Back home in the 'hood.

We’re home!

We only just made it – loading up at the Rev G’s house yesterday, we had major major trouble getting everything in to the car, and ended up with TSP’s feet on the dashboard (good job she has feet that are detachable from her legs), and my rack back in the passenger footwell.

The weight of all the stuff had the car sitting pretty low on the back suspension, and I noticed that both of my front tires were pretty worn on the inside edge, suggesting that there’s a tracking issue that really needs sorting out. So, we drove all the way from Edinburgh to London at 60mph. Having a frontwheel blow out at 60 wouldn’t be funny at all, but would have been marginally less dangerous than at 70.

Still, we got here, in one piece (well, once I’d re-attached TSPs feet).

Looking back on the fest, it was a major success, lots of fun, exhausting in a good way, and a chance to meet up with lots of lovely people. I didn’t have a single off-night on the gig, all the audiences seemed to dig the show, even my one ‘bad’ review wasn’t really all that bad and said I was ‘top class’. And on top of that, I sold out an 80 seat venue on the last night, which is no mean feat at the Fringe.

So, we need to start planning for next year now.

Stuff to do now I’m home? Need to get the remaining t-shirts listed in the e-shop here, and send out the orders that are waiting to go. I really need to pay my parking ticket from Edinburgh (which I felt strangely less worried about when looking out at a packed house on Tuesday night.)

I have a gig tonight at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park – not sure quite what I’m going to take with me yet for that one – whether I take the whole set up or just a scaled down mini-rig.

And this afternoon I’m going shopping with Martin and Wes for a new bass for Wes, which is always fun.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I’ve got to sort out the carnage that is my office, so that I can teach in here tomorrow!

Soundtrack – Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’ (this is the first music I’ve listened to in two weeks that isn’t Duncan Senyatso – and for the next week, his will be just about everything I’m listening to, as soon as I get a tape deck rigged up so I can listen to it.)

I think that's called 'going out on a high'

Words I wasn’t expecting to hear at the Fringe ‘hello can I get a ticket for ‘Bass: The Final Frontier?’ ‘no sorry, sir, he’s just sold out’.

Oh yes, a sell out. A rather confusing sellout, given that I’d got lots of comps and given them to friends, not expecting the room to be full at all, so just before I went on stage there were people who had bought tickets who didn’t have a seat… all v. mixed up. My fault. But hey, what a problem to have!

The show went superbly, and loads of lovely people were in tonight – the poetry legend that is Jude Simpson sat in on the show and did a cracking version of Femur (to the tune of Fever), Ronnie Golden was there (his show with Barry Cryer, Little Richard III has just started at the fest, go and see it!), Duncan, Simon and Rise – who I spent a fantastic 5 hours rehearsing with today for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – were there, Jack Cryer, the guys from Rap Canterbury Tales and of course the potty-mouthed Rev G. ‘Twas the perfect way to end a run at the fest, great crowd, I was on form, played well, bantered well, and sold lots of CDs and T-shirts. If you were there, thanks so much.

The CVenues crew in C Central were great to work with – lovely peoples who put up with a lot of crap.

And now it’s finished, and I’m off back to London, to spend the next week and a half teaching and learning the songs for Duncan’s gig at Greenbelt – the rehearsal was amazing, and the best bass lesson I’ve had in years, getting to grips with the African rhythmic stuff that Duncan and Rise were throwing at us. Being on stage with two guitarists that good will be a dream come true. They are both outstanding (Rise Kagona was the guitarist in the Bhundu Boys, one of the first African bands I was properly aware of, thanks to Peelie and Andy Kershaw).

So tomorrow we’re off home, via Berwick to see the family again. It’s been so much fun staying with Gareth and Jane – they are the perfect Edinburgh hosts, and it’s just a shame we’ve seen so little of Jane, as she goes to work before we get up, and is in bed before we arrive back in the middle of the night.

So if you’re still in Edinburgh please go and see the shows I recommended tonight at the show – , , , , , .

And I’ll see you here again next year!

TAGS – , , , .

The eternal edinburgh quandry

the huge problem with the Fringe is that there are so many great shows going on, and so many lovely people whose shows I’d LOVE to see that there’s no way you can get to do everything. What’s even harder is that when your entire team is two people (me and TSP), any time taken off to go to a show is effectively two person-hours of flyering time lost, which at this stage is pretty vital to the show.

