www.betika.co.uk
Our run of bad luck continued into sunday; Chris still couldn't get his car going, in spite of Imogen's attempts to fix it, and the van hadn't miraculously repaired itself either. I decided to do a spot of gardening, and while raking up some leaves I trod in some fox poo, which I didn't notice until I'd walked it all through the house. I cleared it up, and in doing so narrowly avoided being electrocuted by the Hoover, the mains cable of which had been mysteriously sliced open, exposing both the live and neutral, as I found as I was coiling it up. I attempted to record some singing in the afternoon, but my voice had dried up to a reedy thin squeak of a thing (most likely the result of my caffiene-binge on Saturday), so we recorded Caz doing some oboe and melodica instead. Which was good.
Other good things have happened since, in the form of some very exciting gigs we've got lined up for the next couple of months, more on which when we're in possession of all the pertinent facts. There's going to be a couple of chances to catch Betika this week if you live in or are prepared to travel to Southampton. Caz and I will be popping into the open mic night at The Talking Heads to do a couple of songs tonight, and the whole band is playing at The Joiners on Friday (Feb 3rd) night in the company of Toupe, Stout and This Black Static.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Sunday, January 29, 2006
And how we beat it...
www.betika.co.uk
Well, Imogen and Richard got back safely, Imogen succesfully repaired her damaged hands with superglue, Rich and Gary dragged their ruined bodies into the recording room and we set to the task in hand with only two of the six hours we'd allocated remaining. And we did three almost flawless takes of "25" straight off the bat, and nailed "Hatred" in seven. Vocals and overdubs tomorrow, mixing next week, job done next weekend! Or that's the plan.
I've made myself go a bit mental tonight, I've been drinking tea non-stop today, I've had a couple of beers over the course of the evening and I haven't really eaten since breakfast, now I'm simultaneously dog tired, hyper to the point where I'm shaking, incredibly happy about the way the session turned out and yet somehow really sad. It's not very nice and I wouldn't reccommend it.
I wrote a new song this week called "The taming of the shrew". It's about small animals.
Well, Imogen and Richard got back safely, Imogen succesfully repaired her damaged hands with superglue, Rich and Gary dragged their ruined bodies into the recording room and we set to the task in hand with only two of the six hours we'd allocated remaining. And we did three almost flawless takes of "25" straight off the bat, and nailed "Hatred" in seven. Vocals and overdubs tomorrow, mixing next week, job done next weekend! Or that's the plan.
I've made myself go a bit mental tonight, I've been drinking tea non-stop today, I've had a couple of beers over the course of the evening and I haven't really eaten since breakfast, now I'm simultaneously dog tired, hyper to the point where I'm shaking, incredibly happy about the way the session turned out and yet somehow really sad. It's not very nice and I wouldn't reccommend it.
I wrote a new song this week called "The taming of the shrew". It's about small animals.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
The Curse of Betika
www.betika.co.uk
Today we're supposed to be doing the last recording session for the album, however;
First thing this morning I wanted to go to the guitar shop to buy a new lead - I got in the van, it started first time then died abruptly and wouldn't even turn over after that. I was in a hurry, so I jumped into Lexi's car. That didn't start, but after much coaxing finally got going. Meanwhile;
Hubcap (producer) stood up at home and pulled something in his back which left him in agony.
Rich (drummer) was angle-grinding some metal racking at work, and knackered something in his shoulder.
Carrying these injuries, they arrived at the session. However;
Chris and Imogen had gone out for a walk, and in the course of a game of frisbee Imogen managed to tear two of the nails of her bass-playing fingers. She tried cutting them back, but decided that they really needed sticking back together with superglue. After much hunting, no superglue could be found, so she decided to go back to her flat to get some. Her car has been broken for some weeks, so she borrowed Chris'. Or she would have, only guess what? It wouldn't start! Not so much as a squeak would it make. Exactly the same as my van. So Rich has taken Imo home to get some glue so she can fix her hands so we can start recording, some four hours after we originally intended. I'm praying they make it back unscathed.
Today we're supposed to be doing the last recording session for the album, however;
First thing this morning I wanted to go to the guitar shop to buy a new lead - I got in the van, it started first time then died abruptly and wouldn't even turn over after that. I was in a hurry, so I jumped into Lexi's car. That didn't start, but after much coaxing finally got going. Meanwhile;
Hubcap (producer) stood up at home and pulled something in his back which left him in agony.
Rich (drummer) was angle-grinding some metal racking at work, and knackered something in his shoulder.
Carrying these injuries, they arrived at the session. However;
Chris and Imogen had gone out for a walk, and in the course of a game of frisbee Imogen managed to tear two of the nails of her bass-playing fingers. She tried cutting them back, but decided that they really needed sticking back together with superglue. After much hunting, no superglue could be found, so she decided to go back to her flat to get some. Her car has been broken for some weeks, so she borrowed Chris'. Or she would have, only guess what? It wouldn't start! Not so much as a squeak would it make. Exactly the same as my van. So Rich has taken Imo home to get some glue so she can fix her hands so we can start recording, some four hours after we originally intended. I'm praying they make it back unscathed.
Monday, December 26, 2005
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
More Pictures
www.betika.co.uk
There's some more lovely Paul Savine pictures, this time of Caz and myself playing at Le Bateau last sunday (and all the other folks also doing so) here.
There's some more lovely Paul Savine pictures, this time of Caz and myself playing at Le Bateau last sunday (and all the other folks also doing so) here.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Pix and things
www.betika.co.uk
Some photos of Chris, Carolyn and I (also The Kid and The Shed) doing some acoustic songs at Solid Air this Monday can be found here. They were taken by a chap called Paul Savine, who clearly has something of an eye for this kind of thing, and is a very nice fellow to boot. The gig was a bit of a strange one, we arrived to find that almost all of the acts had pulled out due to illness and various other reasons, and we had to extend the short set we'd rehearsed - beyond songs we knew, past songs we sort of knew and right the way into a song we haven't played in public ever before ("The Castle"). There were a few ad-hoc re-arrangements of some songs, including me and Chris taking turns attempting to play basslines of Chris' guitar on a couple of songs with mixed results, it was all very seat-of-the-pants, and not a little ropey in places, but very good fun at the same time.
More acoustic Betika this week at Le Bateau on Sunday, just me and Caz this time, but in the company of Indigo, Frankie, Farther and The Shed (again). See you there maybe?
Some photos of Chris, Carolyn and I (also The Kid and The Shed) doing some acoustic songs at Solid Air this Monday can be found here. They were taken by a chap called Paul Savine, who clearly has something of an eye for this kind of thing, and is a very nice fellow to boot. The gig was a bit of a strange one, we arrived to find that almost all of the acts had pulled out due to illness and various other reasons, and we had to extend the short set we'd rehearsed - beyond songs we knew, past songs we sort of knew and right the way into a song we haven't played in public ever before ("The Castle"). There were a few ad-hoc re-arrangements of some songs, including me and Chris taking turns attempting to play basslines of Chris' guitar on a couple of songs with mixed results, it was all very seat-of-the-pants, and not a little ropey in places, but very good fun at the same time.
