There and back again!

I can tell by the number of responses to my last blog that you are all beside yourselves with impatience in anticipation as to what the ‘American Record contract’ is all about. Actually, to be fair, I do have a very strong visual image of tumble weed and the sound of crickets chirping that accompany the very real lack of interest that has greeted me.

Still, as they say, why change the habit of a life time. Chuckle!!

Regular followers of this blog will remember that back in the long distant past in the days of my youth I used to play in a rock band called Amaziah.

This year is actually the 30th anniversary of Amaziah’s demise and September this year will mark the moment when we all went our separate ways in disgust at having royally dropped the ball and not having achieved anywhere near what we had hoped we would. Such is life.

The memory of Amaziah began to slowly dim, rekindled only when our one and only album suddenly re-emerged as a collector’s item and began reaching sums of 1500 dollars on the open market.

Inwardly groaning at the fact that I had given several boxes of said record away as I couldn’t sell them once the band had gone I content myself that I had performed on a recording that the discerning collector would seek out. People actually wanted it and were prepared to pay good money for it.

I ignored the fact that what was on the record was immaterial; it was it’s rarity that people coveted. Whatever the reason, I was a collectible. Well, not just me, but Amaziah as a whole.

As the clouds of time thickened I moved on and I thought no more of it.

That was until my good friends Quick Sketch and Bassbin persuaded me to pick up the quill and begin to pen my memoirs in the form of this blog.

My burgeoning talent for the written word (cough) was soon recognised and I was commissioned by several websites to write columns and music reviews.

Within this I began to write for an international site called ‘Cross Rhythms’ and in a moment of unbridled sentimentality I wrote a brief history of ‘Amaziah’ from my perspective. The article was well received and it even allowed me the pleasure of catching up with several former Amaziah members that I had not had contact with since the bands demise.

Time, as always, moved on.

Until last week when Cross Rhythms asked me to contact the director of an American Record label that had stumbled across my article and desperately wanted to talk to me.

It would seem that many years ago he had managed to get his hands on the American release of the album, and rather enjoyed it. Suddenly he now had the opportunity to contact one of the band and set about realising an ambition to re-master and re-release ‘Straight Talker’ as a ‘classic album.

Suddenly, I found myself on behalf of my former band mates in a position to be signing a five year contract with a large American Record company who have a world wide distribution network 30 years after the band has ceased to be. Now that is what they call irony.

Three things excite me about the project;

Firstly, the company will re-master the whole album and my experience already from when one of the tracts was re-jigged last year, is that the album will take on a whole new life and be much fuller and have more depth.

The second is that the company are interested in putting some of the demos we later made, but never saw the light of day, onto the album as bonus tracks.

The third and perhaps the most exciting is that the company would be extremely keen for Amaziah, the band, to explore the possibility of a reunion.

That in itself would be fraught with hurdles and difficulties, but non the less if it could come off I personally would jump at the chance.

My main motivation has to be that I am a far more accomplished singer and musician than I was at 19 years old (despite the comments made by my current band mates). Listening to recordings of Amaziah and my bass playing on ‘Straight Talker’ only highlights my youthful lack of ability and confidence. I have often day dreamed on the notion ‘what if I could go back, knowing what I know now?’ Well, here is the opportunity to do just that.

Anyway readers, you will be the first to know of any new developments.

It’s just that knowing how successful several ‘re-reformed’ acts have become second time around…it could be an interesting ride. However; I wouldn’t hold my breath that it would be in the same league as ‘Take That’….but it might be just as big a larf!!

The Rock Goes goes global!

This will be the shortest blog to date.

I just thought that this piece of info is so interesting that I would fling it at you, let you chew on it for a few days and then explain what on earth it’s all about when your curiosity can stand it no more.

Yes I’m flogging it!!

Right!

Your very own rock scribe, over the next few weeks will be signing a five year deal with an American Record label with distribution throughout the world.


Has that got your attention?

Continued shortly……chuckle!!!

The Green Green Grass

They do say that the ‘grass is always greener on the other side’; mind you, people who make this kind of comment often say a lot of things, especially at times when you wish they would keep their particular self important brand of philosophy to themselves just once in a while.

However; at times sayings like these do contain a modicum of truth.

When I was in my teems I dreamt of being a ‘Rock God’, and I mean a proper one, not one that borrowed this moniker in way of ironic self effacement.