So please allow me to apologise in advance to everyone who has invited me to their show that I don’t make it to – it’s genuinely not through a lack of a desire to see you perform, just a logistical impossibility. I am taking notes of the website addresses of productions that I really want to see, so that hopefully I can catch them at a fringe theatre in London at some point. The wealth of talent on display up here is breathtaking. TSP and I keep reading yet more reviews of shows that sound utterly compelling, but unless we added a week onto the end of the run just to watch shows 10 hours a day, there’s no way we’d get round everything we want to see!

Ooh, this was a nice find!

Just been doing a vanity search to see what sites have got my Edinburgh gigs listed, and found this from the Guardian, as one of ‘July’s best jazz, world and alternative music gigs’ –

“THEO TRAVIS featuring ORPHY ROBINSON
Sax man Travis, who effortlessly straddles prog rock, ambient and genuine jazz, has built up a regular creative partnership with bassist and live loopmeister Steve Lawson. Tonight they are joined by the multi-instrumentalist Orphy Robinson, known for his work with Cleveland Watkiss, Jazz Jamaica and Steve Beresford. JLW
The New Vortex, Gillett Street, London N16 8JN”

that’s nice, isn’t it?

Much more productive day today

Today was better – started off with lots of practice, which doubled up as a way to continue experimenting with the laptop looping set up. Am just experimenting with what kind of tolerance the processor has for varying degrees of looping and processing all happening at once and what the optimum buffer size (and therefor latency time) is. It’s a bit of a faff, but I think it’s coming together… Should be able to get something workable soon…

Also managed to get some nice things to wear on stage, and find out how much my programme printing is going to cost – the nice people at The Bass instutute in london sent me their ad through to stick in it, so I now need to put it together with some bio stuff and an ad for my website and online CD shop, and we’re away! That’s probably the main job for this evening.

Anyway, knowing that quite a lot of bloggers read this, I have a cheeky request, which is that you blog about my edinburgh show, and link back to this site – that way it should send a whole load of traffic my way, and get all the Edinburgh-bound readers of your lovely blogs to come and see the show, and then I won’t need to phone you up to beg for food when I lose my shirt on the show, thus posting one blog thingie will save you having to console me on my failed show for hours on end… go on, I dare ya!

the two links you need are to the edfringe.com page for my show – http://www.edfringe.com/shows/detail.php?action=shows&id=BASS where people can get tickets, and to the front page of my website where people can have a listen to some MP3s and find out a little more about the show!

and you can include this picture if you like, too!

thanks!

Another London Tragedy

So it seems that the man shot on the tube yesterday wasn’t in any way connected to the terrorist bombings. Why am I more shaken and fearful as a result of this than the bombing? I feel sick to my stomach to know that an innocent man has been shot in the head by police on the underground. I’m not placing blame – I have no idea how thoroughly the police had followed whatever proceedure their anti-terrorist measures require, or just how unlucky the guy was to fit a profile so exactly that his behaviour ended with him receiving five shots to the head, but right now, I’m seriously freaked out.

And I feel deep sorrow for the policeman who fired the shots. The pain he will be going through is inconceivable. What a dreadful dreadful experience. To act to save a train-full of people and end up with innocent blood on your hands.

A very dark day for London.

The comments on the Guardian newsblog’s post about the shooting are an interesting reflection of the feelings of some londoners.

This is a time when it feels very strange to be this far from home.

Soundtrack – Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’.

italy post no. 3

(written 22/7/05 14.15)

It’s really odd being away from home, and away from fast internet when people are getting shot on the London underground. I sent TSP a text message this morning from the beside the pool, sitting in the sun having just had a lovely swim and a leisurely breakfast, and got one back saying that a guy had been shot dead by plain clothes police on the London underground. That kind of thing messes with your head, big time.

So I got online and had a read about it on the BBC news site, but being back using a dial-up connection was fairly debilitating, and meant I couldn’t find all my usual news blogs etc. (time to get my del.ic.ious page up to scratch so I can get all my links anywhere any time… )

So I’m having a lovely time in Italy – great food, great wine, fantastic company, scintillating conversation, and all the while London is in turmoil, quite understandably.

It’ll be interesting to see if they can find out why the bombs yesterday didn’t go off – one suggestion is that they were made at the same time as the last lot and were somehow out of date by now (dunno if this was some sort of electronic detonation device, or if they included some sort of organic ingredient that had just decayed). Either way, it seems like thursday’s bombs were a really lucky escape for London, and have left a bit of a trail for the phorensic peoples to chase up.

