Colin H on Being a Bandleader

On 10 January, I invited three of my local music associates, all bandleaders and ‘music lifers’, round for a cup of tea and a three-way interview session. In order of seniority, Dave ‘The Hat’ McLarnon is a punk veteran, Adele Ingram is chief songwriter with quirky all-girl hillbillies Wookalily, and Scott Flanigan is a piano/organ jazz sensation with a splendid line in wit.

Northern Ireland is an isolated region in various senses, and all three have tried, and/or are still trying, to make an impact in their field beyond the locale, while trying to make a living within it. I’ve skirted around the music scene(s) in Belfast since the early 90s, never particularly at the core of anything but around the edges of several things – as, at various times, a local newspaper feature writer, events/recordings organiser, general cheerleader and occasional mentor/advisor – and I’m always intrigued when I find musicians I’ve known for years who have shared the same timeline and geographical space for decades and yet have never previously met.

Even within the ‘rock world’ I found this recently, when I had the great pleasure of pulling together a charity » Continue Reading.

Tiggerlion on the official studio recordings The Beatles made of other writers’ songs.

Apart from a forty second blast of Maggie Mae released in 1970, The Beatles recorded twenty-four covers of other people’s songs during their official studio career, mostly during the first couple of years when they made their first four albums. They were all derived from their live act, some dating back to their earliest gigs, and they give an insight to where The Beatles came from and why they became such a success. Ten were late fifties Rock and Roll classics written by Carl Perkins, Larry Williams, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, appealing to the leather clad rockers within. Ten were originally sung by girl groups or were ballads from musical theatre or by Soul artists, appealing to the teenage girls who were the hotbed of their early audience. Seven were captured in the first take.

Prior to winning a recording contract with EMI, The Beatles had some experience working in a studio. In Hamburg, they befriended Tony Sheridan and acted as his backing band both live and, on 22-24th June 1961, for studio recordings. On the final day they were given the opportunity to record two » Continue Reading.

fentonsteve on interviewing A Certain Ratio

I was offered the chance to interview A Certain Ratio when I go to see them play in Nottingham next weekend. Trouble is, I’m not going to get there early enough to conduct an afternoon interview, and I want to catch support band Sink Ya Teeth. So, after racking my brain for questions (which, it turns out, is really quite hard), and crowd-sourcing a few more from the likes of DocVolume, we did it by email.

I played the inquisitive nerdy uber-fan. Guitarist Martin Moscrop (in the hat) and drummer Donald Johnson (in the middle) provided the answers.

Going back right to the start, what was working with Martin Hannett like? Hooky’s and Stephen Morris book suggests he was hard work. Did he make Donald do each drum part separately? Did he try to freeze you out of the control room during mixing? Did someone at the studio really zero the desk and ruin his mix of To Each?

Martin: Everything that needs to has been said about Martin Hannett’s working practices. He liked to instil an element of confusion into the young musicians he was working with and create an atmosphere of tension » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Artistic afterlife

The afterlife of an artist or writer is an intriguing subject. In the wake of a disagreement I had with Bert Jansch’s estate, which I now view as closed, I’ve been pondering the subject in a general way. This isn’t any kind of open letter to the people who look after Bert’s estate – it’s simply a rumination on the changing nature of artistic work beyond the life of the artist, and the increasing ability in the social media/instant-opinion age of the fans of that artist to make their views on the way that artist’s estate is being run heard. It’s a conversation starter, really – feel free to add your thoughts.

One can go on to other forums, for instance, and find endless discussion and controversy about the activities and perceived motivations of the Jimi Hendrix estate, the Prince estate, the David Bowie estate… There’ll be a nod to Bert’s legacy later, but this is a general ramble through territory that was once shadowy but now, I believe, is so increasingly the subject of widespread opinion and discussion that an artist’s estate would perhaps – and I say only perhaps, because those with the » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Belfast music legends you’ve never heard of

