I'm stil here

Hi all,

I trust that everybody is enjoying their summer holidays, albeit the wettest August since goodness knows when if you happen to reside in the UK.

As previously mentioned we have musically closed down for a few months and so there is very little to report, apart from an impending wedding tomorrow evening. As this is in a tiny Devonshire village and down a country lane that you would be hard pushed to ride a bike down I think I might have some interesting tales to tell come Saturday.

However; I just wanted to assure all of you who kindly read my scribblings that I have not given up, but that I was giving my brain a bit of a rest (and at my age I need that from time to time).

We will speak again VERY soon

Paul

Is it loud enough for you?

Our guitarist, Aaron, suffers from noisy neighbours.

For years it has been the connoisseurs of Rock that have been tarred with the brush of excessive volume when in reality it is those that like the more commercial drum & bass, R&B and dare I say it ‘pop’ that tend to create the most consternation late at night.

It would appear that if your taste is of a more ‘youth’ orientated persuasion then it is not only acceptable but almost obligatory to shake the street with abnormal levels of hi fidelity bass at 3am in the morning and damn those that have to get up for work in the morning.

Now I am not one to criticise volume, after all when my girlfriend (now my wife) would arrive at my parent’s house to meet me she would have to wait until a song I was listening to ended before hammering for all she was worth on the front door to get my attention. However; it was only ever during day light hours and the thought of getting Rhianna or Beyonce rattling my fillings and frightening the cat at some ungodly hour does annoy me somewhat (mind you, it could just be that I am getting old and grumpy)

Sadly Aaron is learning an extremely valuable lesson about life……some people are just plain selfish.

That being said I have probably got to hold my hands up to being involved in permanently damaging many ear drums over the years.

I have been playing in bands since my teens and several of them have been unnaturally loud. My first professional band, Amaziah, was so loud that I would be unable to hear anything above a high pitched whistle (tinnitus) until the following morning, and we were BEHIND the PA. The sight of teenagers actually sticking their heads in the PA’s bass speakers haunts me to this day.

To be fair, I have rarely had any control on how loud we have been as this is normally always the job of the sound man and I swear that several of them in the bands employ have been totally deaf to begin with.

For sure, at several well known venues in my home town of Bristol the in-house engineers are famously as deaf as a barn door and any complaints regarding sound quality or level quite literally falls on deaf ears. The band being presented at any one time can only pray that the engineer hasn’t killed any sense of vibration with ale that night and that they might at least end up being distinguishable as a band as opposed to an airliner taking off in a hurricane through a mountain of empty coke cans.

My family accuse me of acquired deafness, something my mother states I inherited from my father (probably as a strategy for tuning out unwanted nagging I suspect); however it is probably more likely that I have blown the top end of my hearing clean away with years of excessive volume.

So a few years back inspired by my failing eye sight due to the advancement of years, I determined not to go the same way as many famous rockers who rendered themselves in need of hearing aids before their time was due as being short sighted is pain enough without adding ‘deaf as a stick’ to it for laughs.

So I went out and invested in a set of acoustic ear plugs.

The idea is that it reduces the level of the volume without actually filtering out the quality of the sound. This is of course total bunkum as the sound you are left with is that of having stuffed a pair of old socks into your ear holes.

The draw back is that I nearly always forget to put them in during the sound check and as the gig kicks off I suddenly find that my finely crafted on stage mix is being ‘sock filtered’.

The only other thing sadly is having lost the volume you also lose much of the oomph that makes up a good rock & roll set. Many is a night when our sound to me has been flat and lacking spark, when in fact it has been crisp and soundly smacking the audience around their chops like an audible slap in the face.

However; years have taught me that lying in bed on the night of a gig with that high pitched whistle keeping me awake far more affectively than any drum & bass obsessed neighbour is not something I want to continue, especially long after I have become too old to play.

Bono suffers badly for this very reason as does Pete Townsend and he states that it is threatening to finish his career .