More acoustic Betika this week at Le Bateau on Sunday, just me and Caz this time, but in the company of Indigo, Frankie, Farther and The Shed (again). See you there maybe?
Sunday, November 20, 2005
I've scored!
www.betika.co.uk
A film, that is! I've been writing and recording some music this week for a short currently being made by my friend Glenn Sadler. It's the sequel to "The Aldwych Hall Horror", a spoof paranormal / detective caper from two years ago, which I also did some music for. For "The Aldwych Hall Horror", I made some very creepy noises by playing an autoharp with a metal slide, which were used more as abstract sound-effects than music - this time round I've been a little more conservative and written an actual theme tune! I wrote it on a cheesy '80s Yamaha keyboard that I got a few weeks ago from a second hand shop, and it initially had a John Carpenter (Halloween / Assault on precinct 13) kind of feel to it, but it came up in conversation with Carolyn that Brad (her very close friend and accomplished bass-player from Brenda//) has a double bass and a cello, so I arranged it for those instruments, along with oboe and flute which Carolyn played. And what a difference it's made! My crappy little synth piece now sounds almost like the work of someone who knows what they're doing. I'll put an mp3 of it up here after the film has been premiered, I don't want to give too much away yet. Eventually, when I've done enough of these I'll put together a CD of film music, I'm still a way off though, only having only done two-and-a-half to date (not counting those rare occasions when I've whored myself out to The Man and done stuff for cash). The other film I did, "Watermelon", directed by Tim Clague has being doing the rounds of various film festivals this summer, I believe it made it's way as far as Cannes. I expect Tim will put it on his website in the fullness of time, I'll put a link to it up as soon as he does.
On a related note, the SK5's animated film "Utility Soul Shambles" got a screening in a cinema in Newcastle last week, which is quite exciting, the first time it's been viewed on such a large screen as far as I'm aware. I haven't heard back yet how it was recieved.
A couple of weeks till the next full Betika shows (9th / 10th Dec), but tomorrow will find Chris, Carolyn and I at The Green room, doing a set consisting entirely of songs that Caz sings, and next Sunday we'll be down at Le Bateau doing something similar, but with me doing a bit of singing too. I'm also going to be doing some singing the following weekend with Toupe, who have asked me to contribute backing vocals (as part of a group of singers) to a performance they're doing in a theatre which is being filmed for a DVD which will be their next release. I don't think I'm an obvious choice for even a backing singer, seeing as how I'm not really very good at singing in any of the commonly accepted ways, but Grant insisted that he really does want me to do it, and so I will. I'll tell you all about it afterwards.
time for me to get some zeds now,
nighty night
D
A film, that is! I've been writing and recording some music this week for a short currently being made by my friend Glenn Sadler. It's the sequel to "The Aldwych Hall Horror", a spoof paranormal / detective caper from two years ago, which I also did some music for. For "The Aldwych Hall Horror", I made some very creepy noises by playing an autoharp with a metal slide, which were used more as abstract sound-effects than music - this time round I've been a little more conservative and written an actual theme tune! I wrote it on a cheesy '80s Yamaha keyboard that I got a few weeks ago from a second hand shop, and it initially had a John Carpenter (Halloween / Assault on precinct 13) kind of feel to it, but it came up in conversation with Carolyn that Brad (her very close friend and accomplished bass-player from Brenda//) has a double bass and a cello, so I arranged it for those instruments, along with oboe and flute which Carolyn played. And what a difference it's made! My crappy little synth piece now sounds almost like the work of someone who knows what they're doing. I'll put an mp3 of it up here after the film has been premiered, I don't want to give too much away yet. Eventually, when I've done enough of these I'll put together a CD of film music, I'm still a way off though, only having only done two-and-a-half to date (not counting those rare occasions when I've whored myself out to The Man and done stuff for cash). The other film I did, "Watermelon", directed by Tim Clague has being doing the rounds of various film festivals this summer, I believe it made it's way as far as Cannes. I expect Tim will put it on his website in the fullness of time, I'll put a link to it up as soon as he does.
On a related note, the SK5's animated film "Utility Soul Shambles" got a screening in a cinema in Newcastle last week, which is quite exciting, the first time it's been viewed on such a large screen as far as I'm aware. I haven't heard back yet how it was recieved.
A couple of weeks till the next full Betika shows (9th / 10th Dec), but tomorrow will find Chris, Carolyn and I at The Green room, doing a set consisting entirely of songs that Caz sings, and next Sunday we'll be down at Le Bateau doing something similar, but with me doing a bit of singing too. I'm also going to be doing some singing the following weekend with Toupe, who have asked me to contribute backing vocals (as part of a group of singers) to a performance they're doing in a theatre which is being filmed for a DVD which will be their next release. I don't think I'm an obvious choice for even a backing singer, seeing as how I'm not really very good at singing in any of the commonly accepted ways, but Grant insisted that he really does want me to do it, and so I will. I'll tell you all about it afterwards.
time for me to get some zeds now,
nighty night
D
Monday, November 14, 2005
Stealing from my friends
www.betika.co.uk
This week we've been recording "Love let me not hunger" and working further on the batch of new songs we're going to be unveilling for our Winter 05-06 collection. One of them is brand new, so much so that the ink is still not dry in my notebook. It's called "TwentyFive" and I started writing it while sifting through the latest batch of recordings made by The SK5 (the improvisation group consisting of myself, Mooro from SeeMonsters, Chris from True Swamp Neglect and Lee from Dutch Husband). The modus operandi of The SK5 is to get together once every couple of months, plug in our Casio SK5 sampling keyboards and guitar effects pedals, and then noodle away for a couple of hours, recording absolutely everything as we go. Chris Swamp then edits these often epic jams down into more easily palatable chunks, until we've got enough good bits to make a record, and then we start all over again. We also record all our gigs, but somehow the minidisc always goes wrong when we play well, but works perfectly when we're not at our best. Anyway....I was listening back to some stuff we recorded a couple of weeks ago, and one particular tune jumped out at me, and I started making up words to it, and then I developed it a bit more and lo and behold, half an hour later I had a song! I told Rich, Lee and Chris about ripping off their work, and they didn't seem too bothered- I will of course give them writing credits so they get a share in the royalties when it becomes a massive international hit in six months time.
Elsewhere, Chris Betika, Carolyn and I have been helping out in the latest incarnation of Sancho. Somehow, I've ended up playing drums and singing a bit, and also simultaneously with that playing bass or keyboards in a couple of songs. And my trademark horrible trumpet, of course. Carolyn has wound up playing bass as well as her usual vocal and woodwind things. Chris has sensibly opted to stick with the guitar. Other personnel are Rizlo (laptop and bass) Kerrie (keyboards, voice and glock), Kieron (viola) and Sancho Paul himself (guitar, voice, bass, keyboards, typewriter etc). This Sancho will be released into the wild on (I think) 15th December.
Next full-band Betika gig is now not until Friday 9th December (with Toupe and True Swamp Neglect), the 26th Nov show with Flipron having sadly been cancelled. There will however be a chance to catch Carolyn and I doing some acoustic stuff at Le Bateau on Sunday 27th - check out the website for details and future gigs.
