Astrolabes

Following a tip off from Rima Staines, I went to see the Al-Mizan exhibition at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science yesterday. It's basically a collection of astrolabes, those extraordinary devices, in use from the Middle Ages right through to the Early Modern period, that are part star map, part compass, part clock, part work of art, part science, part magic. They are exquisitely beautiful and reveal a phenomenal understanding of maths and astronomy (not forgetting astrology too).

There's an online exhibition for those who can't get to Oxford, but if you're anywhere near, then I recommend you visit.



Since speaking to Rima astrolabes must have been on my mind, for they feature in a new song that I finished this week. Though there's been much hammering and bending in my tune-smithy of late, I haven't written a song for nearly a year - sometimes the creative coffers are just empty. I've learned not to try and force a song to come, though during the lean times it's hard to trust that the muse will ever return.

Most of my songs begin with my secreting myself away, lighting a candle or two and noodling on the mandolin for a few hours. I try chords at random, leave one or two or more strings open to act as drones, let my ears guide me. Occasionally it is as if the instrument leads my fingers to new patterns that I couldn't consciously have discovered - most mysterious.

When I have a set of chord sequences that work, I play them over and over and start to sing nonsense over the top until I have a melody that I'm happy with. Like most people when they start writing songs, my melodies used to be simple and horizontal - now, as my melodic sense has improved, they are more vertical, with ever longer curls and tails.




I find that the chords present images to me - once I have the chords I already know what the song is to be about. The tricky part is writing the lyrics, taking these opaque images and feelings and trying to convey them with words that fit the melodic and rhyming scheme, but which aren't hideously cliched. I am all too aware that sun, moon, silver and gold are my most overused words (and, of course, moon appears in the song)!

Sometimes a complete line will occur to me as I wake up - I find the hypnagogic morning state to be most productive: though it may look as if I'm lazing in bed, my mind is active as can be. So one morning I woke with the opening line: 'Last night I saw Rachel turn into a bird.' Lovely! But the rest required a lot more work as you can see from the amount of scribbling in this photo (though please don't look too closely at this work-in-progress).



Once I have most of the words pinned down I have to make sure that they 'work' - the written word sounds very different when spoken or sung. I 'sing' the song in my head as I walk or cycle around Oxford. Changes and improvements occur to me. Eventually everything settles.

It's through the writing of the song that I find out what it's about. This one began as a farewell song to a dear friend who, in a sense, is moving away. By the end it had become a song about change and mutability, about how we are constantly in a process of metamorphosis and about how, if we try and hold on to the past we simply hasten the end (the keen-eared among you will also pick up some classical references that managed to find their way in: to Orpheus, Syrinx and Heraclitus).

So here it is, Astrolabe (I hate having to say this, but I'd probably better - Copyright © Andy Letcher 2011), recorded with my beloved by candlelight in our front room, warts and all. If you listen carefully you might be able to hear the fridge in the background. Perhaps one day it will become a Telling the Bees song and you'll be able to hear how it changes in the playing.

Astrolabe by andyletcher

The drugs do work, apparently

With its pages stuffed full of the gurning faces of the fashionably wasted, I've always steered clear of Mixmag. But I picked up the latest copy when my eyes were drawn by the results of their annual drugs survey.

Theirs is not a scientific study of drug use in the UK. Rather it gives a picture of what mostly twenty-something, white, middle class lads-who-go-clubbing are imbibing, snorting, swallowing and smoking.

Unsurprisingly MDMA comes in at number two, behind that old ego-mangler, alcohol. Cocaine is still alarmingly high in the list (62.7% of respondents said they'd used it in the last year), as is ketamine.

Just under half of respondents had tried mushrooms but only about 16% had used them in the last year - a finding that is consistent with other studies. Those who return to mushrooms more than about five times remain a minority. The lower ranks of the list are filled with 'designer' drugs from outlaw chemists exploiting the Shulgin cookbook and the loopholes of legality. I mean, WTF is Benzo fury?

You know you're middle aged when the kids are doing drugs you don't understand, but I couldn't help feeling a tug of nostalgia for the days when people took psychedelics for philosophical, psychological and - dare I say it - spiritual insight. The prevailing youth culture is one where excessive and demonstrative polydrug use is the norm - what? you mean you've only tried MDMA? - and where the weekend's exploits are turned rapidly into cultural capital around the water-cooler. We've been given the keys to sweety shop and boy are we gonna gorge.

Certainly, those of us for whom the archaic revival was all about reaching out - to each other, to the land and the shamanic realms - rather than cutting off and pulling the plug, have much to do to overcome the fact that such a view now appears hopelessly out of fashion.

