APRIL 2008


Wednesday April 23rd 2008 @ The Mission Theater, Portland OR. supporting MIRAH AND THE SPECTRATONE INTERNATIONAL


Thursday April 24th 2008 @ The Axe and Fiddle, Cottage Grove, OR. supporting CAMP 3 and SHELLEY SHORT. 8.00 pm showtime


Friday April 25th 2008 @ Mississippi Studios, Portland OR. 10. 00 pm
showtime. Tickets at www.ticketweb.com Box Office: (503)288-3895 (Tues
-Fri 2-6pm)


Sunday April 27th 2008 @ The Green Frog Acoustic Tavern, Bellingham WA.


Monday April 28th 2008 @ The Sunset Tavern, Ballard, Seattle WA.




MAY 2008


Sunday May 25th 2008 @ Center House Theater, Seattle WA. NORTHWEST FOLKIFE FESTIVAL - 5.00 pm showtime.


Friday May 30th 2008 @ The Twisp River Pub, Twisp WA. with DAVID ROVICS

TOUR DIARY - FEBRUARY 2007


A review below by Billy Bangs www.billybangs.co.uk of the set at the Chumbawamba 25th anniversary gig in Leeds, which really does sort of catch some of the flavours of it. For a fuller review of the whole evening, which was quite wonderful, and wonder filled, see current news page of www.chumba.com

danbert nobacon
city varieties
leeds
10th february 2007

a bald man tricycles in circles
he’ll try anything, you know
chasing his own tales
a tad tangled mad mangled
garbled garbage grumbling
conspiracies are tumbling
danbert waits and he waits and he waits
a man on the edge of reason
thrashing out chords for the hordes
rattled about the unreasonable
he plays it straitjacket
he’s bootlace and fancy free
statues and statutes
kicked over with a fine tooth comb
what other use would he have for one
two three four
what are we fighting for?
the criminality insanity of war
a case is presented
as matters of fact
tony and george get in on the act
yo blair! transatlantic drawls
bacon’s piling it on with trowels
it’s jaw dropping stuff
a mad mental melange
it’s such a fine line
twixt genius and the sphincter clench
the lineage is a roll call, count ‘em out
daniel Johnston
ivor cutler
wreckless eric
gg allin even
and count ‘em back in
released from his previous confines
“weird bert” bacon is out there
an introductory anecdote from 84
punchlined with the heckle “fookin weird”
and you now what?
It still fookin is.

copyright 2007 billy bangs



TOUR DIARY - DECEMBER 2006

Five gigs in a month amounts to the closest I have been to a solo tour since the nineteen eighties. I absolutely love playing in October-November-December time, and I think this stems from some romantic nostalgic notions of the winter drawing in, and child-hood memories of being tucked up cosy drinking hot milky Horlicks in front of an open fire, during the first ten years of my life, in the time before we had central heating in the house I grew up in. Some of these 'memories' may have been subsequently invented of course, or grafted on to feelings of emotional warmth and childhood security.

There is a theory that the human brain cannot possibly store every bit of information from every minute experience of our lives, so it files important stuff deep down and in short hand, and if that memory is required years later down the line, it rebuilds it anew using the shorthand as a guide. As a result, the new reconstructed memory naturally differs from the actual original event, because life experience lived in the interim adds flavour and colour which was previously unoriginal. And before we know it we are reconstructing the reconstructions.

An example: the first Christmas song I ever wrote; They Say it Never Snows on Christmas Day, in December 1981 (not included in the current batch) was based on a childhood memory of waking up one morning, opening the curtains and seeing one foot of snow in the garden. This was unusual but not unheard of in the mid to late sixties winters in England. In my mind I had compressed the data, and had by 1981 long since combined this with the memory of building a snowman with my dad and brother, and configured it as happening on Christmas Day. However, meteorological records for the period in North East Lancashire clearly make this an impossibility, and as I was only coming up to a year old when the harshest winter of modern times hit in 1962-63, (and even then the snow did not begin in Northern England until Boxing Day 1962) I could not have been building snowmen on Christmas Day. Moreover, the whole notion of a 'white christmas' never became popular until Irving Berlin penned the song of that title in the 1940's. I digress.

Perhaps now, with this immediate past summer, autumn and thus far winter being the warmest on record, the idea is as much to preserve the sounds and smells of winter on record. Like photographs of soon to be extinct tigers, as a time capsule to remind future generations of how people lived, and what strange and wonderful creatures existed in the old times. And better make sure it exists as a hard copy because when the digital data banks crash … ah I am getting ahead of myself.