This week we've been recording "Love let me not hunger" and working further on the batch of new songs we're going to be unveilling for our Winter 05-06 collection. One of them is brand new, so much so that the ink is still not dry in my notebook. It's called "TwentyFive" and I started writing it while sifting through the latest batch of recordings made by The SK5 (the improvisation group consisting of myself, Mooro from SeeMonsters, Chris from True Swamp Neglect and Lee from Dutch Husband). The modus operandi of The SK5 is to get together once every couple of months, plug in our Casio SK5 sampling keyboards and guitar effects pedals, and then noodle away for a couple of hours, recording absolutely everything as we go. Chris Swamp then edits these often epic jams down into more easily palatable chunks, until we've got enough good bits to make a record, and then we start all over again. We also record all our gigs, but somehow the minidisc always goes wrong when we play well, but works perfectly when we're not at our best. Anyway....I was listening back to some stuff we recorded a couple of weeks ago, and one particular tune jumped out at me, and I started making up words to it, and then I developed it a bit more and lo and behold, half an hour later I had a song! I told Rich, Lee and Chris about ripping off their work, and they didn't seem too bothered- I will of course give them writing credits so they get a share in the royalties when it becomes a massive international hit in six months time.
Elsewhere, Chris Betika, Carolyn and I have been helping out in the latest incarnation of Sancho. Somehow, I've ended up playing drums and singing a bit, and also simultaneously with that playing bass or keyboards in a couple of songs. And my trademark horrible trumpet, of course. Carolyn has wound up playing bass as well as her usual vocal and woodwind things. Chris has sensibly opted to stick with the guitar. Other personnel are Rizlo (laptop and bass) Kerrie (keyboards, voice and glock), Kieron (viola) and Sancho Paul himself (guitar, voice, bass, keyboards, typewriter etc). This Sancho will be released into the wild on (I think) 15th December.
Next full-band Betika gig is now not until Friday 9th December (with Toupe and True Swamp Neglect), the 26th Nov show with Flipron having sadly been cancelled. There will however be a chance to catch Carolyn and I doing some acoustic stuff at Le Bateau on Sunday 27th - check out the website for details and future gigs.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
What we did at the weekend
www.betika.co.uk
Carolyn and I did an overnight session at a studio called Alchemea in Islington this weekend. We recorded acoustic versions of "We will not know peace", "You can call me brother", "Pink Hulk" and "The only way is up" with John Jeffreys, who is one of the many new friends we've made this year. The trip was the first long-distance trip Carolyn had made in her new (old) MG (a '79 BGT), and also the first time we'd attempted to fit guitars into it- it turns out that despite appearances, you can actually get quite a lot of stuff into the back. It's a good job she didn't get the roadster version! We travelled up in the early evening and did the usual hicks-go-to-London thing of getting slightly lost and exercising poor lane discipline, we arrived around 10 and we worked through pretty much solidly and very productively 'till about 7am, when we packed up and went home. Carolyn was far more sleep-deprived than me, so she went home to bed. I on the other hand was wide awake somehow, if a little ragged around the edges, and I wasted the afternoon doing this. I apologise if you are a fan of, or are even aware of the original version- this will probably upset you just as much as that bloke out of The Darkness' horrid version of "This town ain't big enough for the both of us". It just seemed like a good idea at the time. I hadn't slept for over 24 hours and I was very, very tired.
In other developments, I've built a sequential switch circuit into the Lexitone, as Betika's Casio MT-40 is henceforth to be known. I made a particular sound with it while recording the demo of new song "Penis" by manually sliding around the switch that selects the sounds, and I wanted to be able to recreate it automatically, so with not a little help from Imogen (who is our resident electronic genius) I designed and built a circuit to do the job. It's the first thing I've ever made with ICs in it, and probably the only thing I've built since school with transistors for that matter. I'll post a proper illustrated account of how I done it on the web somewhere when I get the time, in case anyone is interested in doing something similar, the circuit can be applied to any instrument that uses mechanical switches to select or modify sounds.
"I'm not showing you mine until you've at the very least described yours"
Carolyn and I did an overnight session at a studio called Alchemea in Islington this weekend. We recorded acoustic versions of "We will not know peace", "You can call me brother", "Pink Hulk" and "The only way is up" with John Jeffreys, who is one of the many new friends we've made this year. The trip was the first long-distance trip Carolyn had made in her new (old) MG (a '79 BGT), and also the first time we'd attempted to fit guitars into it- it turns out that despite appearances, you can actually get quite a lot of stuff into the back. It's a good job she didn't get the roadster version! We travelled up in the early evening and did the usual hicks-go-to-London thing of getting slightly lost and exercising poor lane discipline, we arrived around 10 and we worked through pretty much solidly and very productively 'till about 7am, when we packed up and went home. Carolyn was far more sleep-deprived than me, so she went home to bed. I on the other hand was wide awake somehow, if a little ragged around the edges, and I wasted the afternoon doing this. I apologise if you are a fan of, or are even aware of the original version- this will probably upset you just as much as that bloke out of The Darkness' horrid version of "This town ain't big enough for the both of us". It just seemed like a good idea at the time. I hadn't slept for over 24 hours and I was very, very tired.
In other developments, I've built a sequential switch circuit into the Lexitone, as Betika's Casio MT-40 is henceforth to be known. I made a particular sound with it while recording the demo of new song "Penis" by manually sliding around the switch that selects the sounds, and I wanted to be able to recreate it automatically, so with not a little help from Imogen (who is our resident electronic genius) I designed and built a circuit to do the job. It's the first thing I've ever made with ICs in it, and probably the only thing I've built since school with transistors for that matter. I'll post a proper illustrated account of how I done it on the web somewhere when I get the time, in case anyone is interested in doing something similar, the circuit can be applied to any instrument that uses mechanical switches to select or modify sounds.
"I'm not showing you mine until you've at the very least described yours"
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
An article
www.betika.co.uk
Our Martin has written a piece for the local BBC about our experiences at the lovely Manor Farm Festival last weekend. You can read it here.
Our Martin has written a piece for the local BBC about our experiences at the lovely Manor Farm Festival last weekend. You can read it here.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Recipe for disaster?
www.betika.co.uk
Rumquila Blanket
1.5 litres of good quality lemonade
250ml Mount Gay or Morgan Spiced rum
200ml Red Bull or similar
50ml Tequila
dash of Ribena.
Drinking this last night should have given me one hell of a hangover this morning, but for some reason I'm feeling absolutely no ill effects. Perhaps it will catch up with me later when my liver spontaneously ruptures.
The rock band Betika takes no responsibilty for the consequences of any use you make of the above information.
Rumquila Blanket
1.5 litres of good quality lemonade
250ml Mount Gay or Morgan Spiced rum
200ml Red Bull or similar
50ml Tequila
dash of Ribena.
Drinking this last night should have given me one hell of a hangover this morning, but for some reason I'm feeling absolutely no ill effects. Perhaps it will catch up with me later when my liver spontaneously ruptures.
