An experiment.....

Not tried to embed something in the blog - let's see if this works....



priceless - it gets better the longer you watch.

I've been out of the UK to Crete taking a well-deserved break (god knows how my bank balance looks) - but the Breeze gigs will be soon - the guys have a new PA! Big big big and shiny shiny shiny. Nice!

Right - did that embed work?

To kid or not to kid....

Not some dude-style reference to comedy pastimes. Should I have kids?

If you know me, you'll know committing that question to any form of readable stuff is quite a step forwards. I've been debating the issue again with myself on and off for the last few weeks, running around like the proverbial rat in a maze down the usual blind alleys labelled "self-loathing", "mortality", "loss of self", "economics" etc etc.

And I still have the feeling I don't have enough information to make the decision. I'm a terrible decision maker anyway, and barring infanticide (which is a little messy once the authorities know you've got one) there's no real way to reverse your decision once it's been made.

I've always been dead set against having kids, mainly due to the usual middle-class vices of having free time to think and hobbies. If you think about stuff enough you never do it: fear is the mind-killer.

But, predictably as the sun rising and setting, I've come to wonder what the hell I'm doing anything for: if all it's for is getting a couple of strands of molecules to make it into another protoplasmic carrier for 4 score and 10, it all seems pretty bloody pointless.

I wish there was someone I thought could tell me something about this which would help... there isn't, is there?

So I'll do the trad british thing and muddle through, I guess. I bet most kids are accidental...

If anyone's listening out there in information blizzardsville, let me know if you made the decision and did it, and why.

Peace.

Peace is spending some quality time with your family, after having to persuade yourself out of the hectic mind-set that life in the south east gives you.

Leicestershire is stunning in the sun.

A

Breezy n bright

I should start writing crosswords... the post title could correspond to the gigs at o'neills, or the weather, which is much more like the June we know and love. Pre-summer, as I used to call it: not as still as July/Aug/Sept (and, in the SE here, October) but one hell of a lot warmer than April.

I just got the new Chilis album. 28 tracks of gold dust, I love the simplicity of the tracks, the way the arrangements leave me to fill in spaces, the lack of huge instrumentation: it's so good to see a band with the confidence to trust their songs and not fall into overkill. The lushest RHCP album has to be "One Hot Minute", mainly down to the influence of Dave Navarro, who filled in the guitar for that album. It's a great album, but shows that the 4 piece we have now has a solidarity about them which produces some of the best music I've heard in a long time. There's contrast here - it's not all introspection - there's trademark funk, and you can hear more of John F's influence coming in. In particular, the harmony vocals are startlingly good on this album, doing a great job of filling out spaces where lesser bands would have dug into a synth pad or something.

Everything is mixed so wonderfully dry, it reminds me of beaches somehow.

Now, more metaphysically - I recalled recently a line from "The Princess Bride" (indulge me) - "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." - is our pace, our consumerism, all of it, destined only to crush us....?

Resilience.

How resilient are you? Do you have a depth you need to sink to before you rise up again? I saw a woman this morning on (gasp splutter) GMTV who was "an alcoholic". Well, she was actually bright, well spoken and had exactly the right opinion of why she drank, and it wasn't like she was in the gutter:

bluntly, she was alone, and scared. Said she's always been scared, and booze dulled fear of stuff so she could cope.

Doctor Hilary (sic) then piped up with medical addicition mumbo-jumbo, totally missing the point. How many alcoholics out there are drinking to dull fear, pain, anxiety, job worries, marraige worries, lack of self esteem?

Modern life+booze equals the UK boozer phenomenon.

But try hearing that on TV. Nobody ever puts the who puzzle together, least of all our MPs.

How many bars are there in the westminster asylum for the terminally egotistical anyway?

Hmmmm.

Another Breeze gig, wot a scortcha (apols to the sun)

That's the newspaper AND the actual item.

Good gig last thursday, but I'm well under par at the moment. Far too many unforced errors and stumbled pickings-I'm exhausted, not getting any sleep, but with any luck things will change after the 16th when I see the sleep docs at Churchills Hosp in Oxford. I'll get a neat machine to strap to my face and fall asleep having air pumped into my nose. Hopefully then I can get some sleep.

I never thought I'd have what is essentially a genetic defect: this OSA is partly due to the shape of my throat and mouth. Feels a bit odd to wander through life for 30 odd years with no real problems and then face up to being built wrong. Sort of like facing mortality, in a way.