I’m rather excited about this concert – this Friday. Let me explain… Two or three months back, I started digitising and uploading to YouTube a load of music by mid 90s acts from the Belfast music scene – cassette demos, CDRs of lost albums, the odd commercially released local CD, tracks from various artist live albums etc., moving on to unreleased live sets from DATs (with permission from those concerned). I was a part of that scene as a writer for a local newspaper and organiser of two multi-artist live albums from two venues, firstly The Warehouse (a now legendary venue run by a couple of bohemian characters, only open for 18 months) and then The Empire (part of a chain of pubs/hotels, and still going as a venue). This activity led to various coffee=shop catch-ups with musical pals and scenesters I hadn’t seen in 20 years… which led, with barely any effort whatsoever, like a giant open door, to this four-band reunion concert in five days time. 🙂

We hear a lot – as in, we simply never stop hearing about it locally and, I suspect, nationally (off the » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Belfast music legends you’ve never heard of

I’m rather excited about this concert – this Friday. Let me explain… Two or three months back, I started digitising and uploading to YouTube a load of music by mid 90s acts from the Belfast music scene – cassette demos, CDRs of lost albums, the odd commercially released local CD, tracks from various artist live albums etc., moving on to unreleased live sets from DATs (with permission from those concerned). I was a part of that scene as a writer for a local newspaper and organiser of two multi-artist live albums from two venues, firstly The Warehouse (a now legendary venue run by a couple of bohemian characters, only open for 18 months) and then The Empire (part of a chain of pubs/hotels, and still going as a venue). This activity led to various coffee=shop catch-ups with musical pals and scenesters I hadn’t seen in 20 years… which led, with barely any effort whatsoever, like a giant open door, to this four-band reunion concert in five days time. 🙂

We hear a lot – as in, we simply never stop hearing about it locally and, I suspect, nationally (off the » Continue Reading.

Tiggerlion on Hot Buttered Soul by Isaac Hayes

The fortunes of Isaac Hayes and Stax Records in Memphis are inextricably linked. He first auditioned for the newly-named label in 1961 and covered on keyboards for Booker T. Jones in The M.G.s when Jones was away completing his university studies. By the mid sixties, Stax’s imperial phase, he’d teamed up with David Porter to write and produce a host of hit records, most notably Soul Man and Hold On (I’m Coming) for Sam & Dave, an act loaned to the label by Atlantic.

In December 1967, Stax’s star man, Otis Redding, died in a plane clash, an accident that also claimed the lives of most of his backing band, The Bar-Kays, too. In early 1968, the agreement with Atlantic fell apart and Atlantic took Stax’s back catalogue with them, as well as acts like Sam & Dave. Memphis, the city, was also in crisis with a sanitation workers’ strike, a stand-off with the authorities led by a white, racist mayor, the murder of Martin Luther King in a Memphis motel and the rise of black power threatening the balance of mixed race there was in the company.

Stax’s future » Continue Reading.

moseleymoles on In which Mr Moles muses on his life through objects

Recent changes chez Moles have thrown more focus onto the shelves, racks and piles of stuff that we – chiefly I – have filled our des res with over the years. The re-organisation of the Front Room has led Ms Moles to make what she would like to think is a ‘full and final settlement’ of the space allocated for CDs/vinyl/books/comics/DVDs. That settlement in full:

The DVDs not to exceed their allocated shelving. Roughly 650 DVDs worth.

The fiction shelving not to exceed their allocated shelving. Approximately 800-900 including overflow onto the floor below and behind the sofa.

Non-fiction and vinyl not to exceed their allocated shelving. Vinyl is one area Ms Moles does chip in with approx. a third of the total. And no, we may have been together 30 odd years and produced two offspring but those collections remain unmerged.

New shelving to be provided in the front room as part of its redecoration for the CDs – I would reckon between 1500-2000 (maybe 300 Ms Moles). And for the comics – around 2500 (er…all mine, 90% 2000AD).

Though I instinctively bridle, I know that » Continue Reading.

Tiggerlion on In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

Fifty years ago today, Miles Davis unleashed a quiet storm. In A Silent Way is unique in the world of popular music and jazz. It calmly and clear-sightedly surrenders the old ways of acoustic instruments and small groups captured in whole takes and warmly embraces the new, the hum of electricity and the role of producer as contributory artist, cutting and splicing away. It consists of two vinyl-side long pieces that seem to float, beautiful and ethereal, only bursting with colour for a brief moment in the final third of side two. It challenges the very definition of Jazz, raising questions of authenticity and its relationship with technology and a wider Rock audience. The final product sounds as futuristic today as it did fifty years ago. It is Miles Davis reinventing modern music once again.

