Yes. I am actually blogging. You are right. More on this in future posts.
More important at the moment is tomorrow’s setlist. I’m playing a solo set tomorrow at Stage B in Stoke Newington Church Street. Come along, it’ll be fantastic. To ensure that I’ll be able to make that sort of idle boast, I really need to sort out what I’m going to be doing. Which is a little strange considering that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last few years floundering around on various stages around the country, and occasionally nearby countries, not having a clue what I’m going to do. And I like doing that and it’s fine and good but the very reason for doing a solo gig is to try to push things forward a stage or two.
Last solo gig I did was in May. It was at the new Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston and it was great. I’m not saying that in terms of how enjoyable it must have been for the audience, although I think it wasn’t bad at that, but it felt fairly comfortable. My first solo gig, about three years ago was not a comfortable affair: my synth didn’t get on with the venue’s power supply and was turning itself on and off in rapid succession, the electric sitar sounded rough as fuck through the PA and I was drunk and nervous. That’s bad. One gets drunk in order to avoid feeling nervous. The gig in May was pretty angry. Mostly for very bad reasons, but that doesn’t matter, it gave me a certain amount of energy and vitriol and that was what the set needed.
What held the set together though, was a solid structure. There were large spans of improvisation in there but I had a fair idea of where I could go if things got boring or didn’t work.
And since that’s getting boring here’s the current version of the setlist:
- Ain’t Got Much Money You & Me But Baby We Got (Toiletries)
- When You Go To The Sea
- Damp Samosa
- Mister Soleil
- Minor Improv
- Du Duh
- St Michael
- Piece’o'Shit
Anyone who saw the last gig or is familiar with my last ten years of material, which is none of you, will say, “hey Zali, there’s a lot of *songs* in that set!” And there are. In the last few years I’ve been trying to bring out more of my song-based material. The Entropy Circus gigs I played last year included a couple of songs in them, a cover version of When The Levee Breaks and my perennial Piece’o'Shit, as did the last solo. Since you’re probably not all that familiar with my material I’ll go through the setlist in detail:
Ain’t Got Much Money You & Me But Baby We Got (Toiletries): Wrote this song in a kitchen in Farnham about ten years ago. My friend Kanchi’s flat had a cupboard full of freebie soaps, shampoos and the like. But that’s not what the song is about. What is the song about? Not a fucking clue! All I know is that it starts with: “Don’t let Eastenders drag you down/ ‘cos like Grant Mitchell you’re always frowning…”
When You Go To The Sea: This was written a few year later. It’s like a Tim Buckley song if Tim Buckley couldn’t sing for shit. Another guitarist recently described the riff as “pretty”. It is. I played this one at my last gig and preluded (?!) it with a kraut-folk improv in the phrygian mode, which I’ll probably do again. Anyone want to know what that means?
Damp Samosa: A new song! Kinda shoegazey singalong stuff. The main chorus of “I had a damp samosa” has been around for a while and was based on a real damp samosa incident on a train going somewhere in Kent.
Mister Soleil: About eight or nine years old, this song. I wrote most of it at Hackney Downs station during a miserable winter. The chords I used for this are kinda mutant jazzy barre chords that I was using a lot at the time. They’re almost identical to the chords for another song of similar vintage called Waiting For The Lights To Change, so I might add a chorus from that in somewhere.
Minor Improv: What it says. This will probably be modelled on this progression that sounds slightly Jewish that I’ve been playing for about fifteen years. Not a real Sephardic scale, they have all sorts of interesting twin semitone runs in them. But I guess I can put a few inflections like that into the piece.
Du Duh: This was the most conventional song on a very unconventional set of recordings I did in about 1996, called Monorail. It has a nice descending major scale drone, although it might actually be one of those modal things which are almost major but not quite, if you follow me…
St Michael: Major pentatonic. If you play about with major pentatonics for long enough you will find yrself playing Michael Row The Boat Ashore. Fact. That’s what this is. Might augment it with a Casio drone. When done right this sounds fucking celestial. A version of it will be appearing on the new album, boys and girls!
Piece’o'Shit: The old favourite from Paddington Hardstare. I’ve recorded three versions of this song in the past and it has had a few live outings. Features the line, “if you’re needing me like I’m needing you then I might as well start sniffing glue instead.” It’s was originally about moving flat and not about relationship angst at all.
Well, wasn’t that interesting?