The rock band Betika takes no responsibilty for the consequences of any use you make of the above information.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Uneasy Listening
www.betika.co.uk
I had a vivid and disturbing dream last night in which I was sat at a table eating dinner when an air-raid siren started up, closely followed by the sounds of bombs detonating close at hand. The building opposite the one I was in was hit, and it started to topple over towards me, only to stop abruptly at an angle of about 45 degrees and hang suspended in the air. It was still like that when I woke up in that sudden, sweaty way you do when you've had a nightmare.
The siren-sound in my dream hadn't been the sound made by an actual air-raid siren, instead it was the sound of violins imitating one, as heard in Penderecki's "Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima". I expect the piece has been played a few times on BBC Radio 3 lately to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Japan, but it'd been a couple of years since I'd heard it, so I had a dig around and found a recording of it this evening. If you've never heard it, you can get it for the next few days by clicking here, it's quite long, so it's about 10Mb in size and may take a while to download if you're on dial-up, but definitely worth a listen. I think some of it may have been used in "The Shining", certainly some of Penderecki's stuff was; this is even more disturbing given it's context. Listen to it nice and loud, there's lots of horrible detail in the quiet bits. It's like being eaten alive by ants.
Apart from that, my listening has been mostly post-punk this week, The Slits, Gang of Four and Young Marble Giants all enjoying heavy rotation. I had meant to demo some new songs, but I inflicted an inexplicable freak injury on one of my fingers that caused one of the joints to go black, swell up and not bend in the correct way, impairing my musical abilities beyond even my normal levels of hamfistedness. All was well enough by yesterday to play unhindered at the Endorse-it In Dorset festival (at which many a Betikan got horribly drunk and occasionally soaking wet), so barring further freak accidents I should be able to get some musical sketches done in the next couple of days.
I had a vivid and disturbing dream last night in which I was sat at a table eating dinner when an air-raid siren started up, closely followed by the sounds of bombs detonating close at hand. The building opposite the one I was in was hit, and it started to topple over towards me, only to stop abruptly at an angle of about 45 degrees and hang suspended in the air. It was still like that when I woke up in that sudden, sweaty way you do when you've had a nightmare.
The siren-sound in my dream hadn't been the sound made by an actual air-raid siren, instead it was the sound of violins imitating one, as heard in Penderecki's "Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima". I expect the piece has been played a few times on BBC Radio 3 lately to mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Japan, but it'd been a couple of years since I'd heard it, so I had a dig around and found a recording of it this evening. If you've never heard it, you can get it for the next few days by clicking here, it's quite long, so it's about 10Mb in size and may take a while to download if you're on dial-up, but definitely worth a listen. I think some of it may have been used in "The Shining", certainly some of Penderecki's stuff was; this is even more disturbing given it's context. Listen to it nice and loud, there's lots of horrible detail in the quiet bits. It's like being eaten alive by ants.
Apart from that, my listening has been mostly post-punk this week, The Slits, Gang of Four and Young Marble Giants all enjoying heavy rotation. I had meant to demo some new songs, but I inflicted an inexplicable freak injury on one of my fingers that caused one of the joints to go black, swell up and not bend in the correct way, impairing my musical abilities beyond even my normal levels of hamfistedness. All was well enough by yesterday to play unhindered at the Endorse-it In Dorset festival (at which many a Betikan got horribly drunk and occasionally soaking wet), so barring further freak accidents I should be able to get some musical sketches done in the next couple of days.
Monday, August 08, 2005
For anyone waiting to hear from me...
www.betika.co.uk
I'm becoming acutely aware that I have a backlog of packages I've promised to send to folks and emails that need replying to - apologies to those concerned for taking so long about it, I've got a mind like a sleep-deprived and slighty hungover sieve and a gazillion things to remember, but I will get round to doing everything eventually. If you think that I've completely forgotten you, there is a slight chance that you're right so please give me a kick up the inbox and remind me.
You'll no doubt be thrilled to hear that I've written a song called "God gave me a penis", after an evening watching The Organ (who were bloody amazing) and drinking lager shandy.
I'm becoming acutely aware that I have a backlog of packages I've promised to send to folks and emails that need replying to - apologies to those concerned for taking so long about it, I've got a mind like a sleep-deprived and slighty hungover sieve and a gazillion things to remember, but I will get round to doing everything eventually. If you think that I've completely forgotten you, there is a slight chance that you're right so please give me a kick up the inbox and remind me.
You'll no doubt be thrilled to hear that I've written a song called "God gave me a penis", after an evening watching The Organ (who were bloody amazing) and drinking lager shandy.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Potter. Is poop.
www.betika.co.uk
I wasted the best part of a weekend reading the new Harry Potter book, in which only one thing happens in six hundred-odd pages. Imagine "The Phantom Menace" without the special effects - that's how rewarding an experience it was.
I will never let a book cheat me of so much valuable time again
I wasted the best part of a weekend reading the new Harry Potter book, in which only one thing happens in six hundred-odd pages. Imagine "The Phantom Menace" without the special effects - that's how rewarding an experience it was.
I will never let a book cheat me of so much valuable time again
Monday, July 18, 2005
The Great Outdoors
www.betika.co.uk
Loads of gigs since the last post- firstly with Delicate Hammers, who came down from Manchester to play with us a couple of weeks back and spread some half-hop tinged love around Bournemouth. I'd taken the day off work so I could be at home when the Hammers arrived, and I'd spent most of it pottering around the garden without bothering to switch on the TV or radio, so it wasn't until about 3.30pm that I went to check my email and discovered that the terrorist attacks on the London Underground had taken place. Talk about living in a hole. So I got onto the phone to my Londonfriends pretty sharpish to make sure they were all okay- this was the third time I've had to do this in my life, and the first call in each case has been to the same person, my friend Ali. She was living in Manchester in '96 when the IRA blew up the Arndale Centre, then working just around the corner from one of the nail bombs that were set off in London around '99. Trouble seems to follow her around, but thankfully never quite catch up with her. This time, as before, everyone was present and accounted for. For me at least.
Naturally, the atmosphere at the gig was subdued. Again, this is the third time I've found myself in that situation, trying to play music while feeling strange and slightly numb with shock, to an audience in the same state. The night Princess Diana died I played a gig (with Police Dog and The Elastins), and also in both the 12th and 13th of September 2001 (with Tex la Homa and Betika respectively). It doesn't get any easier, but we all still played our hearts out as best we could. The Hammers were awesome, but for me Betika's set felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, like it wasn't quite real.
A couple of days later we played our first outdoor gig of the year, at Grooves on the Green in Parkstone, which is a relatively small event that just runs for an afternoon in a park. We thought it would be a fairly small-scale do that would ease us gently into the festival season, but as it turned out the weather was glorious and there were probably a couple of thousand people there. Which turned out to be a very good thing. I've had to start changing the lyrics to some of our songs slightly, so as to protect the younger audience-members who are so abundant at daytime festival events from the cussing and grown-up subject matter. I hadn't really thought about this prior to taking the stage at Grooves, so I had to come up with some bizarre off-the-cuff nonsense. Some of it was words, some of it was just noises. One section of "By Default" just went "bimbimbimbim, bimbim bimbimbimbim", though Carolyn, having a filthy mind, thought she heard even worse language in there than there would normally be.
