ComEnts

YAY!

Stayed up late last night listening to Pete and the Pirates on XFM. Three of them were playing some songs on John Kennedy's show, it was quite good I think, fairly funny. They are a bit of a nightmare to interview though. They played This Thyme and Come on Feet acoustically live and Wait Stop Begin and Disco off the EP. Good stuff.

Tonight is their CD launch party at The Spitz, Spittlefield Market, London, but I'm not going, I'm going to Club Velocity to see Six Nation State, and it's also Rich SNS's birthday. Plus the Pirates are playing in Reading on Wednesday at the BBBs so I'll go to that and get copies of the EP! Very much looking forward to going out tonight.

Band name discussions continue... argh.

Fringe Festival Press launch was last night, it seemed to go quite well. We didn't get as many press as we hoped but the Evening Post and BBC Berkshire made appearances. 107 fm couldn't make it so Kevin Harrington pre-recorded some soundbytes and The Chronicle didn't have anyone to send but are going to be very supportive again.

It was a very odd evening, I arrived at South Street where the launch was happening hot (and sweaty) from work. For the first time ever, turned right and headed towards their small room. What an undiscovered (by me) gem that place is! By the time I got there, it was all darkened and lit nicely, there were candles on the table and a small PA set up for the little speech and Damien A Passmore (another undiscovered gem) to play a few songs. It's a really nice space although it was very warm last night. Would be perfect for a little acoustic night or something.

Mainly it was a chance to meet some press, some of the promoters and venue people who live locally and have a chant about what we do. Hmm. I mean chat, not chant. Nice typo maybe we should have chanted, that would have been a story!

After that a few of the Fringe people went to The Retreat (yes another undiscovered gem, a proper pub close to the centre of Reading!) for a few beers. I introduced Ben Halls, the fringe live music guy, to the joys of pickled eggs. Now, in a pub situation a pickled egg really ought to come served in a packet of Salt and Vinegar crisps but The Retreat has a fine selection of really nice (if a bit hippy) vegetable crisps so we departed from the norm and tried those. The Tyrell's Sausage and Mustard flavour that Ben had were particularly awesome. They genuinely tasted like sausage and english mustard! How rare. Nearly forgot to mention, whilst we were in there we saw one of Josaka's most notorious reviewers (before he stopped) David Miller and Barney the former guitarist from the legendary Caged Baby. It really must be a cool place!

This morning we find out that one of the Screwball bands, Somebody's Mind, have split up and cancelled on us. Typical! The day after the bloody press launch.

It seems that Mikey is making considerably more posts than me o flate. This hopefully reflects popular opinion as much as it does my ability to think of anything worth saying. Regular readers of Berkslive will agree with me on that point, I imagine. It's easy to talk shite on there, whereas I see this blog as being worth more than being just another outlet for my drivel.

At present I am trying to find a venue for a light opera night as part of the Reading Fringe Festival as well as confirming what will be happening at the Picnic Day in the Forbury Gardens on Sun 20th Aug.

I start a new job on 7th Aug, need to have found a new place to live by 16th Sept and also find some temp work to earn some cash before I start the new perm job. Plenty to do, and plenty of time to do it in as long as I get cracking this week (AFTER I've sorted the fringe fest stuff, that remains my priority at the mo.)

White Sunday are writing, rehearsing and generally getting ready to go into the studio to record the first batch of what should hopefully be our debut album. We're working with Dave Allen who has recorded a lot of the Cure's albums as well as Frank Sinatra (so I'm told). He's a cool guy, seems to really dig what we are trying to do and we're all as excited as hell about getting the tracks down. We played at our "local" the Prince of Wales in Caversham on Sat, had a brilliant time and got some quality feedback from friends and fans alike. New tunes went down well, new drummer Tony destroyed his drumkit at the big finale, and I renewed my acquaintance with a very foxy blonde afterwards. Lovely. The Prince's kitchen also provided THE BEST fry-up on Sunday morning when we picked up our kit, what a lifesaver!

I'm pleased to see that the Palestinians are back! Look forward to seeing them as part of the fringe festival as much as I look forward to hearing Mike's new band; I note with amusement that he hasn't been quite as keen to suggest band names as heavily-laden with sexual innuendo as his last effort..

