Where Worlds Collide

The Cambridge Rock Festival (formerly the Rock and Beer Festival) took place in the unlikely venue of the Wood Green Animal Shelter in Godmanchester, just outside Huntingdon. Given the vagaries of the British excuse for a summer, this one took place in an indoor arena. That turned out to be a large cow-shed like building, whose acoustics were actually a lot better than you’d expect.

With both Mostly Autumn and Breathing Space on Sunday’s bill, along with The Reasoning, whose fan base has a big overlap, the festival saw the biggest gathering of Mostly Autumn fans since the convention last March; an awful lot of familiar faces there, far too many to name, and apologies to anyone I didn’t get the chance to say hello to. Add to that a bar with an extremely large selection of real ales, most of which I’d never heard of, so ordering a beer was a matter of choosing something at random.

Local blues band Taildragger opened the proceedings; competent and tight but rather generic; as a friend of mine remarked, blues bands all tend to sound the same. Bijoumiyo were rather better; a mix of funk and reggae basslines with psychedelic guitar, quite unlike anything else on the bill.

The first two acts played to a largely empty hall; clearly the prog fans had time their arrival to get there in time for Touchstone’s set. I’d seen them a year and a bit ago supporting The Reasoning; frontwoman Kim Seviour’s first ever gig, and that was a somewhat nervous performance. Today they played a confident and energetic set, mostly drawn from their album Discordant Dreams. Probably the proggiest band of the day, but with a hard-rock edge. You could tell they were clearly enjoying their time on stage, and went down well with the growing crowd. I think this performance probably earned them quite a few new fans.

Breathing Space played an absolute blinder. For the biggest gig of their career so far, they rose to the occasion with a superbly tight set, the best band of the first half of the day, helped by having just about the best sound of any band at the festival. There’s little I can say about Breathing Space I haven’t said before; a bit poppy for some tastes, perhaps, showcasing Livvy Sparnenn’s fantastic lead vocals, but there’s still enough instrumental depth to keep prog fans interested. Aside from Livvy, the rest of the band shone too, especially guitarist Mark Rowan. Livvy’s striking mermaid costume was definitely the stage outfit of the day.

John Otway’s pub-rock meets standup comedy shtick isn’t really my cup of tea, I’m afraid, and I missed part of his set in search of food. But I have to say his set closer of The Osmond’s “Crazy Horses” with the theramin solo was entertaining.

The Reasoning’s set was one of the most eagerly awaited of the day’s lineup, their first gig with their new guitarist Owain Roberts. They played strong hard rocking set, mixing favourites from “Awakening”, a great version of the Karnataka oldie “Talk to Me” with several songs from the forthcoming “Dark Angel”, including the prog-metal masterpiece of the title track, and the live debut of one called ‘Call Me God?’. Marillion’s Steve Rothery guested with them for “Within Cold Glass”. They did suffer from more than a few technical glitches and sound mix problems, which took the edge off things slightly, which meant they didn’t quite top Breathing Space’s earlier set.

I felt sorry for Jim and Geoffrey. As an acoustic duo (guitar and violin) they struggled to hold the attention of an audience that had been rocked out by the previous band, and despite being quite good, they died horribly. I’d love to see them in a small club venue, where might make more of an impression.

If the number of t-shirts was anything to go by, Mostly Autumn had the greatest fan support of any band on the bill. So many people were seriously annoyed when they got half-an-hour lopped off their set because the following band apparently insisted on having a whole hour to set up rather than the half-hour everyone else had. To make matters worse, problems with Bryan’s guitar setup delayed the start, so the band ended up playing for just 40 minutes or so, to the intense disappointment of both the band and their legion of fans. But for that short set the band were absolutely on fire; a storming ‘Fading Colours’, a really intense ‘Unoriginal Sin’ and a fantastic ‘Heroes’. Heather’s stage outfit certainly caused one or two jaws to drop; wearing a catsuit when seven month’s pregnant took some courage. Had they had the opportunity to play their originally planned setlist they would have been the band of the day without question.