In conclusion, an afternoon of good clean family fun was had by the whole band.
Thursday last week took us to the Larmer Tree Festival, where we were scheduled to play a couple of sets over the first couple of days of the festival - as it turned out we played no less than four! The first one was just before seven on the Thursday when we were the first act on a bill the culminated with a set by Jools Holland and his r&b orchestra (some time later and on a different stage!), then we returned at around 11.30 that evening to play another, more wired set joined by Sancho Paul on vibes and some random strangers on extra percussion. Chaos ensued. The next set we did was Friday lunchtime when we played a few of our quieter songs, kicking off with the first outing of "You can call me brother" which Carolyn and I did with just guitar, melodica and voices, and concluding with "Hatred", which has fast become my favourite Betika song. Having retreated back to camp with Hubcap and Lee and Sarah Dutch, we had a bit of a singalong around what would have been our campfire had we been allowed to make one, and inbetween various Pavement and True Swamp songs (it took all of our collected minds to remember all of the words to "Dear Fingerprint") we worked out some nice four-part harmony singing for "If you go to work on me" (Imogen and Hubcap providing the extra voices), and also a cover of Hefner's "The Greedy Ugly People", which we've been considering doing in our acoustic sets for a little while now, but had become reluctant after having witnessed Darren Hayman's own spine-tingling rendition a few weeks ago. It all sounded rather lovely, so we took it all along to an open mic session much later that evening, where it didn't seem to work quite so well. We'd done several hours of drinking inbetween, which in retrospect probably wasn't such a great idea, and not something we'd do again in a hurry.
The rest of the weekend was spent watching bands, highlights for me were Jose Gonzales, This is Seb Clarke, Otis Lee Crenshaw and what little I caught of Flipron. I'm sure there should be many more, but it's all a bit of a blur to be honest.
Lots of new songs being rehearsed at the moment, look out for a couple at this week's Betika gigs;
Wednesday @ o'neill's - with Dutch Husband and One Shade Lighter
Sunday @ Le Bateau - me and Caz doing acoustic stuff.
Loads of gigs since the last post- firstly with Delicate Hammers, who came down from Manchester to play with us a couple of weeks back and spread some half-hop tinged love around Bournemouth. I'd taken the day off work so I could be at home when the Hammers arrived, and I'd spent most of it pottering around the garden without bothering to switch on the TV or radio, so it wasn't until about 3.30pm that I went to check my email and discovered that the terrorist attacks on the London Underground had taken place. Talk about living in a hole. So I got onto the phone to my Londonfriends pretty sharpish to make sure they were all okay- this was the third time I've had to do this in my life, and the first call in each case has been to the same person, my friend Ali. She was living in Manchester in '96 when the IRA blew up the Arndale Centre, then working just around the corner from one of the nail bombs that were set off in London around '99. Trouble seems to follow her around, but thankfully never quite catch up with her. This time, as before, everyone was present and accounted for. For me at least.
Naturally, the atmosphere at the gig was subdued. Again, this is the third time I've found myself in that situation, trying to play music while feeling strange and slightly numb with shock, to an audience in the same state. The night Princess Diana died I played a gig (with Police Dog and The Elastins), and also in both the 12th and 13th of September 2001 (with Tex la Homa and Betika respectively). It doesn't get any easier, but we all still played our hearts out as best we could. The Hammers were awesome, but for me Betika's set felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, like it wasn't quite real.
A couple of days later we played our first outdoor gig of the year, at Grooves on the Green in Parkstone, which is a relatively small event that just runs for an afternoon in a park. We thought it would be a fairly small-scale do that would ease us gently into the festival season, but as it turned out the weather was glorious and there were probably a couple of thousand people there. Which turned out to be a very good thing. I've had to start changing the lyrics to some of our songs slightly, so as to protect the younger audience-members who are so abundant at daytime festival events from the cussing and grown-up subject matter. I hadn't really thought about this prior to taking the stage at Grooves, so I had to come up with some bizarre off-the-cuff nonsense. Some of it was words, some of it was just noises. One section of "By Default" just went "bimbimbimbim, bimbim bimbimbimbim", though Carolyn, having a filthy mind, thought she heard even worse language in there than there would normally be.
In conclusion, an afternoon of good clean family fun was had by the whole band.
Thursday last week took us to the Larmer Tree Festival, where we were scheduled to play a couple of sets over the first couple of days of the festival - as it turned out we played no less than four! The first one was just before seven on the Thursday when we were the first act on a bill the culminated with a set by Jools Holland and his r&b orchestra (some time later and on a different stage!), then we returned at around 11.30 that evening to play another, more wired set joined by Sancho Paul on vibes and some random strangers on extra percussion. Chaos ensued. The next set we did was Friday lunchtime when we played a few of our quieter songs, kicking off with the first outing of "You can call me brother" which Carolyn and I did with just guitar, melodica and voices, and concluding with "Hatred", which has fast become my favourite Betika song. Having retreated back to camp with Hubcap and Lee and Sarah Dutch, we had a bit of a singalong around what would have been our campfire had we been allowed to make one, and inbetween various Pavement and True Swamp songs (it took all of our collected minds to remember all of the words to "Dear Fingerprint") we worked out some nice four-part harmony singing for "If you go to work on me" (Imogen and Hubcap providing the extra voices), and also a cover of Hefner's "The Greedy Ugly People", which we've been considering doing in our acoustic sets for a little while now, but had become reluctant after having witnessed Darren Hayman's own spine-tingling rendition a few weeks ago. It all sounded rather lovely, so we took it all along to an open mic session much later that evening, where it didn't seem to work quite so well. We'd done several hours of drinking inbetween, which in retrospect probably wasn't such a great idea, and not something we'd do again in a hurry.
The rest of the weekend was spent watching bands, highlights for me were Jose Gonzales, This is Seb Clarke, Otis Lee Crenshaw and what little I caught of Flipron. I'm sure there should be many more, but it's all a bit of a blur to be honest.
Lots of new songs being rehearsed at the moment, look out for a couple at this week's Betika gigs;
Wednesday @ o'neill's - with Dutch Husband and One Shade Lighter
Sunday @ Le Bateau - me and Caz doing acoustic stuff.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
First Blog in ages
www.betika.co.uk
I set this up a few months back with all the best intentions in the world to keep it regular and up-to-date, and all of a sudden a month has passed since I last posted here. In my defence, I've been keeping pretty busy with work on the record- Hubcap and I have now got our mixing heads on and we're doing marathon 12-hour sessions per song and are slowly but surely parting company with our minds in the process. It's incredibly difficult to stay focussed on what we're doing when the sun is shining outside and there are people to see and books to be read, and mixing is one of those tasks that requires 100% total concentration, otherwise we're just wasting our time. Good results seem to be coming in though - we'll preview some new recordings on our MySpace page in the near future so you can judge for yourself. I don't know when we'll have the whole thing finished, we have a deadline of 22nd of July, which is drawing frighteningly close at an alarming rate, so I'm guessing that we'll have it finished at 11:59 PM on the 21st!