Like Jimmy Rabbit from the film The Commitments I would lie on my bed of an evening day dreaming of television interviews I would have with Michael Parkinson explaining why I was not like one of the typical brand of ego inflated rock casualties and that I intended to give so much more back to society and the world (thank the Lord, Bono beat me to that one and proved how irritating that kind of self righteous attitude can be despite the extremely honourable intentions).

Sadly my dreams of interview supremacy was not to pass, at least not with Parky anyway as he has now long retired from the chat show game, and I find myself reflecting more in these pages than I would have to an adoring national TV audience.

As much as it would have been fun to have been a giant in the world of men I think that perhaps I have done okay…at least to some extent.

The more I see and hear I come to realise that no matter how far we travel as troubadours we will never be satisfied with our lot.

The sight of Jon Bon Jovi moaning about how lonely and bored he sometimes gets all alone in his hotel room after a gig makes me feel like screaming “then buy a book or a pack of cards you ungrateful Muppet”.

However; in all seriousness the serious number of rock & roll casualties in terms of drink, drugs, relationships and mental health issues seems to suggest that the good ship fame and fortune is not all that its cracked up to be.

When you hear multi million selling record artists claiming that they tire of performing to hundreds of thousands in the worlds stadiums and would prefer to be reliving the intimacy of the pub/club circuit you are left feeling that it really is that tough at the top either that or they have very short memories, or, and this just a suggestion, they’re talking crap!

I would love to be there when some 80’s poodle perm turned musical colossus decides to truly relive that artistic intimacy of his early days and cart his own kit into the Frog & Hamstring (having dumped his van 3 miles away due to the lack of parking in the vicinity), set up in a space no bigger than a picnic table, having moved a rowdy crowd of inebriated office workers first, to perform to a totally indifferent crowd of chav teenagers and aging cider heads and then pack up the van in the rain. Oh, and barely cover the petrol back home for his troubles. Then perhaps they might be grateful for what they have got and trundle off to chat to the concierge or something instead of complaining at their lot in life.

All in all though, despite the lack of a road crew, despite the serious lack of cash that gets bandied about at the end of gigs and especially despite the hit and miss size and appreciation of audiences, it is still better to be performing in a rock & roll band that still has the ability to entertain than not. This is a cause for some kind of contentment.

Hey and at least I get to go home most evenings after the show to my large glass of post gig scotch and a pot noodle. I wouldn’t say that this is exactly living the dream, but it’s my home and it’s my Pot Noodle and generally at 1:30am in the morning I have ‘Mock The Week’ for company.

A face for radio

Well we did it, we actually set foot into the bright sun light and had our photos taken.

Bottom line….I think we may have to go back out and do it again. A comment about me closely resembling American actor John Lithgow has seriously dented my rock & roll ego and has resulted in my hiding my head inside a paper bag ever since.

Aaron was so self conscious about this rock & roll photo lark that you could hear the tension creaking from every limb of his body. Every photo resulted in him standing stock still with a fixed grimace of embarrassment on his face. Mind you this was not helped by his sister the photographer biting his head off every time his hands went near his pockets, which is sad really as my hands never left my pockets.

Mind you we have learnt a couple of valuable lessons about back ground, colour and not rolling out in a t-shirt when it’s freezing cold, you tend to look it.

Out of about four hundred pics these are probably the least embarrassing and even then they have stretched my photo shop ability to its maximum.

Bruce Willis Vs The Oscars

I think I may have mused this one before, but if you compared what we do as musicians to Hollywood movie stars, who would I be?

It’s a pretty stupid thought I know, but when you are sat in a corner of a pub listening to the many fine musicians that come through Bristol as part of an acoustic showcase your mind does tend to wander into uncharted territory.

I think part of this thinking was born out of the look of sheer horror that accompanied the faces of those ‘serious’ musicians that had to follow us during one of these showcases.

It’s not a gripe, just an observation, but if you have a party, or a celebration or an event that is designed to raise money then The Mudheads or The Loaders are your boys. However; if the event is more ‘high brow’ and with the intention of impressing people then we are the last bunch that ever seems to get invited.

I think this was no more appropriately illustrated than when Aaron & I performed at a local competition (for the full story go here). My memory of the event was that we received the biggest and most enthusiastic applause of the evening and yet we weren’t even short listed. Could it be that as entertaining as we might be, we lacked that certain credibility that is required to be taken seriously by the music community. (Perhaps my Mr Blobby costume was an ill advised idea after all).

