Anyway, later on I remembered the name found the original song and just loved the sentiment of it, mainly because I am the polar opposite of the song. I fear time, I am scared of it running through my fingers and I worry about the day when I won't be around to care for and annoy my loved ones. So maybe that's why I did this?

But I was going through my server and I discovered that I'd done a version of this - it was just bass guitar and rhythm guitar, so tonight I set to work adding electric guitar, drums and vocals. It's nice. It has a warm feel to it. I just wish I could sing a bit better and do it justice. The vocal is a bit wobbly because I am not really a vocalist and I keep tackling female vocals for some reason, but I like everything else, even the drums which are all mine too. Just stick your fingers in my ears when I start warbling...

And here's the original:

I made a fairly short assessment of the supremely awful Nick Cave-fuelled "Grinderman" release Super Heathen Child on their website and I was somewhat surprised to see it picked up and noted in the diary of Robert Fripp. My critique was short and to the point because the quality of the music dictated the amount of energy I should expend in order to warn people of how much of a turkey this thing was. I kept it short:

"What a load of old bollocks. The wailings of Fripp save it from being a complete musical turd."

Unfortunately, this isn't the correct way to review music and I have been correctly castigated by Mr Fripp by this suitably verbose rebuttal:

So, what are these posters, given these clearly expressed attitudes?

It continues to surprise me; even having been for 43 years close to publicly declared unkindness, nastiness, resentment & hostility towards those who have the presumption to play music in front of others; that anyone would seek to wander out in the full view of public gaze and show their fundamental lacking in courtesy & grace, by presenting an opinion that is not even sufficiently developed to quite qualify as an opinion. These are reactions. They demonstrate an inability to manage & direct the personal energy-ecology, in this case of the feelings. It is quite possible to present a reasoned critique / review of Grinderman's (and anyone else's) work, but this would take intention, reflection & consideration. If our response is negative, we have the additional challenge of presenting the negative in a positive fashion. It is more difficult to be critical than supportive, noting that impartial criticism is about as supportive as it gets.

The main problem musicians have these days (apart from whinging about how terrible their life is being ripped off by record companies and those naughty downloaders on that there Internet thingy) is that they are in direct connection with those people who hear, digest and, most importantly, buy their music. In the past, critcism and critique such as I've displayed above would be limited to pub talk or chatter amongst friends:

Discerning Music Fan One: Have you heard the new {insert band name here} album?
Discerning Music Fan Two: Yes, it's a load of old cobblers...

Such off-the-cuff remarks would have never reached the ears of the artiste. Such barbed comments would have been limited to your circle of friends and so the fragile ego of the musician would have been preserved for a brief moment of time until a proper music journalist did a hatchet job on them in the music press and really affected their sales. Because again, most of those music fans in the past would have bought the albums and paid their money before expressing such sentiment.

Nowadays, we have been liberated by the net, because not only can we express our thoughts in the most forthright way and make indirect contact with our idols, we can actually hear the music for free and form our opinions without shelling out our hard-earned cash and being really disappointed by the crud these musicians release as music. The game is up and these chancers who managed to learn four chords on the guitar don't like it that we can pass criticism in a heartbeat. To qualify out opinion we need to quantify it with love, consideration and energy. OK - I'll give it a try in the interest of fairness.

Of course, I read Fripp's reaction and I thought to myself for a moment: "Hey, perhaps I am wrong? Perhaps Old Man Fripp is right. This reaction is hardly an opinion is it? I should go back and listen to this track again and again and again until I find something that I like in it".

Fripp is right my posting is a reaction - all opinion is based on reaction, on previous experiences and that invisible sliding scale in our brains that dictates what we like and don't Iike. Of course, if you hold someone prisoner and beat them enough, they soon learn to love their captor, so perhaps I need to play this song over and over until I form the musical equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome? As someone who immediately got into "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" from King Crimson on the first listen, I am used to engaging with difficult and ugly music.

But now I find myself become facetious and moving away from the task at hand. Let's go back to the Grinderman B-Side and see if there's anything I like about it. When the track starts the guitar noises interest me, but this is stuff I've heard before, most of the music that is presented seems to be familiar and familiar is OK, but the chugging drum and bass motif is satisfying and then Nick Cave starts singing. Now I have no issue with Nick Cave and his music, I am ambivalent towards him, he exists in a stylistic realm that is of no interest to me, but what I am hearing here sounds like someone who is trying too hard.

How can I explain that? It sounds like he's faking it, like he's written these words down and he's trying to force an emotional reaction from himself - at points he sounds as if he's trying to do a bad Elvis impression - and the lyrics appear to me to be utterly meaningless and throw away as if he just wrote down a few lines to sketch out the theme of the song and then riffed over this and improvised until the pot was empty.

I think I was a bit unfair before as I listened to this a third time, I tried to disengage the lyrics from the music and to listen to this as a purely instrumental endeavour and I can see this being a very cinematic piece, and Fripp's guitar work (as I said in my original estimation) really saves this from being a study in monotony. It is classic Fripp stuff and the type of guitar playing that still makes it alright for Fripp to tell me off and for me to take my punishment.

The more you take away the vocals, the more atmospheric the music becomes, but the lyric and vocal performance just turns it into a bit of a comedy show because Nick Cave doesn't put in a convincing performance to me - the energy levels appear to be a bit flat. I get the feeling that Nick Cave wants to channel the vocal stylings of Captain Beefheart or Howlin' Wolf but it just ain't working for me.

