The very talented Julian Friers was one of a number of artists giving a painting demonstration at Flowerfield Arts Centre last week, as part of an evening designed to promote the Royal Ulster Academy. I had a bird's eye view from the balcony and I couldn't resist putting pencil to paper as he painted up a superb piece of work while talking about his techniques in front of a live audience. Now that's entertainment...
A playlist for Easter break
Despite the cold weather, there's the chance of a few days off for Easter and the sun is shining here and there, and I feel the oncoming rush of spring. I want some stimulating, uplifting tunes.
Here's my suggestion of ten tracks to put in the car and hit the road for the day, with a picnic, a pair of shades and a blanket.
Hey! Make some extra suggestions and drop me a line...
- Come Go With Me - The Staple Singers
- This Charming Man - The Smiths
- Mr. Wendal - Arrested Development
- Free Falling - Tom Petty
- Move On Up - Curtis Mayfield (above, right)
- 1-2-3-4 - Feist
- Helplessly Hoping - Crosby Stills & Nash
- Waiting in Vain - Bob Marley
- Easy - The Commodores
- My Baby Just Cares for Me - Nina Simone
Bad reception
This poor little telly was abandoned on the pavement on the Sydenham Road in Belfast. Andrea and I were out cycling and I couldn't resist a snap as I passed.
I know, I know - it's a lump of plastic, glass, microchips, switches and wires. But the simple addition of a little 'sad face' sticker makes me worry about it being out in this weather.
Songs on the Freeway
Do you ever have those nights when you lie down to sleep and a million images revolve in front of your eyes like confetti in a hurricane? That’s Austin. Looking through snapshots and notes, I can’t believe we packed so much into such a short space of time.
Ben and Anthony at Bird'sWe had two showcases – Belfast Rocks, in which Strait Laces, And So I Watch You From Afar, General Fiasco and Fighting With Wire pinned everyone to the back wall of Club Latitude 30 with fiery blasts of energy and attitude. And then a few days later, our more gentle Belfast Unplugged night at Bird’s Barber Shop on 6th Street.
On that night I took to the stage alongside songwriters Ben Glover, Eilidh Patterson and The Lost Brothers. Our special guests were legendary Canadian songwriter Lynn Miles and the wonderful Ron Block, best known as guitarist and banjo player with Alison Krauss and Union Station.
Various figures from the music scene networked, drank beer, applauded warmly and nibbled on chicken while we did our thing. We went on stage and came back off, then went up and came back off, each time swapping business cards and trying to find someone who would be interested in pushing us up on to the next rung of the business. And some of those present were angling to turn US into THEIR customers. It was hard to tell who was hustling who in the end.
In between, we attended panel discussions on marketing, digital distribution, publishing… Some of them were dazzling, a few were baffling. The whole world was there selling, hustling, handing out free samples, downloads, invitations… By the end of the week the streets were awash with fliers, promotional guitar picks, wristbands and badges. And everyone under the age of 30 looked like this (see left).
I’m not sure, when all is said and done, if SXSW is the place for a 40-something solo singer songwriter without the logistic support of management or a major label deal. I had a meltdown on the third day and walked across the River to the Bohemian jungle of South Congress and got lost for a few hours.
I felt a little like I was standing on the side of the freeway, holding my songs out to speeding cars. Throwing them over walls of houses where dangerous dogs barked. Slipping them under doors of hotel rooms where other people were having a party.
But we did our best - we smiled and shook hands with everyone we met. We played our hearts out when we got the chance and we gave our promotional material to anyone who asked for it. We tried to match our material with the right people. We saw some amazing performances and some total bores. I imagine it’s the same for everyone who goes to SXSW. This enormous flurry of activity. It’s hard to tell at the time if you're generating anything but heat and light. And by the time you work it out, it's too late to do anything about it.
But hey - as The Hold Steady tell us, you gotta stay positive. With the final roll of the dice, I was headed back for the hotel on the last night and I ran into a fairly high profile songwriter outside the Continental Club. He remembered me from a show we had done in Belfast last year and I talked about the possibility of working together on some songs. Without hesitation, he gave me his phone number and asked me to call him - to set up a meeting the next time I was back in Nashville. That kind of thing never happens if you don't show up in the first place. How ironic, though, that the last conversation I have at SXSW… should point me back to Tennessee.
The high points:
- Smokey Robinson’s keynote address
- Poking my head into the room when Cheap Trick were being interviewed
- Sitting 12 feet from Freedy Johnston as he sang songs from his new album
- Meeting Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby and a real guru
- Seeing Ian McLagan and the Bump Band at the Lucky Lounge
Letter from Texas via Nashville
I look out my hotel window at rain on the Red River and realise I’m coming down with the cold that has been dogging our party since we landed in the States.