With all this perhaps subconsciously in mind I began writing a 'Christmas Album' (in my head in 2004) and actually coming up with songs in 2005 and continuing this immediately past festive season. It's like how I imagine doing an Open University course might be, part time, but more than a hobby, and only having to produce work for inspection once a year. Frank Sinatra's is the classic, Johnny Cash's is awful, but of course, mine will be no merey (sic) collection of debauched versions of O Come All Ye Faithful and Jingle Bells, and Aimee Mann got to You're A Mean One Mr Grinch first. No, this is rather a fictional 'musical' noir set at this particular time of year.

And, the inherent problem of playing Christmas-type songs live is that you can only really get away with doing them — the odd one here and there say in July is fine but I mean a whole batch — in the seasonal run-up itself.

Problem number one was the first gig at the Northbridge in Exeter on December 8th, where the most friendly landlord in the world had imposed a ban on saying the C-word until December 13th, punishable by a fine of 20p to be paid into a pot to be donated to a local charity, for those who transgressed. Tricking people into saying the C-word was actively encouraged, and after my attempt to illicit a response from the audience ("Er, crossword clue: birthday celebration, nine letters, third letter 'r', fifth letter "s', ends in 's'?") failed miserably, as my set list and a good few of the songs therein spoke the season's name, I had little choice, but to cave in myself By the end of the night Tracey Curtis and myself between us had racked up at least a tenners' worth.

The second problem is that as it gets closer to Christmas there are so many other distractions that the chances of getting people out to a gig become slimmer and slimmer. Despite having a performers' genealogy that runs through Leicester — my Dad's Aunt Jessie sung at De Monteford Hall in the early part of the 20th century; her brother Roy played for Leicester City reserves during WW2 (he was in his forties, there being a lack of young men who were all at war, but that is the nearest my family get to football glory); and their brother and my grandad John Charles was born on the road in Scotland, my great parents Wilson John being a stage manager /actor and great grandma being the leading lady in a late 19th century troupe of travelling players. Turn of the century poverty then in fits and spurts forced everyone on all sides of my family to abandon farming on my mother's side and theatre on my dad's side and go work in the Lancashire cotton mills) — getting people to The Criterion (pub) on a Tuesday December night in 2006 proved difficult. That said, and according to that part of Sod's Law which refers to performing, it was as stellar a performance from Curtis and myself as you are likely to see, as those who were there can testify.

The home-leg: place of residence Leeds; place down the road Bradford; and hometown Burnley seemed, in the twilight zone of the long hours before stage-time to be "a good idea when the gig was booked but … " And, in such cases there is little choice but to enter that karmic space of thinking: "well it does not matter if there are five people or five hundred, I have to make the performance every bit as good," and to varying degrees in each case it seemed to work reasonably well.

Leeds was a Karma Kabaret event and I had intended to cabaretalise my set to an even greater degree than usual. I had even started building a ventriloqusits' dummy called Norbert Yehbutt — you think I'm joking? but it does get kind of lonely up there having spent most of my adult life on stage with the security of my band mates — but even with the adrenal thrill of invention I had got nowhere near completing it in time.

Ventriloquist's Dummy no problem? Find one on E-Bay and modify it? Sorry no items match your request. Find a design on Google and take it from there? Did you mean Vampyra Inflatable Doll? Order one from Amazon.com (US only) and modify it, only $35 but just as I was about to click 'buy' I noticed the postage was going to be $145. Which only leaves to Design and build one from scratch, and three proto-types later, to get a workable jaw mechanism, I am finally at last only now, a month later building the final creation. Talk about reinventing the dying art of reinventing the wheel?

Miraculously, not least at the hallowed 1-in12 at Bradford, people literally materialised out of the walls, woodwork, and plasterwork — some of which above the stage is by my very own hand and survives nearly twenty years to this day — when it was time for me to play, who by all rational observation were not in attendance when I plugged the guitar in and could not be seen entering the club on the CCTV. Ghosts of Christmases past and future. I like to think so.

In Burnley, at the Centre Spot, part of that hallowed ground Turf Moor, and Burnley Football Club which held a treasure chest of memories, largely from my teenage years, where the venue was considerably larger the perceived lack of people was an optical illusion of course, The Notsensibles, and some folks I hadn't seen since I as a teenager, on after the gig for drinks, and a simple taxi ride home to my mum and dad's? Can't be bad.

Yesterday's gravy, tastes better today. Indeed, and now it's time to put Aimee Mann to bed until the power cuts next November force me to dive under the quilt in search of creative juices. Until then …

TOUR DIARY - NOVEMBER 2006


Buy single train tickets for each way of the journey (rather than Standard return) and they come in at just under nine 'of your English pounds' each; and Leeds to King's Cross in under two and a half hours with decent leg room is how public transport should be. Of course the electricity should be generated from renewable sources, but it beats driving on every scale as long as there is no one on board with a rucksack bomb. And, of course nearly every other route you might want to take is worse and more expensive now than it was twenty years ago.