So for now I shall continue stuffing the socks (sorry I mean the acoustic ear plugs) into my lug holes and continue to yell….”Is it loud enough?” because sadly for me, it’s not.
.

A gig in the life

People will often say to me “cor, I wish I could play in a rock & roll band like what you does”. Sometimes they even say it a little bit more eloquently than that. And for the most part they would be right, playing in a band can be one of the greatest honours there is and it is why so many of us are so utterly addicted to it.

However; life on the road is not always rock, roll, Guinness and groupies, far from it.

Let me relate to you a night in the life of The Mudheads, Bristol’s hardest working bunch of misfits.

The night is a Thursday and we have been invited to perform at our guitarists local.

It’s a great little venue and we always leave feeling appreciated and without fail get an invite back, for which we are both honoured and grateful.

We had originally been booked to play in June, however; the England football team were having some sort of soirée down in South Africa. I not sure what it was all about but we were assured that as the stage at the venue was slap in front of the video screen where the great event was being broadcast live our lives would most probably be put at significant risk if we attempted to continue regardless.

So we bumped the gig up to July, rather foolishly forgetting our own rule of never playing during the two hottest months of summer as nobody shows up.

The day approached and CJ our drummer groaned to discover that he had been given an all expenses paid ticket for an evening at the Savoy in London with his company, leading politicians and celebrities. This did nothing to improve his outlook of the gig that he was now obligated to perform at instead of wining and dining with the most influential suits in his companies employ.

Add to this the unfortunate consequence of missing the meal meant that he would have to be in Reading (that’s about 80 miles from where he lives in Bristol) at 7:30am the following morning and he was fast beginning to lose his normal sunny and cheery disposition.

As it was local to Aaron he said that he would meet CJ and I down there. What this actually means is that he would arrive a full half an hour later than us and after we had completely emptied the trailer into the venue on our own and put most of it into place ready for cabling up.

I have previously mentioned that July and August are Britain’s two hottest months. This of course is fanciful tosh and they are normally wetter than a rather rainy day in the Brazilian rain forest and tonight was to be no exception.

We were also delighted to find that the council had dug up the road directly outside of the pub and we had to park on the opposite side of the road and run the gauntlet of motorist skidding along the fast moving river that was beginning to take the place of the road.

It also had to be noted that expensive musical equipment does not go well with running water and so we both had the enviable task of getting approximately two tonne of kit out of the trailer, across the road (river) and into the pub before they got too wet creating the very real threat of electrocution.

This we did at considerable risk to our personal health & safety, aching backs and good humour.

Once in we then had to navigate two guys that were deep in the throws of an earnest darts tournament and were most disconcerted that their game was going to be brought to a sudden close by two dripping wet herbets lugging a mountain of speakers and amplifiers.

We then noticed a silence that was not a normal fixture of this particular venue. This was caused by it being particularly and horribly empty.

Normally we are sweet talking dozens of punters to move out of the stage area in order for us to set up and we are fielding requests from the hordes before we have barely entered the building. Tonight however; we were serenaded on our entrance to the chirp of crickets, the soft rustle of tumbleweed and the gentle swish and thud of dart leaving hand and making its merry way to the board.

CJ’s normal positive mood was finding nothing with which to elevate itself and was singer faster than the Titanic.

With all the kit in place and the trailer locked safely up, my son and heir and our esteemed guitarist bounded into the pup trailed by his girlfriend who looked as drowned as we felt and cheerily announced that it was time to “Rock & Roll”.

Ten minutes in to his time with us he announced “My we are all in bad moods this evening aren’t we”. The sound of CJ splintering heavy duty drum sticks with his teeth was generally the only response that we could muster at that point.

Anyway the kit was assembled and plugged in and it was time for a sound check. It was then that we became hideously aware of a major problem we had not had to encounter at this favourite of venues before………as it was empty the sound took one quick fling around the bar and shot straight out of the main door.

