You are allowed to enjoy this…

I have managed to secure tickets to see the new revamped Penguin Cafe (Orchestra) fronted by Arthur Jeffes at the Barbican next February. Here’s a clip of them I found on YouTube (innit marvellous?) of them playing the RAH last week:

Even better is that the concert is being opened by another favourite of mine: The Portico Quartet.

I have front row tickets so there’s a good chance I’ll be staring right up Arthur Jeffes’ trouser leg. Even better is that the concert almost coincides (by a week or so) with my fortieth birthday.
So if everything goes to plan and nothing cataclymic happens (and there is a good chance of that considering what happening here at the moment), I’ll be heading to London next February!!!
Of course, if it all goes wrong I’ll post the bloody tickets on eBay for a massive profit…
Fingers crossed, eh?

Famed bubble-permed psychic Russell Grant has this to say about my fortune today:

“You’re firmly ensconced in fantasy land, which is so much more fun than the real world. Abandon yourself to a love affair or creative project. If that means calling in sick, so be it. You’re the type who needs to exercise their imagination in order to be happy. Writing music, painting a self portrait, or making jewellery will be a rewarding exercise.”

Meanwhile, I take delivery of my new MIDI controller keyboard which I got for a knockdown price from Whybuynew.co.uk – a company I completely endorse as my keyboard appears to be new and untouched by human hand, despite being classed as B-stock. RESULT!

After much consideration, I have decided to pare down my setup and get rid of my Korg Triton LE hardware keyboard and the 25-key MIDI controller I use for on-the-fly work in favour of moving to a completely software synth setup now. And this is why I purchased a Novation SL61 Mk II – the driving force behind this is the fantastic Automap software it ships with. I am a complete MIDI idiot (probably the guitarist coming out in me there) and Automap automatically maps keys to software synths at the touch of a button. It’s great!
For a long time now, I have been threatening to do a totally electronic recording. I’ve mainly been threatening myself because I am not much of a keyboard player and tend to think in guitar shapes, musically speaking. So it will be a challenge to do something like that.
Of course, I have to actually sit down and do it. That’s another matter and I’ll probably end up squirting guitar all over it in the end…like I always do.

I think I’ve documented this before, but when Simon Jeffes, leader of the Penguin Café Orchestra died I cried for about 20 minutes at the unfairness of it all. As musical heroes go, Mr Jeffes is not a Hendrix or a Townshend or even a Fripp, he existed on a different plane for me. I like my heroes unassuming and humble and doing their own thing and he ticked those boxes with his music in the Penguin Café.

Back in 1997, I wasn’t quite as connected to the Internet as I am now, in fact there were no such thing as news feeds or a way of searching for news and I came across the news of his death aged 48 years old of brain cancer about a week after the event. It shocked me to the core. And I did cry.
I remember my mother crying the morning it was announced Elvis had died and couldn’t understand her grief. I remember the assassination of John Lennon and the emotion on show and still couldn’t equate how you could feel sorrow for a stranger. Mind you, I was only seven and ten years old respectively in those cases.
But with that horrible news, I glimpsed how you might be emotionally attached to someone you don’t know, but have been touched by their art. For me it was another case for life being unfair and rotten. I knew he had more music in him and his work was ended prematurely. That hurt.
A decade went by and in late 2007, Arthur Jeffes, son of Simon, assembled members of the original Penguin Café Orchestra and performed a tribute concert to his father. Unfortunately, I’d moved away from London a couple of months before and deeply regretted both moving away from my spiritual home and missing the gig. I thought no more of it because it looked unlikely that the Penguin Café Orchestra would ever play again. I cursed my misfortune and stupidity for missing another exciting musical opportunity. But I am forever the fool.
Last year, I became aware that Arthur had assembled his own band together and was playing festivals throughout the summer. Of course, I was a bit tied up with my own life to break away and see them perform, but it was exciting news to know. Then more recently, I picked up the live CD/DVD the new band put out in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust and was once more transported to the mythical and mystical musical world of the Penguin Café.

