Ok, so here's the thing. It's been a good 13 years since I wrote anything on this blog site, during which time a lot of things have happened, but we'll skip over all that, at least for the time being. I've brought it out of hibernation so I can record a little project I've set for myself, so here goes...
As a musician I am probably best known (if I am known at all) for doing fun parody songs (usually in collusion with my old pal Richard), or as lead singer and second guitarist in a sporadic pub covers band. Yet behind the scenes, I have for decades written many original songs. However, few if any of these songs have ever seen the light of day. Why not, you may well ask? Well, if I had to sum it up in one word, it would be… fear.
Most people have a bit of fear, trepidation, nerves etc before performing in front of people. It’s natural, and stops you being complacent. And in the other parts of my musical life, I’ve learned to handle it. But for me, the step up from doing other people’s songs, or ones where you’ve taken someone else’s tune and changed the words (often with a deliberate purpose of making them funny to a specific audience), to playing songs that you’ve written entirely by yourself, felt like a cliff face. You’re putting so much more of yourself out there, and the fear that it won’t be appreciated looms large. So for a while now I’ve been going to open mics, seeing people seemingly effortlessly getting up there and performing their own compositions and wondering how they do it. Even though it’s probably the case that they’ve had their own cliffs to climb, or I’m only seeing the serenity of the swan on the water and can’t see the frantic underwater paddling.
Anyway, I turned 58 recently and thought I would set myself a challenge to do something before I turn 60. But what challenge, and how can I set myself a SMART objective? (Okay I still haven’t got business-speak totally out of my system yet.) Doing 60 open mic nights is a tall order in two years (just over one a fortnight doesn’t sound much, but have you SEEN my diary?), so how about performing 60 original songs? This would enable me to chalk them up more quickly - most open mics in my area give you a 15-20 min slot, which means 3-5 songs per OM night. At the moment I only have backing tracks for nine songs. I know I don’t strictly need a backing track, but psychologically it provides a bit of a crutch and makes me feel like the songs can be made more interesting to the casual listener, especially if they are of a fairly standard ABAB format. Also, performing 60 different songs might be a stretch – I’ve probably got about 30 usable songs, and I’ve no guarantee the muse will strike enough to double that in the next two years. So how about counting the number of individual performances of originals? This has the benefit of being able to repeat songs, which seems much more realistic and achievable.
Another advantage to this approach was that I knew I could get off to a flying start, as I was scheduled to do a 45 minute slot at a private festival, where I would be among friends, and if I nailed my colours to the mast and said I was doing a set of original songs it would be much harder to back out (even though I briefly considered it as the hour approached). So, here is my list of 60 original song performances before my 60th birthday, with commentary on the songs themselves and the goods and bads of each performance. I'll keep adding them along the way as I do them. Happy reading.
#1: Jonathan Livingston I Presume? (No Glasto No Problem, 04/07/26)
I originally wrote the music for this one way back in the early ‘90s and it has had many different sets of lyrics, though I have now settled on the current ones. The song is a retelling of Richard Bach’s 1970 novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is a bit of a New Age woo-woo story about rising above the pack, spreading your wings, reaching your full potential yadda yadda. After this performance I was told that my acoustic guitar was out of tune, more of which later. I had performed this song once before in a “live” setting, as part of my 200 lockdown songs project on Facebook – it was the only original song I did, and the only video I broadcast live.
#2: Duck Thief (NGNP, 04/07/26)
After JLIP, I realised I couldn’t hear the backing track through my monitor. Though I had done a full rig test the week before, I hadn’t done it with the cable I bought after that, which goes into inputs on the mixer that then don’t feed back out to the monitor. I’m not the most tech-savvy and this provided the proof if proof be need be. I’ve since bought a cable that will do that job, so I guess that’s a learning point actioned already. So for this song I decided to sack off the backing track as I knew it would be too quiet for me to hear, being only some bongos (which they don’t drink in the Congo), a synthesized cello and an occasional bit of piano.
This song is my attempt to write something in the style of Nick Drake, making use of down-tuned strings, unusual chord patterns and many of his esoteric vocal inflexions. The lyrics are basically a twist on the old “I shagged one sheep” joke, with an overall meta-joke that I’ll leave you to work out for yourself. This one seemed to go down well, with at least a couple of people saying they particularly enjoyed it.