Normally our healthy volume is soaked up by the myriad of bodies standing in front of us. Tonight, whilst we sound checked, we played into a void and subsequently the band could be heard as clearly by those living in the local neighbourhood as the staff standing at the bar.

We reduced the sound down and down till in the end we might have been better off playing off acoustically for all the oomph we had left. However; we are not stubborn musos who don’t give a damn about anyone we are nice accommodating individuals who recognise that the Landlords would have to live with their neighbours long after we had offended everybody in a 20 miles radius of the pub. So we determined to give it our best and keep it as low as we possibly could as we launched into our first set

Even then, the landlord presented himself in front of the band with a hand full of cards, and doing his best Bob Dylan impersonation proceeded to spell out the phrase “Can…you….please….turn…it….down”.

It was funny and very much in keeping with the good humour that we always experience at this place and so to try and accommodate even further I almost flat lined my bass guitar volume.

Then nature or the council threw us a curve ball, all the power went out. Not for very long, but long enough to change all the digital settings on Aaron’s equipment and nearly killing his amp.

Also it left us with the extremely uneasy feeling that we were responsible for this disaster (we found out the following day that in fact the whole of south Bristol had experienced this power outage, and that despite the fact we have more equipment than sense, we weren’t responsible).

We tried not to let ourselves be distracted by this turn of events and ploughed on with Aaron taking every opportunity he could to reset everything to where it was supposed to be.

Of course, half an hour later it went and happened again didn’t it.

By half time I think all three of us were mentally calculating how fast we could pack up and get out of there to our beds on the conclusion.

Thankfully, the pub began to fill as we sipped our cokes wondering what we had done wrong. I was in a bit of a daze to be honest and at one point Aaron grabbed me and made me sit down as I looked quite lost as I wondered around the stage looking…..well, lost.

We tanked into the second set with a few more bodies to soak up the volume and joy of all joys a handful of Aaron’s mates (we like to call them the Mudheads Mob) arrived, which always guarantees an enthusiastic response.

However; I could tell by the expression on CJ’s face and also the tired lines under his eyes that this really had been a very long week for him and he needed to be in bed and soon!

This wasn’t to happen as soon as he would have liked though as come the last song, the Mudheads Mob awoke to a man, women and boy.

Bringing the rest of the now assembled pub with them they lined the space in front of us and demanded song after song after song for the encore.

I was re-invigorated and at that point could have gone through the whole set again. However; CJ now had the look of a man who would shortly be carried from his drum kit on a stretcher if we didn’t finish any time soon. We played one more mental rendition of ‘Land Down Under’ and we were off, pulling all the main plugs with us as we went.

I know that we had to decamp back into the trailer in the rain; I know it was late, and I know that poor old CJ had a VERY long day the following day, but come the end I felt that it was worthwhile. The venue enjoyed us, the punters enjoyed us, the Mudheads Mob were superb as always…and it is at the end of the day bread and water to us. And to be fair, this was a normal night out for a jobbing band on the circuit.

Maybe next time we will stick to our guns and not take a gig until September. It will probably be a whole lot dryer than a British summer that’s for sure.

The summer beckons

I am sorry that it has been a week or two since my last entry; however I felt that readers of this blog deserved my best work and not what ever comes straight into my head (I can hear the howls of derision from around the south west of England as I write this line).

It is the summer months and this year we kind of are endeavouring to fulfil a promise to ourselves as a band and that is to have a few months off.

Of course this is always a great idea, but never really pans out as planned…we have three full on gigs in that time and most bands would look at us in bemusement to enquire as to how this constitutes a ‘break’, but for The Mudheads, three performances in two months is a break believe me.

One of those gigs is a wedding, which I suspect might make a joyful (or not) entry to the blog following the event.