Legend has it that In A Silent Way, like Kind Of Blue ten years earlier, was recorded on a single day, that day being 18th February 1969. The story goes that Davis, the wizard alchemist, brought together a group of musicians and, with no clear instructions or guidance, coaxed a masterpiece out of them. The truth » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Michael Standing

I do like a good pun. And cultural history. And speculation. All three combine in this delightful aside from my book ‘The Wheels of the World: 300 Years of Irish Uilleann Pipers’ (2015).

The speculative aspect is this: could I have stumbled upon the ultimate source of the current TV news obsession of cutting to reporters standing outside somewhere where something happened hours ago but where absolutely nothing, bar darkness and bad weather, is happening now?

Legendary Irish piper Leo Rowsome corresponded vexatiously with various BBC producers between 1926-52, eventually securing several radio and TV broadcasts. It’s a fascinating tale in itself, possible to reconstruct from BBC Written Records and other sources (which I did, in a chapter of the book). One of the shows he was keen to appear on was ‘In Town Tonight’, a radio magazine/chat show that ran from 1933 to 1960, with a TV version simulcast from 1954 to 1956. Opening to the sound (and later vision) of Piccadilly Circus, the presenter would begin: “Once more we stop the mighty roar of London’s traffic and, from the great crowds, we bring you some of the interesting people who have come » Continue Reading.

Raymond on how a man of 77 gets to make his recording debut

In 2014, I started writing about the process of recording some songs with the intention of making an album. The project that I started documenting back then has grown arms and legs and morphed into a multi-headed beast (more about that some other time). I’ve taken several detours along the way, but the one that means the most is about to get a proper release on an actual record label, something I had barely even considered as a possibility when I started out.

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Colin H on Researching Music History

Not everything is on the internet, but likewise not everything you might be looking for in period sources might be where you would expect to find it. I thought Afterworders might be interested in this little glimpse of how a rich vein of research can be opened up by a single line of print in an obscure source.

The moral of this tale is twofold: (a) sourcing and perusing period print sources is crucial; (b) there are times when period print sources can trump the retrospective interview recollections of period participants. (The caveat being that, very occasionally, the opposite of point (b) is the case – where period print evidence is inaccurate.)

When I was researching Big Pete Deuchar for my first John McLaughlin book ‘Bathed in Lightning’ (Jawbone, 2014) – Pete’s trad jazz outfit the Professors of Ragtime having been John’s first band – I lacked the time to delve fully into the tale, and so it occupied only a few paragraphs in that book, essentially supplying a means for John to get from Tyneside to London. When I was subsequently working on the companion volume ‘Echoes from Then’ (self-published, 2017) I spent » Continue Reading.

Sewer Robot on Comedy Horror

Comedy Horror, eh? It’s bleedin’ everywhere nowadays. In movies, in those comics your kids buy, even on proper, non-satellite, tv channels. But has its ubiquity blinded us to fact that this marriage of genres is an ill bred abomination? I mean, I like sitting at home at my “table” and I also enjoy a vigorous game of “tennis”, but that doesn’t mean I can just bolt these two words together to produce a game involving tennis-style skills that can be played indoors on a waist-high wooden surface.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh has a line about the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children. True dat – but it’s also true that there were loads of things we encountered as kids which, though of fairly recent vintage, we, in our stupid innocence, assumed had been around forever.

Chuckle worthy beasties were ubiquitous in the culture when we were kids. “Over He-e-e-r-e” were Scooby and Shaggy hiding from ghosts in the pantry, over there was Creature Teacher and the other assorted ghouls of Monster Fun comic. We bought gum containing cards where the black and white monsters from old RKO » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Big Pete Deuchar

Today’s ‘i’ newspaper had a long piece on Spotify, apparently the saviour of the music industry by driving people towards purchasing physical product, according to recent research. One of the passing remarks in the piece was that almost everything recorded can now be found there. I suspect this is a greatly exaggerated claim. To give one example, very little of the commercially released output of Big Pete Deuchar (aka Big Pete Duker, on later releases) in the 1960s is available either digitally or on CD. Ironically, the one digital item I’m aware of – ‘Walk Right Out of the Blues’, A-side of a Melodisc 45 in 1965 –– is also his rarest British release in its original form. It’s the one Deuchar/Duker single I don’t have, but the A-side can be had for 99p via a digital compilation of British rock’n’roll. It just about qualifies.

