Julian – new song and video

I’m having real trouble trying to get my source files working now Google groups have changed the way they operate. So I have dumped my video on Youtube.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4lUuM0bxy8

I wrote this song in June but it has taken me a while to get the video sorted out. It’s difficult to get non copyright video and my video camera has packed up which doesn’t help. The Morris dancers are from Adlington and I took the footage with my normal camera.

The music was composed first and then I added the lyrics. Most of the lyrics are titles from books that I have read – a bit quirky but it seems to work. Most of the pictures are other peoples, some I can identify the owner some I can’t and I thank them all.

Malc Battle took the pics of Manchester.

Caroline Hocking took the pics of the tattoos.

The authors of the books are:

Eric Hobsbawn, John Gray, Simon Gray, Louis de Bernieres,Patrick Hamilton, Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Baines.

Not quite sure what I am going to do with this blog now as Google are ceasing certain elements of Google groups. Maybe this is the last post!!!

What the hell is going on!?

Positive Negativity

There seems to be so many calamaties of unbelievable proportions happening in the world at the moment. The BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the disgraceful Isreali attack on Aid ships in International waters (Israel has become one of the axis of evil along with North Korea) and they need to be brought down a peg or two but the American politicos are scared to death of the Zionist lobby like AIPAC, so nothing will happen. It’s obscene the way Israel gets away with ignoring so many UN resolutions. I really think the Israeli whistler blower Mordechai Vanunu is a brave man. If only our politicians told the truth and faced up to Israel. How on Earth can we in this day and age, have three million Palestinians as virtual prisoners? The sympathy I had for the treatment of the Jews in WWII has been severely diminished by the paranoid actions of Israel today.

The volcano in Iceland was a natural disaster but worst still we now have a coalition with my beloved Liberal Democrat party going to bed with the ‘not to be trusted Tories’. I remember when the Conservaties were in power last time, VAT went up under Thatcher and again with Major, there were three million unemployed and interest rates were in double figures. Is this what we have got to look forward to? The country has a deficit of a  £153 billion pounds and the government are farting about trying to justify saving £6 billion. We’ve got to get rid of Trident, stop being the World’s policeman and stop punching above our weight. We need to deal with the lack of social responsbility that many of my fellow countrymen have. You know the ones, the bone headed white trash that demanize the immigrants but will never work themselves. The ones that expect a council house but will never contribute to the tax system by getting work and who show no civil respect or responsibilty to fellow citizens. If you don’t know who these people are, just stand at a bus stop or sit on the top deck, you’ll soon spot them.

I love a good rant, especially after a rather delicious bottle of wine. My new track (Just loved by you) is in a way going back to what I played in the 80s & early 90s with a band I was in called Backdoor Jack. It’s just a 12 bar blues number with some fancy chords. I played slide for the lead and tuned the guitar to EAEGBE. I did the lead in one take. I’d had a really boring day at work one day and came home and exorcised my ennui via my Starcaster on to this track. I think it works OK – play it loud.

Bandcamp

A friend of mine recently put me on to bandcamp which is a publishing platform site that will host your music for free. It has good points and bad. It allows you to upload your own artwork, I did the painting and took the landscape photo and it went on without a hitch. It allows you to find out who is dowloading your music and it even has a facility for people to pay for your music. The downside is that it only uploads in ‘lossless’ formats such as wav files which can take quite a while to upload and bandcamp only allows 250 meg. It does not accept mp3′s which is the format that most people convert to after they have finished mastering in wav format, strangely bandcamp converts the wav file so that people who want to download  get it in mp3 format. I have loaded my track No More Lies onto bandcamp but in truth I can’t tell any difference in quality. Check it out and let me know.

http://skeelydog.bandcamp.com/

DESTINY

I wrote this song in early December just before I went on holiday for a month to Goa. I am not particularly superstitious, however, I am not a very good flier and I thought that for some reason putting this on the web before I go on a journey that involved three flights to get there was pushing it. OK I am a little superstitious.  This song is now lost except for the finished track because I lost all the recorded parts when I was transfering my stuff from my old pc to a new one. In January I bought Reason Record, a very powerful and creative tool which made putting songs together a lot easier but it wouldn’t run on my old pc because it was under-powered. When I wrote this song I did it the hard way  by recording all the parts on Reason then converting them to audio files and playing them through Sonar and then adding the guitar and vocals. I had the Sonar lite version which was cheap and cheerful but not really up to the job and made the process long and cumbersome. Anyway that is all behind me now. Of all the files I have transferred onto my new pc it is strange that I just lost the files for this song – maybe it is Destiny!!!!

I am becoming a great fan of Youtube, all you have to do is think of a track and you can find it. Last night I downloaded songs from the fantastic 70′s band ‘The Cate Brothers’, produced by Steve Cropper they were one of the best and most underrated bands of the era, songs like ‘Union Man’ and  Where Can We Go’ are just timeless.  Listen and enjoy  to some great funky guitar playing.

I’m not depressed!!!

Dark Shades in a Sunny Room

Two new musical creations with rather depressing titles. I don’t no why they end as they do. I start out with an idea but never really know where it is going to end up. The song ‘Dark Shades‘ was sort of spontaneous and I put together in less than a few hours. The second ‘No More Lies‘ took me weeks. I have a very patient wife who understands that if I didn’t spend time on my music I’d go nuts. I often wonder what other people do if they haven’t got music to relieve the boredom of everyday life.