In contrast, Andy Fairweather Low was the nadir of the day. As someone who’s had a few hits aeons ago, and had since been an anonymous sidesman of other people, he had neither the charisma nor the material to play such a long set this high on the bill. His interminably long set seemed to consist mainly of 50s and 60s covers, with perfunctory takes on his few hits. As someone it’s probably better not to name said “Who wants to listen to this wank? Just because he’s been on Later with Jools Holland”. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Music for chin-stroking Mojo readers perhaps, not not music for the sort of Rock fans who made up this audience.

And so, headliners Marillion. A band I’ve been a fan of for longer than members of some bands lower down the bill have been alive, playing a 90-minute festival set. To be truthful this wasn’t in the same league as the two awe-inspiring shows I saw in 2007; still good, but lacking the sort of intensity I’ve seen in past gigs. H was on fine form despite evident lack of sleep due to being the father of a five week old baby. “Sleepless nights, very rock and roll”, as he said. I’d love to have seen Heather’s and Ian’s reaction to that line! They played what amounted to a greatest hits set of the post-Fish era, favourites like ‘Easter’, their recent hit ‘She’s Gone’, ‘Afraid of Sunlight’, ‘King’ and the encore ‘Neverland’. Still very good, but for me at least failed to top the Mostlies, despite their truncated set.

While what happened to the Mostlies put a bit of a damper on an otherwise great day, in the end the event was bigger than any individual band. The whole festival had a relaxed air, members of many of the bands mingling with fans throughout the day, helped by the fact that there was no backstage bar. And there seemed to be no egos involved, with one possible exception. That laid-back approach probably would not have worked at a bigger festival, but here it added to atmosphere; the whole thing felt like a fan convention of sorts. It made me wish I’d camped and made a weekend of it.

Mermaid Kiss explain their concept behind their current work-in-progress album American Images. Yes, they’re a prog band - an album’s got to have a concept.

Although I have never been to America, I have a good idea of what it’s like. In my head are cities, deserts, buttes, mountains, canyons, houses, cars, people, lakes, rivers, lots of empty space. And roads. Especially roads.

Evelyn’s never to been to America either. I harbor a desire to sling a couple of guitars in the back of a beat up Buick (it wouldn’t have to be a Buick, anything distinctly American would do) and play our way across the USA, taking our time, stopping off whenever and wherever we feel - staying as much as possible on the back roads where we believe the real heartland of America lies.

This fantasy, is, of course, fueled by watching far too many US road movies with evocative soundtracks… As we planned our imaginary journey from picturesque Boston to the bright lights of New York, down via the Appalachian Mountains where time stands still, and on to the steamy South (ours is to be no straight ‘coast to coast’ trip), it dawned on us that the America we were driving through is the America of films and of music - an America uncorrupted by reality.

They’ll be telling me they’ve never actually been to Etalis next.

I’ve only been to America on business trips to Atlanta, GA, back in the days before George Bush and the War on Terror. I have no desire to go there now. To me, America resembles a gigantic version of Milton Keynes. Not quite sure if that’s quite what Mermaid Kiss are after.

On the other hand, what about the HO-scale Americas built by various Americanophile railway modellers in Britain?  I’m thinking of things like the small crumbling small prairie town of Godinez, Iowa, featured in the July issue of Continental Modeller.  Or all those grain elevators (every layout seems to have one).

It’s only July, and gigs for October and November are getting seriously silly.

October sees a bad crunch of gigs; I’d planned to catch two of The Reasoning’s dates, Crewe and either Cardiff or London. Now I find that the Saturday night London show clashes with Karnataka in Rotherham, which is the only one of their short tour that I can easily get to. And to end an exhausting weekend, Breathing Space play Crewe Limelight on the Sunday. It could theoretically mean four gigs in four days.

And to cap it all, Panic Room will be touring in October, but have yet to announce any dates.