Should I be grasping for wanting kids at this point?

I do know there are people who start families because they've run out of things to do. That sounds like the worst reason to have kids to me! Are most families the result of burnout, early onset middle age crises, burst condoms and tequila binges? That's a sad society if so...

I need to write some lyrics. It's all in there waiting to get out. Catharsis is good for you.

Another great Breeze gig! Who is Robbie Williams drummer anyway....?

Yep, another great night last night. Was "supposed to be" tonight but Jay got confused :) at one point after the first set someone approached Jamie for his number (a guy, I might add - arf arf!) saying he was Robbie W's drummer and he was "always looking for good support acts" - yeah right!

Good crowd last night, they always sing along really loudly to the crowd pleasers that Jay stokes 'em up with ;)

I'm thinking of getting some flightcases with half decent wheels on for the stack, to protect the bits in (smelly) transit (so to speak). Jamie says he'd really like to case up the Marshall head... I suspect Rich would like his amp cased too, I've got it at home to look at like I did Jay's the other week, the knobs are all well shagged and the preamp doesn't work too well - he generally plugs a guitar POD into the poweramp input on the back (which sounds good!)...

Trouble is, if I flightcase the Warwick cabs, they won't fit in the car any more. D'oh!

Hmm. Thinks.

Diversifying a little... indulge me.

Ok, I've been gigging with Breeze a lot, which is fun. I'd like to be gigging more with tempa tempa, but it's not happening. That ship seems to have sailed.

Add to this a flaccid day job and you have one thoughtful Andy once again asking "what the hell am I doing all this for?".

I know, it's too easy to give in to despondency, but seriously, I don't have any faith in anything being worthwhile right now: I'm totally down on people, who seem to me fundamentally selfish creatures (nearly getting wiped out on the M4 the other week didn't help), and our whole system of society, from huge bonus payouts to fat idle gits who fail to run businesses properly right down to Jane "einstein" Goody, the thinking man's thought-arsenic. Sold lies about consumerism, pensions, products, owning your own home, starting a family, being in a band with a crack at it, etc etc etc is all starting to finally tell on me. I've had it.

But there's no other way, it seems. I watch it all happening around me with a sort of dreamy, drugged-up anger which doesn't feel hot any more, just despondent.

Perhaps it's time to start thinking about something different. Oh yes, back to my day job, which got shipped to china. I used to test phones, you know: now, I write macros for a living. Very intellectual, very deep, very quality oriented.

Ho very much hum.

Normal service will be resumed shortly... I hope.

Breeze and Sweat

Wow, just remembered I should put something in about last weeks breeze gig at O'Neills in Oxford: best yet. I felt much more in control (although I think in future I'll take a 4 string!) and we had the pub totally rammed with wildly dancing singing punters. Jamie's showman qualities are outstanding: he really knows how to wind up an audience, and dispenses with hecklers without alienating anyone.. apart from the heckler heh heh

More playing-on-the-bar antics, and this time I got the bassline for the killers track much truer, actually listened to it the other week and realised they have a very inventive bassist: I'll be checking out the other tracks on the album with a more critical ear!

Practise is all about theory and slap at the moment. It's coming on quite well. Also tentatively volunteered to help something musical at the local youth club if I have time!

Cheers chums

Reeeeee-cording'

Wish me luck, today I'll try to get something that isn't too awful onto some tracks of Jake's at the WitneySoundCentre.

Got some cider, had a chicken wrap, sitting in the stunning early May sun. This is the life. Worth the 1 hr drive!

Mill streams a gurglin' and I'd let myself into the studio if:

1) I had keys
2) I wanted to get out of this lovely sun.

A quiet moment in an otherwise tortured existence.

Question of the day: do you find the widespread use of the made up infantile word "radicalised" (and the many crap forms therefrom) as annoying as I do?

I swear modern journalists are getting so lazy it's a real turn off.

I'm 35 you know.

the calm before the breeze

the calm before the breeze,
originally uploaded by Spammy Spamton.

Arf arf! Breeze, bricklayers arms, marston lots of fun. Restrung the 6 string, sounds zingy on Warwick EMP 25s!



Wish me luck... I'll be reading the songs as we go along!

New songs! Tempa fun...

Jake's going to get me to lay down some bass tomorrow, and sent me a couple of new tracks to listen to yesterday: on one of them, Jamie T was singing(!)-he's got a great voice, sounds like Kincaid from Brand new heavies!

Great track too, total BNH funk style. I'm working on lines for that.

