Category: Music
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Jon Batiste's Tiny Desk concert
Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.
This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).
Don’t it make your soul shake?
Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys’ Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
Living and breathing
I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.
Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009
Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.
All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.
By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.
My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!
At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.
Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.
One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.
I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.
This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.
Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.
Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,’” Welch sings in the chorus of “Between Two Lungs"
I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the song is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.
No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last
I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.
It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.
Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.
Finally feel like I’m getting my breath back after four days of having trouble breathing in, wheezing and feeling like I’m emphyseming.
Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager.
I like some Oasis stuff, the early stuff. I like some woke stuff. This quote and picture are true enough and funny, though.
Never listened to Buffalo Tom’s eponymous first album before.
Produced by one Joseph Donald Mascis (as was their second album Birdbrain, although there he was credited as the more familiar J. Mascis).
When I first went to university, one of my first mates was a very quiet and shy bass player, a Geordie skinhead called Tim. Tim was into getting stoned and listening to Frank Zappa. I never got into Zappa. But I am now.
Curriculum Vitae (Hocus Pocus)
Inevitably, my time as a Manchester University player came to end, and I left the club by mutual consent when my contract ended.
Somewhat bizarrely, looking back on it, I joined what appeared to be an obscure and tiny religious cult in the middle of nowhere (deepest, darkest Lincolnshire), dabbling in some rather questionable therapy / witchcraft.
My role was primarily as Administrator with responsibility for making sense of the almost entirely lacking paperwork, contracts, and financial arrangements of the company (?) / sole practitioner / lead sorceress. Bed and board were included in my pay, which meant I didn’t get paid much at all, and had to do a lot of household chores on a strict rota, along with the other, er, residents.
I got kicked out about six months later for dropping acid at the weekend. Somehow, with a couple of band mates, we cleaned ourselves up and managed to persuade a friendly estate agent to rent us out a four-bedroomed semi-detached house that had one careful previous owner (the local vicar), that was ideally located opposite a big pub and just up the road from the local drug dealers.
We spent eighteen months there, mostly on the dole, getting our musical act into gear. Completely by chance (we put up a card in the local Spa shop window asking for a “chilled out lamppost”), we met a nomadic (on the run) alcoholic junkie who could actually sing, write songs, and also played a mean guitar. We rehearsed every day in that house (pity our poor neighbours), recorded a couple of decent demo tapes (got to number one in the local newspaper charts), and played some wild gigs that were generally pretty well received.
The end was nigh, though, as it always is. I’d got a job to help pay for gear, and fell madly in love with one of my new co-workers. Euro 96 appeared, and we all took a break from music to enjoy Ing-er-land’s latest heartbreak efforts. Our junkie friend wasn’t into football, or staying around, and one day he was gone. My love interest left, too.
This was the catalyst for me to focus on work for the first time in my life, as a coping mechanism for loss, as much as anything else. The more I worked, the less loss I felt. I couldn’t get enough of it.
I started at the bottom. Literally. The job I applied for was Personal Carer in a Residential Home. I assumed that it meant psychological care, and didn’t pay much attention on my first morning shift when I shadowed another carer who was wiping bottom after bottom (and more) of all these frail, elderly folks.
Anyway, I got into it (and my new co-worker), and found that, yes, there was a quite a degree of psychological care involved, too, if you had the time, skills and inclination. Unbelievably (or so it seemed to many in the industry at the time, when frail, elderly people find they have something worth living for (a friend to talk to, something fun to do, something like a day out to look forward to), they’re much more capable of getting themselves dressed, feeding themselves, staying continent.
Of course, many carers had none of those things, and in fact, got very little psychological care themselves in their own lives. Often it was just a continuation of the sadistic brutality from their school days.
But I found myself actually enjoying the job despite the low pay, and often quite unpleasant working conditions. I enjoyed the people - the camaraderie and comradeship of the staff and residents. We really were all in it together
That said, there was only so much arse wiping I could do before I got fed up with it. I’d done everything and more I’d been asked to do and applied to be a Senior Carer and even a Care Services Manager (responsible for running the shifts, and the home in the absence of the Home Manager). But I wasn’t successful - too little experience, I was told. Which might have been true. I’d only been there a year.
But I suspect it might also have been because I was too much of a threat to the darker side of what was going on. The manager was taking money from at least one of the more severely demented residents, and some of the staff were in on it, too. At least, that’s what I’d been told.
Curriculum Vitae (Repetitum)
Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels.
Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths. Let’s never forget that killing is a sport for our aristocracy and their hangers-on. Famously, at the time, the host of these shootings was “peppered in the buttocks” by our drunken home secretary Willie Whitelaw. You couldn’t get away with a name like that now.
My brother graduated from bush beating for toffs to hunt sabotage.
I did well enough in my ‘O’ Levels (one A, eight Bs, and a C), that my maths teacher told me I would “never amount to anything”. He wasn’t wrong.
My dad tried to motivate me after my mock ‘A’ Level results by leaving me a drunken handwritten note and caricature drawing of me with an arrow pointing to it (I mean, in those days what else could he have done?) saying: “THICK CUNT”.
Then he got me what felt like a punishing summer job at the duck processing plant where he was a line supervisor. Being the boss’s son was no fun when they put me on the killing floor. I became a vegetarian for nine years after that (although since returned to meat eating - that’s another story).
I messed up my ‘A’ Levels (three Es, and failed General Studies writing about the punk band Stiff Little Fingers). I was profoundly depressed, but had no one to talk to about it. Mainly because I had been brought up not to talk about or express any “bad” or “difficult” feelings. Random people used to come up to me and say “Cheer up, it may never happen”, but it in my internal world, it already had.
Music, and playing guitar in a band, was my only outlet, but we were young and totally delusional. We were a three-piece, but believed we were the next Fab Four. We played a successful debut gig in Cleethorpes at The Sub, but instead of building on that, we immediately packed our bags and gear into a van, and drove to London to live in a series of squats in Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse.
An older ex-school friend was part of an anarchist community based out of a bookshop, and helped us find, gain entry to, and occasionally get the water, gas and/or electricity working. In those good old days, you could easily “sign on” the dole and get enough to actually live on.
I read and heard a lot about the politics of anarchism, which I found very attractive to my idealism. That said, I couldn’t ever see how it would work in practice, in the real world. It would need a revolution, of course, but even then, it would need a revolution in people’s minds and thinking first.
Six months living in squats, a couple of lousy gigs and a demo tape later, we packed our bags and returned home.