We did it... I got home - not too late, considering everything. Murray and I would have gone for a late chill-out drink and to compare more notes - but the valve I have in my throat had been playing up all day. Which meant every time I had a drink I was spluttering and running out of the venue space for a quick cough. I wondered if anyone thought it was part of the show - we have a certain reputation at the Club Sporadic for eccentricity... But. We did it. At nine am yesterday (Saturday 10 Sept) I was walking down the road inthe pouring rain to go and organise the pa delivery. And thinking - **** this! At this point -I should mention one of the people who has made all our gigs possible. The very wonderful Frank Marmion who runs a local folk music club - The Packe Horse - who probably hates most of what we play and put on - but has the grace to help us do it because he's a great supporter of live music and a good and valued friend. And a very good performer himself... We have used his pa since the birth of the Sporadic - and as we run on a shoestring it is a great help. Thank you, Frank!
By ten o'clock we had the pa at the venue. When Murray arrived we sound-checked and started to really wonder what we had let ourselves in for! Would anyone turn up? On a day when it rained solidly hour after hour... the afternoon commenced with an acoustic session - which I had to open as we were short a couple of musicians due to unavoidable circumstances. I only had my electric guitar with me, which I don't usually use for solo performance, but... I sat down with an eye on the clock (I had to keep going for about 15 minutes I reckoned - with music and banter) and improvised a strange medley- fiddling around in G until I hit on 'Ain't Misbehaving' played in and out of tempo then a segue into 'Lady is a Tramp.' Off into the blues and a couple of modal vamps based on A minor - D major chords. Ending on some scrambled dropped-D fumble involving bits of 'Statesboro Blues... it went down reasonably well -I figured people were charitable! It was also the first time I had played in public since the problem with my left hand had manifested itself a few months ago - and I had resigned myself to not being able to play guitar again - at least in the ways I used to. But - who knows? Mabe I'll start practising again and figure out ways round the problem...
Next up was Jake Manning - a young local performer who writes his own, very different, sensitive songs, accompanied by good guitar playing, a high, sweet voice and harmonica. I missed his set a few weeks back on one of our acoustic nights. I was impressed - and thought that in the current climate of some kind of resurgence in folk and acoustic musics he will do well in the future. Think Devandra Banhart maybe, as a frame of reference only, as Jake is already his own man.
The other artist in this segment was Gren Bartley. Who played one of his first gigs for us way back - every time I hear Gren I am confirmed in my gut feeling that he will be a very important contributor to the music in the coming years. In a short space of time, he's moved from his influences - an interesting mix of Kelly Joe Phelps and possibly Nic Jones is what I hear - to his own space as a performer. Accomplished stage presence, a high, accurate voice and some blinding guitar picking. And importantly I feel for a long-term contribution- impressive self-written songs alongside very good covers. (Gren does - not so much now, it must annoy him that he still gets requests for it but that's the price of brilliance - a brilliant version of Richard Thompson's 'Vincent Black Lightning' which I prefer to the original - but I don't like Thompson's singing very much...)
We had a good audience for this start-up to the festivities. More people arrived - including the Liquidiser crew from Northampton. As Murray had been liaising with them, I didn't know quite what to expect - but that's the fun of the Sporadic. Suddenly, an enormous amount of equipment and people started setting up. The band went into a long, loud improvisation which took us off from acoustic music into the other direction we are noted for. Unfortunately for Paul, his laptop had crashed which prevented his visual accompaniment to the music but luckily he managed to reboot and he did a fascinating set of short films - some of which provoked a girl in the audience to walk out as she said that they messed her head up. Weird. I thought they were soothing... A lot of very clever split screening in parts, these are works that encourage you to drop your own narrative onto the succession of images - while disrupting conventional narrative. (More about this in a later post). The Liquidiser people also bravely had a typewriter(I kid you not - they still exist, people) at the back of the room for audience to enter words/comments. I tapped in 'polyvalent' just to be pretentious and because I have the word in a sample chopped out of a Charles Bernstein interview with Susan Howe on some Internet download which I intended to use in the Plexus performance later. (I hear Bernstein read with Lyn Hejinian at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre several years ago but that's another story... they were great!). Sorry Charles... but, hey, it was in the spirit of 'Language Poetry' or something...
Liquidiser did a solid chunk of the day and proved that there is a hell of a lot going on in the UK out of London (they are based in Northampton and are getting a lot of stuff out -see their site...) The music and visuals weren't for everyone but I don't care - if I wanted to promote safe stuff I wouldn't be doing this. Most reactions I had though were very favourable and I look forward to exploring their work in the future. Interestingly, I thought their music operates in similar areas to ours in Plexus when we play at full strength - but is also totally different. Theirs is based a lot more round two guitars and some kind of electronic reed - Lyricon? -instrument and a lot of electronic percussion, ours more laptoppy but with guitars used in varying ways, going from the almost conventional to more textural sound.
