimmed the dampers that were fouling each other and getting jammed, and last weekend I tuned it using a guitar tuner, a drum key and a dirty great spanner. This is probably setting a new record for dullness of diary entries, but I'm not sorry. It's a bloke-tool-gadget- thing, all part of the making, doing and fixing urge I get that makes me restless and want to write songs, and build websites. It may be that that last statement is a bit sexist, because girls might get these urges too. I don't know, I've never been a girl and I've never really understood how their minds work. That probably sounds even more sexist, verging on the MCP, but it's not meant to be.
It's raining, and I'm going to get wet cycling home.
I saw and enjoyed the bands Vext of Wareham and Lamb Quartet of Exeter recently, and I've been listening "Mastered by Guy at the exchange" by Max Tundra and other items from his back catalogue. I've read "Mortal Engines" by Philip Reeve, and "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. Chris is disappointed he didn't get to see Dogbonfire again.

From The Archive - The smell of fear

Did you know that your sense of smell is your fastest sense? It's because it works by having tendrils of your brain which are exposed to the air in the roof of your nasal cavity. All the other senses use optic or aural or whatever nerves to send their messages to the brain, which takes a little bit longer. I think that's why smells are so evocative of not only places and people but feelings too.
The air this morning carried with it the smell of fear; of the fresh intake of students into secondary schools, far enough now into the term to have identified the bullies to whom they may fall victim, and for the bullies to have identified them. It smelt of seemingly endless lunch-hours trying to be invisible, of trying to beat out the sparks of confrontation in the powder-keg of the playground, of adrenaline pumped by a racing heart, fists clenched and lip bitten in the face of insults and abuse designed to provoke a violent response; of scuffles and scraps and beatings and blood and tears and rage and shame and humiliation. It smelt of pretending to be ill, and bunking off. And it smelt of finding refuge in books and in libraries and in music-rooms.

From The Archive - A Machine Translates

Got this in my email a while back- I think it's the work of Babelfish!

This ep, ' Heads smashed in by the boy/girl thing ', takes again some of these songs re-recorded with a lighter production, more acoustic, even if guitars, glockenspiel, oboe or melodica do good housework. One cannot really speak about revelation but the songs present here are really fascinating and pleasant.
' I' ve been in year accident' is a small happiness out of time, pretty top of the ep for which Betika even turned a clip. Pretty gracious melody with the mixture of male-intonated voice and female, generous melancholy and opulante, green lawns mouthfuls of dew in morning, crossing of districts in the bicycle under a hesitant sun. Sure, one was many times much more close to the loss of balance, but to roll here one however fills the lungs with a fresh air which does not know pollution.
' the bierdigan' is splendid as much, as to go quickly on a fine and slightly elevated edge. Something of slightly childish with the real benevolence, as escaped from another time. Betika it is as suddenly a small path which takes shape between two bushes of hedge and involves us in a richly and précautionneusement arranged garden, with the pretty solid masses in flowers whose perfumes transpierce us their emanations.
' release' is somewhat percussion, finally not so far that that from the beginnings of The Beautiful South (??). I thus remain here somewhat being wary. Left pretty solid mass of pink pinks almost nauseating.
On ' one day my house will Be flooded ', Betika is found stripped to the maximum, almost a guitar and two songs then a xylophone, which intersection, a striptease which lets however see a body with the still soft and quite generous forms.
In the same way, ' dance and scream' seems out of time, an American journalist spoke about them the madrigaux one and, here, it is true that one is not far from the whole so much poetry dense and is coloured of it. And the ep to finish with the good named 'summers of solemnity' which summarizes well the pop step of Betika, estival and solemn.
Good ep, beautiful writing and charm some.
Didier

This week I have been listening to 'They threw us all in a trench and stuck a monument on top' by Liars, which is the best thing I've heard in ages, and reading the 'His Dark Materials' Trilogy by Philip Pullman, which is a heretical epic for "young adults". Quite a thought-provoking read, if you're into homespun theology, and let's face it - who isn't?

From the Archive - Simon le Bon's dog

I used to know this girl who had this odd thing about Simon le Bon. Like an irrational hatred. I don't know exactly what caused it- the most I got out of her was once when we were really drunk, she said something about Simon le Bon's dog having shat on her mum on a beach in Cornwall when she was little.

I'm listening to "Dub come save me", the Roots Manuva remix album, and "Vunerabilia" by My Computer, which is a bizarre mix of chill-out electronica, techno, and Jeff Buckley / Freddy Mercury vocal histrionics. I've been reading proof copies of children's books, and reminiscing about when I didn't have a radio in the house so I'd go and listen to the Evening Session in my car which was propped up on two piles of bricks in the garden. Happy times

From The Archive - A Bloke and his Bird waltz sinister.

