I've had a couple of pretty special-looking LPs and tapes in the post recently, but I thought this release particularly deserved a good blogging.
Art Is Hard is a South Coast label, mainly promoting South Coast bands, but with the odd one or two from further afield. I heard of them a while back, when they put out their first compilation, as a t-shirt with download, which featured some great now-defunct Bournemouth bands like Dutch Husband and True Swamp Neglect, as well as the much-more-currently-active likes of Colours and Kinnie The Explorer.
And then, whenever I saw Lee Dutch, he would inevitably be wearing the t-shirt, so it was kind of hard to forget about them!
Now, it's 2012, and they seem to have not gone away yet, and are seemingly boasting an ever-more impressive roster (Yrrs and Black Tambourines currently doing it for these ears).
Over at their Bandcamp, they've been running the Art Is Hard Biweekly 5" Pizza Club for a few weeks now. Basically, every second Friday, they put up a track for free download, with only one physical copy available to buy, at 1pm on the day. I somehow managed to snag a recent one, and so was the lucky recipient of a tasty-looking burrito pizza CDR, carefully packaged in this amazing (and much bigger than I'd expected!) pizza box.
The CD is My Teen Idol by Perfect Hair Forever, apparently from New Zealand. It's some of that retro recorded-on-a-lolly-stick surf sound that all the cool kids dig. You can hear that, and the other pizza club tunes, at the Art Is Hard Bandcamp. But I'd recommend also visiting the Perfect Hair Bandcamp, and checking out the whole EP that the tune comes from - beautiful stuff!
I've designed a logo, and have also been working on a few posters and web bits for a braw new festival that Fence Records are staging in St. Andrews this April - Eye O' The Dug!
The artwork is intended to tie in with the cartographically-inspired artwork for their new Chart Ruse subscription 7" series (David Galletly is designing the sleeves for those, and the first one is a beaut).
The original brief was to produce a logo representing St. Andrews as the dug's eye on a map of Fife, but I've since manhandled the project down a dank tangent of my own making, which basically means that I've gotten to draw some dog-based cyclopean sea monsters. Good times.
You can find all the info about the festival at the Fence site here, or at the official Eye O' The Dug website (currently still in the tweeking stages at the time of writing). All up in the Facebooks here.
Better out than in.. especially with a line-up as heavy as that of Kid Canaveral's second all-day Christmas Baubles event, happening at Edinburgh's amazing-sounding Summerhall.
Alas, it has already sold out, but here's a poster I did for the night - a wry seasonal warning, with an unfortunate nutcracker blowing bogus snow chunks. Take it easy on the mince pies kids!
Back when Hardsparrow was still just an unfortunate Ebay account name, I went by the name of The Brass Warrior and played bass in a band called Brides Of Kong. An unashamedly sleazy combo with little respect for genre-barriers, social taboos, or sensible song titles.
I'd spend long tube journeys to practises in Acton writing daft lyrics to make the other band members laugh. Some of these are still in their repertoire, and mine. I Drew Skeletons being an obvious example.
I'd already been writing and recording songs, but writing without the pressure to achieve anything other than making some other grown men giggle around the crisp machine in Survival Studios was a big breakthrough for me, and I wasted little time in transposing this discovery to my acoustic stuff.. the dubious comedy world of Hardsparrow was, for better or worse, born.
After illness forced me to abandon London town, I was replaced on low notes by Silent Dave, and the Kong - Dave, Mungo, Ant, and Dr. Vodka Martini - are still forging their unique badger-like trail on the London gig scene. You can catch them at the 12 Bar later this month, and you can now also download their first album, The Simian Songbook, from their Bandcamp page, here.
Other than Skeletons, I wroted the lyrics for Wildman, and came up with a couple of the other song titles.. Mungo did the rest, word-wise, and everyone chipped in musically. One of the most interesting things for me, personally, is to hear how far some of these songs developed from the original sketchy tunes we used to jam (ah, happy memories!), to the well-oiled machine that constitutes current Kong.
I can only hope that the world will one day also get to hear the Kong version of Hacienda of the Snake-Legged Dead, or the mythical lost Dog Smell of Griffin sessions.. hey, we all need a dream. In the meantime, don't be a wrong 'un and get some Kong in your life.
Some years back, I was briefly playing "inaudible banjo" and "keyboards played with my feet" in a band called Skitanja. At a rehearsal back in about 2006, the band's twisted mastermind, Steve Potatoes, had introduced me to the wonderful music of R. Stevie Moore. I can still vividly remember being stood by his computer, listening to I Like To Stay Home streaming through the interubes. Incredible stuff, I thought! Crucial work, really!