We normally avoid weddings like the plague as ‘requests’ for dreadful 70’s ballads are aplenty and we have visions of the bride’s mother thundering towards the stage, handbag in hand, because ‘the drummer’ is WAY too loud and he is frightening Great Aunt Matilda.

However; in this case, the groom-to-be assures me that his entire family are ‘cool’ with the idea. However; we shall see.

So, please bear with me, do not wander off, and keep on checking the site. As soon as something worthy of recording passes our way (which should be a few days knowing my world) then you good readers will be the first to know.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to keep CJ away from the mic’s at the wedding, some of his marital jokes are a little, shall we say, ‘colourful’ and I have promised the couple faithfully that we are family friendly……I can see the handbag swinging in our direction as we speak.

Good Fortune Favours....

I promise you that I am not going to turn this blog into a review site as I do enough of those for the web magazines that I write for. However; I must share with you the events of an amazing gig that I went to at London’s O2 Arena this last weekend.

Now Mrs Rock God has been a bit of a Bon Jovi fan since she bought me a ticket to see them at Wembley Stadium in 95, being supported by the outstanding Van Halen and decided to go along as well.

Things went a bit quiet on the BJ front until they made an appearance at the Bristol City Football ground a couple of years ago. With tickets in hand we made our way down to the ground and join the rest of the throng in what turned out to be a bit of a disappointing evening.

The highlight for me was getting a cup of Bovril (it’s a kind of meaty soup like substance for those that have been fortunate enough never to have heard of the stuff…however; it is said that you need to imbibe this black substance if you are attending football matches, so I did).

We had managed to get seats right at the back of the stadium, which meant that we couldn’t really see anything. This was not aided by the wind that was whipping through the stadium like a blowy whipping thing, lashing dust into the faces of the expectant crowd. It also took the sound and threw if as far away from where we were sitting as it could get it.

So as you could imagine this was not the best way to start and evening. It was also not helped by some plonker of an announcer declaring that the band would be taking to the stage in 5 minutes, JUST as BJ were launching into their first number. All in all it took about 20 minutes before the confusion subsided and anybody could figure out what the hell was going on.

It wasn’t until it began to get dark that we could see the screens and the sound began to improve as the wind died down. With that they were off!

In transpired later that the council had placed a serious time clause on the gig and the band had to get off before they got a fairly hefty fine.

We read later that not only were the audience left disappointed and feeling not a little cheated, but so had the band. I suspect we won’t be seeing the Bouffant One in the West Country any time soon.

Time moved on as it does and the band recorded a new album called ‘The Circle’ and set about organising a tour to promote it.

However; these boys aint young anymore, in fact the drummer is a clear 9 years older than me, and the prospect of spending their lives back on the road clearly did not appeal to them and so they booked themselves a residency at the O2 in London.

Twelve nights in one of Britain’s premier venues was too good an opportunity to miss and Mrs RG hit the internet with enthusiasm, only to discover that all the good seats had gone within the first 30 seconds and all that remained were the naff seats OR would cost us the equivalent of the national debt of a small European nation. So we opted for the cheap seats.

I was a little concerned as knowing my good ladies enthusiasm for all things Jovi and off of the back of the last disappointing gig being stuffed at the top of the arena, slightly behind the stage, was beginning to suggest that we wouldn’t be able to see a flamin thing.

Anyway, after months of anticipation the weekend arrived and we duly made our way to London and The O2.

The first thing you notice about the venue is that is enormous. The second is that it is extremely high….nose bleed, in need of Oxygen high. My hopes of being able to see anything were dwindling faster than the hope of an England World Cup victory.

We worked our way to the back end of the venue (and it seemed the universe) and then began to traverse the escalators up into the clouds. I began to feel like we had somehow died on route and were in fact on our way to the ‘here after’. But no, we were still climbing towards our seats.

Having reached the summit further wandering to an even more excluded entrance followed. My heart sank.

Then, we were met by an eager O2 official who asked is he could see our tickets.