I set this up a few months back with all the best intentions in the world to keep it regular and up-to-date, and all of a sudden a month has passed since I last posted here. In my defence, I've been keeping pretty busy with work on the record- Hubcap and I have now got our mixing heads on and we're doing marathon 12-hour sessions per song and are slowly but surely parting company with our minds in the process. It's incredibly difficult to stay focussed on what we're doing when the sun is shining outside and there are people to see and books to be read, and mixing is one of those tasks that requires 100% total concentration, otherwise we're just wasting our time. Good results seem to be coming in though - we'll preview some new recordings on our MySpace page in the near future so you can judge for yourself. I don't know when we'll have the whole thing finished, we have a deadline of 22nd of July, which is drawing frighteningly close at an alarming rate, so I'm guessing that we'll have it finished at 11:59 PM on the 21st!
Several Happy Betika Birthdays this week - Carolyn's was on Monday (I made her one of my trademark disturbing photo-collage birthday cards, which one day will have a horrible disturbing internet gallery all of their own. But only when there are enough of them.) - Imogen's was on Tuesday (I found a rather lovely semi-acoustic bass in a second-hand shop a couple of days beforehand which I've lent her as a kind-of-present) and Martin's is today. I'm not sure what I'm going to give Martin, but it's going to be amazing.
I've been re-reading the "Hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy" quintilogy over the last couple of weeks, and listening to (amongst other things) Raymond Scott's "Soothing Sounds for Baby (vol.1)", Jethro Tull's "Benefit", "Innervisions" by Stevie Wonder, "Music for Airports" by Brian Eno and a disproportionally high amount of Betika mixes. I've been lucky enough to attend a couple of those really rare gigs this week where absolutely everything on the bill was amazing- on Monday we celebrated Caz and Imo's birthdays in the company of Sunshine Republic, Brenda and True Swamp Neglect, each of whom was on absolutely top form, and last night Chris, Caz, Lexi and I went up to Bristol see Darren Hayman (of Hefner fame) and Steveless. The venue they were playing in, The Cube, is a tiny backstreet cinema-cum-theatre-cum-live venue (which has a lovely old-cinema smell and vibe about it), and so it was an all-seater, pin-drop quiet gig, which was absolutely perfect. Steveless, who you may have heard on John Peel's show around about this time last year, did a set of what was kind of misanthropic observational stream-of-consciousness-standup comedy but set to accompaniment from guitar, bass-drum, melodica, accordian and kazzoo and delivered mostly deadpan but interspersed with random YELPS! and SCREAMING! I was grinning like an idiot all the way through. Then Darren Hayman did what was basically a greatest-hits set of Hefner songs, along with at least one song by The French (his post Hefner band) and some stuff from his new solo records. Definite highlight was "The greedy ugly people", which he played on a ukelele (causing me to radically revise my previously low opinion of that instrument). Lexi nearly cried, and so did I. Another beautiful moment occurred during the interval, when a) I discovered that The Cube's bar served tea (I was driving), b) I learned it would only cost me 50p and c) at that moment, the DJ played "Grave Architecture" by Pavement. Sometimes the smallest things can make you very, very happy.
"Hatred" is the wisdom of Lexi set to music.
Look out for Betika and Delicate Hammers at Mr Smiths this Thursday! 8.30, £3.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Good, Bad, Ugly
www.betika.co.uk
BAD:
Rich has done himself quite a mischief, legwise. Whilst walking his dog early on Sunday morning he managed to bend it the wrong way and tore some ligaments in his right knee. This means he's on crutches for a bit and won't be able to play the drums for a week or so, but he's confident he'll be fit for the PodParty gig at Smiths on the 19th.
In other illness and accident news, Lexi is miserable with a cold and I managed to get quite badly sunburnt whilst gardening a couple of days ago. I discovered a whole new world of discomfort yesterday when I got my hair cut and all the really short hairs found their way down my collar and onto my already itching-like-mad back and shoulders which were far too sore to scratch. I've also hit my head on shelves twice today, in one case ironically when bending down to gain access to a chemicals cabinet that was installed in the name of health and safety.
GOOD:
I wrote a new song this week, called "Hatred". We ran through it at rehearsal a couple of nights ago and I caught Chris whistling it a couple of hours later, so I reckon it could be a winner.
The singing on the Betika album is 9/10ths done. It has been a painful and unpleasant experience for all involved, but I think that ultimately is will all be worth it. We'll have the first two or three tracks mixed ready for the start of the festival season so we've got some CDs to give away by the hundred.
UGLY:
There is a video interview with Betika on where-r.co.uk. In it I look very uncomfortable and like I have tiny little eyes like a shark. That aside it's a lovely bit of film-making, with some live footage from one of our recent shows.
and that's all
Dave
BAD:
Rich has done himself quite a mischief, legwise. Whilst walking his dog early on Sunday morning he managed to bend it the wrong way and tore some ligaments in his right knee. This means he's on crutches for a bit and won't be able to play the drums for a week or so, but he's confident he'll be fit for the PodParty gig at Smiths on the 19th.
In other illness and accident news, Lexi is miserable with a cold and I managed to get quite badly sunburnt whilst gardening a couple of days ago. I discovered a whole new world of discomfort yesterday when I got my hair cut and all the really short hairs found their way down my collar and onto my already itching-like-mad back and shoulders which were far too sore to scratch. I've also hit my head on shelves twice today, in one case ironically when bending down to gain access to a chemicals cabinet that was installed in the name of health and safety.
GOOD:
I wrote a new song this week, called "Hatred". We ran through it at rehearsal a couple of nights ago and I caught Chris whistling it a couple of hours later, so I reckon it could be a winner.
The singing on the Betika album is 9/10ths done. It has been a painful and unpleasant experience for all involved, but I think that ultimately is will all be worth it. We'll have the first two or three tracks mixed ready for the start of the festival season so we've got some CDs to give away by the hundred.
UGLY:
There is a video interview with Betika on where-r.co.uk. In it I look very uncomfortable and like I have tiny little eyes like a shark. That aside it's a lovely bit of film-making, with some live footage from one of our recent shows.
and that's all
Dave
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Disintegration
www.betika.co.uk
We played a showcase gig for the Larmer Tree festival a couple of days ago at o'Neill's. The night had been set up by Conrad and Paul from Solid Air with the aim of getting a couple of other bands (d'Urberville and Penny Come Quick) and ourselves to play in front of the people who run the Larmer Tree and hopefully impress them enough to get a place on the bill. It sounds a bit like a Battle of the Bands, and it felt like one too, the sense of cameraderie that normally exists between bands sharing a bill didn't seem so strong. There was a faint whiff of competitiveness in the air, though that may just have been me! Whether there was any need for this I don't know, it may well be that all three bands have made it onto the festival line-up.