November sees Marillion, Fish (with The Reasoning as support), Uriah Heep, Opeth and Mostly Autumn all on the road in the same two-week period - there are already two bad clashes

4 days to go to the Cambridge Rock Festival, where Sunday night’s bill stars Marillion, Mostly Autumn, The Reasoning and Breathing Space, of whom I have said a lot in this blog, along with Andy Fairweather Low, “Jim and Bob from Caravan”, John Otway, Touchstone and a couple of other bands of which I know little.

Should be a truly progtastic day.

Did I also mention there are a lot of good beers (none of this nothing but overpriced Carling nonsense)?

I’ve never been a unadvertised private invite-only gig before.

Although I’ve already seen Breathing Space four times this year, and it meant missing the first day of Stabcon, I felt this benefit show for the brain tumour charity Andrea’s Gift was something I just had to go to. Especially when I’d been personally invited.

It had a very different feel to a regular gig; I guessing everyone there knew Howard Sparnenn; a lot of family friends, although there were quite a big group of Breathing Space fans, with just about all the regulars present. Two big screens either side of the stage shows a series of pictures of Howard, ranging from recent gig photos to holiday snaps from years ago, which served to remind us of why we were here.

I estimated there were about two hundred people there, I’m told they sold all the tickets, and raised more than £3000 for charity. The downside was the with a lot of people there not being fans of the music, the gig was marred slightly by a lot of talking when the band were playing - Livvy Sparnenn actually had to ask people to be quiet at one point. I’m sorry to say that two individuals I won’t name but were both firmly in the ’stoat eyed acolyte’ camp were among the worst offenders.

Breathing Space played two sets, with much the same setlist as they’d been playing this year, with the addition of the cover of “Autumn Leaves”, specially requested by Livvy’s mum Jeanette. Between the two sets we saw a one-off reunion of Howard’s 70’s band Flight, a blues-rock four-piece playing a mix of originals and covers, including some of Howard’s songs.

I’d noticed the whole of Mostly Autumn were present in the audience; in fact Heather Findlay was sitting right next to me during Breathing Space’s second set, making me wonder if I should really have worn that Marillion t-shirt to the gig. I wasn’t expecting The Mostlies to take to the stage for a couple of numbers, the very appropriate “Faerytale” and “Heroes”.

Finally Breathing Space returned for their now-traditional encore of “The Gap Is Too Wide”. When I first heard this live, I wondered whether they could really do the song justice without the choir for the end section, but they’ve made it work with the (very prog) big walls of Mellotron.

Musically this was definitely Livvy’s night, a very emotional performance which must have been very difficult to do, especially songs like “Belief” and “On the Blue Horizon”. One of the band spoke to me afterwards telling me how much he agreed with my Amy Winehouse post. While I didn’t name any names in that post, we both knew who I meant.

As reported in The Guardian Music Blog

“ORGAN2/ASLSP As Slow aS Possible“, a 4.07 metre-long score which would stretch to an estimated 47,000 kilometres in its elongated form, originally took a mere 29 minutes and 15 seconds to perform when it was premiered in 1987. Believe it or not, it has become one of the most talked about events of the German cultural calendar. The weekend’s change to C4-A flat4 which happened at precisely 3.33pm, attracted about 1,000 spectators including Cage fans.

The church has been forced to erect a Perspex sound barrier outside after complaints from neighbours who say the tone which plays uninterrupted until the next change, was hard to bear. There have been periods of silence - for instance an 18-month pause until February 5 2003 - which came as a welcome relief to some.

Those who missed the latest event may journey to Halberstadt on November 4 2008, when a further tone change is to sound. And in several years’ time, one note will sound for 58 years without a break - organ specialists will be on hand to ensure the organ is robust enough to handle the strain.

When I first read this, my reaction was that this sounded like something out of the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. It would be the sort of thing all the rage in the Pseud cluster. Probably the Syrian Cybernetics Corporation customer complaints line would play it while you were kept on hold.

But apparently this is for real…

This is clearly deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against the fact that the avant-garde has a terminal case of cranio-rectal insertion syndrome.

Update: One blogger seems to be taking exception to what I’ve said, and considers me a philistine.

I reject the idea that only an elite priesthood of anointed critics are allowed to comment on any work of art. I have as much right to question the validity of Cage’s 600+ year long piece as a Guardian hack scribbler has the right to dismiss a generic indie band.