The other one (bounce, current working title) sounds trickier to lock down: possibly Jake may want to keep that one all electronic? We'll see wht I can conjour, eh?

Man, Reading has a lot of ugly naked bellied people in it.

Arf!

That new years resolution of 2005...

This blog started when I decided to get involved in something which was going somewhere musically and which pushed my bass playing, really energising me to new heights and confirming to myself that I've got something creative to give to a project. Janeiro really made me feel that way. It even made me feel a sense of belonging to a band which you want to feel, less of a spare part or a session player and part of something vibrant, alive, building, growing... luminous. That feeling saw me through a lot of the worthless vibe in my heart which was planted and nurtured by Panasonic's feeble appreciation of my efforts.

But.

As ever, this is only a personal view. It's how I feel. Since we lost Javier and Dan, we've gained 2 very capable, affable, talented musicians, but they're both in london. this wouldn't be a problem if they 9-5'd it like yours truly (that feeling I was talkng about got me driving a LONG way in the evenings!) byt they're both pro musicians, so they're pretty much always busy. As a result, there hasn't been a rehearsal in a couple of months, and the gigs in Izi's, while fun, have seen more covers drifting into our set.

This isn't how I saw my resolution panning out. Few gigs, no rehearsals, and once again my dweeb knowledge sees me being web liason, which might as well be a full time job! It really needs a lot of work which I don't have time to do the way I'd like...

I find myself cursing work more and more these days, it's really getting in the way.

Tempa tempa needs to get loads more gigs and more togetherness pronto! I'm also worried that Jake and George now have their own Myspace artist profiles, george has a great song on there!

Hmmm. Stuff to contemplate. I should really get some of my material on Myspace.

Cheers punters

Andy the increasingly worried.

Knackered!

Jeez, I'm tired... I haven't picked up a bass in 2 days(!) - the Tempa Tempa gig last week (thursday) was fun, if a little scrappy. The problems of getting rehearsals together are really starting to tell. I'm pretty sure Jamie T is busy during the evenings most nights - he's got to make a living out of his drums, after all - so he seems to be keen on daytimes, which of course is totally out for me.

Unless these diverging time pressures are resolved there's no way this can continue... Jake wants me to come in to record ASAP but I'm feeling shaky about Tempa material as we haven't rehearsed it, and the gigs we're doing in Witney nearly all consist of covers (some rehearsed on the spot during the soundcheck!)...

It's a little wierd... the Breeze gigs feel more organised at the moment. More profitable too. But not that funky, in the style that I like!

Oh - and I could have some real fun this Xmas if I took up something I've been offered musically.... ooooo yes. Once in a lifetime stuff! Not going to make me famous though.

Cheerio reader (yes I know that's singular)

From IZIs! Tempa gig blog returns...

Just banging this one out between sets at IZIs tonight. So far, so good but we really need some rehearsals. Bit scrappy but the feeling is nice and funky.

Soundman Andi Fatsounds is experimenting with middly bass tonight for more funk: I think he's got something. Pokey as hell! Bit nervewracking though, outside comfort zone alpha but fun.

In the next set, I'm singing Word Up no less arf arf! I use a sort of baritone Axl Rose voice and suddenly it sounds just like the cameo original!

Just got the 6 string with me tonight, forgot earplugs so I'm on toilet tissue specials which are pretty much working.

Witney's a wierd place: lots of bright young things and people watching them... like me!

Slap solo on the 6 felt pretty good. As ever though, wish I had something locked down!

L8rs!

Breeze - a breath of fresh air? :)

That breeze gig 2 weeks ago (wow, was it that long ago?) was such a blast I'm off to do another one tomorrow night! This time, I'll take the monolith with me so Jamie and Richie's PA doesn't have to work so hard to get the bass out there. I reckon 900 watts of Warwick Pro Tube IX should be enough to underpin O'Neills in Oxford, eh? :)

I haven't laid down those bass tracks for Tempa Tempa yet - and a load of potential gigs fell through because it's hard to get us all in one place at the same time. In my defence, I should say there was only one date out of about 6 I couldn't do! The bass tracks should get done next week I hope. Jake's been busy this week... studio stuff, he has a client or somesuch! I've scanned the materials he gave me for his studio website... pity I don't have any graphics though. I was hoping he would give me all the bits I needed electronically, so I could just put something together... I'll have to come up with something fairly basic I guess. I think that's all he wants though.