Fast forward to earlier this year, and I happened to find myself sharing a flat with Mr. Potatoes. So it was that I heard first-hand when the simply incredible happened - Potatoes (possibly whilst drunk) had booked R. Stevie to come and play in Bournemouth! It's little understatement to suggest that, for myself and many of my friends, this incredible booking coup represented the most exciting thing to happen in Bournemouth possibly ever! R. Stevie was touring outside the US for the first time in his forty year career, and was not only coming to the UK, but to Bournemouth!
Celebrate the news!
An overlarge supporting bill was arranged, posters and flyers were printed, and the mayor was informed.. and so it was that, on an uncharacteristically hot British summer's day, R. Stevie arrived in Bomo. (Now, don't ask complicated questions, but suffice it to say that he arrived from the continent, driven by one Steve Potatoes..)
Recently-opened superior record-purchasing emporium Rose Red hosted an afternoon acoustic session, with a relaxed R. Stevie playing a raft of lesser-heard (but genius) songs to an appreciative crowd, on the shop's wonderfully airy and light lower floor. As a fan, it was an unbelievable treat to experience R. Stevie playing so casually, in such an intimate environment. Really magical stuff.
In Rose Red Records
With hellos said to R. Stevie, and the instore cola supplies drunk dry, there was some aimless wandering in sunny Boscombe (something about a Sleeping Dog Lying test, the so-called woof response, on the counter in Richer Sounds?), before I headed to the venue for the evening show, Champions, with Martin and Ed.
Some of the area's best weirdo bands were also playing: Martin's ever-incredible Powdered Cows, plus a hastily reassembled but on-skronk Skitanja, featuring the afore-mentioned Ed, along with Martin, Potatoes and Inspector D. I. Signs. I played a Hardsparrow set too, but there you go. Nothing is perfect.
Powdered Cows
Pretty soon, it was nearing time for the R. Stevie main course. He seemed a bit distant and unsettled, compared to the earlier show. It's not hard to wonder what it must seem like to a seasoned musician like R. Stevie, to be in a foreign country and arrive in a venue like Champions, which is, quite frankly, a bit of a weird place at the best of times (part venue, part Overlook Hotel, despite great improvements and the best efforts of the owners to revamp it.) The stifling warmth of one of the hotter days of the year was probably not helping much either.
Nonetheless, the gig was great. Following fantastic sets from Skitanja and the Powdered Cows, R. Stevie's touring backing band, Tropical Ooze, played a set which was worth the price of entry alone.
Then R. Stevie played. Despite his seemingly unsettled mood, and the oddness of seeing a legend like RSM in a local venue that I'm not hugely keen on, it was fantastic to get to jump around to the actual R. Stevie Moore, playing the actual hits, backed by a solid band, surrounded by friends. Two of these friends, Rich and Lucy, had travelled down from London for the evening, just to see R. Stevie. The band swung into the sublime Play Myself Some Music, and all was wonderful with the world. The whole day was really such a special event.
The man, the legend
The set began to draw to a close earlier than I had expected, with a bit of an awkward stand-off developing between RSM onstage, and a slightly confused audience. Eventually, temporarily placated with a bottle of wine, the set continued for a short while longer, before finally ending with his celebrated solo rendition of the Popeye theme.
After the gig, I got R. Stevie to re-sign the back of my i-Pod (he'd actually done it earlier in the day, but it had rubbed off in the sweat-pit of the gig), rechristening it an R-Pod, in acknowledgement of the huge amount of the prolific musician's material that has made it on there.
The R-pod
By and by, it would turn out that I'd lost my wallet (and train tickets) in the venue, presumably whilst pogoing to I Like To Stay Home, and so it was that I had to wake myself at 6am to return to the venue, to try to recover it before catching the train back to Scotland. Did I say train? Well, I ended up having to change to the overnight coach in London, travelling on for some ten hours to Dundee, arriving in the early hours of Monday morning having had precious little sleep - it was a somewhat hellish journey, much of which was spent with the guy next to me, Bobby from Bulgaria, either talking incessantly, or asleep, crushing me like a long-suffering wife. And then I had to go straight into work.
But, you know what? It was all worth it. So totally worth it. For the legend that is R. Stevie Moore.
I did this last-minute poster for a James Yorkston/Pictish Trail gig at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh this month. The heron is collaged from pages of Yorkston's highly recommended collection of tour reminscences, It's Lovely To Be Here. The pages cut up real nice.
Originally there was a cowboy Jesus (?) as part of the heron's beak, but it looked better without it. There is a weird painting of a donkey in there somewhere though.
The background elements are all taken from a Facebook gallery chronicling the custom-build of James' new guitar. But it probably just looks like I got some photographs of some chipboard and some scrunched up Quality Street wrappers, I know.