Canterbury Soundwaves

Like most hippies, I spent much of my twenties in a fug of hashish, losing myself in fantasy fiction and listening to prog-rock. One of my favourite albums was this, Caravan's third (and I think greatest), In the Land of the Grey and Pink.




It's fair to say that I know every note. Never ones to invest too much thought into their lyric-writing - 'standing on a golf course, dressed in PVC, I chanced upon a golf girl, selling cups of tea' - the music nevertheless conjures extraordinary images, with Dave Sinclair's fluid organ riffs and solos carrying the imagination into far off times and places, and always staying the right side of self-indulgent prog-noodling. I'm sure I've unconsciously incorporated many of their harmonic ideas into my own songwriting.

Another band that I couldn't get enough off back then was Gong, who I've blogged about before. Hard to say which of theirs was my favourite, but on balance it has to be Angel's Egg.


Psychedelic guitars, jazz dischords, spacey textures and Daevid Allen's surreal but allegorical Planet Gong mythology add up to an album that is as beautiful as it is unpredictable. Hard to imagine that anything this good could be made in today's climate of bland conformity to X-factor, market-driven dross.

What both bands have in common is that they were part of the so-called Canterbury Scene, a loose agglomeration of bands and artists that emerged out of this small Kent city from the late 1960s through to the mid 1970s, and which also included Soft Machine, Egg, Kevin Ayres, The Wylde Flowers, Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, and so on and so forth.

Something must have been in the ether for the Canterbury Scene seems to have produced some of the most inventive, unusual, odd, occasionally silly, and out there music of the psych-prog era. Record companies were just happy to put musicians into a studio, leave them to it and see what they came up with. Heady days. It's a rich seam that is very definitely worth mining.

Happily, my friend Matt Watkins (author of the most excellent Secrets of Creation) is producing a monthly podcast covering the music of this period. Lovingly produced from - get this - his caravan in Canterbury, it is full of interesting anecdotes, obscure and hard to find gems, and many long lost rarities (not least, in episode three, a live recording of Frank Zappa jamming with Caravan). So do check out Canterbury Soundwaves. An excellent podcast dealing with a vital and exciting chapter in the history of British Psych music.

BBC Folk Awards 2011

The BBC Folk Awards were announced last Monday and there were some worthy winners. James Fagan and Nancy Kerr richly deserved Best Duo - you're unlikely to meet a more generous and hard-working pair of musicians - while Chris Wood's 'Hollow Point' (Best Original Song) is everything a folk song should be - rooted in tradition but addressing contemporary issues with effortless musicianship, craft and political punch.

But I can't help feeling that there's a weary sense of predictability about the winners. All award ceremonies have to negotiate the tension between the genuine desire to reward artistic accomplishment and the demands of the marketplace. The Folk Awards are no exception (indeed, this is just one of many tensions that folk music in general is faced with - some, after all, might question why a musical genre that is 'of the people' needs an award ceremony in the first place).

But the danger is that with festival organization, CD distribution and band promotion all controlled by an ever narrower set of individuals and agents, and with the gongs apparently rotated around a similarly narrow set of artists, year in year out, the Folk Awards start to look a bit too cosy, driven by the market and not merit. The lifetime achievement award seems to go to anyone from the sixties that the general public might have heard of, irrespective of whether they've done anything in the last twenty years.

The Folk Awards, for all their faults, are undoubtedly good for folk music. But if it's innovation that you're after then head to the Spiral Earth Awards. Who else would pit Sam Sweeney versus the godlike Johnny Kalsi in the Best Musician category? Or include Dreadzone in Best Live Act (after seeing their set at Glastonbury 2010, I can confirm it's an award they thoroughly deserve)?

The Spirals are decided by public vote and there's still time to make your opinion count - voting closes on 21st Feb. Whatever you think about their choices, and the ultimate winners, at least you can be sure that the Spirals are created by fans for fans, and, free of the pressures of the market, they offer a much more balanced picture of what is currently a thriving but diverse music scene.

Truck Store opens

In an age when record shops are shutting even faster than pubs, HMV is teetering on the brink and the Vigin Megastore is but a footnote in the history of rock, it takes a certain chutzpah to open an independent store.

But Joe and Robin Bennett, the boys that bring you Truck and Wood festivals, may just be the people to pull it off with their Truck Store, conveniently placed on Oxford's liveliest street, the infamous Cowley Road.