I personally had an absolute disaster of a gig. For starters I've had a cold all week, which seemed to start in my voicebox and spread out to my lungs and sinuses as the gig drew nearer. I spent a couple of days effectively mute, hoping that rest might keep my voice at least functional for the night, and was drinking cough medicine from the bottle before and after we played. I sort of managed to keep it together singing-wise- being congested in the nose and ears makes pitching things properly an even greater trial than normal, and I wasn't sure if any of the high notes would come out. As it turned out, they didn't! At the end of "Dormitor" I have to go up to an F#, which is as high as I can comfortably go before breaking into falsetto, it's normally a bit hit and miss but I'm generally somewhere close. When I sang it on thursday my voice just broke up into a gravelly rasp- like Rod Stewart gargling something with quite big lumps in it- that didn't seem to have any easily-identifiable notes in it. But that was the least of my worries by that point! During the first song (Bob Hope) I managed to break a guitar string. I've gone years without breaking a string on stage but at two of our last four gigs I've managed to do it. Initially my superstitious side got the better of me and I thought perhaps that a particular audience member who was present on both occasions but not at gigs where I didn't break strings might be some kind of string-Jonah and be causing it to happen. But then logic intervened. I think that the reason is that I've been using a different guitar for the last four gigs. I've got two acoustics which I use on stage, an old Framus that dates from around 1970, and a mid-'80s Yamaha. The Framus I found in a loft in a very bad state, it had been under a heavy roll of carpet for several years and the neck was bent like a banana. Fortunately, it's construction is a bit unusual in that it has a bolt-on neck, which made it very easy for me to dismantle, put right and re-assemble it. When it was all back together it turned out to be one of the nicest playing and sounding guitars I'd ever encountered (though it looks like crap) and it's been my main, well only, live and recording guitar for the last couple of years. Unfortunately all that time has taken it's toll. There are little hollows on the top of the guitar either side of the neck where I've been playing it so hard that the my plectrum has been digging into the wood, and the bolt-on neck isn't quite as secure as it used to be, it moves around a bit now so it doesn't stay in tune very well. Consequently I've semi-retired it and only use it for "By Default" live, because that song requires a different tuning, and in its place I've been using the Yamaha, which was the guitar used to record "Heads smashed in...". The Yamaha is similarly beaten-up, having been abused quite badly before it even got to me, but it's of much sturdier construction than the Framus so I'm not so worried about beating it up further. It turns out though that another unconventional bit of design on the Framus, a metal plate on the bridge that the strings slot into, makes it much less liable to string-snappage, I guess because the angle that the strings bend through as they go over the bridge (which is where they invariably seem to snap) is much smaller than the 90-ish degrees that the strings on the Yamaha are bent through with its standard wooden-saddle and plastic-peg bridge. The snappage I suffered on thursday was particularly bad- not only did I break the string, but in doing so I managed to rip the plastic peg that secured it to the bridge out of the guitar and send it flying into the dark nether-regions of the stage. Having broken a string a few weeks back at The Villa, I had a contingency plan in mind- moving the set around so we play a song ("Love let me not hunger") that doesn't involve me playing guitar, while I change the string. I hadn't however reckoned on putting the guitar into a state where I couldn't restring it. A small panic set in and scrabbling around on the floor ensued until Carolyn found the missing string peg and the ever-reliable Hubcap very kindly replaced the string. The guitarist from d'Urberville also very kindly offered me the loan of his guitar, but it was a Takemine that looked like it cost ££££s and I didn't want to run the risk of hurting it so felt I'd better decline. The whole business probably only cost us a couple of minutes, but that seems like a lifetime when you've got a roomful of people staring at you and a load of bright lights shining in your face. Also, the loss of momentum is bad psycologically. We have a ritual where we have a quick huddle and pep-talk just before we go onstage, where someone will say a few encouraging words so we hit the stage in the right frame of mind and explode out of the starting-blocks when we begin the first song (and get carried away and break guitar strings). Unfortunately it's not possible to re-enact this ritual mid-set when everything has ground to an embarrasing halt, and on those occasions it takes real effort on my part to keep doubt, uncertainty and ultimately despondency from creeping into my head and making me play bad. I'm getting better at it with practice! The rest of the set went off relatively hitch-free, but I came offstage in a foul mood, convinced we (or more precisely I) had blown the audition, so to speak. I drowned my sorrows in Meltus (for chesty coughs and cattarh).
I guess things must have gone considerably better than I thought they had, because a few days later we'd been offered not one but two slots at The Larmer Tree, one of them on the main stage supporting Jools Holland! Needless to say we accepted PDQ.
We've confirmed a couple of other festival dates, check out the schedule page for details.
We played a showcase gig for the Larmer Tree festival a couple of days ago at o'Neill's. The night had been set up by Conrad and Paul from Solid Air with the aim of getting a couple of other bands (d'Urberville and Penny Come Quick) and ourselves to play in front of the people who run the Larmer Tree and hopefully impress them enough to get a place on the bill. It sounds a bit like a Battle of the Bands, and it felt like one too, the sense of cameraderie that normally exists between bands sharing a bill didn't seem so strong. There was a faint whiff of competitiveness in the air, though that may just have been me! Whether there was any need for this I don't know, it may well be that all three bands have made it onto the festival line-up.
