the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
All the latest news about musical goings-on…
Thanks SO much to everyone who came out to the show at Tower Of Song with Jem Godfrey and Andy Edwards. We had a great time, and were delighted with the audience reaction.
Recordings will be available soon in some form or other, but for now, here are some gorgeous photos, taken by Rob Groucutt, to give you a flavour of what it was like 🙂
Following on from last week’s lovely gig with Julie Slick and Andy Edwards, I’ve got TWO more Sunday night gigs at Tower Of Song in Birmingham coming up:
August 10th : Jem Godfrey, Steve Lawson, Andy Edwards – Jem’s band is Frost* (which Andy used to be in), he’s also played keyboards with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. If that wasn’t enough, he’s an Ivor Novello award winning songwriter, writing massive hits for Shane Ward, Atomic Kitten, Holly Vallance… He’s very, very good at whatever area of music he turns his hand to, so expect amazingness. [Ticket Link] -0- [Facebook link]
August 17th : Lobelia’s Lazy Sundays presents Briana Corrigan + Steve Lawson – Briana was the original vocalist in the Beautiful South, sang on all the early hits. Since then, she’s released two wonderful solo albums, written and performed in plays and a one woman show called ‘Mum’s The Word’. She’s properly brilliant, and I’m VERY excited to see what we come up with together… the plan is to write/arrange/rehearse/plan a show in 3 days. There’ll definitely be songs, music, maybe some spoken word stuff, story-telling, poetry… who knows. It’s going to be lovely, and you need to be there. [Ticket Link] -0- [Facebook Link]
So, two in a row. Very different, but equally magical, I promise.
And if you’re wondering what you missed last Sunday, here’s some lovely video of the opening 12 minutes of the show (it’s shot in HD so choose the 1080p option and watch it full-screen!) :
See? Loveliness. 🙂
This is getting silly, right? It’s the summer of new albums for me, that’s for sure.
First Diversion, then Tangents with Murphy and Andy, now this…
What’s this? Well, it’s an album called Marinate by me and Julie Slick. It’s 35 minutes of bass duets, all improvised. A little bit mellow, a little bit odd, generous helpings of melody and niceness…
One track was recorded back in April, and the rest were recorded last Saturday. We’ve been playing together now for about 4 years – it’s taken time for us to find the right place where our sounds meld in the right way, hence Marinate. 🙂
A couple of the tracks are on Soundcloud.
Here’s one:
So how does one get this album? That’s the fun bit. You can’t just buy it. Nope…
It’s only available for free to anyone who has bought my latest album, Diversion, and Julie’s latest album Fourth Dementia.
If you send me a link to your Bandcamp Fan Account with both albums listed, I’ll send you the download code. You can post the link in the comments here, Tweet it to me, stick it on Facebook… Just let me see it, and I’ll send you the code for free.
Sounds good, eh? Go get ’em.
Yup, just as you were thinking “it’s been DAYS since an album came out with Steve on!” the latest one appears…
Those of you who are semi-regular readers here will know that Andy Edwards and I have been playing together a lot over the last year – Andy’s a highly respected prog/rock drummer with a jazzer’s heart – so we’ve set about putting ourselves in numerous improv situations, from just us as a duo, to the upcoming shows with Julie Slick and Jem Godfrey.
One of those improv situations that arose was with Murphy McCaleb. Or Dr Murphy McCaleb, to afford him the title his PhD in Performance Studies from the Birmingham Conservatoire gives him (“ooh la la!” says Moss…) – Murphy plays bass trombone. Very well, as it happens, and has developed an increasing interest in improvised music and processing the sound of his trombone over the last year.
So we went into the studio at college and recorded a load of music – two trio pieces, one bass/trombone duo and one drums/trombone duo. It’s pretty adventurous stuff, at times achingly beautiful, at others gnarly and scary. Definitely worth putting on decent headphones/speakers.
Of note is that I also mastered it. So it naturally sounds very lush indeed 🙂
Have a listen, and if you like it, you can buy it and tell your friends about. That’s how it works, right?