I popped in to the grand opening this evening. Glad to report that it was rammed, so I didn't really get a proper opportunity to look at the stock, but it looks like a healthy selection of CDs and vinyl drawn from the kind of Indie and Folk bands that comprise the Truck stable, with local Oxford bands getting a good showing, some eye-catching oddities and a range of comics too. New stock is arriving all the time so be sure to go in for a browse.

Nothing compares with being able to rummage through racks of CDs, with finding the unexpected gem you never knew you wanted. It's a dying art. iTunes just can't compare.

So, long may Truck Store continue. I wish it every success.

Folk Trance

Folk music has many associations, not all of them good, most of them bad. English folk music in particular has a reputation for being lumpy, twee, parochial and terminally uncool, all beards and tankards and nit-picking over the finer points of tradition. We tend to think of folk as something conservative, something that holds and constricts, not something Dionysian and un-tame, that liberates and releases. And yet it is the trancey austerity of folk tunes that drew me to them in the first place (I discovered folk at the same time as I discovered rave). They have the power to elicit a curious atavistic feeling, to facilitate an undoing.

A good tune needs to be repeated many times. Not for me the Irish way of playing a tune twice then hopping to the next and the next. I want thickness and depth.

Like a mantra there is a delicious pleasure in hearing a tune again and again, a delight that unfolds from the tightly structured narrative of the 32 bar form: tension-release, tension-release, statement-development-resolution. A good tune is like a story. You never tire of hearing it even though you know the ending. And when skilled musicians extemporise, weaving variations and harmonies around the warp, their embroidery makes it something exceptional, a unique piece of folk art. There should be a sadness when it ends.

The bagpipes lend themselves to repetition. Their traditional role was not marching people into battle, but leading people into the dance. All across Europe, since the Middle Ages and probably from Antiquity, people have leapt and stepped in time to reed pipes, the textured layers of the drone and the rich timbres of the chanter carrying them onwards, urging them upwards. And when musicians and dancers start to forget themselves, lose themselves to the crowd and the groove and the tune and the repetition, something wonderful starts to happen. An intensity. A feeling of flow, that things are cooking, that this could happily go on forever.

There's magic in the music. Bagpipes are the original trance instrument - a design classic, still in use after 700 years.

To illustrate what I mean, here are some musicians playing on the Greek island of Karpathos. The bagpipe is a tsabouna, an unusual instrument in that you can only play 6 notes on it. The art is to play it almost as a percussion instrument. I also like the bells on the lyra player's bow which give his playing an extra bite. Art music this ain't. Listen right to the end and you'll hear that things go up a notch. Something starts to change. Somewhere a goat-footed god is starting to jig.

Sketch

And here's a sketch that one Merlin Porter made of me while I was performing at Catweazle the other night. He finished it in about four minutes flat, which is how long it takes to sing my song, Star Gazey Pie (all about sons, fathers, ancestry and Cornwall) - not bad!

Facelift

As you can see, over the last few days I've been giving this blog a bit of a facelift. Previously I was blogging music related posts over at Telling the Bees and keeping this site for my writing and academic work.

But it must be conceded that the life of a writer is not that exciting - I spend hours with my face screwed up in front of the computer, my nose in a book, or plodding about with my eyes fixed upon the middle distance. Apart from advertising my periodic public or festival appearances, I've struggled to think of what I could possibly blog about that might be of interest. And after a day of squeezing out words onto the page, the last thing I've wanted to do was write more. My word pile was getting dangerously low.

While considering opening up the focus I remembered that Renaissance magicians thought scholars (and I suppose, by extension, writers) to be ruled by the planet Saturn (grayscale planet of restriction, dessication and death, in astrological terms at least) and hence prone to melancholy. Certainly, writing requires a Saturn-like narrowing of focus, a kind of self-absorption or looking inwards, too much of which leads to a gloomy outlook, a subtle pessimism that I think has been reflected here. It's all been a bit austere.

So in a new spirit of Jupiter-like expansiveness, of reaching out into the world, I've decided to make this blog about my life as a writer and as a musician, and, especially, as someone who plays the little known but very much alive English bagpipes. Music remains a large and indispensible part of my life and I'd like to share that here.

The new header photo shows me performing in a 2009 dance piece called Common Dance, choreographed by Rosemary Lee and with an exquisite and specially composed score by Terry Mann. A site-specific work for fifty dancers of mixed ethnicity, age and formal ability, it took place in Greenwich Borough Hall. You can see more photos here - I understand a DVD is in the making. It was as beautiful and extraordinary as it looks.

My role was small but significant - 'the piper' shamanistically marking the transition between the three acts (birth, life and death), starting my journey in the bowels of the building and ending it right up in the gods.

Let's just say that it was a role that suited me well.