Little Victories

Curse

Kate Bush is being played on the radio right now. I once said an amusing comment about the re-recorded version of “Deeper Understanding” but I can’t remember what it was.

I’m getting old. We all are.

There are some LV shows coming up. They’re all listed above and take place over the next few weeks. In an ideal world, there is distance between performances in order to encourage you to part with your hard-earned money more readily. If they’re all bunched together, the story goes, one is more inclined to think “I’ll give this week a miss and go to the one in a fortnight”. Maybe that’s true.

After these are done, so are we.

I’m getting old.

There’s something beautiful about a Pavement video being uploaded by someone called “WeezerFan4Ever”.

Maybe there still is good in the world.

DB x

Dispersal

Whilst I was in the shower this morning, I started thinking of answers to questions no-one had asked:

“That’s very kind of you to say so, Jonathan. Well, you’re right but I’ve always liked to call it ‘English approximation of Scottish rock music’”

I had a similar thing last week as I tried to sleep off some jet-lag. I thought it would be a good idea to invite some members of the crowd up to clap along to our last song. But then when we did play to an audience last Friday, as the particular moment in question came and went, I thought that the song was a wee bit sombre for crowd participation. Despite the best (and appreciated) efforts of those in the front row.

Maybe we need a Motown song: “Clap on the 2 and the 4!” We did try a Motown beat once but it didn’t quite work and morphed into the Smashing Pumpkins instead. Our white, distinctly non-soulful roots always betray us.

After spending so many months writing about an impending recording schedule, we finally came through on our promises but we’ve somehow now found ourselves at a slight junction. In the hope of making it sound more interesting than it would be if I simply told you, I can’t go into specifics about either of these roads. Rest assured that, very shortly, you will know about something. And hopefully it will be worth getting excited about.

Still, the more eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed a change around the place which bears secret fruit. New visitors won’t notice this change but benefit all the same. It’s a bit like The Great Escape. I am David McCallum as Ashley-Pitt and I have come up with an ingenious way of getting sensitive materials out under the watchful gaze of those in charge.

Until “very shortly” then, we’re playing a few more shows around the local area. Some late festival things and support performances, that sort of thing. We made our first concerted effort last week for the live show and I think it was a positive response, at least on stage. It’s always nice to feel like everything is a bit more busy and it’s not just you standing in front of a microphone.

The house is starting to get a little bit cold in the evenings now. Previous winters have tested the limits of human and feline endurance so hopefully this one will be a bit more bearable. Somehow, every house we’ve lived in has operated on a gas card.

Even when it is directly uncomfortable, our nostalgia knows no bounds.

DB x 

Entente

I quite like the new LC! track. I really hope that the reason I don’t love it is due to a musical divergence rather than a residual personal bitterness. That’d be really shitty of my subconscious.

We have also recorded stuff. Said ‘stuff’ will probably be available in an undetermined format, within an undetermined time frame.

Apparently we now sound like a Celtic REM/Pulp. Go Figure

BT

Hiatus

Not really. Thank you to everyone who came to our last two shows. We enjoyed both of them.

Now we’re away to record something so we’re not selling ourselves on year-old songs we don’t play anymore. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to this so much all weekend.

“All I want to know is why is he dressed like Roddy Piper?”

Oh man.

DB x 

Ritournelle

LD came back so it’s time to start working [full-time] again. That’s a double entendre seeing as Curb Your Enthusiasm is back on US screens. Just another insight into the personal world of LV. Well, at east one sixth of it.

We’re playing two shows next week as you can see from the “Forthcoming Shows” above. One is our “first” performance aboard the Thekla with Babeshadow and the other is under the guise of the Bristol Harbour Festival. We’re on at 7PM for the latter and entry is free. Those take us up to the end of July and I think we’re going to be recording shortly afterwards which means no performances for a while. I have said that before but this time I mean it.

BT has got into British Sea Power in a big way. Further proof that I don’t just talk about songs I like merely to seem knowledgeable. I’m trying to enrich your life.

Until a month ago, I knew The Sundays because of “Here’s Where The Story Ends”, which I had always considered nothing more than an artifact of the 1990s alternative rock scene. File next to Elastica, that sort of thing. Despite this, I bought Reading, Writing And Arithmetic on an impulse last week and found out I was wrong. Seriously, this album is amazing. I read a description of their sound that was absolutely perfect: the music of The Smiths and the voice of: 

Another impulse purchase. I’d heard “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” on the radio and had grown to like it well enough that I thought I may as well buy an album. The vocals are less unintelligible than on other Twins releases apparently. Liz Fraser does the whole “emotion in her tone” way of singing whereby I have no idea what she’s saying but I can absolutely feel it. 

And here’s something different from female-fronted late 80s alternative rock. LD and I have discussed before about how we’d love to be in a position where we could pick the artists we play with (Lena, Vanessa Carlton). Have I mentioned this before? Anyway, Hall & Oates did this before in 1985 and played some songs with Eddie Hendricks and David Ruffin from the “Classic Five” era of The Temptations.

I got into the solo work of David Ruffin a couple of years ago and consider his version of “I Want You Back” to be untouchable. Lots of people have said that he had one of the best voices in music history and sometimes lots of people are right.