When an artist who produces something inherently ridiculous, nobody should be surprised when it becomes the subject of ridicule.

I didn’t see Amy Winehouse’s Glastonbury set on BBC2, and I’m not sure I really want to. I’m not particularly a fan, and by all accounts it was a car-crash; a shambling performance from an anorexic drug addict too drunk to perform properly.

Of course, it was predictable that some third-rate NME hack would proclaim it a work of genius. This toxic little squit appears to imply that it’s necessary for someone to be that screwed-up in order to produce great art, and anyone that disagrees is ‘Daily Mail’.

He claims she “is an icon because she can articulate pain and heartbreak through her songs”. I’ve seen more than one person articulating genuine pain and heartbreak through their songs in the past year and a bit, and not one of them is screwed-up drug addict that will be dead within a year if they don’t clean up.

This post is turning into a bit of a rant, I’m afraid. But I have complete contempt for people that idolise such self-destructive behaviour, or voyeuristically gawp at it.

Psycho Chicken has let loose the Seven Songs meme again.

1. Mostly Autumn - Tearing at the Faerytale
2. Mostly Autumn - Unoriginal Sin
3. Blue Öyster Cult - Astronomy
4. Fairport Convention - Tam Lin
5. Breathing Space - The Gap Is Too Wide
6. Opeth - Burden
7. Uriah Heep - What Kind of God

Four out of the seven are songs I’ve seen live recently, in some cases more than once.  And yes, I know I’ve listed one song by the band that have been playing it live, not the band that originally recorded it.

Blue Öyster Cult are my favourite American band. In recent years they’ve come over to the UK every couple of years. Last time they came over was 2006, so I figured they must be due over again this year. And lo! a tour was annouced! Last time I said to myself I’d try and get to multiple dates, but in the end Manchester turned out to be the only one I could make. The gig moved from the smaller Academy 3, where they’d played last time, to the larger Academy 2. I asked the doorman how many tickets they’d sold, and he told me they’d sold 600 in advance, half again the capacity of Academy 3, which explains why they moved it.  If it wasn’t completely sold out, it was a pretty good crowd; and enthusiastic too; who was the guy behind me shouting for “The Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle in Wessaria”? Beats “Grendel” at Marillion gigs, I suppose.

I was underwhelmed by support band Rolling Thunder.  Instrumentally they were pretty tight, and their guitarist, though a bit too much of a showoff, had good chops.  Unfortunately their frontman was a far better poseur than a singer, and they suffered from a critical lack of memorable songs.

With Allen Lanier absent due to ill-health, this tour saw Danny Miranda return on bass, with previous bassist Richie Castellano moving over to rhythm guitar and keys. As you’d expect from the last night of a tour, they were pretty tight, Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma on great form vocally, and Buck reeling off some wonderful solos, reminding me just why I rate him so highly as a guitarist.

BÖC always vary their setlists a lot from tour to tour, and even night to night, and you never know quite what they’re going to play, they always manage to throw in some surprises. This was a great setlist; opening with “This Ain’t the Summer of Love” and “Career of Evil”, we got personal favourites of mine, “Shooting Shark” and “The Golden Age of Leather”. And Astronomy.

Astronomy is my favourite BÖC song, in fact one of my favourite songs by any band. Although it’s always been regularly rotated in and out of the setlist, I’ve never heard them play it live on the five previous occasions I’ve seen the band. So I’ve waited for 28 years to hear this song live. So when I heard that opening guitar figure and a huge cheer went up.

Occasionally hearing a favourite song after a long wait can be an anticlimax. This wasn’t. The version they played was utterly spellbinding, with Buck Dharma playing what might well have been the best extended solo I’ve ever heard him play.

They closed the set with the usual standards, “Godzilla”, complete with bass solo, drum solo, and a brief Queen medley, and of course “Don’t Fear the Reaper”.

Sadly the strict curfew meant the band couldn’t come back for an encore, which left what had been a great evening ending a little flat. But that was soon forgotten; it was still a fantastic gig; they may be old, they may not have released a good record for ages, but they still rock live.