Meanwhile... tomorrow night it's fun fun fun with the full-on "jump around" O'Neills venue.

Seriously, if you're reading this, and you live anywhere near Oxford, get down to O'Neills tomorrow night. You won't have seen anything quite like this before. When Jamie does his solo on the bar thing, it's the funniest thing I've ever seen!

I get to be so chilled out as well: there's no pressure, the songs are all dead simple (although to my credit, I have learned "californication" properly now ;) - so I can have a beer or two and kick back.

It feels like this will be how my retirement feels: I always saw myself down the local pub playing blues once or twice a week, barely moving and yet still cranking out stevie ray vaghan style bass licks, with only an unfeasibly large glass of whisky next to me. Nice.

Ah, why isn't life more full of fun for everybody?

Cheerio punters, see you in O'Neills

Andy the Bassist

.... YAWN!

Ooer, I'm suffering from gig withdrawal again. Had a blast with Breeze last friday night - Rich and Jamie and Steve... O'whatsits in Oxford, 3 sets, playing until 12:30am... holy cow, I haven't had that much fun in ages! Took the fretless (only!) and did the whole cover-fuelled nonsense on that! Top shit! I actually took a slap solo (octaves, mainly) on a fretless... and got whoopin applause!

Happy happy happy.

This sunday it's stripped-back Tempa at Hoxton... ironically without Jamie and Richie (funny....).. .and then on friday it's another Breeze gig at the O'summats again in Oxford opposite the Odeon cinema.

Ever seen a guitar player playing while dancing on a bar? about 40 feet away from the stage, having made his way through the crowd while playing a solo? Jamie does that... seriously, there's people taking flash photos of him.

insane.

Good fun though!

Arf

A

Solo operations....

I think it's time to put some of my ideas on the blog - I've never been one to wear my heard on a vest under a shirt... so to speak. I'll stop that before I get accused of Frasier-esque verbosity. Oops, there I go again.

There are two ideas flying around my head to get more (local) gigs at the moment (Tempa Tempa doesn't gig enough for me, I need to be on at least one a week, and I could do with the extra cash!) - one is "highbrow" and one is "profitable"? ;)

Idea 1
This one's the "highbrow" one. I've harboured one of those muso conceits to do little intimate jazz gigs in classy restaurants for ages now. Not necessarily insane Jaco solo stuff, but something with some jazz standards where I've got a great backing track (I could get Terry to help me out here) and I play the 5 string fretless over the top - solos, basslines, depending on where in the track we are. Nothing deadly taxing, I could work up to be-bop :)

Advantages: solo gig: no rehearsals to try to arrange: can be very well prepared in advance: will increase my theoretical chops as well as my physical ones: spend more time with the 5 string fretless (which sounds amazing): classy gigs that don't go on until 2am: local to Windsor there could be demand for this kind of gig
Disadvantages: hard work (possibly): takes time to get set together: the audience will not be screaming for more (this does matter!): more gear needed (small PA of some kind)

That's not a huge list of disadvantages! Hmmmm. So, on to....

Idea 2
I don't need to go into intense detail for this one. I'll do solo nightclub gigs with a dance/funk crossover thing. Still using backing tracks, but with live bass (and maybe vocals, could use samples). Maybe George could do some vocals for me (she's got one hell of a voice).

Advantages: Insane audiences: great feedback: I already know the chops (funk funk funk funk): opportunity to be really creative using tools and samples I already have: don't necessarily need outside input for the backing tracks: a little further afield (london/reading) there could be a real demand for this stuff

Disadvantages: Late gigs: may need more gear (although this isn't a given): money may not be as good: might need more people (george at gigs?): local area (windsor) may not have a great demand for this kind of gig.

Hmmm. I do love audiences to go mental. Best part of the job!

As you can see, it's a couple of great options. I'll mull it over, shall I?

Ooo - and my eBay hobby has started up proper, I'm selling stuff like there's no tomorrow! I've just about got my packaging activities streamlined, and last night I started using "Turbo Lister" from eBay, which is a cracking tool. Much easier and quicker than using the website! Like they say on unnovations - "once you've got one, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it"

The slide towards luddite?..... the new Tempa Tempa site's "up"!