He then announced that we were being up graded and asked to take the lift back to the first floor and he dispatched the Sherpa, removed our climbing equipment and led the mountain goats away.

As well as enormous excitement I felt a sick feeling of ‘what if we have just been conned’ in my stomach.

Anyway, the lift doors opened to reveal the seating where we would be spending the evening and the view was amazing. And I mean amazing. We were so close to the stage we would be able to see the boy himself flashing his white smile and even the small superman tattoo on his arm.

Just to set our minds at rest around us sat a group of people who had just suffered the same good fortune as us and we all chatted excitedly about our good luck.

That was all apart from one couple who sat silently and with a slight scowl on their faces. It was my estimation that they had actually forked out the 200 quid face value for those particular seats, only to be surrounded by a bunch of lucky nare-do-wells who were giggling in excitement and boasting of their good fortune at having been handed the musical offer of a life time.

At the end of the day the concert was a blinder. If you ever get the chance, and can afford it, go and see Bon Jovi, treat yourself, they really are as good as it says on the tin.

Right I’m off to watch the video footage that I took with my phone as I still can’t believe my luck.

He’s behind you!

I have been watching with interest a series of programmes called ‘I’m in a rock & roll band’, and have been both amused and bemused as to what constitutes a really good rock & roll band.

What has made it interesting is the variety of rock celeb’s both past and present that were wheeled out to pontificate at length on who was the best singer, best drummer, best guitarist etc (I was totalled offended that as a bass player I got listed as ‘the other one’ and was unceremoniously lumped in with the keyboard player, saxophonist and ‘Bez’ from the Happy Mondays…however; the bass players lot is generally a lonely unappreciated one).

It did amuse me to discover what they considered to be the greatest of the great.

I was totally baffled for instance that in the final programme they rated ‘Slash’ from Guns & Roses over say, Eddie Van Halen. But there you go, it’s was only a TV programme and lives were never going to be changed or saved.

One iconic rocker that made me chuckle every time he proffered an opinion was Gene Simmonds from Kiss.

Here is a man that made a career, and a very successful one at that, by taking the absurd and making it even more ludicrous.

Bottom line is if you have had the chance to witness a Kiss concert you have been a participant in a rock & roll pantomime, which remains in your memory for ever.

Now I have been to some iconic concerts, I mean I even saw Queen before they were massive and had just got to number one with Bo Rap. I have seen some of the best that rock has got to offer, but I have NEVER again seen anything like Kiss.

Friend and partner in crime Bassbin had obtained tickets to see Kiss at the Stafford Bingley hall somewhere in the vicinity of Birmingham.

It was to be a rock & roll week for me as only a few days before I had been to the very first ‘Monsters of Rock’ gig at Castle Donnington and had seen Rainbow, Judas Priest, Saxon, the Scorpions and a load of American bands I had never heard of.

This was August 1980 and was the signal for a new resurgence of British Rock Music.
An amazing day ruined only by the leaving of car lights on and being stuck in the car park with a flat battery half the night (they didn’t have those warning buzzer things back then…and there were four large blokes crammed into a Mini Cooper).

Anyway, I was in the mood for ROCK and Bassbin and I set of for Stafford Bingley to witness the major spectacle.

We stood patiently in line with the hundreds of other punters trying to make the one packet of cigarettes we possessed between us last the distance (one every hour I think was the ration….thank goodness I gave that one up as a stupid habit to have).

Anyway, we eventually got in and hustled our way down to the front and waited for the festivities to commence.

The opening act were a great little band that I had seen several times before called ‘Girl’ who featured guitarist Phil Collen who went on to play for Def Leppard. We thoroughly enjoyed their set but were really in the mood for ‘larger than life’

And boy did we get it.

With explosions so intense it nearly burnt our eyebrows off Kiss took to the stage.

