kaput: fat sams, fri 06 feb 2009

Here, in handy playlist form, is the video of our set supporting The Hazey Janes at Fat Sams a couple of weeks ago. Filmed by Mr Christopher Lee-Marr, of the wonderful Esperi. The audio is quite quiet, so you'll need to turn it up loud.

general round up

Not much activity for a week, but there have been a few things I've intended to write about. Unfortunately, they can be crammed into a few sentences...

Have now seen both Frost/Nixon and Milk. Won't bore anyone with attempts at reviews, but will say that both films are good and worth seeing. If you only have time for one, make it Milk. It's wonderful.

I've finished reading Join Me by Danny Wallace - since seeing Yes Man a month or so ago, I've read all three of his books. None of them are particularly hard going, but they are all good - enthusiastic, funny and touching in places. Or, in places, touching. Nothing dodgy. I'm not sure reading the book was enough to make me want to become a Joinee though, I think I'd find doing a random act of kindness every Friday a bit tricky - anyway, I try to be kind all the time!

My step-dad gave me his old 35mm SLR, went to Camperdown to play about with it. I took a couple of rolls, which you can see pretty much all of here. I'm a little disappointed that some of them didn't come out as I'd expected (many of them a lot darker than I'd anticipated), but looking at them now I think there's some good first efforts there. Anyway, the point of getting a film-based SLR was to force myself to think more when setting up the shot, so it's all a learning experience. Excuse some of the dodgy scans...

Kaput played at Fat Sams on Friday night with the Hazey Janes. The Hazeys were fantastic, probably the best I've ever seen them, and we all enjoyed playing our set. It was the first time in nearly 11 years of playing gigs that my sister had got to see one of my bands. She said she enjoyed it. The whole set was filmed, will get that uploaded once I've actually seen it!

I'm beginning to think that writing a little about every record/CD I buy this year may be harder than anticipated, after an unexpected trip to Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago found me in Fopp, and then on Saturday morning I got the chance to rake through all the new promos in Grouchos...my wallet has taken a beating. It makes me sad that there's a generation of "music lovers" who will never really experience the joy of spending a chunk of your Saturday raking through random CDs, hoping to strike gold, and getting a bit of banter and recommendations while you do it. Sure, there's a social element to Last.fm or some torrent clients, but it's impersonal, nowhere near the same as actually speaking to other people in person about music. I just hope that it's not something that's completely lost too soon, especially in smaller cities/towns. I'll try and write a January round-up when I get off night shifts.

That's pretty much all for now, I'm off to watch A Room For Romeo Brass.

kaput: drouthies, thu 16 0ct 2008

A few videos of three of the five songs we played at our gig in Drouthies back in October. Only just got the files to put online this week. We're playing at Fat Sams on this coming Friday (6th Feb), should hopefully get that filmed too.

1. "Happy Birthday"


2. "Captain Capo"


3. "Eyes Like Palaces"

the a forest: early demos, rambling

Amongst our friends, the as-yet unreleased The A Forest album has started to take on "Chinese Democracy" style mythical status. At least for the 2 or 3 people still waiting... We started on it in 2005, ditched the original recordings and have very slowly been piecing it together since 2006. We thought that at one point last year that it was finished, we had it mixed...then realised we still needed to tidy a few things up. There's still a couple of vocals that Cat wants to re-do, but hopefully it should see a release in some form next year.

I've been listening to the tracks that are likely to make up the album today, and I have to say I'm pretty proud of them. I've had my doubts at times, but I think a little bit of distance from the writing and recording has put it all into perspective. There are faults, but they don't upset me like they used to. One thing that struck me was that when it does come out, it will be 5 years since our split single with Mercury Tilt Switch, a re-recorded version of which will appear on the album. That's got to be a bit of a record delay between the release of a single and its appearance on a (non-compilation) album?

As well as the album tracks, I've been listening to other early demos and songs we recorded for the album, but discarded along the way for various reasons. The early instrumental demos have a certain charm, especially as they were recorded live in a practice room with a couple of mics and an 8-track. They are surprisingly good considering we've not always been the strongest live band. The album offcuts include songs that we played live quite a bit, but that just never translated too well into recordings.

In the spirit of the season, I've uploaded a few things. They're a bit rough around the edges and hopefully no-one else in the band will mind me doing this! You can listen to five songs from the album over at our myspace.

[MP3] The A Forest - Nursery
[MP3] The A Forest - Kids Jumping Off the Bridge

Two instrumentals from our first set of demos, before Cat joined. We definitely played "Nursery" at quite a few shows, always as an instrumental. This involved the peak of our instrument swapping, with me taking a shot on drums. The instrument swapping was something I was keen on early on, but we calmed down on it after a while. I don't think we ever played "Kids Jumping Off the Bridge" live, but may be wrong - we did play one gig without a singer before Cat joined. The title comes from the Perth tradition of kids in the summer jumping into the Tay from one of the bridges. I never did it, the idea terrifies me. Both tracks recorded live onto Chris' 8-track at Stage 2000 during September 2003.