My love was reignited and I purchased all the recently remastered albums again (as they were on special offer on Amazon) and worked my way through them. During these listening sessions, Verity picked up on the music and loved the sleeve illustrations of Penguin men. She is now a fan and demands “Penguin Music” to which she dances in her own sweet way across the living room. “I’m dancing like a penguin,” she says, and I realise that my daughter has excellent taste in music.
Verity even has her favourite song from the group. It is Steady State – which one would think a little unusual as it is one of the slower numbers, but this is the one she demands to hear the most. I am truly blessed with a wonderful child.
And so tonight, I missed another gig I would have happily given ten years of my life away to attend. Tonight the new Penguin Café performed at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms season and gave a truly magnificent performance. I don’t know if you can be proud of other people’s children, but I am truly proud of Arthur Jeffes for he has done justice to his father’s musical legacy and taken the weight of responsibility for the Penguin Café on his shoulders. For not only does Arthur and his group give faithful representations of the classic repertoire there are also new songs in there to keep the grey matter nourished. Now I don’t know if he is channelling the energy of his father, or has a direct line to the Penguin Café or is really adept at producing remarkable pastiches, but these new songs are strong and feel right. The newest of these is called Landau (after Martin perhaps?) and I’ve cheekily posted at the foot of this for your consideration. If you like it, buy the CD/DVD set above.
I’m no Simon Jeffes and I don’t record music a millionth as good as the Penguin Café, but I secretly hope that when this useless, flabby old body of mine finally gives up the good fight Verity and Herbie might look at my music collection and do something positive with it. That would make me very proud indeed.
But congratulations to Arthur Jeffes – I think you’ve made an awful lot of people very, very happy.

As a footnote, I recorded a tribute to Simon Jeffes in 1998 and here it is for your consideration. After hearing Landau, it suddenly reminded me of this track for some reason.

Direct download: CLICK HERE
And for those of you looking for my review of the Penguin Cafe concert at the Barbican on 9 February 2011, you can find that here.

Seeing as Fred liked my design for the Laurie Anderson concert I was talking about yesterday, I thought I’d have a root around in the archive and see if I could find anymore examples of my design skills. Unfortunately, a lot of the King Crimson designs are in a format I can no longer read (anyone got a copy of Easy CD 3 or 3.5 they could lend me?) but I did find these three Genesis sleeves for your enjoyment.
I think I am a frustrated graphic designer! But I remember really enjoying coming up with designs for those albums using existing elements I’d scanned it or grabbed from video stills.
With my own CD designs, I tend to keep the concept fairly lightweight because the more colour you use, the more ink you use and if you are printing a large run on a crappy inkjet printer, it is going to cost you money. So I tend to make sure there is plenty of white space on my sleeves and don’t get too clever with it!!!

I’ve been having a right royal sort out here at StudioLock and I found a box of old CDs that I’d burnt in the year 2000. These were mainly “bootlegs” or music I’d recorded from the radio or Internet sources, but despite looking perfect, none of these CDs would play back or could be accessed by computer or audio CD player. I suspect that these CD-Rs were from the same batch that rendered me losing half-an-album’s worth of masters (“Touched by the King” recorded in 2000 – where I lost most of the master recordings due to CD-R failure).
I remember at the time the media saying how reliable CD-R were compared to hard drives and other recordable media, but this appear to be untrue – well at least for this particular batch. Nowadays I put my failth in a NAS (network attached server) with two terabyte hard drives that duplicate each other automatically and a 1.5TB backup drive on my main PC, so effectively there are three copies of any music/document/picture/video file existing anyone time.
As time goes on and the propagation of self-created digital media expands exponentially with the amount of digital devices you have, you soon find yourself becoming a keeper of a massive digital archive. Especially if you are creative, like myself, and have your own music archive too.
But as I was going through the discs that were lost, I found a concert that I had genuine love for and wanted to keep desperately. It was Laurie Anderson performing at the Barbican the 24 May 2000, where she took part in her “Songs and Stories from Moby Dick” – a show that was never ever put out via commercial channels. So with no official release, I was pretty upset that my only copy, a pretty decent recording from the radio, lovingly put on CD-R was no longer playable.
So I went online and searching on Google and – lo-and-behold – I found a copy of the concert via a trading forum and downloaded it pronto. When I played back the recording, I quickly realised that I was actually listening to the recording I had made all those years ago.
You see, at the time, I was in touch with a fellow on the net who had a King Crimson concert at the Royal Albert Hall that I’d attended in 1995, which was notable because it fell on the same day as KC-drummer Bill Bruford’s birthday and one of the songs “Indiscipline” was altered to take in this fact. Don’t think I am some great bootlegger, because I am not. I have made a handful of recordings in my time and have only traded about six or seven discs for similar concerts.
So I traded one copy of my Laurie Anderson CD-R to this guy in the US for a copy of this King Crimson concert, and he must of traded it onwards until it because the only source of the concert.
In a weird way, by sending my CD-R across the ocean, I’d actually preserved it forever…strange virtual world, innit?



And this is the CD sleeve I designed for the concert.