I personally had an absolute disaster of a gig. For starters I've had a cold all week, which seemed to start in my voicebox and spread out to my lungs and sinuses as the gig drew nearer. I spent a couple of days effectively mute, hoping that rest might keep my voice at least functional for the night, and was drinking cough medicine from the bottle before and after we played. I sort of managed to keep it together singing-wise- being congested in the nose and ears makes pitching things properly an even greater trial than normal, and I wasn't sure if any of the high notes would come out. As it turned out, they didn't! At the end of "Dormitor" I have to go up to an F#, which is as high as I can comfortably go before breaking into falsetto, it's normally a bit hit and miss but I'm generally somewhere close. When I sang it on thursday my voice just broke up into a gravelly rasp- like Rod Stewart gargling something with quite big lumps in it- that didn't seem to have any easily-identifiable notes in it. But that was the least of my worries by that point! During the first song (Bob Hope) I managed to break a guitar string. I've gone years without breaking a string on stage but at two of our last four gigs I've managed to do it. Initially my superstitious side got the better of me and I thought perhaps that a particular audience member who was present on both occasions but not at gigs where I didn't break strings might be some kind of string-Jonah and be causing it to happen. But then logic intervened. I think that the reason is that I've been using a different guitar for the last four gigs. I've got two acoustics which I use on stage, an old Framus that dates from around 1970, and a mid-'80s Yamaha. The Framus I found in a loft in a very bad state, it had been under a heavy roll of carpet for several years and the neck was bent like a banana. Fortunately, it's construction is a bit unusual in that it has a bolt-on neck, which made it very easy for me to dismantle, put right and re-assemble it. When it was all back together it turned out to be one of the nicest playing and sounding guitars I'd ever encountered (though it looks like crap) and it's been my main, well only, live and recording guitar for the last couple of years. Unfortunately all that time has taken it's toll. There are little hollows on the top of the guitar either side of the neck where I've been playing it so hard that the my plectrum has been digging into the wood, and the bolt-on neck isn't quite as secure as it used to be, it moves around a bit now so it doesn't stay in tune very well. Consequently I've semi-retired it and only use it for "By Default" live, because that song requires a different tuning, and in its place I've been using the Yamaha, which was the guitar used to record "Heads smashed in...". The Yamaha is similarly beaten-up, having been abused quite badly before it even got to me, but it's of much sturdier construction than the Framus so I'm not so worried about beating it up further. It turns out though that another unconventional bit of design on the Framus, a metal plate on the bridge that the strings slot into, makes it much less liable to string-snappage, I guess because the angle that the strings bend through as they go over the bridge (which is where they invariably seem to snap) is much smaller than the 90-ish degrees that the strings on the Yamaha are bent through with its standard wooden-saddle and plastic-peg bridge. The snappage I suffered on thursday was particularly bad- not only did I break the string, but in doing so I managed to rip the plastic peg that secured it to the bridge out of the guitar and send it flying into the dark nether-regions of the stage. Having broken a string a few weeks back at The Villa, I had a contingency plan in mind- moving the set around so we play a song ("Love let me not hunger") that doesn't involve me playing guitar, while I change the string. I hadn't however reckoned on putting the guitar into a state where I couldn't restring it. A small panic set in and scrabbling around on the floor ensued until Carolyn found the missing string peg and the ever-reliable Hubcap very kindly replaced the string. The guitarist from d'Urberville also very kindly offered me the loan of his guitar, but it was a Takemine that looked like it cost ££££s and I didn't want to run the risk of hurting it so felt I'd better decline. The whole business probably only cost us a couple of minutes, but that seems like a lifetime when you've got a roomful of people staring at you and a load of bright lights shining in your face. Also, the loss of momentum is bad psycologically. We have a ritual where we have a quick huddle and pep-talk just before we go onstage, where someone will say a few encouraging words so we hit the stage in the right frame of mind and explode out of the starting-blocks when we begin the first song (and get carried away and break guitar strings). Unfortunately it's not possible to re-enact this ritual mid-set when everything has ground to an embarrasing halt, and on those occasions it takes real effort on my part to keep doubt, uncertainty and ultimately despondency from creeping into my head and making me play bad. I'm getting better at it with practice! The rest of the set went off relatively hitch-free, but I came offstage in a foul mood, convinced we (or more precisely I) had blown the audition, so to speak. I drowned my sorrows in Meltus (for chesty coughs and cattarh).
I guess things must have gone considerably better than I thought they had, because a few days later we'd been offered not one but two slots at The Larmer Tree, one of them on the main stage supporting Jools Holland! Needless to say we accepted PDQ.
We've confirmed a couple of other festival dates, check out the schedule page for details.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
busybusybusy
www.betika.co.uk
It's been a fun- and thrill-packed week for Betika;
On Monday night Carolyn and I did an acoustic set at Solid Air, and a pretty random one at that. We suffered simultaneous mental blockages mid-gig, and couldn't think what any of our songs were called, or how they went, or which one we should play next. We did consider playing a few seconds of all of them, but settled on five arbitarily selected tunes. I can't remember what they were.
Tuesday we had a Betika rehearsal where we finished beating the set for Friday into shape. Things seemed to go pretty well, which isn't always necessarily always a good thing, sometimes a good rehearsal just before a gig leads to complacency and a sloppy performance on my part. Chris didn't attend, he was at the Arts Centre getting angry at Herbie Hancock for playing the wrong kind of jazz.
On Wednesday me, Lexi, Carolyn and Martin did an interview with a pair of nice ladies from www.where-r.co.uk, and then went to see yourcodenameis:milo at The Old Firestation, which was one of the finest gigs I've been to in a long time. It was great for the following reasons;
1) a really amazing band played in my town, which has been a rarity for a long time. The last noteworthy gig in Bournemouth was Brian Wilson last March and before that The Flaming Lips and Clinic way back in 2003;
2) playing live they were as good as, if not better than their recorded output;
3) I had a brief chat with Paul the singer afterwards and he was a really nice bloke.
On Thursday night a bunch of the other Betikans took themselves off to witness what was by all accounts an incendiary performance by Brenda at Rubber Soul, while I spent the evening in Hubcap's studio singing "Robot" over and over again, each time a little better than the last until we were happy that we'd got a pretty decent take of it.
This is getting a bit like the accounts of my weekends that I had to write every monday morning at Primary School- On Saturday I got up and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I went to bed. On sunday I woke up and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I...and then I went to bed.
We played at Mr Smiths on Friday night with support from The Marlins and a DJ set from Nic Rawlings. It was one of those magical nights where everything came together and worked just like it's supposed to but so rarely does- The Marlins were fanstastic, they made me feel strangely nostalgic but not about anything in particular, like I was yearning for a childhood that I never lived through and have no memories of...?; Nic played exactly the kind of obtuse-but-fascinating set I had hoped he would (I'll try to get a tracklisting from him at some point); the audience were a good mix of old friends and new faces who seemed to appreciate what we were doing, and plenty of them were dancing and shaking various bits of percussion. Not much more we could ask for really! For the first time ever we had an encore planned, but I was terrified that if we left the stage after "By Default" that everyone would assume we'd finished and leave! Happily, we got called back to the stage not once but twice, ending with impromptu renditions of "He's gonna step on you again" and "I killed a fly".
What was going to be a quiet after-gig drink at Betika towers for those of us who were driving somehow turned into some kind of party. Nic had never DJed before, but he's clearly been bitten by the bug- he was playing us Ivor Cutler and Bonzo Dog songs until about four in the morning.
I didn't want to get up on Saturday morning. I'd had far too much exercise convulsing around the stage for an hour the previous night, and I'd had far too little sleep. But I had to get up and do more singing at Hubcaps, so get up I did. We'd decided a while back to record mine and Carolyn's vocals simultaneously because we do a lot of stuff where we're singing in block harmony and it's nigh-on impossible to get the phrasing exactly the same if we sing our parts seperately. Doing it together has the advantage that we can watch each others lips and get the phrasing absolutely bang-on, but the disadvantage that there's double the chance that one of us (usually me, to be fair) will sing some kind of bum note that necessitates the re-recording of both of our parts. Needless to say, it's a painstaking and time-consuming process, which within a few hours will cause everyone involved in it to lose first all sense of objectivity and perspective, and then ultimately their minds. I'm normally the first to go, but in a rare turn-up for the books Hubcap and Carolyn both lost it long before I had the chance. When we took a break, Hubcap went out into the garden with a video camera and pointed it at a nondescript clump of greenery, adding live narration as he went; "These are my plants..." - long pause - "These are my plants...". Poor fella. Nothing constructive could be achieved after that, so Carolyn and I retired to the Towers to watch Doctor Who and work on a top secret art project about which I can reveal nothing for the time being. All will become clear in due course. Horribly clear.
Next Betika gig is on Thursday 19th May at O'Neill's, Old Christchurch Road.
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.
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Betika Seated, Badgers again.
www.betika.co.uk
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.
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