Off the back of researching Deuchar primarily for a chapter in my book ‘Echoes From Then: Glimpses of John McLaughlin 1959–75’ – concerning Deuchar’s Professors of Ragtime band, of which McLaughlin was a member (1959–60) – I’m working, when time allows, on a small book on Deuchar’s life and » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Quintessence

It’s been a while since we’ve had a history of Quintessence around here. On the last occasion, various reviews and previews aside, it was a ‘Record Collector’ piece from 2015. This time it’s piece that was originally published in ‘Shindig!’ in 2016, upon the release of the 2CD studio outtakes collection ‘Spirits From Another Time’. It might as well join our various other long-form Quintessence pieces around here.

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Colin H on Mike Westbrook

A wander down memory lane with Brit jazz colossus Mike Westbrook, published in ‘Record Collector’ in October 2017.

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Take a trip around Ebay and Discogs and you will conclude that Mike Westbrook is a man who makes rare records. Periodically, something from the first decade of his remarkable 50-year career is reissued and within five years it becomes a pricey second-hand prospect itself. Meanwhile, original pressings of those classics go on ascending the twin escalators of legendary greatness and practical inaccessibility. Absurdly, the current resale price for a 2008 Japanese CD edition of 1969’s ‘Marching Song Vol.1’ is around £100 – £20 higher than the (conservative) ‘Rare Record Price Guide’ price on a mint Deram original.

I can think of no other significant British artist whose 60s/70s oeuvre is currently so out of reach. However, with expanded CD editions of his 1972 ‘Live’ on Hux and his long unobtainable two-volume masterpiece ‘Marching Song’ out last year on RPM’s Turtle imprint (including unreleased 1966-70 tracks), with hopefully further expanded RPM/Turtle releases, this golden anniversary of Mike’s singular career in music is also a golden opportunity for new listeners to find out what all the fuss » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Stuart Bailie’s ‘Trouble Songs’

There aren’t many people from Northern Ireland who have made a living in what was the music media, but Stuart Bailie and me – for certain periods of time – have been two such curiosities. Stuart’s heartland is in the punk era he grew up in and in young people thereafter making noisy music; mine is in pre-punk musical history, only occasionally popping in to visit the here and now. Aside from neighbourly greetings and the odd cup of coffee there has never been a Venn diagram within which we have converged. And then Stuart’s long-promised book about ‘the Troubles’, and music’s part in its downfall (or vice versa), started to become a distinct possibility.

I was surprised but touched when Stuart asked me to help him with some of the logistical aspects of bringing his magnum opus to the masses. Knowing very well the lonely path of the musical history author, I hope I’ve been able to give some moral support along the way, too. The offer last year of generous part-funding towards printing costs from the British Council – provided that he delivered finished copies in time for a Troubles anniversary » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Linley Hamilton

Of all the great characters I’ve met in the music game, trumpeter Linley Hamilton is among the greatest – and one of the funniest. A master of shaggy-dog stories and witty remarks, a brilliant onstage raconteur and entertainer, and a man always ready to help fellow musicians in any way possible. He’s also among the greatest musicians I’ve met. For many years, Linley himself might have replied, ‘You don’t get out much, then?’ – his own harshest critic.

Recently, though, it seems to me that he’s become more assured about the quality of his own playing – and very definitely an artist deserving to be heard around the world. If I was to boil Linley’s story down to one sentence, the mid-90s Belfast bar-band hustler became a mid-2010s international jazzman, regional BBC personality (with a weekly jazz show on Radio Ulster), session man supremo, Irish jazz facilitator, music college tutor and inspiration… and still a bit of a bar-band hustler and casual comedy king.