To say that they were wonderfully over the top would be an understatement and a half. You had a bass player (Simmonds) dressed as a massive demon with a huge gothic costume and with makeup something akin to a clowns face gone mad, staggering around with a pair of demonesque platform boots spitting stage blood every where. A singer again with the face paint and high heeled boots. and the guitarist and drummer being pretty much similarly attired and the stage was set for a good night of ‘Wow’.

I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what the band sounded like as all I could manage was a mouth open catching flies expression as rockets flew out of the guitars resulting in massive explosions high in the rafters. Gene Simmonds suddenly taking flight and careering high over the heads of the audience spitting blood over everybody and the drummer suddenly rolling towards us as his drum riser turned in to the kind of gun turrets that you only find on a battle ship.

By the time we stumbled from the arena our senses had been well and truly pulverised. Now that is what I call a rock & roll band.

Oh, just as aside, as if some cosmic prankster was having a joke on our behalf, we went and left the lights of the car on again, so once again we spend half the night sat in the car park. However; this time it was a Ford Capri and there were only two of us.

No matter what the hassle though, you could not remove the stupid grin off of either of our faces.

The loneliness of the rock god

Being a wandering troubadour is a lonely existence, fraught with pitfalls, heartache and disappointment.

In days past, the minstrel would pass from village to village entertaining the local populace for the price of a roof over his head and a crust, with perhaps a pitcher of ale to dampen his dry and dusty throat.

Nowadays you would be flippin lucky to get a pint of something wet condemned by the third world as unfit for human consumption and a packet of pork scratchings that were past their sell by date when Wellington gave Boney a hammering on the playing fields of Belgium.

The only thing that keeps the beleaguered performer moving forwards, albeit in the blind optimism that is the jobbing muso’s only solace, is the applause of an appreciative audience.

If that audience is made up of his (or her) proud and loving family then the satisfaction could ward off starvation for months to come.

This was the prospect that was to face my partner in crime and son and heir Aaron and I last night as part of an acoustic evening when all the acts were supposed to be related in someway.

Now bear in mind that I am not as young as once I was, my mother and father have not witnessed me perform out side of a church setting or funerals since I was 18 years old, and thus has never seen their grandson Aaron play.

I suppose that bearing in mind the level of volume that I have tended to play at over the years and also taking into account that my mother weaned me on Jim Reeves and Burl Ives, their reluctance to have the wax summarily blasted out of their ears is somewhat understandable.

However; neither of my two sisters, who are both younger than me, have also seen me perform in any capacity since I was a young man whose dreams of international stardom still remained intact.

On this occasion they could not pluck the usual argument from the ether that is normally bandied about….”I heard you play a few weeks ago, “I heard all your songs before”.

When my family last heard me play I was still listening to the original line up of the Jam and the Undertones. Put it like this, Paul Weller was still considered and angry YOUNG man as opposed to the grumpy old git he is now.

So you can imagine when the opportunity to pull my family together in order that Aaron and I could proudly demonstrate our musical prowess to adoring grandparents, Uncles and Aunts that I jumped at it.

Of course they would all come they exclaimed, they would love to see us play it would be a golden opportunity.

With the amount of promises I had both from my own kith & kin and my wife’s family we should be able to pack the place on our own, thus extending us a longer length of time to play.

Need I go on???

Of course not??

Not one single relative graced us with their presence.

Now to be fair, my mother had just had a major operation on her knee and was going nowhere, and my father was required to be hovering in her presence for any required whim that could be bestowed on him from her sick bed and was knackered.

Also, and to be totally magnanimous, it was tipping down with rain and had I not been committed to performing myself I think I might too have sought sanctuary in the warm and safety of my sofa and watched a film instead.

However; all good reasons aside, we were once again stood solitary, friendless and on this occasion orphaned to entertain an appreciative audience of office workers and bar staff.

In that this was the first family wide invite to an event in the last 20 years or so, I am going to be a very old man indeed before I pass out invitations once more.

The life of a wandering troubadour is indeed a lonely existence