Birth of a Band 1

If you scoot back over the news section of the Mechkov website, you will see that (apart from news of a cracking new soundscape album) there is a flurry of news regarding my new band, Custard Cream. From this flurry, it is also (I hope) clear that the band has managed to cement itself into the local gigging scene with some speed following its first gig on May 11th this year (2013).

I thought I ought to get down how this came about…

There is a rather spiffing little website here in the UK called joinmyband, through which musicians and singers can find other musicians and singers, and which I had been trying (unsuccessfully) to get people to hop in on my projects.

Ah! We are a funny bunch, we musos. We seem, when we are together, to have so much in common when together on a stage, but when a person has his own plans and ideas, getting others involved is a tough ask. They are all far too busy trying to find others to join them on their projects.

So, having had limited success on this, my wife suggested I join in on someone else’s project – and maybe earn some money while I was at it.

Unfortunately, the ad I followed up on the site is now long gone, but it went something along the lines of: “Custard Cream is moving to Berkshire and needs a drummer, bassist and a singer to join lifelong pals Nige and George on guitars for a blues and rock band. We have a lot of experience and our own Sharon Osborne.”

Can you tell what the clincher might have been for me here? Yes, of course, as with any musician, the thought of having someone actually taking on the responsibility of marketing, managing and promotion was too much to ignore – let alone hope for. I answered the ad immediately and pretty soon Nige and I were in correspondence. I’m guessing that he was attracted to me as an option because I could both play bass and sing AND I had my own website with original music. He wasn’t interested in this, but it does show I have some capability without having to go through the pain of a crap rehearsal.

The email chain goes back to September 26^th 2012 and it appears that Nige had said that the band would be able to meet during weekdays – this really did sell the project to me. Nige was moving to the area from Cornwall, so I figured it would be best to leave him and his family to the horrors that are moving house before pushing for anything more.

By mid-October, Nige informed me that he thought he had found a drummer – and, what is more, one that could rehearse on a weekday (one day per week), but that, following the move, he would have to spend a few weeks doing the house up before ‘Sharon’ would even let him think of going out to rehearse. Fair enough, I thought.

By October 19^th, we had shared set lists and George had come through with a sort of hybrid list based on all of our contributions of song titles and Nige was saying we would be in rehearsal by December at the latest and gigging in January. ‘Bloody perfect’ was my thought on the issue.

Come the end of November, I was champing at the bit to get into rehearsal, but Nige still hadn’t finished his ‘house work’ and so we agreed to postpone until after Christmas and meet up in the New Year. It also turned out that George (the other guitarist) would NOT be able to rehearse on weekdays… hmm…

In the meantime, the drummer, Neil, suggested that we meet up for a drink. Yes, all of this planning and we hadn’t even met – yet, for some reason, I felt sure this was going to be a good project…

Why? I have absolutely no idea. Normally when I have a gut feeling for something, I end up being so wrong, I have to pretend I was never really interested in the first place, but of course at the time it all seems to make perfect sense. I really did not see this as being something that was dragging on.

The end of one rainbow

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Now, why would I have gone to all that trouble of starting to document my task of documenting a new open mic night only to come to a shudderingly abrupt halt just eight weeks into the project.

Well, there are two reasons. First, my wife kept saying ‘do you really think you should be writing a blog when you are earning as little as you do?’ which is, sadly, true on one level.

Second – and if it hadn’t been for this point, I probably would have ignored my wife and continued – I chickened out.

When writing a blog, one needs to be brutally honest and true to one’s thoughts and opinions, however upsetting they might be for the people you are writing about. When organising an open mic night, one needs to nurture relationships and create a nucleus of loyal participants. Pissing people off could well be counter-productive.

The fact is, the main body of support I got for the Plough’s Tuesday evenings included Psycho Deano (a lovely bloke), Sassy Lozza (my wife), The Mafia (nice people, but always tricky in terms of conversation), Jeff the Jock (who is as lovely as he is boring beyond belief) and Not Manic Mark (again, as sweet as honey, but a real effort to talk to and play with). Among this group, only The Mafia would both play and sing. All the others either required me to play and/or sing. But I needed these people to make sure that someone was there in the pub to keep East End Bob happy.

So, taking the micky in a blog might not be the most conducive method of mollification of my muso masses. With these guys coming regularly, anything else was a bonus.

And so the Tuesday evening chugged on through up to Christmas and into the New Year, becoming stronger and more defined with each passing week. In order to keep East End Bob happy and in control, I agreed to a pay cut, but he was decent enough never to pay me the minimum amount – always adding a little extra on and often giving me the full fee.