No doubt all local musical scenes have individuals within them who are characters, scenesters, larger-than-life people who make things happen and get talked about. Linley was certainly one such » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Liam O’Flynn

In 2015 I wrote ‘The Wheels of the World: 300 Years of Irish Uilleann Pipers’, with piper John McSherry. The recently passed Liam O’Flynn was one of John’s piping heroes, and featured in three sections of the book. Here’s one, a profile of a quiet man.

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Colin H on Andy Powell

On March 1, I interviewed Wishbone Ash bandleader, scholar and gentleman Andy Powell for an Afterword exclusive – me in snowy Belfast, Andy in sunny Connecticut. In a couple of weeks, the Madfish imprint of UK label Snapper releases the colossal 30 CD + book/posters/etc set ‘Wishbone Ash: The Vintage Years 1970-91’. Cherry Red have also just released expanded 2CD editions of the band’s two mid-80s albums ‘Raw To The Bone’ and ‘Twin Barrels Burning’.

In 2015 I had the great pleasure of helping Andy with his autobiography ‘Eyes Wide Open: True Tales of a Wishbone Ash Warrior’. I’d recommend it to anyone interested not only in the glory days of British rock but in the nuts and bolts of how a band from that era has been kept alive in the changing times and circumstances since then, to the point of becoming the central cog in a kind of giant fan family around the world – a robust cottage industry thriving outside of the mainstream of what remains of the music business.

It’s well-documented that five years ago Andy Powell and Martin Turner, co-founder of Wishbone Ash, met in court to address » Continue Reading.

Colin H on Big Pete Deuchar & his Professors of Ragtime

A couple of years back I posted on the Afterword a short feature on Big Pete Deuchar, one of the great ‘footnote’ characters in British music of the 50s and 60s – and one of the great characters in the British cycling and cycling administration worlds of the 70s and 80s.

That piece, around 3,000 words, was all that I could muster in time for ‘Bathed In Lighting’ (Jawbone, 2014), the first of my (now) two books on John McLaughlin’s musical adventures pre-1975. It ended up being one of the extra chapters appended to the e-book edition, with Big Pete & his Professors of Ragtime – John McLaughlin’s first experience of being in a professional band – getting a couple of paragraphs in the print version.

In essence, in such a long and illustrious career, the key role of the Professors of Ragtime in John’s story was to give him stage experience and, crucially, allow him to move from being a 16-year-old school-leaver and precosious sitter-in with older jazzers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to being a gifted man with a go-getting attitude to playing music for a living, come what » Continue Reading.

Raymond on a band who could have been contenders …

In 1993, the rock press started to talk about something called ‘Britpop’. I had no idea what it meant, other than that someone had invented yet another music genre. The phenomenon went on to carry some cultural weight, although perhaps not always for the reasons celebrated by some commentators. Depending on your point of view, Noel Gallagher hanging around Downing Street with Tony Blair was either the zenith of ‘Cool Britannia’ or the precise moment at which rock music relinquished its risible claim to be the standard bearer for anything resembling a counter-cultural movement. Here’s a clue: If you’re sipping tea with the Prime Minister, you may still fancy yourself as a rebel, but you are most definitely inside the tent, pissing out.

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Raymond on the remarkable rise of Doctor Peterson

If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.

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Dave Amitri on It’s been 21 years…….

21 years ago this week Billy MacKenzie took his own life in his Dads shed. It was the end to a sometime glorious, often difficult, sometimes beautiful but ultimately unfulfilled life. For some reason I don’t quite understand Billy affects me more than any other pop star. Something about his ridiculous talent alongside his suffocating vulnerability and self doubt constantly draws me back. Like most of us he only came to my notice through his appearances on Top of The Pops in the summer of 1982. He laughed and pissed around while performing the still ahead of it’s time “Party Fears Two” and the impossibly catchy “Club Country”. He looked like someone with the world at his feet he had the looks, the swagger and that voice from some otherworldly place like nothing heard before or since. I went a bought “Sulk” expecting 10 more foot tapping pop songs and was left scratching my head at the likes of “Bap de la Bap” and “Nude Spoons”. It still confuses and delights in equal measure. After that despite insane record company spending and Billy wasting time and money on his whims and fancies only » Continue Reading.