Another Mostly Autumn tour has come to an end. This time I managed to get to six dates, two of which I’ve previously reviewed in full on this blog.

The band had gone through a lot of personnel changes from last years spring tour - gone were Gavin Griffiths and Chris Johnson, busy touring with Fish, and Angie Gordon, taking an extended career break following the birth of her daughter at the end of last year. We saw the welcome return of Liam Davidson and Iain Jennings, Anne Marie Helder continuing in the role she took on from Angie at the end of last year, and welcomed the new drummer Henry Bourne. The new version of the band gelled pretty quickly. I really hadn’t realised how much I’d missed Iain’s keyboard playing until he was back; whether it was that Hammond solo on “Never the Rainbow”, or the delicate piano playing on a great many songs. Same with Liam; while having just the one guitar last year gave Bryan more space, having two guitars does make for a much bigger sound. Liam’s not really a rhythm guitarist as such, while he doesn’t play much in the way of solos, much of what he plays is lead runs, often doubling up with Bryan.

Anne-Marie Helder has really fitted in well; she’s a very different personality to Angie Gordon; one of the strongest images I have of this tour is Anne Marie really going for it on the tambourine during “Never the Rainbow”. The choice of songs meant she didn’t play as much flute as Angie did last year; but her contributions as a backing singer were very prominent.

Henry Bourne is a fantastic drummer. The two drummers last year, Gavin Griffiths and Andy Jennings, had different strengths; but Henry seems to combine the best of both; he’s powerful when the songs needs it; can do complex stuff when required, but never overdrums with over-ornate fills when it’s not appropriate. For this band and their music, he’s perhaps the best drummer I’ve seen with the band. And he’s a really nice guy as well.

And hats off to Heather Findlay, six months pregnant by the end of the tour. Playing a two hour show singing lead must be very hard work in her condition, but she sang flawlessly throughout the tour. And she still manages to look fantastic.

I wasn’t at the very first show, at Bilston, although I’ve heard it said that they were a bit rusty in the first half, and took a while to get going. I did get to the second, in Gloucester, and that one was an absolute blinder. Leicester was shortly after the sad death of Howard Sparnenn, and the band were rather subdued that night for obvious reasons. The next one in Crewe was the weakest of the tour, where poor sound and a lot of niggling technical problems took the edge off things. Eight days later in Bury the band were firing on all cylinders again. A couple of weeks later in Lincoln was the best one I saw on the tour; a superbly tight and emotionally intense performance helped by a crystal clear sound mix. The final date at the brand new venue in Stocksbridge just outside Sheffield was another good one, apart from a few niggling problems with the venue (and a bad case of gig talkers - who in their right mind pays 15 quid to see a band then loudly discusses the football with their mates?).

Apart from a couple of changes very early on, they stuck to the same setlist all tour, the only changes being in the running order, with the piano ballad “Above the Blue” alternating between the later part of the second set, and the first encore. While I’d love to have heard more songs from the new album “Glass Shadows”, I have to admit this was a very strong setlist indeed - it was lovely to hear “Simple Ways” and “Another Life” from the previously-neglected “Passengers” album. They’ve rested a few oldies, such as “The Dark Before the Dawn”, and only a couple of songs from “Heart Full of Sky” remain in the set.

It’s difficult to pick out highlights; that superb “Carpe Diem” at Bury, “Unoriginal Sin” which grew and grew in intensity as the tour went on; some real lump-in-the-throat versions of “Tearing at the Faerytale” and “Heroes Never Die”. Even oldies like “Nowhere to Hide” and “Spirit of Autumn Past” seem to have gained a lot of power on this tour, especially towards the end.

Those who wrote the band off because they didn’t like “Heart Full of Sky” don’t know what they’ve been missing.

It’s another five weeks until their appearance at the Cambridge Rock Festival, which will be their list appearance before Heather goes on maternity leave. I’m guessing there won’t be an extended spring tour next year other than the limited number of dates in February.

See you at Cambridge!