Carry on regardless................ . .. ... .

So, we announced most of the line-up for Screwball Cabaret today. As I mentioned it's been a real struggle getting stuff booked up but we've got there in the end. Doing anything in the music world takes a huge amount of work and effort. With Screwball we have a 4 person team and for various reasons each time it has tended to be a different pair of people who are doing most of the booking for an event, although with a lot of input from the others. This time has been the first time I've really felt like I've been one of the main two responsible for the line-up and it's been quite stressful. We've (eventually) got a fantastic line-up, better than I thought we were going to, but it has shown me a little bit how out of touch I've got with the local 'scene'. I used to go to a local gigs most weeks, no matter who was playing now I very rarely do. On the other hand, from the Fringe side of things we've got in touch with people like fire jugglers and installation artists that we might be able to use which has been great.

One thing I never appreciated when I was just a band member and had never got involved with anything like promoting or the Fringe Festival was how many bands there are out there who don't put in what I would consider the minimum amount of work to promote themselves or get somewhere. Getting your name and music out there is really hard work. When I was only in a band I'd figured that sending a CD to a promoter and asking for a gig was basically all that's required to get gigs but now, seeing it from the other side, I totally understand why promoters have a tendency to book bands they know or have booked before or who've played locally before. You want to book bands you have worked with, or know something about because you can prevent a lot of problems just by booking bands you know will be easy to work with, will work to promote the evening and have some fans. If you take those criteria and add that the band has to be really good to keep the reputation of your night as high as possible it makes it more difficult to book 'new' bands. That said we booked Suitable Case for Treatment to play the first Screwball because the songs on their MySpace were really great and exactly what we were looking for. On the other extreme, I am using one demo I was sent as a coaster for my tea mug.

It annoys me sometimes with the Fringe Festival how few people are prepared to muck in and help with the organisation compared to how many people are saying "great idea, can we have a gig?". I've been doing a moderate amount compared to someone like Luella our Project Manager who's put in a heroic workload, but all it'd really need is 2 or 3 extra willing volunteers to do even the small amount I did and we'd be able to lessen her load and really expand. The amount of events this year is significantly up on last year, and we've got some great events but I think that's going to have to be a focus for next year. How do we get people involved nice and early, in areas we haven't covered this year and how do we inspire them to really get involved. It's amazing looking at the list of events now and seeing what we've achieved (hey, I did a little bit at least...).

It never rains but it pours. Fringe Festival print deadline is Sunday, the last week has been a desperate scramble to get events confirmed, details on the website updated, promoters chased etc. So far we've got 48 fully confirmed events on the website.

In the meantime we've been booking acts for Screwball, a very difficult thing to do because we started so late and so many of the best local bands had already been booked. That said, we've almost completed an absolutely amazing line-up and as far as I know we haven't got anyone who is playing another fringe event which is quite an achievement.

And we've got the second ever rehearsal with the new band tonight. The traditional "can't think of a good name" discussion is ongoing. Hopefully we'll end up with something unshit this time...

The old band, Müf, have a reunion gig on the 22nd August as part of the fringe so we've been arranging rehearsals for that. We might actually have to learn to play the new song we wrote in the studio. If anyone could listen to Epitaph and tab my bits for me that'd be great.

I've also recently recieved a load of contacts to talk to about the dutch tour but I have got absolutely no time to do anything with them at the moment.

The jam was a great success. We all clicked really well musically. My girlfriend the drummer was good, despite being incredibly out of practice, which was great. I am even more in love with my pedals now. The English Muff'n is just such a crisp overdrive, you can play a nice heavy sound and still hear the individual notes. And the micro synth is incredibly special. It's much too easy to be a bit overindulgent with it. Definitely needs to be used sparingly.

Wow.. been a while since I last posted on here. Seems like Mike is well pleased with his new band's development thus far, hope to catch them playing around Reading soon!

White Sunday are laying plans for to go and record some tracks, have been working with the producer dude and all seems ready for some digital commitment. Watch this space! Actually, give it a week or two and then start watching.. whatever.

Fringe Festival is now in the buttcheek-tightening stages, but so far so good! Lots of good stuff lined up and as I thought the big challenge has been finding venues for events, etc. Which reminds me, I still have some phone calls to make..