DB x

Cord

LD has gone on holiday to the mythical West Coast of America so, as seems to be the way that we’ve operated for the past few years, we’ve taken the summer off. You might think that some of our songs are probably best listened to during the months where there is some sunshine but we like to take the opposite tack wherever possible. It’s best to play songs about summer in the winter so that everyone thinks how nice it would be to spend a couple of days doing little in parks. It rained today anyway.

When I was at work earlier, feeling down, knowing the endless, shifting rain stood between me and the relative comforts of home, I wanted nothing more than to be riding a bus through San Diego. But now it’s raining outside and I am resolutely inside and I just want to listen to The Sundays and watch the rain drum against the pavement. 

You’ll have to forgive me for using this as an actual diary rather than an effervescent news post. I’ve been reading The Celestial Café by Stuart Murdoch, you see, and it’s giving me nostalgia for when I was fifteen. Back then, blogs and the suchlike were the realms of the Internet-savvy but socially off-centre. Not so much people living in their parents’ basements (as the cliché goes) but university students who listened to Belle & Sebastian and wore corduroy.

I somehow found a group of people that all read and commented on each other’s blogs and I pretty much idolised them. Sadly my frequent attempts to ingratiate into their group just made me seem a bit of a dick but it set my tastes in good stead for when I did enter my twenties. Of course by that point the Internet had gone mainstream and blogs became a series of embedded YouTube videos and pictures of cats (I’m aware of the hypocrisy in this complaint).

For all the good the Internet has given us, that change is something that I’ll have to accept, but there’s a large proportion of people who will never know the pleasure of messing around with PERL and cgi-bins in order to install Greymatter. Anyway, reading that book has made me think about (re)starting a diary blog about life in LV. When we’re off vacation, you understand.

I’ve been using my time off to try and write songs, something I’ve not managed to do properly in 6 years or so. It’s odd to consider song writing as something that you have to practice but I would say it definitely is. Only when you’ve forced a song to completion do ideas start tumbling out. A bit like a blocked tap, I suppose. Probably because of my recent obsession, I’ve not managed to progress far beyond writing songs in major keys and leaning heavily on the chord of A. Sometimes you just have to wake up to the fact that your vocal range is one note.

DB x

Big

Hey guys.

How was your weekend?

We bucked our recent trend by actually playing a show we said we were going to play and had a good time of it. Thanks to everyone who came out and to [The] Goodness and My Friend Friday. We wanted to play some of the new songs we’ve been rehearsing but decided to play it safe and stick to what we know, which led to a fun but slightly unpolished show.

And then we woke up to the news that Clarence Clemons had died and it sucked. No other group has had as much of an impact on Lewis, Ben and I in recent times as that of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Back in my hedonistic days, Ben and I bonded over the Boss and alcohol, whilst Ben used Jungleland as an example when trying to tell Lewis we should have a long song.

Lewis thought the song was boring at the time but changed his mind after seeing them live and now we write songs that try to rip them off. Later in the day, I did some DIY with my dad to celebrate his status in my life. It was pretty much what men do.

Of more interesting note is that, over the course of the two days, I finally watched the Belle & Sebastian documentary that has been sitting on my shelf for 6 or so years. For as long as I can remember, people have always said we’re like Belle & Sebastian and I’ve been left bewildered by the suggestion.

But then I watched the documentary and, hey, they’re actually one of my favourite ever bands, even though I hadn’t realised it. This epiphany also helped answer my own question from weeks ago about describing LV in one sentence: the punk Belle & Sebastian.

It’s funny how things can happen like that.

The only negative aspect is that I could have made Isobel Campbell my teenage crush instead of my early twenties one. What a wasted opportunity.

Due to Glastonbury/business, we’ve not got anything planned for a couple of weeks again so use yr time off wisely.

DB x

Falling

So now we’re actually playing two shows this month. I like to keep you on yr toes by saying we’re not doing one thing and then promptly doing just that. The show on the 18th is very much the standard full-strength squad performing with electricity, under the guise of “hottest new band”. The show on the 14th is a more subdued, 5-a-side affair with LD alone; playing a selection of old, current and new songs on an acoustic guitar in support of Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou.

Elsewhere, we [finally] got a review from 247 Magazine about our Dot To Dot performance. It was positive. Maybe we’re not so bad.

Here’s a song dump of stuff I’ve been listening to in the past week.

The biggest wonder of the past few years is where Sons And Daughters went. The first time I saw them was supporting Franz Ferdinand and I bought some of their merchandise that very night. The second time, Adele liked my Bright Eyes t-shirt. Heady days.

I have become obsessed by Twin Peaks. I watched both seasons a month or so ago as quickly as I could get through them. Best show. It turns shit for a while but the rest is so perfect in every way that it doesn’t matter.

I spent my free weekend enjoying my video game sabbatical and watching classic films (The Red Shoes, North By Northwest) and documentaries I’ve owned for a while but never watched (King Of Kong, Instrument). The ethos of Fugazi is so admirable but it seems like such an American thing to be able to do. The UK is a different beast and, especially in 2011, I just don’t see it being easily emulated.

BT has earned a degree in English Literature. As anyone who has been to a show can attest, his dedication to playing gigs instead of doing work was a valuable asset.

Slowly my life decisions are proving to have been ill-advised.

DB x