Last week I wrote and recorded a song with my girlfriend Lexi. It's the first time I've made music with someone I've been going out with, despite having had a few musically inclined girlfriends in the past. I hope our collaboration tends more to the Her Space Holiday / White Stripes end of things rather than the Wings / Fleetwood Mac. I suppose it's not without precedent- Carolyn's boyfriend was in Betika briefly, and co-wrote "Thunderstorm", and we've roped in some of Steve's lady-friends at various times. Lexi played the Casiotone that is the main Betika keyboard, and I played stand-up drums a la Bobby Gillespie, and overdubbed some autoharp. The results sound minimalist, sinister and clockwork.

Thursday

Woke up this morning with that lovely feeling you only ever get when you're safe and secure in the knowledge that it's Sunday. A big group of Superglider-affiliated personnel went en masse to see Miss Black America last night. The few times I've seen them I've always come away with my heart a little bit warmer- there's something about their energy and enthusiasm that's really infectious and a thing of beauty to witness. Stirs the spirit. Last night was no exception. I suppose in some ways you could think of them as the English Rage Against the Machine, not that they sound anything like them, but in terms of their uncompromising, highly politicised stance and their boundless raw energy. And both bands had / have a refreshingly innovative guitarist. I came home hyperactive, singing and wanting to be Seymour when I grow up (he's three years younger than me.). I'm starting to get quite excited about the prospect of taking Betika up to London, but at the same time not a little bit nervous. Not only will it be the first time we'll have played this year, it'll be the first time we'll play with our new line-up (with a human drummer to compliment the beatboxes), and the first time we'll have performed some of the songs. Still, there's nothing like fear to give the buzz of playing a real edge...

From The Archive - Carolyn's first Diary entry

My recent thoughts have been filled with visions of people drinking things that are wrong. These terrible visions started a couple of weeks ago when a work colleague seemed unnaturally down when he was forcibly told that he wasn't very good. These black moods continued, causing concern for myself and others, culminating in an offer to go out and get mashed on the Friday night, to get rid of his black thoughts, you see. This didn't happen and it didn't happen the next week either. He trudged home and the sight of his hanging head must have weighed heavy on my mind as that night I dreamed he drank down a botle of hydrochloric acid. 5M, the strong stuff you know. That very same day, I had to laugh out loud when one of my young friends Dom put his hand and announced "I drank bleach" in a proud voice. My initial reaction was to piss myself laughing, and when it occurred to me that maybe he had drank bleach as he has no lenses in his eyes and therefore didn't know what it was, perhaps mistaking it for lemonade, I just laughed harder. When I realised he shares his name with a popular brand of the very same cleaning product he drank, it all made sense so I just smiled and said "good lad" with a benevolent smile. That last bit is a lie, but the rest is true.

From The Archive - The one with the link to the hidden song

I was working on a sort of 'Making the video' type write-up for the Superglider site to accompany the "I've been in an accident" vid the other day, and rambling away tangentially as I do my train of thought took me back to the first band I was ever in. (How I got there is too convoluted and obscure to bother with here). I was 10, and my friend Kamran Javid and I -inspired by a couple of girls in our class who could play "Heart and Soul" (the duet kids everywhere can play)- started writing tunes on the school Casio keyboard. We almost exclusively used the black notes, and we only had three tunes. The first, "Organ Time" I have a recording of that we made in the school hall. It has the sound of kids playing outside in the background and faint birdsong at the start. Our second tune didn't have a title, but I submitted it five years later as a composition for my music GCSE. I got a B. Go figure. The third song we did likewise had no title that I can remember, and never got recorded. It stuck in my head, though, and being reminded of it again the other day I thought that maybe I should record it. So I did. I kept the tune exactly as we wrote it, but I tried to produce it in the way it would have been had record company execs decided that 10-year-old electropop duos were going to be the big thing in '87. Now I can't stop listening to it, though I think it's more through nostalgia than the tune being any good. It's quite sad to hear it now -around the time we wrote it Kamran and I were both pretty melancholy over a girl we both liked who was systematically flirting with every boy in the class. We'd been early targets in her campaign and she'd moved on. I remember waking up one day around this time to "Nothing's gonna stop us now" by Starship on the radio, and being struck from nowhere by this horrible empty feeling and the realisation that after we left for our different secondary schools I'd never see her again. In hindsight our tune is based on the same chord progression. Plagiarism is obviously in my genes. Chris and Carolyn both got the internet this week. Hopefully the next diary will not be mine!