Well, I relented and did something to get [ TempaTempa website ] up and running. Telivo, who I got the JaneiroMusic.com domain off, were doing an offer on .co.uk domains for £5 / 2yrs. So I used their forwarding to take it to... a myspace site ;)

I apologise for not creating an all-singing, all-dancing website (or even doing up the Janeiro one with a new logo!) but to be honest, the day-to-day bits of the website which i was editing were pictures (which I can still do - I'll put the pics on the Janeiro webspace and use a scroller from [ Slide.com ] to display them on the MySpace site) and news (I'll use the [ myspace blog ]) - so I'll just use the MySpace site and think of something else to do with the JaneiroMusic.com domain and the webspace.

I might tinker with Flash to make a front end animation for the tempa tempa site before it redirects to the Myspace area... that'd be cool.

Music News - how to warm up quick and keep finger-fit
I found my hand exerciser thingy - no sniggering - and man, I'd forgotten how much it helps. If, like me, you struggle sometimes to squeeze in practise and want to cut down on warm-up time (I do have a full warm up exercise program which lasts anything up to 25 minutes!) one of these little dudes is a must. I also have a medium tension rubber band wrapped around it which I use to warm up the extensor muscles (?sp?I think that's right) by opening my fingers in a fan with the rubber band attached.

If you use the exerciser for about 15 minutes while you're doing other stuff (say, checking email or eBay or whatever) then when you finally get to picking up the bass, you're already mostly warmed up and can move on to nailing that Bach cello suite or Jaco solo (arf arf) piece you've been working on.

If only I could invent one for slap warm ups...

Never happy, eh? Roll on the 30th and another IZIs gig. Hopefully this time I can back away from the audience a bit: one thing's for sure, I'll be taking less gear with me!

Big shout to Jo Theones at Fox FM!

The joys of eBay n stuff

The linky thingy in the title is my eBay "shop" (well, it's a list of the items I've got on there). I've actually been getting my arse in gear and listing a lot of the stuff I've got stashed away for eBaying. Hopefully it should prove a lucrative sideline, and clear a lot of junk out of the house to boot.

I wonder if eBay is killing the lovely British Car Boot habit? Although it costs to list things on eBay, and it costs to use PayPal (something I'll put up with in return for the ability to have non-paypal customers be able to pay me with credit cards), it's a small price to pay not to have to fill a car with stuff and ol paste tables, etc. There's something about browsing through other people's junk which is very English though. Read "nosy". I guess there's no way of knowing what's happened to car boot sales...

Podcasts - inevitable
I've got into iTunes podcasts, finally. There's wicked electronica podcast from Gowan, a mate here at work (who has just been made redundant, the lucky sod) which I've subscribed to. I listened to most of the Ricky Gervais ones as well (who didn't, I hear), and I was into the pub landlord ones but they seem to have stopped for some reason...

iTunes: quality music?
I don't buy songs from iTunes though. I have this thing (probably from being a musician) about fidelity (or at least trying to get the best I can). When you buy compressed audio from these websites, you're not getting CD quality. As ever, perception is a fickle thing, so you just get used to not hearing some of the subtleties the producer and artists put into the music: while I've little doubt there's plenty of fiddling going on during mixdown with a view to how it will sound on an iPod, I just need to have that CD so I can make the decisions about sound quality: I don't want to download something for the same price as that track would cost on a CD and not get CD quality!

Plus, this method of buying tracks will have the inevitable effect of cheapening the best music. Not literally, but artists will be under constant pressure to come up with singles all the time - no room for any artistic "indulgence" (as a label would see it) - and you won't see CDs "crafted" in terms of their being a musical journey on their own: 7 to 10 tracks of music, chosen by the artist and arranged in an order that's pleasing to them.

Without being a luddite, this legacy hangover from LPs about putting many songs on a media so they are distributed all at once is surely a good thing: I don't like crap filler tracks, but there are plenty of songs which never made it to singles which I love (I'm a big fan of Queens of the Stone Age and some of their more "out there" stuff is brilliant, but not populist - and all the better for it).

I fear that iTunes, with the ability to audition tracks before you buy them, will not only kill CDs but it'll make life really difficult for people who want to make music from their hearts. Another bean-counting nail in the coffin of music that touches the heart, eh....?

Janeiro / Tempa Tempa
Well, I think I've probably relented on the "build a website" front. Only slightly though - I'll build a tempa tempa framework which houses stuff on other sites like MySpace. Neil doesn't think we've got enough of a following under the name Janeiro to be worried about moving to another Myspace site. I have some reservations, but he's the boss! I won't be buying another URL for the name out of my own pocket though. I'll have to work out what to do about that - I do have some ideas using Javascript cleverness from a while back.