I Hate Mornings

In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond XK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

Last Saturday I took the train down to London to jam with Nigel Hoyle. I didn’t know exactly what to expect. When musicians talk about having a “jam” I get a horrible premonition of standing around with a bunch of halfwits in a grotty room playing blues riffs and grinning incessantly.

But with Nigel, I was optimistic. He produced the Jont album we recorded in December, and was brilliantly businesslike through the whole process. During rehearsals he would sit in the corner, singing arrangement ideas into his phone, writing notes and recording the whole thing on his MacBook. And he wore a jacket and tie all the time. So when he phoned me up to ask if I wanted to come and invent Space Country with him, I was confident that I would at least get an interesting day.

Beautiful instruments make for great tracks

I wasn’t disappointed. I arrived at the tiny studio (one of a stable of six or so) and settled into a corner. Nigel had borrowed a Fender Rhodes for me to play, which he put through a Fender Twin and which produced (I’m not sure why I was surprised) that classic Rhodes sound. He was playing a beautiful old Gibson acoustic that sounded like three pianos playing perfectly in tune. We chatted for 30 seconds then got down to business.

Nigel had an idea. He had recorded a guitar sequence onto his phone and had it sitting on his computer, ready to go. A simple, soulful idea in A minor with some nice voicings and an unexpected twist. I played along, and we decided on a structure that seemed to work, with an A major chorus and a bridge in C with quicker harmonic movement that gave the tune a lift when it was needed.

How can you know what you mean until you’ve played it?

I put down a few takes, adjusting the click speed each time to get the feel just right: relaxed and groovy, with just enough swing and no drag. I abandoned the sustain pedal, which was making rumbling noises, and settled on a series of voicings that I would never usually play on the piano. It’s always refreshing to spend some time on a different instrument (like organ or electric piano or monosynth), because the limitations force you to create new ways of expressing the music you’re imagining.

After a couple of breaks for tea and toast (with Marmite, of course) we had the Rhodes, acoustic guitar and bass parts down. We added some of Logic’s looped beats as a placeholder drum track, and sat back to listen. I recorded a quick 12-second video on my phone:

It’s just good music. That’s it.

We have the beginnings of a great sounding track. Now we’re both coming up with melody ideas, and when we meet again in a couple of weeks we’ll see how they all fit together. I can’t wait.