[MP3] The A Forest - Waves

This has been available before but I took it down from the website, though it ended up on some playlist on a blog and turns up on Last.fm, scrobbled from far flung corners of the world. It's based around a chord progression I'd had kicking around since school, having recorded a version of it myself at one point. The cello sounds pretty out of tune, and my guitar is probably knackered, so forgive us. We recorded parts of it ourselves at Stage and one of the sound rooms at Duncan of Jordanstone but got Robin Sutherland to do the final overdubs and mix it for us, the start of a beautiful relationship. Recorded spring/summer 2004, at the same time as "Dans L'aide du Levrier Retraite".

[MP3] The A Forest - There Is No Love Between Pigeons

This is an abandoned recording from the album sessions, recorded in 2006/2007. It sounds better than I remember, but definitely not good enough for the album. This was what we ended our set with for quite some time, often ending in some rather pathetic guitar abuse from me, a little over-excited. That poor guitar was kicked around the floor, thrown at walls, strings snapped and often knuckles bleeding... The title was inspired by the sight of some rather one-sided courting between two pigeons in Dundee city centre.

Hope there's something to enjoy there, for fun more than anything else.

past & pending #1: mikee & the lambos

Mikee & the Lambos
Active: 1998
Gigs: 1
Recordings: 0

As promised some time ago, the first in a very occasional series chronicling the glorious failures and mundane successes of my ten years playing in bands. The original idea was prompted by a similar move by my friend Alex Botten, eventually resulting in his recent book "Hanging Around".

We begin at the beginning, at age 15, with the first real band I was in, one that actually had instruments, and practised, and even played a show. Mikee & the Lambos, as we were christened before stepping onstage at that solitary show, were my friends Euan and Andrew on drums and bass respectively, myself on guitar, and on vocals (and six years our senior...) Paul. Paul was one of two respondents to our "singer wanted" advert in a local guitar shop, the other a girl in the year below us at school. After months of regular (but hardly committed) practice, we had been offered a gig by some school friends in that well known rock and roll Mecca that was Burrelton Village Hall. Still, it was a gig, and we were confident. We agreed, a set was worked out and new Ellesse trainers purchased.

Not for the last time in my life, questions of general musical competency were ignored with naive over-enthusiasm. When I mentioned that I could play most of "I Wanna Be Adored" by the Stone Roses, this was good enough for Paul to insist that we play the whole thing, my faltering approximation of the actual guitar solo and all. We generally tended not to play anything too complex, for good reason, so this was always going to be disastrous. The rest of our set, as I recall, consisted of "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones, "Creep" by Radiohead, "Kung Fu" by Ash and one original: "Funky Riff". A title that the word misleading will never, ever be enough for. "Funky Riff", as far as memory serves, consisted of little more than me playing a single, unfunky, riff and working through my effects pedals over a straight 4/4-plod and inaudible bass. The lyrics, in full, were "Funky riff/funky riff/funkiy, funky riff". It was more than likely worse than you could ever imagine.

I don't think our one show was quite what anyone involved may have imagined. There was no heaving crowd down the front - everyone was sat on plastic chairs against the walls of the hall (amazingly, the chair-to-punter ratio was about 1:1) - and our friends never suddenly saw us as messianic figures. Largely because we were terrible. Still, it wasn't all bad - we did get to play an encore of "Creep". Just as well really, as the first time we played it I managed to pull my guitar lead out with my foot as I went for my distortion pedal. I think the most important thing I learnt that day was to always loop the lead round the strap...

Mikee & the Lambos never survived in that form, unsurprisingly. Paul (or possibly his fiance) realised that this was clearly a waste of time, and we never really saw him again. After a short break, Andy, Euan and I did continue. That is where we will pick up next time.

kaput - captain capo... (again, live at drouthies)

Another video of "Captain Capo...", this time taken on a camera phone by Maxi at our Drouthies gig on August 16th, with Esperi and White Heath. There's photos that I took of those bands here, and more video to come once it's been uploaded, courtesy of Cat.

I have clearly failed miserably in my attempts to write regularly in this blog (last post in July!), but I guess I've just been pretty busy (and very lazy). Still, I think it would be good to force myself to write regularly, even if just to keep my brain ticking over, so will persevere with it.

kaput - captain capo & the battle of goujon (live clip)

Here's a short video of my band Kaput playing at the Doghouse in Dundee on Tuesday just passes (8th July 2008). A friend of mine filmed it on my camera when he thought he was still taking photos, quality is pretty reasonable. It's only part of the song, but gives you a pretty good idea of what we sound like. Enjoy, hopefully!