Housemate's "Comic Strip Presents" box set has just arrived, need to get a lot of things done before I can allow myself to wallow in the comedy..

So, I went to Guitar Village in Farnham and spent a lot of money on guitar toys. I tried the two pedals I mentioned last week, the Electro Harmonix Micro Synth and the English Muff'n. Both sounded absolutely amazing. The Muff'n is a valve overdrive/distortion pedal which genuinely sounds like an expensive all valve overdrive amp and can go from really nice warm drive, through hard crunch into something really quite heavy. The Micro Synth is an absolutely amazing thing. You can make some incredible sounds with it. At the moment I've found a dark bouncy techno synth sound that I really like but I could potentially spend hours playing with the different sounds on it.

Guitar Village was a really nice surprise. Farnham, it turns out, is an amazingly nice looking place. Very pretty. Guitar Village is in a very old building just on the edge of the town centre. It's a bit of a little maze, with low ceilings but they have it crammed full of an incredible amount of stuff. The guy said they had about 800 guitars, which is probably about right. It's absolutely rammed to the rafters (and it probably really does have rafters, but I'm no architect). They also have a decent amp room and just about every pedal I've ever heard of. Well worth a trip. Plus it's open on Sundays! This is VERY important. Kingfisher in Fleet and Dawsons in Reading please take note. I should mention that Guitar Works in Reading is open on Sundays, good work.

ps. Screwball 17th August, Plug'n'Play, Reading.

Maybe it's going to be a huge anti-climax but I am incredibly excited about the jam on Monday. It feels like so long since I was in a rehearsal with a band writing songs, having a laugh, drinking a beer. WOOO!!! Nothing beats it really. Except playing a great gig or maybe organising an amazing gig and everyone having a great time.

Speaking of which, one of my Screwball Cabaret co-organisers, Helen, got in touch the other day to say she didn't think we could let Reading Fringe go by without a Screwball Cabaret. So... watch this space. If we are doing it we'll have to book some stuff by Monday which is the press deadline for Fringe Festival events so I'll update you then. The reputation we built from the last two events was fantastic but it is a tough act to live up to! We're always going to struggle to match that first gig. Aqua Livi and the Roots Imansion just produced such an amazing performance, it was one of the best things I've seen ever. We'll try our best though.

This blog has been really crap for the last month or so (even more so than normal I mean...) I must try harder.

I mentioned the other day that I have been looking at starting up a new band, this seems to be going pretty well. We've got a frontman, drummer, bass player and two guitarists. Actually, I quite fancy playing some bass on some songs so I might swap over on that. Bass player is Sam, who I've played with in my last two bands. We've got a really good understanding in the rhythm section engine room and have jammed a lot of times with me on bass and him on guitar. He's a decent guitarist but I need to work on my bass playing. Get my hands stretched out. My girlfriend's going to drum as well. She hasn't played for ages but apparently can play ok. We'll see. Hopefully it'll be good but I suppose that situation is potentially disasterous.

The first jam is on Monday, we've got a room booked and everything. Plan is to just get the musical elements of the band together so that we can try and get past that awkward "er... what shall we play?" stage. No idea what the style of music will be at this point, we'll let that come naturally. The singer we have got to potentially agree to this project has never been in a band before and my gf has (as far as I'm aware) never drummed in a band before so I imagine it'll be quite a slow start the first few jams. As long as it's fun, that's the main thing and the line-up is a really fun bunch of people that I get on really well with. We'll see how that lasts once we start having heated musical debates!

The last couple of days I've been really drooling over some of the Electro Harmonix effects. I'm considering getting myself an English Muff'n because the digital distortion on my amp is a bit shit, but I'm also really tempted to get a guitar synth like the EH micro synth. I've been tempted to try playing synth but a guitar synth could be a great compromise. I've got some money coming in next month that could be used very usefully on such things.

Haven't posted anything about the Dutch tour I was going to be organising recently. That's because I haven't really done anything, been mostly doing Fringe Festival stuff (and really busy at work). I've got a contact for a guy who's going to send me some information so hopefully we can start making some progress on that again soon.

On the plus side, I just heard that a Dutch guy I know played the my old band Sonic Undermind's last CD Chimpcopter at a party and people liked it and asked him who it was. Crazy.