Then the last week of March was upon us and – after a couple of quiet evenings – no-one came! For the first time ever, not a single person showed up. I was gutted. East End Bob was mortified.

This stung me into action. I immediately got on to the Slough Observer and wrote press releases, gave interviews and sent over pics (taken by The Mafia). The lovely people at the paper promised me good coverage.

Then I got a message to ring East End Bob…

“I think we’d better knock it on the head,” he said… At least I think that what he said. It could have been ‘a thud with berry knocker on the air’, but I took it to be the first one. The second one was just ridiculous.

The next Tuesday some 15 people turned up having seen the article in the Observer. I wasn’t there. I just smiled a knowing smile and thought to myself: “Bob, you chickened out. We’re as bad as each other.”

It’s Alive! (The Joys of Mediocrity 3)

Okay, so there are a couple of glitches to be ironed out – and those are regarding my general inability with systems and processes in the html world – but the Mechkov website is now very much up and running.

Thanks to the unbelievably patient and imaginative Timothy Read of Ripplenet for the design and tutorials, who, from a few scribbled notes on the inside of a Rizla packet, got the whole thing finished pretty much exactly as I had imagined it. It took a couple of months and I am just so chuffed.

I suppose some people might be thinking ‘why?’ Why would an almost completely unheard of singer songwriter with a penchant for the left-field and the obscure want to fork out the time, money and energy necessary in building and maintaining a website when the chances are no-one is ever going to even visit it, let alone buy anything? In this age of ‘access all music’, why would anyone want to visit an isolated website to listen to music that has had no influence on his or her life, when everything and more is easily available cruising along the mainstream superhighway?

Well, I suppose the ‘because I can’, one-size-fits-all answer fits here, but I also think precisely because of the plethora and dominance of the mainstream in music, whether that is mainstream television (massive cult success of the X-Factor and the like), mainstream rock, metal, pop, R&B, blues, hip hop, garage, trance ambient – whatever – I am certain that there is someone (and maybe only one) out there who is looking for something that he or she simply has not found elsewhere.

The great Robert Fripp, my hero for many and untold reasons, has many aphorisms he uses to provide distilled kernels (er, sorry, mixed metaphor there)… Distilled droplets of understanding – each one capable of being expanded out into whole areas of discussion or explanation and I take pleasure from time to time considering these.

One of them, ‘music will always find a way to its audience’, struck a particular resonance with me and it has become something of a motto. Another one (and I’m probably going to stagger into the realm of paraphrasing here) says: ‘Music so needs to be heard that it sometimes calls upon the most unlikely people to give it voice’.

A further (mis)quote from Fripp is that asking a musician not to play or create music is like asking a pregnant woman not to give birth.

Working Backwards, then… I am not a mightily gifted, talented nor even hard working musician. So much so, in fact, that I have spent many years of my life trying very hard NOT to play music. After the fourth such attempt (from 1997 to 2000) I ended up working in and around the musical instrument industry and finally realised that there was simply no point in trying to evade something that didn’t simply stir me, or stir within me, but it drove me, it compelled me. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, fragments of songs would form and I found myself itching to put something together.

Unlike Fripp, I am not a disciplined person – or rather, I have not been a disciplined person. Certainly not to the nth degree that the people I admire always seem to be (this is one good reason why I kept trying to walk away). As a result, as I have said in previous blogs, I have achieved a level of mediocrity that is almost good enough, but not quite. Because of this, I am the most unlikely person I can think of who should be putting himself out there and making any sort of noises before an unsuspecting public.

So, I feel driven and compelled to make music, despite my (many, various and sometimes quite terrifyingly large) shortcomings. I am thus left with what seems a requirement to try to work out why.

Could it be that at some point – I’m pretty sure it is not in the past, thus I guess it is in the future – the muse that pours this need in me to make music sees the opportunity to say and/or do something that no-one else can or would?

The answer to that question is: ‘I have absolutely no idea’, but it is the only reason that has struck any sort of chord with me, so until I find another chord struck that says something different, I’m going to carry on down the path that will allow my music to be heard. In this day and age, that is a website to feature what I have done to now – and to make space for what I will do in the future.

The next step is a return to performance – and, once again, I have absolutely no idea what form (or forms) that will take, but the empty pubs and clubs of the UK are beckoning and I fell obliged to… Yes, you get the picture…