November 14th at The Luminaire in Kilburn , voted London's best live venue in Time Out recently, and it's not half bad at all, not least cos they have a mission statement to treat the artistes right. I am more a grima than prima donna, but historically England and London in particular have a less than proud reputation for not showing basic decency to its indigenous, and sick and twisted travelling players, so it was most welcome.

The fabulous Jean Cook from Brooklyn, Ship and Pilot's fiddle playing firestorm, performing on these shores for the first time, had a tour project to interview working musicians about how the mechanics (and the mechanicals) of how they operate in a workmanlike fashion, in terms of making a crust. Some people play scrabble, some people crochet, some take pictures of storm grates in different cities … Now in all my 27 years in the business, despite being Chumbawamba point man on PRS and deciphering record company royalty statements no one has ever asked me about any of this stuff, and I was never very successful in conveying what it meant to the rest of the band. Jean of course got things out of me I didn't even know were still there.

And then a more ethereal discussion on the virtues of Doctor Who, Tom Baker era, and the classic Genesis of the Daleks. Sarah, bass player for Mekons and playing in one of her other outfits Striplight tonight had recently watched the whole six episodes. I had actually looked on Amazon for it a few days previous to get it my six year old Doctor Who-o-philes for Christmas and she convinced me to do it. I haven't seen it since it was first on in the mid seventies, but remember to this day the bit where the Doctor has the opportunity to destroy the daleks whilst they are laying prone in their incubators before being born and going on to wreak havoc across the universe. He doesn't do it (of course) but delivers Shakespearian gravitas to the soliloquy as to why he had to let them live. And I will re-live all over the holidays if Amazon deliver.

A bloke who had travelled with the guys from the US (Barry?) who had the best twang and showed us a film he'd made, on his lap-top. It was like computer graphics but in a fifties B-movie style, with the best voiceovers, and it was like nothing you had ever seen before. Can you tell miss being on the road, pants round my ankles in backstage debauchery? Well I do feel a strange kind of comfort in the camaraderie. Like a smoker who hasn't smoked for years but knows exactly how the smoke feels as it lovingly caresses the back of the throat

Striplight do an impressively good line in edgy guitar, dynamic robot girl pop, and can be found lurking around London and of course in the netherworld of myspace.

I do half of set acoustically and then am joined by Jon Langford on guitar and backing vocals, Dan Massey on drums (both of whom play on my almost now imminent album The Library Book of the World ) with Tony Maimone (whose pedigree includes not least Pere Ubu) on bass. Such is the flair of Mister Maimone that despite only knowing the songs from a quick run-through in sound-check, he seems as if he has been playing them all his life, and perhaps he has in the sense that half-decent tunes are but cultural evolutionary memes lodged in our collective subconscious forever seeking reproductive expression. With Mister Massey keeping us tight in the back and Mister Langford operating as a free radical this all means I have to concentrate, in order to navigate. From where I was standing it all seemed to work , and above the crashing of the waves and despite the cooing and crying of the Three Sirens in the shallows — real or imagined? who in my twisted mind look like Jean Cook, Sally Timms and Susie Honeyman — we were at least not dashed upon the rocks.

I did a gig with Ship and Pilot at the back end of last year in New York as part of a Here Be Monsters comedy-variety seasonal special where a whole range of misfits and miscreants all did a twenty-thirty minute slot. And indirectly it was that gig led to me making The Library Book of the World in Chicago with Langford-Massey et al. Looking through the sleeve notes of the first Langford solo album Skull Orchard recently I saw the tiny black and white photo of a pub called Ship and Pilot (presumably in Newport South Wales).

In direct contrast to that one strand of purist Mekons chat room geek-speak that has little time for the extra curricular activities of Jon Langford in general and for his latest solo album Gold Brick in particular, Ship and Pilot deliver a full length and quite spectacular treat. As a fan of Gold Brick I am biased anyway, and as it should be, the live experience, and the recorded experience transcend in different ways, operating as they do on different, though not mutually exclusive, parts of the brain.

Steeped as we are by now in maritime otherworldliness, we can taste the salt of the oceans upon our lips, making the kiss of life that much sweeter. And, history with the filters removed becomes much more colourful in all respects.