#3: Sailor Boy (NGNP, 04/07/26)
While playing the intro to this one I realised the problem highlighted by JLIP. My acoustic wasn’t out of tune in and of itself, but it had got out of sync with the backing track. The problem I had here was that I didn’t have a readily available tuner for the acoustic (for the electric, I had a tuner as part of my pedal board but the acoustic was plugged directly into the mixer). So rather than waste time trying to retune the acoustic I used the electric to strum along, which for this song isn’t ideal. But it did mean I’d got all my acoustic songs out of the way first so there was no constant swapping which would have been the case if I’d stuck to my original setlist. That setlist went out of the window early doors as I decided to start with the gentler ones and work up to the faster ones, rather than the original rollercoaster setlist I’d planned.
I introduced this song by saying it was the story of my 4x great grandfather. I have for some time been working on a suite of songs either directly or obliquely about my ancestors and the events surrounding their lives, having done a lot of genealogical research. At some point I will finish these and maybe even try and put them together as an album, even if only for my own edification.
#4: I Wanna Be (A Wallaby) (NGNP, 04/07/26)
This is just a lightweight rock and roll song about wanting to be a success in the music biz but realising it almost certainly won’t happen. And there are no wallabies mentioned in the lyrics. What the lyrics do include is one of the oldest lyrics I’ve got (verse 3, about Cadillacs and all that) which I wrote in my teens and has survived numerous re-uses of the tune, which at one point included it being part of a multi-part prog-rock epic based on the parable of the Prodigal Son called Take The Money And Run. I’ve already cannibalised that for several other songs since then, so it will probably never see the light of day…
#5: Thrown To The Wolves (NGNP, 04/07/26)
I had some tech issues with this one. This is essentially an instrumental which relies heavily on the use of a delay pedal. However, I had done some last-minute panicked changes to my pedal set-up (including sacking off the cab simulator pedal which seemed to be making the guitar sound awful) which meant the delay timing was all out, so I didn’t get the effect I was hoping for. I guess the learning point here is to do more robust soundchecks.
I hope I can get to make this work properly because it’s quite fun to play, though I’ll admit it is a bit left-field. It’s another of my “ancestors” tunes, though based on a family legend rather than anything factual.
#6: Shanty Of The Ark (NGNP, 04/07/26)
I suspected this one would go down well, and so it proved. Happily I could dispense with the guitars on this one and concentrate on singing, and comically miming playing the melodica (I did actually play it on the backing track, along with a synthesized accordion).
The lyrics major on the fact that in the biblical Flood story, there were no sea creatures taken onto the ark, which in my book means it didn’t really have any impact on them at all. There are a few references to other practical issues which the story also doesn’t touch on, and a few fun Easter eggs (some of which some people spotted). It’s one of the songs I’m most proud of, at least for the moment.
The open mics at last year’s London City Voices Spetses holiday had a big sea shanty theme so I was determined to write one of my own, with a view to performing it on this year's holiday. In the end I bottled it and covered a Jeffrey Lewis track instead. Now I definitely have my eye on doing it next year and roping a few peeps in to help with some vocal harmonies and general animal noises.
#7: The Day That Jeffrey Lewis Held My Wine (NGNP, 04/07/26)
I’d had the idea for this song for a while and, like a lot of songs, suddenly I had a spark of an idea and bang went any chance of sleep that night! I love the way Jeffrey Lewis plays fast and loose with lyrics, cramming words into lines and making the most unexpected and brilliantly funny rhymes, so I wanted to write something in that vein, so why not marry that up with a (mostly) true story about how he ended up holding of our gang’s wine at a gig?
One of the things you learn when you start performing is how many new skills you need to learn. For example, playing guitar standing up, which is a whole nother ball game from playing sitting down, which had been my MO for decades. While I’m more used to that now, having played guitar in bands for a few years, manipulating pedals and switching from playing rhythm to soloing is something I’m still working on. As a result, the two lead breaks in this song weren’t as great as I’d hoped, or as I’d got them in practice. Still, the only way to get to the Albert Hall is to practice.
#8: Not Enough Music (NGNP, 04/07/26)
I’d decided to wrap up with Jeffrey, as even though I had two more songs with backing tracks available to me, neither of them would have suited the mood, and I was running close to time. So when the call came for one more song, I just chose something light and fun that I hadn’t played for a while. This song is a fictional scenario where a couple splits up because they can’t bear each other’s music any more, and is riddled with musical references. I had a lot of fun playing this one and decided to tack on Vatican Broadside by Half Man Half Biscuit just to round things off.
All in all it was great a experience for me to try out a bunch of songs in front of a sympathetic and appreciative audience. Now I’ve saddled myself with doing another 58 songs. No pressure then…