Right, gig news! Some REALLY exciting collaborations coming up – here are the three I can tell you about now. All of them are at Tower Of Song, in Birmingham, UK, and all will, of course, be recorded:
August 10th – with Jem Godfrey and Andy Edwards :: [tickets] Jem is a true musical genius and original. There’s pretty much no-one else who fronts a massive and widely respected prog band AND writes world-traversing ginormous pop hits for the likes of Atomic Kitten and Holly Valance! Jem’s band is Frost*, who Andy used to drum for, and we’re SO excited to be playing an evening of improvised music with him. Don’t miss this!
Special Offer:
Tickets for the Julie AND Jem gigs for just £14 (£3 off)
Then, the week after the gig with Jem, something else VERY special:
Yup! Julie‘s back at the end of July, and we’re doing another gig – Julie, me and the wonderful Andy Edwards on drums. This is the beginning of a new series that Andy and I will be hosting – Andy, Steve + 1, tentatively called ‘Steve and Andy’s New Curiosity Shoppe’… August’s show will be announced ASAP…
Anyway, details for the gig with Julie:
[gigpress_shows scope=upcoming artist=17 limit=1]
And here’s all the music that’s currently public from the last time we played together. Enjoy!
…here it is! I’ve been really looking forward to sharing this with you. It’s a 21 minute, 2 song live set from me and double bassist Jon Thorne (from Lamb). It was recorded at the London Bass Guitar Show in March, and I’m massively proud of it:
Some things that you might like to know:
It’s turning into a veritable film festival round here – video #2 for this week went online last night – a demo of three MXR bass effects pedals, and the new Dunlop Super Bright bass strings that I’ve recently started using.
The video itself is about 10 minutes of playing using the effects in various combinations and settings – 1001 sounds (give or take a few) by combining the three effects in different ways (though I didn’t actually change the order!) – it’s pretty long, but is fairly comprehensive in terms of the range of sounds that I use from these three pedals…
The string demo part is most obvious right after the ambient pad part is laid down at the start – the first bit of playing is just my bass through my ever-present Markbass MiniDIST pedal that acts as my preamp, with a little bit of reverb from my Lexicon. That’s my ‘neutral’ sound. If you’re pretty familiar with my sound, you’ll perhaps hear the difference from my old strings – more bite, more clarity low down on the neck… What’s not possible to show on a video is the FEEL of the strings. They just feel great. I’d been using my previous string brand for over 20 years, happily, and was reluctant to even try anything new, but after giving these a try, I’m hooked.
enjoy!
Right, I’ve had a busy couple of days, working on a new cover version. Lobelia and I were talking on Saturday afternoon about which REM song we’d like to cover. The logical answer was ‘all of them’ – way too many great songs to be able to choose. When we got home, I decided to have a go at Orange Crush as my start-point. I played it through once to work out how it goes, and recorded the 2nd time – that’s here:
Then today, I thought I’d do a version for video, and that’s here:
Compare and contrast! It’s a pretty good example of where my bass sound is heading – the layered overdrives and all the gnarly goodness they bring is there in full effect, as well as the more edgy, forceful tone of these lovely new Dunlop Super Bright Strings that I’ve got on that bass. I love them!
More new music a week today – that’s when Diversion is released!
Right, first up, here’s a new thing I recorded this morning, as a tribute to the great Gerry Goffin who died yesterday. He was one half of one of the all-time great songwriting teams, along with Carole King. They wrote SO many amazing songs, but I picked ‘I’m Into Something Good’ to reinterpret for my tribute:
Now, the new album is out on July 1st, is called Diversion, Â and comprises two long duo pieces with double bass genius Jon Thorne, recorded live at the London Bass Guitar Show this year, the first time we’d ever played together.
Jon, as bassist with Lamb, has been a bass hero of mine for many many years, and his own album, Watching The Well, written for Danny Thompson, is outstanding. I’m SO happy with this music, and am looking forward to playing shows with Jon. Here’s the artwork for the album. It’ll be at http://music.stevelawson.net on July 1st!