The human story of near blind intermingling across oceans and continents is full of nooks and crannies and dark alleyways which have been photo-shopped from the Eurocentric-Caucasian world picture. In the ten years before the 'first' English settlement in North America at the Jamestown colony in Virginia, turned a corner and was declared a success in 1617, many starved to death, died of disease or disappeared. Falling in love with the locals , or at least subconsciously sensing the evolutionary imperative that survival depended upon the good will and encyclopaedic expertise of the native hunter gatherers who had lived intimately with the local terrain for the past ten thousand years, some defected and were removed from the historical record.

Older songs like Tom Jones Levitation sit well with the likes of Lost In America, Gold Brick, and the momentous epic Nashville Radio. And, in amongst the inbetween song malarkey, and occasional revelation, that an unusually high proportion of world weary sailors hung up their compasses and lost their sea legs in the hinterlands of Newport giving a favourite like Pill Sailor with its line: Shirley Bassey comes from Tiger Bay a newer clarity. Shirley Bassey was big in Burnley in the sixties and seventies, the golden age of TV show-band singer showcases, at least in our house because she shares a Christian name with my mother. And there in the moment, inside the dark warm London underbelly — and perhaps imperceptible to the casual outside observer confronted with the seemingly limited head space housing individual human brain power — life collapses into its constituent worlds atoms and molecules and expands horizons exponentially.

The latest forensic history — for if you haven't guessed by now I am something of a nut for the stuff of where we really come from — reveals in the Ancient History of Britain study (2006) that the proto-human and human occupations of the British Isles were wiped out by Ice Ages no less than seven times. Moreover, the eighth colonisation ie the current one, began a mere 12,000 years ago. At that same time, revolutionised by sharper spears, and no less so by the invention of the bone needle, which in combination enabled a new technological peak in the ocean going animal skin boats, the Cro-Magnons of what is now south western France were able hop westwards, tracking the southern fringe of the Ice sheets all the way across the Atlantic to the Americas, leaving a trail across the centuries of mita-chondrial DNA as they went.

All this ten millennium and more before the late fifteenth, early sixteenth century explorers Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. If you go back, a few extra, but still short steps in terms of planetary time, we are all of immigrants of some description or other and the intermingled offspring thereof.

I digress, but such is the nature of the cultural peaks of the live rock 'n' roll performance is that it transports us, like dreams, across time and space.
The banter between the great Sally Timms and Captain Langford is in itself worth seeing the gig for. Massey, Maimone and Cook provide the fireworks and it rocks with life affirming warmth.

And at a time in world history where everywhere has been explored, The line in Dreams of Leaving: After the ice-caps there is only space, puts us in history at the point where everything seems to have been explored and Dreams of Leaving are no more. Stephen Hawking recently interviewed on Radio 4 reiterated his unfashionable belief that human survival depends upon us colonising other worlds in other galaxies. Whilst more troubled waters lie immediately ahead, any thoughts of space, seem, with the plimsoll line up beyond our our knees, three feet high and rising, somewhat misplaced. Who then would write a space shanty?

But then in the exploration of the space of the other dimensions of the human imagination there are worlds yet to be invented and twists and turns along the way we cannot predict or anticipate. We may even surprise ourselves again one day soon.

http://www.myspace.com/jdfanglord


TOUR DIARY - AUGUST 2006


In the space of a week in mid August I played at the Hide-Out in Chicago with Captain Langford and the various Pine Valley Cosmonauts who play on The Library Book of the World , which — being as I am used to playing being on stage on my on these days, — quite simply rocked, (though I say so myself). Just enough time to run through the songs in soundcheck, not having played them since we recorded them back in May and then people were in the door ... apparently there is a live recording of the gig floating around out there in cyberspace, but I haven't found it ... also got to see the tremendous Devil in a Woodpile (Bloodshot Records) who did their completely acoustic washboard blues, Tuesday-night-residency-thing in the bar at The Hide-Out after we had played, which rocked even more ...

AND, back in Leeds I had the pleasure of doing a support slot for Patrik Fitzgerald, variously known as the punk rock legend who authored "Safety Pin Stuck in my Heart" and/or the first punk to play an acoustic guitar. I first saw Patrik in 1978, when I was sixteen at the Anti Nazi Carnival in London, where he got canned off by the hordes of punks in the mosh pit (before it was called the mosh pit) waiting for The Clash to come on. As well as being a key inspiration for me picking up an acoustic guitar ( and you can debate amongst yourselves whether that is a service to the cause of music or not?) he is a genuinely warm and friendly bloke. He said his experiences at Sham 69 gigs were on occasion far worse than the Anti Nazi Carnival. In Leeds he played a great blend of old and new stuff which is reflected a CD he has out called Floating Population

http://www.myspace.com/patrikfitzgerald