It’s been a really exciting trip, and hard work – and exhausting, to be honest. I tried really hard to put a structure on my Nashville week, but opportunities and exciting things kept bouncing across my path and it seemed stupid not to chase them.
Nashville is a classic example of how the heart of the American city has moved to the outskirts – I took a walk from the hotel down to Broadway on my second day. I was thinking – I’ll get a coffee shop and read for an hour and relax. But it was a depressing mile and a half of car showrooms, office suites, vacant lots and parking garages. And I met no-one. Everyone was in their cars, looking out at the walking guy. What’s he doing?
There are a couple of neighbourhoods up near Vanderbilt University and in Hillsboro with interesting coffee shops and boutiques. But downtown is business, apart from the strip of neon-soaked entertainment that is Broadway. You hit Broadway and it’s a strip of honky tonk bars that are pure tourist heaven – lots of fantastic neon and loud live music, played by some of the finest pickers and singers you’ve ever heard. Hit Broadway at one in the morning and it’s like a war zone – rednecks and rubbernecks and zombies all thumping into each other and going from bar to bar looking for each other, calling cell phones that nobody can hear.
On the other side, we were invited to the homes of some of the people who nurture the Sister Cities relationship between Belfast and Nashville, and they’re the kind of Dream Home properties you see in international House and Garden magazines – steeped in family history, filled with heavy-looking antiques and cut glass. We’ve been so well treated – these people know how to put on a spread. I tasted my first grits and overdid it on the country ham.
Breakfast wasn’t included at our hotel, so the musicians and the people from Belfast City Council would eat every morning at a fantastic diner called Noshville, a couple of blocks from our hotel. I miss it already. We’ve grown up with America as a movie that rolls all the time inside our head, and suddenly you walk down a street and find yourself on set, sitting at the counter in a diner ordering eggs and sausage and a side of toast.
And someone pointed out a wonderful second hand record shop close to the hotel – a fantastic place called The Great Escape, so I’ve picked some old Randy Newman, some Rickie Lee Jones and Steve Forbert, etc. My poor suitcase is groaning already.
The most important things I achieved in Nashville were a couple of co-writes with well-known Nashville songwriters Kent Agee and Pat Alger. Kent and I got a start on something we both thought was very strong, and we’re in the process of finishing it. Pat and I, over the course of a couple of mornings, got a song finished which we were both very happy about. And I met quite a few other interesting writers who have invited me back to work with them. Which is very encouraging.
I also had a meeting with the Nashville Songwriters Association, who gave me some useful advice on writing and the business in general. And I performed and hung out with the four songwriters who are over here from Belfast – Gareth Dunlop (deep soul roots), Iain Archer (tunes that look delicate but which could knock down buildings), Ricky Warwick (big hearted anthems that slam out to the back wall) and Aaron Shanley (pretty and affecting songs about young love with awkward elbows). I’ve put some pictures from the Nashville trip up on the gallery if you want to take a look. All four took part in a showcase gig at the Belcourt at which they shone bright alongside some of the most revered names in Nashville songwriting – Pat Alger, David Olney, Elizabeth Cook and Bobby Bare Junior.
A chance meeting with the lovely John Briggs from ASCAP resulted in a roadtrip for Ralph McLean and I down to Muscle Shoals in Alabama, to visit the fabled Fame studios, where everybody from Aretha and The Staple Singers to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon recorded. Again, there’s a gallery of pictures from the visit up on the website. The studio remains pretty much as it has been since the seventies. It’s one of the brownest places I’ve ever been – if The Last Waltz had been turned into a studio, it would look like Fame – wood veneer, brown carpet, beige wallpaper, brown sofas. There’s an unmistakeable presence in the place – you can sense the ghosts of greatness.
We stopped off at Big River Broadcasting and met Gerry Philips, son of Sam Philips of Sun Records, who signed Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis... And I sat on the porch of WC Handy’s old home. The Father of the Blues. I’m a distant relation come to pay homage.
There was one last inspiring encounter. John took us to meet two old friends, a pair of artists who live in a dazzling, cavernous apartment above a shop in the centre of Tucumbia. Audwin McGee is a painter, a blogger, he works in sculpture and installation and architectural design. The apartment is huge and open plan, so there’s a canvas-in-progress set up in one corner with dustsheets all over the floor, a piano in another corner, a large open fire hearth and some comfy old chairs and sofas, a vast dining table covered with work in progress and artwork all over the walls. His architectural work on shop fronts in Tucumbia is transforming the town. He and his wife Sandi Stevens, a gymnast-turned-designer who has a range of clothes called Can You Say Geronimo, are at the centre of a growing artistic community in this small town, and they host dinner parties, evenings of readings and music to help it thrive. I was immensely impressed and a little jealous. People like this move me every time – they make me want to sketch and write and sing and make things. And never stop evolving and creating.