The multi-media set came home with Sean Clark from Cuttlefish Digital Arts who are locally based. Sean collaborated with an improvisation by Murray on laptop and guitar - we haven't been able to play together much recently so I haven't heard a great deal of what he has been doing - this was a cooler blend of processed guitar and projected images, using a folky type of ambience that led seamlessly into Sean's solo set - softer, with an odd poignancy, with music weaving in and out that set up the visuals to good effect. It took you on an interesting journey... a trope used in footage of a night journey that interweaved with footage from nature to present a meditation on change and decay - maybe? I'll probably write more about the audio-visual sets of Sean and Paul from Liquidiser at some later date, as mentioned somewhere above... It's an intriguing area for me and one I want to get more involved in as I see it as a fruitful method of presenting laptop based improvisation (which is a bit boring for the audience, let's face it!) in a collaboration with film - spontaneous and created previously. Going beyond 'soundtrack' to a more active interrogation of the images projected...
We took a break for an hour to allow Liquidiser to pack up and for us to have a breather. I had been feeling very fatigued at one point but started to get my second wind. Murray and I also agreed that things so far had gone really well.
The evening performance started with The Good Anna. Murray had said they were good but they blew me away! Just guitar and stripped down percussion, these two played with a ferocious emotional intensity that belied their years. They were the youngest performers of the day - but by God, they held their own! An indication that improvisation is a flourishing area of music - they seemed to be simultaneously playing out of the rock and jazz tradition while creating something new. The rapid-fire drumming appeared to come out of free jazz and was very assured, the guitar more rocky via the volume from the Marshall amp but spitting some very fast licks here and there that crosses from jazz to rock and back re technique, then going into fast-strummed crescendos of noise. Watch out for these guys - they are serious!
Up next - the old firm. Warner and Ward. Your humble hosts. Murray using guitar and laptop - me, just laptop. I was going to use my electric guitar as a sound source but couldn't be bothered to set it up. Too tired. We played an odd set. We had discussed something a few weeks back in which I was going to use vocal samples so I had set up a load of these - based on a poetry them - cutting in and out of Allan Ginsberg reading 'Howl, some Charles Bernstein, Lew Welch and Susan Howe. I had also set up my usual battery of virtual instruments but not in a very flexible manner. We played for about twenty minutes and I felt that it built well. Then we did ten minutes more -and I realised that I hadn't the time to put in more patches and couldn't really use the voice samples again. So ended up playing a couple of noise sammples rhythmically off the scratchy, granular sounds Murray was throwing up. Not sure if it worked... But it's difficult to review yourself...
The culmination of the day... Dominic Lash and Paul May, double bass and percussion.
This is music that is more easily defined I suppose as being in the 'jazz' improvising tradition. I can use the word tradition because several have evolved over forty-odd years since the avant-garde emerged in Europe and America. Pick your own forbears - but the Sixties define the moment when Europen musicians coming off the jazz area of performance start to find their own unique voices. Something that, apart from a handful of names previously hadn't existed. I mean, Tubby Hayes, whom I saw several times and was blown away by, was a great player. But Joe Harriot actually took the music forwards from bebop, beyond a situation where you are always in the shadow of America. Both of them of course died too early so we are left with 'what-ifs'. Tubbs, after all, was developing composing skills which may have gone further out from the area labelled 'modern jazz.' ('Been down "Ronnies" recently, man? Etc...) And both areas sort of co-exist still. But Dominic and Paul don't play bebop licks, shall we say, in this setting. This is intense, physical music - a small stripped down kit and a plucked and bowed bass (arco and pizzicato - hey, I know these things... honest!). Hard, accurate drumming, full of a surprising amount of texture and nuance form a stripped down kit. Bass playing that explores the wide range available on the instrument, when you throw out preconceptions, from almost walking figures to smaller nuances of texture and tone. Perfect for the room that the Club Sporadic uses at the Swan... When you are up close and personal with this music I think you hear it and see it at its best... I've been lucky in the last year to have attended some tremendous gigs both in the UK and in New York (at the Stone Club, for which go - here - ) I think that all I can say is - I enjoyed this performance as much as any of them.
And so endeth the first all day Club Sporadic Sporadicfest... writing this at 4 am Monday morning, I'm still buzzing from the adrenalin, amazed we pulled it off, grateful to all who took part, performers and audience - even a couple who didn't like it, which is both their right and proves to me that we doing the right things and not just going for anodyne safety. And a special thank you to Frank Marmion for the pa. And all of the staff at the Swan in the Rushes from the landlord Ian Bogie downwards, who put up with us with good humour and played their part in making the day a success. And the Tyne Mills brewery, of course... And to Murray - the other beat of the heart that is the Club Sporadic...
The next one? Don't ask me at the moment! Worn out... But, I think that there is a possibility... running a club like this is love/hate writ large - but you miss it when it's not happening...
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