But yeah, on my sixth listen, I love it. Sign me up for 20 copies of this song!!! (But I only really love it for the Fripp solo)

The second is our first proper holiday away together back in 1995 and the day we were due to fly back the weather was appalling and we were rained out, so we headed to the airport early with nothing to do and waited for our flight, which was the very last flight of the day. Spending time waiting in the airport wasn't an issue, it was nice to have a sit down and relax reading the Sunday newspapers but the radio in the airport kept playing this song over and over until I was ready to murder Edwyn Collins.

Thankfully, this murderous rage has subsided over the years and I was moved by Mr Collins' illness and battle back to health and have sent him good vibes on a number of occasions. I think it is that fear that all guitarists (and musicians in general have) that one day they won't be able to pick up their instrument and play due to illness or age or whatever. But Edwyn Collins has proved that the show is never over.

So here is my version of his hit, but I didn't manage to nail the guitar solo as I don't have a proper wah-wah pedal to hand and couldn't find my volume pedal in my numerous boxes of crap that litter my room.

And here's the original:

With that preamble out of the way (in fact it was almost a "pramble" that's when an anecdote is more of an amble than a premable), I usher forth my magnificent vocal destruction of the Verve's "Lucky Man". You hear the instrumental last week and now I finally gargled my way to the mic and laid the foundation to my "Bad Cover Version" album.

I am truly sorry for my crimes against music - I mean that most sincerely, folks!

And here's a link to the original...

I recorded this last night. I cheated a bit by finding a MIDI of the song and stripping all the instrumentation out bar the drum track. But everything else here is my own. When there's a suitable moment, I'll be gargling over the top of this and reducing it to the level of my previous efforts.

Enjoy this for a rousing Sunday morning!

And here's a link to the original...

This isn't the first version of my Bad Cover Version of this tune. Old recording chum Andrew Osborne sent me his guitar-only version a few years back, which I tarted up and gargled my lungs over. But seeing as Andrew hasn't been in contact in a while and I didn't want to steal his arrangement, I thought it be best if I do my own take on the tune.

My guitar shopping experience in the UK has always been a negative one where you either get the sniffy muso shop assistant who looks down their nose at you and deliberately tries to undermine you or banjax you in equal measure. I always remember phoning up Holiday Music in Leytonstone in the late 90s and asking if they had a VG-8 in stock. "No," said the snotty assistant on the end of the phone, "That's a guitar synthesiser (wrong!) and we don't stock those". Meanwhile, I've got a copy of Guitarist magazine open in front of me with their advert telling me they had the units in stock and that's how I got their phone number!

But the Guitar Center is such a laid back place and the staff are friendly and helpful and there are so many different guitars to drool over, it really is Guitar Heaven.


Guitar Heaven 2004

Outside the massive shop front, there is a walk of fame where famous guitar players have left their hand prints. I snapped this picture of Tony Levin's entry because it made me laugh so much - don't worry, he's not deformed or a space alien, he was wearing his funk fingers.

Tony Levin's Hand Print on Guitar Center Walk of Fame

So where are we going with this? Well this is a stream of consciousness post because my attention was brought to Peter Gabriel's recent performance at the self-same Guitar Center, and Tony Levin is his long-term bass playing chum and I have good memories of the place. So I thought I'd combine all these elements into one gooey mess.

Enjoy!

Abracadabra - I wanna reach out and grab ya!

How can I make myself useful after my mortal remains have ceased to be? Why, you could have your ashes pressed into a vinyl record of your own making!

Huzzah! I can still bring music to the masses and my fibre will be contained therein within the grooves.

It was the early hours and I honestly thought I was having a heart attack and passing on. It was as if an invisible elephant was sitting on my chest and no matter what I did, I could not get relief. Thankfully, I worked through this strange incident and I am still here. It was probably just indigestion or trapped wind, but the cold sweats and the urge to defecate on the spot made my mortality even more tangible than usual - so I have set to work transferring all these old tapes onto my PC. The logic is that if I did suddenly die, the Missus wouldn't have the first fucking clue on how to do any of this, so I'd better tidy up before I go.

So the last few evenings, after tales of Milly-Molly-Mandy and kisses goodnight to Verity, I have retreated to the mixing desk and having to relive every awful thing I've ever recorded. My goodness, I have recorded an awful lot of crap in my time. Unfortunately, washing out your ears doesn't take away the pain of listening to my first early fumblings into recording.

Whereas other musicians have paid their dues by playing with other people and actually played gigs and practised, all my musical development has been committed to tape and hard disc. This is how I've paid my virtual dues - so I have to live with every shit idea, whereas proper musicians forget bad gigs and duff performances in a fug of booze and dubious white powder.

One of the first proper "songs" I ever recorded was something called "Electric God". In those days, I was using four-track tape and bouncing down tracks, so it was really hard to edit stuff. Whereas now, editing music is a bit like blowing your nose. So my ideas in those days were usually presented "as is" with no way of editing out the bad bits (or maybe I just didn't know how to) and then mixing down a stereo master to tape, rendering the dynamics to a pool of audio mush.

I've tinkered with this track and tarted up the audio somewhat. This isn't very good - I'd only been messing around with guitar for a year or so, but my bass playing is solid. Always a better bass player. I'll post both versions - the old 1992 master and the new tinkered version. The latter just sounds a bit fizzier.