And then it was a crack-of-dawn cab ride to the airport and down to Austin, where I’m about to register this morning for the South by South West Music Festival – four days of mad networking, business contacts and performance. It’s a wonderful city, even in the rain, and the streets are full of freaks, geeks and trend setters of all kinds. The last couple of days have been the multi-media events, so everyone is walking around with iPhones and blackberries, carrying laptops and handhelds. It’s kind of funny. I keep waiting for them to walk into each other and I imagine the air just bristling with transmissions and electronic communication. And there are some marketing people just handing out bars of chocolate on street corners to passersby.
I’ll drop another line later this week – while I had meetings lined up in Nashville, it’s more unplanned down here. Anything could happen. Or nothing could happen. Or something – that later turns out to be nothing. You know what I mean.
Shut em Downpatrick
I was in Downpatrick on Sunday past - taking part in an afternoon of Creative writing at the Down Arts Centre. It was a lot of fun - like all writers' groups there was a mixture of people taking their first steps and some people who seemed to write with ease. I arrived early (I got my times wrong) and so I spent about an hour strolling around the town, from 1pm to 2pm. Like nearly every town in Northern Ireland Downpatrick has a split personality - there are some gorgeous streets and some grim ones. There's a sense of old money, some of it on the slide. Most depressingly though, I've never seen so many shutters in one place in my life before.
Emil's interpretation
My adorable young London friend Emil recently wrote out what he thought were the lyrics of Well Well Well and his mum and dad found the paper stuck to the window of their house. They sent me this picture. I wish I was in London looking out that window.
If I had a boot
I've been a fan of John Hiatt's since 'Riding With the King'. And a fan of Lyle Lovett since 'Pontiac'. I would regularly sing their songs at parties and gigs. So the idea of the pair of them sharing the stage (Waterfront Hall Belfast, February 16) and talking about songs seemed like heaven to me.
To me, the end result was a little disappointing, as it happens. First of all, they played without an interval for two hours and twenty minutes. My buttocks and bladder were screaming for less. And it seemed to start at about 40 miles an hour, and kind of stay at 40 miles an hour for the rest of the show. I know it's just two guys with acoustic guitars - it's not like you can bring the horn section out for the second half. But it seemed to kind of meander through the songbook without much sense of direction.
Hiatt turned out to be a surprisingly tasty guitarist and his voice is still a wonderful thing, thrilling and gravelly. The in-between chat about songs was supposed to be off-the-cuff, but felt under-prepared. At times they stared at each other and seemed to wonder what to say next. I thought - surely there's SOMETHING more you could say about some of this great material? I mean, what makes you write a line like 'if I had a pony' I'd ride him on my boat'?
Still, it was a pleasure to share the same space as two wonderful writers. High points - Lovett singing Nobody Knows Me and Hiatt singing Crossing Muddy Waters.
The Year of the Tiger, etc
It's a schizophrenic city - not to long ago they were smashing windows and intimidating 'foreigners' out of their homes in certain parts of Belfast. But today, St. George's Market was packed to the doors with people grinning and applauding and celebrating the arrival of the Chinese New Year.
You had the impression of a city that is starting to take the faltering steps towards thinking of itself as multi-cultural. The truth is - it actually went multi-cultural a long time ago. Some people just noticed it faster than others. Our dear friend Stephanie Young (London, via Canada) is staying with us at the minute, and comments that her great grandfather worked at the Shipyard and lived on Mersey Street (50 yards from where I type this), decades and decades ago, before taking the boat for North America.
We left this city and went all over the world. And now the world is coming to us. I say, come on in.
Meanwhile up at the Ulster Hall, the Base festival was in full swing, with all kinds of fashion on display and some groin-loosening drumming going on out in the street. It's been a full-on cultural whirlwind of a weekend - Ben Glover's album launch on Friday was dazzling, with the Black Box packed and roaring in appreciation. Andrea directed Sweeney Todd at the new Theatre at the Mill in Mossley, and it closed to standing ovations on Saturday night.
We saw the lovely Eilidh Patterson give an in-store performance on Saturday afternoon. And then I played with the sold-out Ronnie Greer Almost Big Band at the beautiful Portrush Town Hall on Saturday night. This Tuesday, we 're off to the Waterfront to see Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt in Concert.
I'm like a kid in a candy store at the minute. Somebody should send me to bed for a rest.