I don’t often plug other peoples music but I just got ‘Club Des Belugas‘ 2008 album SWOP – it is has some excellent jazz/latin stuff on it which is very happy and uplifting. So if you are depressed after listening to me go on to Amazon and get SWOP.

The Message Board

It’s strange where inspiration comes from when writing songs. My friend and work colleague Mac is married to a Morrocan lady and he has recently emailed me some of his favourite Arabic love songs. Most of them are about the sorrow and pain of broken love affairs and they are intensely poetic and literate unlike the shallow offerings we often get from the other side of the globe. I can understand that in some countries where even being in the same room with a member of the opposite sex could be deemed to be provocative and promiscuous that these love songs capture the essence of love and betrayal.

I was listening to one track on YouTube and I was reading the comments. One in particular seemed very sad and desperate by a lady who called herself Elnor100. I know we have all been low in our lives but this person seems to have been really hurt.

I used some of her words to write my latest song.

Elnors comments:

love definetely has no limits no boundries. it stings as a bee . cuts like a knife destroys every fiber of your being and comes back to bite you even long after you try to be done with it. every dream every hope every breath you take is little reminders of yesterday. i cannot imagine any good day ahead in this life. dam love broke my soul my spirit my heart in a billion peices and some how i pick up those peices and try my best to forget. but i cannot———— oh dam this life ………..Elnor100

Your words on the message board

Left me in no doubt

Your heart is broken girl

Elnor who are you?

You say love has no boundaries

Even though, it broke you apart

Every dream, every breath you have

reminds you of the pain

Damn love, broke your soul

It will probably do it again

Your message says, love hurts

Your message cries, love is pain

Sad Arabic love song – sung by Mohhammad Hamaki and written by Ana Azeto

A more haunting piece of music is – “Man story”, performed by RUM BAND by Tarik El Nasser, RUM Band is a Jordanian band lead by Tarik El Nasser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_KTIllP0vk&feature=related

Love won’t set me free

This song is an old one that we used to play in The Fins  around 1980/81.

If I remember correctly, it was written by Derek Marshall but I think we all had a hand in how the song eventually turned out. This is my version, not too different from the original idea but a bit more rockier.
I recorded it at home about three or four years ago on my old Fostex VF80 (the one without the built in CD burner) digital recorder. All the keyboards sounds and drums were played on my Technics KN800 keyboard and the guitar parts were played on my Fender Esprit. I think I get a nice raw sound which I’ve seemed to have lost on my more recent songs. Using the computer and programs such as Reason have made things a bit too clinical and it is so easy to get things cluttered with wonderful but unnecessary sounds.

When I compress the file to a MP3 the sound that is produced via the web seems thinner and tinnier – I still can’t find out a way of doing something about that. If anybody knows please leave a comment.

UTSAVAS

‘That which drives away sorrow’ taken from William Dalrymple’s superb book – Nine Lives: In search the Sacred in Modern India.

In this book there are ‘Singers of Epics’ who have whole villages entranced by their musical stories, many of which can last the whole night long. The epics tell the story of the Gods, village life, murder and intrigue and they attract pilgrims from all over the state of Rajasthan.  

We have no equivalent in this country – I wonder why?

A Coachman Ranted Here

It’s just an anagram of my latest song – Romance and Heartache

I started to write this a few weeks back when I was off work with some sort of flu thing that people like to pass around at this time of year. I have been reading a book about someone’s disastrous lovelife and the thought came to me as I was looking out of my music room and watching the beautiful orange/red leaves of the Cherry tree in the front garden fall in the wind, that everything has to come to an end eventually. So I wrote some words that were analgous to autumn and the end of a relationship.

If anybody reads this and listens to the music and is interested, for this song I tuned the guitar to G and played in the key of C. I always tune to G when I play slide guitar.

Everyone has had their heart broken. Just like when there is a gale everything eventually calms but the memory of the storm remains. These words come from all the storms of my past.

Words:

I have a notion, I feel it’s over

I’ve seen the sky cry, tears of blue

If I took your hand, and follow the wind

How would we know, how far to go?

Romance and Heartache, just sail on the breeze

We are just lovers, who will fall like Autumn leaves

There’s a question and answer, all wrapped in one

It’s how did we get here from the heights we begun?

It’s a tragedy,

a mistake

But my friends tell me,

We reap what we make

The Last Ride

I know it’s a title of a song by Todd Rundgren but that’s what came to me when I was thinking of a title for my recent piece of work.  The backing was created on Reason with the guitars and the pianos recorded via Sonar. The slide guitar & the lead work was all done on my old faithful 1975 Fender Starcaster which I bought new in Cornwall from a shop in Truro called Minns Music, probably doesn’t exist now.

I am never really totally satisfied with the sound of any of the stuff I do but maybe it’s a case of too much familiarity and being too close to the project. Anyway I enjoyed writing and playing it.

Comments always welcome.

My band Rhythm House is playing at the Bowling Green Pub on Higher Hillgate, Stockport on November 28th.