Feel free to email bits of info if you have them!

Soundtrack – right now I’m listening to ‘Grace And Gratitude’ – by some weirdness, I’d not actually sent Luca a copy when it came out (can’t quite believe that, but still!), so I’m playing it to him…

Italy post no. 1

(written on the plane, 21/7/05 18.02)

What a day!

Given the travel fuck-ups in London of late, I decided to leave plenty of time to get to Gatwick for the flight to Italy… Little did I know I’d need every second of the FIVE HOURS that it took to get from Southgate to the airport!

The Picadilly Line is already suspended up where I am, so I had to get the ‘rail replacement bus service’ from Arnos Grove to Seven Sisters (oh yes, I’m going into all the really dull details, just for you lovely bloglings… and cos I’m on a flight with not much else to do!) but when I got to Seven Sisters tube, a little man in an orange jacket (perhaps fresh from Guantanamo) said that the whole Victoria Line was suspended…

At this point, the serendipity of my having just got a new phone (Sony K750i) kicked in, as it has an FM Radio built in. I’d been listening to the mighty Robert Elms on BBC Radio London, and he’d done a quick announcement that something had happened just before I got to the tube, but as I crossed the road to try and get on a bus towards Victoria, the situation started to unfold in a fledgling way. The report came through that three ‘incidents’ had taken place, at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush tube stations, and soon after a fourth incident came through on a bus in Shepherd’s Bush. Radio London switched to rolling news, and kept updating with all the facts and no speculation, and did a remarkable job, which greatly helped with the next installment of my journey, definitely the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me on a bus…

…the radio broadcast is interrupted by my phone ringing, and it’s Muriel Anderson on the other end of the line – it’s always a delight to hear from Muriel and my immediate assumption was that she was coming to England to look for gigs. ‘I’m in Indianapolis, doing a live radio spot, and was wondering if you wanted to talk on air about the bomb situation’…!! I checked to see whether they meant the one from two weeks ago, or todays – not knowing whether news would have filtered as far as Indianapolis – and they confirmed it was today. Fortunately having been listening to the radio I was able to fill them in on all the latest official details, and quash a few rumours about huge explosions and the like… My first ever live international radio interview whilst on public transport, that’s for sure!

The bus proved to be a pretty unreliable way of getting across London – it stopped for over an hour on High Holborn, and then turfed us all out – but with the tube network being pretty much closed, I didn’t have any choice but to sit it out, and watch the three hour margin I’d left myself gradually ebb away. The second bus moved much quicker once we got past Oxford Street, and eventually we got to Victoria, and I made it straight onto the Gatwick Express.

At this point, I want to praise British Airways. my initial idea for this trip was to take my rack on the plane as handluggage, and put my bass in the hold in a foam-flight-case. But I weighed my rack-case this morning and it was 50lbs! Not the kind of thing you can get away with as hand luggage. So the plan switched to taking the bass in a soft case again, and checking the rack, hoping it’ll get through OK (it is packed with all my clothes too, so should be padded OK).

I’m used to having to sweet-talk my bass onto a planes by all means neccesary – starting with chat about favourite shades of nail varnish, moving up to compliments on people’s hairstyles, and culminating in blind panic if it looks like I’m going to have to put a soft case in the hold… At the BA check in desk, not a question was asked. The lovely lady who took the rack from me was fine with me taking the laptop and the bass onto the plane, and was very helpful with labeling up the rack as fragile and getting it hand carried down to the plane. None of the other BA staff questioned me taking the bass on board, and it’s now nestling in the overhead compartment above my head!

So as you can now tell, I made it onto the plane, from whence I write (to be uploaded when I find some delicious Italian WiFi at the other end). I’m sat here, listening to Gillian Welch, sipping tomato juice (why do I only ever drink tomato juice on planes? I really like it!) having just eaten a lovely veggie meal, along with everyone else: BA are smart enough to just serve veggie food to everyone, so there’s no questions about who gets what food! smart as plums.

Anyway, the situation with the ‘incidents’ as I left it in London was that there had been four explosions, all much much smaller than the ones two weeks ago, and that no-one had been killed, and there were very few casualties at all – the only confirmed one being the owner of on of the rucksacks that exploded.