I have long compared the live music scene with the Oscars in what the general public find credible and what they do not.

You might for instance have an absolute blockbuster that everybody wants to see like Avatar or Pirates or even Harry Potter and you know full well that none of the cast are ever going to walk away with an academy award. And yet it is obvious by the box office receipts that these are the kind of films that the majority of people really want to go and watch.

The films that do win the awards and receive plenty of in-house back slapping and kudos the majority of your cinema loving public have never heard of.

I know it’s a bit of a generalisation, but I wonder how many of you out there got to see Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart? because he got the best actor award this year. Sam Worthington was the lead in the most successful film of all time and he got nada, zip, diddly squat. That would be Avatar in case you were wondering and most of you did see it and perhaps more than once.

And I think this kind of attitude does tend to translate into the music world.

You have only got to listen to a room full of academics or bored musos talk about their music tastes and what you get is an apparent fondness for hard to reach indie, world or art house music that is as inaccessible as a French film noir.

They might make some reference to early Cold Play or some Leonard Cohan but apart from that it’s generally some tortured genius from 1968 who “blew his mind” in a frenzy of psychedelic self pleasuring.

I admit that we all like to be a little ‘snobbish’ when it comes to our record collections and I suspect that majority of us would rather die than let an acquaintance have a good rummage through our old vinyl, tapes and CD’s, only to rise holding aloft a hidden gem with the words “bloody hell, the Wombles” on their lips.

So perhaps we all claim a sensitive, well considered and academic leaning to our music taste when we are in company and yet air guitar to our hearts content when “Cum on Feel the Noise” by Slade comes onto the radio.

I have to confess to this artistic hypocrisy as much as the next person when somebody wanders into my office at work and are amazed at how fast my I tunes can be flicked from Hits of the 70’s to Nick Cave or Norah Jones.

However; to my original point, if what I do could translate into Hollywood, who would I be?

I suppose if I am honest I would be a bit of a Bruce Willis, and I don’t mean the lack of hair connotation either.

Old Bruce just keeps going and going and yes, going. Nobody EVER admits to liking him or rating him as an actor, but we will all sit down of a late evening with a can of something and a big bag of crisps and enjoy Die Hard for the umpteenth time. It’s just like admitting you had a bit of a soft spot for Duran Duran after all.

I suppose that if I had to be anybody though I would prefer to be Clint Eastwood, he just keeps on getting better and better and more and more popular the older he gets. And where as it used to be a bit of an embarrassment for the elite to admit that they watched Clint Eastwood films, now the guy wins Oscars.

Maybe rock & roll will once again become ‘cool’ and even Robbie Williams despite being a complete prat at times can claim his place as a good all round musical entertainer. I mean come on, 30 years ago, who would have predicted that Tom Jones would headline at a festival like Glastonbury and be seen as the coolest of the cool.

Every Picture Tells a Story

I HATE having my photograph taken, I really do, which as you might imagine being an earnest rock god eager for public attention can create quite a dilemma.

The problem is purely and without apology ego and nothing much else.

I look in the mirror of a morning and wince. The older I get the bigger the groan as I peer half heartedly at my own reflection and ask for the billionth time why I don’t possess the rugged good looks of some Hollywood heart throb or rock superstar.

As the lines on my face begin to resemble a google map and my hair recedes faster than the tide at sunset I reluctantly contemplate that I possess a face and physique for radio.

Over the years I of course have had to endure said photo shoots for the sake of publicity and generally I have got away with it. At least I think I have.

My first proper and serious photo session in a studio was for the cover of the first album I was ever involved with. I was all green flight suit, long blond hair and sultry 19 year old glare and I think I managed to pull it off. Besides, my friend and comrade took all eyes off me by sitting on a piano stool. By the time the photo had been processed the moody shadow that framed us made it look like that he was only four foot tall. He was NOT happy.

Over the years I have had to endure the indignity of having a camera thrust in my face in order to get THAT shot that would sum up the rocker that was within.

This was all very well and good until I hit the dreaded 40’s and my waist line began to indicate that this particular rock star was going the way of Elvis and enjoying perhaps one too many beefburgers.

The last serious shoot I had to face was for the cover of the Mudheads Monkey album, Shout!!

The trouble with this album photography session was that it was actually a freezing cold day and the photo that we used turned out to be one of the very last shot. My gormless expression has rather more to do with my chops being frozen stiff than actually an endeavour to project any particular kind of mood.

I was also beginning to show the tale tale signs of middle age and several of my closest friends took great delight in pointing this out as the CD was sent all over the globe.

I kind of lost my confidence after that and have avoided the camera like the plague ever since.

With my current incarnation in The Mudheads I have managed to avoid this particular humiliation for the past seven years. That was until the current depression in live music in the south west has forced our hand to repackage ourselves as a serious bet and put together a highly polished highly professional promotion pack.

My excuses have finally run out especially as my daughter is a photography degree student, and as a band we are going to be getting out and about during the next weekend and trying to get just one decent shot of the band.

You’ll know me, I’ll will be the one hiding behind the younger and slimmer guitarist.

Emma has promised me that she is a whiz with photoshop; however even then it will be such a huge piece of software manipulation that should she pull it off she will be able to submit it as part of her course work…..she ought to be able to get a first out of this.

If you are interested, I have marked out some of my photo history on Face book. I will be adding new photos when we have done them.

Grab & Smash

Like most people, the musician has processions that are precious to them. However; none are more precious than their instrument of choice, in my case my guitars.

Every guitar I have ever owned demands a place of affection in my heart, with the possible exception of the two twelve string acoustics I owned as a teenager, which were subsequently the only two guitars I ever got shot of.

I still have the 20 quid classical acoustic guitar that my parents bought me for my failed guitar lessons at school (my teacher did not like rock music, considering them to be sub level musicians and rock was the whole point of learning as far as I was concerned).

It may be battered, cracked to be exact, when a teenage girl I had been teasing took acceptation at one of my stupid adolescent remarks and endeavoured to kick me in the shin sadly putting a thumping great hole in my guitar instead. It wouldn’t be the last time a guitar would get between me and a girl that’s for sure. It is also pretty grubby and now lives in the loft, but I still own it. And strum it from time to time.

I have my first electric guitar, purchased for me with great love and affection by my then girlfriend, now wife. Boy has she learnt to regret that decision as she became a ‘band widow’ at a very early age and to add insult to injury Aaron, our son and Mudheads guitarist cranked out his first power chords on that thing. It now lives in his living room and it is this that he drives his fiancée nuts with as he strums away of an evening.

Each guitar for me has a story, a history a special place in my memory and heart. I would no sooner get rid of one of them than I would one of my own children.

So it was with great empathy that I stood beside Aaron at our last acoustic gig when in a fit of haste he dropped the lid of his acoustic case down onto the body of his pristine and much loved acoustic guitar and catching the body with the lids catch leaving a four inch scratch right across the front. It will be a constant reminder to him that these things apart from being extremely expensive are also fragile.

It brought memories flooding back of the two occasions (other than the kicked classical) I managed to damage guitars and that sick feeling you are left with in your gut.

The first occasion was not my fault and I had to fight the urge to separate somebody’s breath from their bodies when they knocked my bass guitar over and snapped the head stock clean off on a drum riser.

The next time was doubly sickening as in a fit of ill humour brought about by having to perform at a gig I REALLY did not want to do I snatched up my acoustic guitar not realising that I had not put the catches down on the case.

It was with that slow motion look of horror that is brought about by the inevitable disaster that is unravelling before you that painted my face as my acoustic flew out of the case, sailed across the living room and came into sharp contact with the corner of the dining table leaving a hole the size of a 50 pence piece in it. It did nothing to improve my mood that was for sure.

I have always marvelled and perhaps envied those rock guitarists that can lift their hallowed axes aloft and then smash the living daylights out of them for the edification of their audiences without bursting into tears or falling to their knees in sickening realisation of the heinous act they have just committed.

I always remember a public school boy of mine pontificating at length about how Jimi Hendrix would pour light fuel over his guitar and set fire to it out of frustration that he could not extract that perfection he so desired and sought from it.

I think probably more cynically that he realised early on that the audience were mad for it, knowledge that has forged the need for guitarists like Ritchie Blackmore taking a dedicated guitar tech on the road with him in order to reassemble the guitar he would smash every night.

However; I think I am definitely too sentimental to take such drastic action upon any of my beloved guitars and will, along with my son and heir, observe a two minute silence in recognition of the terrible scarring his guitar suffered for the sake of rock & roll.

“For those about to be scratched, we salute you”.