Whoever it was who did it did a rather good job of ballsing up London’s transport for another day, and have probably scared quite a few commuters. I’m just glad that the bombs either malfuctioned or were only detonators with no payload. Enough already with the bombing, please!

…and in that serendipitous way that chance can provide a day’s soundtrack, the track that’s just come on iTunes is John Martyn’s ‘I don’t want to know about evil’ – I don’t want to know about evil, I only want to know about love… I’ll find the lyrics and post them when I find the delicious italian wifi.

Soundtrack – John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

The problem with statistics

Inexplicably, the bombings in London – committed by four British guys – have reawakened the frenzied debate about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

A lot of the papers today have covered the story about the government’s failure to meet their asylum targets – that is, they wanted to be deporting more people than were coming in.

The problem with this is that it gets people thinking about numbers and net gain to the population and about those who are categorised as illegal or legal, as economic migrants (is that what anyone who moves to live nearer to their work is?) or terrorist wannabes, instead of focusing on lives.

So it’s apt that the guardian news blog today re-high-lighted the story of Verah Kachepa, and her four children – whose case made front page news during the last election because some odious lying tory scumbag (that narrows it down to, er, all of them then) doctored a picture of Anne Widdecombe protesting on behalf of the family so that it then displayed some crap about controlled immigration, like so –

So this week, Ms Widdecombe, George Galloway and other are calling for this family to be allowed to stay, once again.

We know their story, we’ve seen them in the press, we’ve heard her interviews. The trouble is, there are thousands of stories like this, and crass government targets gloss over the personal stories of threat and tragedy and torture and persecution and good ole fashioned wanting a better life for your family, in favour of quotas and soundbites and the fear of driving the country to the right by being soft on immigration.

This weekend, I had a long conversation with a whole load of 60+ essex residents, all of whom typified the muddled racist rhetoric of middle england. Lots of talk about the colour of their neighbours, mixed in with the problem with muslims but still acknowledging when challenged that none of the problems were anything to do with race or religion and that just as many people have trouble with antisocial neighbours who are white and british born as those who have trouble with immigrant neighbours. When given the language to unpack their situation, race became far less of a feature in the complaints, but the governments statistical chat is lost on a middle england populus who only tell stories about troublesome neighbours when they are definable as ‘them’.

I really hope the Kachepa family are allowed to stay – to deport them would be inhuman, as inhuman as many of the other deportations that go on to try and keep the quotas met. Quotas are bad enough when we’re talking about traffic wardens dishing out enough tickets. When it comes to whether or not to send someone back to a situation where they face persecution or even death, let’s drop the stats and hear the story. If it means we miss the targets, so what?

Telling us what anyone with half a brain already knew

A report today by Chatham House and the Economic and Social Research Council has reported that Britains involvement in Iraq has put us more at risk from terrorist attacks. It’s what those of us in the anti-war camp have been saying since before the war happened, and it’s been proved time and time again by the terror alerts, and now by the terrible bombing in London on July 7th.

But do the government come clean? Are you kidding? This is the new Labour spin machine at work here. So here’s John Reid to peddle the moronic party line,

“And the idea that somehow by running away from the school bully, then the bully will not come after you is a thesis that is known to be completely untrue by every kid in the playground and it is also refuted by every piece of historical evidence that we have.”

OK, what are the similarities between acts of terror and bullying. Are we talking about big kids attacking small kids for no reason? Er, no. Are we talking about people who want to take the equivalent of our dinner money, or assert their place in some kind of playground heirarchy? Er, no. So the bully analogy means nothing.

You can’t describe a group of people retaliating for a war waged on Arabs as bullies. Their methods are horrific – this isn’t any justification of bombings, suicidal or otherwise – but their motivation is not to grab the UK’s dinner money. It’s the actions of the voiceless. Those who feel for whatever reason, their point is not being heard. Mix that in with a load of crazy exteme fundementalist ranting that gives moral credence to the attacks, and you’ve got a potent cocktail. The answer is not to wage war, but to remove the reasons for war. Bully metaphors are just bollocks.

As usual, Jyoti got there before me, with another fine blog on the same story.

Also a must-read is this week’s cover story in The New Statesman, about the islamic tradition that has spawned the extremists – it’s on the cover story page, but I’ll try and find a more permanent link.

and if you want to read the whole report here’s a link to a PDF of it.

Soundtrack – Edgar Meyer/Bela Fleck, ‘Music For Two’.

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

Top