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Copeland with world’s oldest known musical instrument, a bone flute.

Finally got around to watching Stewart Copeland’s Adventures in Music today.

I’d had lunch with my mum, and she mentioned watching it. Had I? She and husband Malcolm said they’d liked it, but not been blown away by it. They’d liked each episode more; sceptical about the first, etc. And a pal, John Morgan, was raving – or should I say singing it’s praises? – about it on Facebook.

So I binge watched all three episodes today. First off, as a drummer who loved and was influenced by Copeland as a teenager, I just enjoyed watching him enthuse about music, a subject I share his fascination for.

Structurally, I seem to have had the reverse experience to my mum and her husband. I liked episode one enormously, and two built on that. But three – as good as it still was – lost me a little, as it seemed to become less analytical, in particular in relation to the religious connections he was exploring, and the (for me, at least) vexed subject of ‘spirituality’.

Funnily enough, earlier in the day I’d been listening to Frank Zappa, and one song that came on and really struck a chord with me was Cosmick Debris, in which the singer takes to task a new age type bullshit peddler. In the final episode of Copeland’s series, when gospel star CeCe Winan says ‘music was created by God… I don’t know if any of us can really articulate how this [the ‘transcendent’ effect] happens, except that God made it happen’, I’m thinking, er… no… that’s a typical religious explanation: you can’t explain something, and so, for you, God fills in those gaps. Like Zappa, I’m not buying that junk.

That I don’t agree with what I deem to be simple-minded religious zealotry is no surprise for me. But someone else who kind of came a bit of a surprise cropper was Stephen Pinker, with his ‘cheesecake’ angle. As a rationalist/humanist, I believe I share certain many aspects of Pinker’s approach/worldview. But, like Stewart, I’m kind of nonplussed by this. Maybe Pinker’s just got a tin ear? Or is otherwise missing something?

Plenty of other scientists, numerous even in similar areas to Pinker’s own field of expertise, including some who appeared here (Dr Nicholas Connard, Daniel Levitin, and others), think otherwise. Some, for example, and I can tell Copeland likes this idea (as do I), believe that music predates and maybe even helped create language. From this perspective it cannot be dismissed as mere cheesecake.

The series is overwhelmingly positive in tone, which is no bad thing. But it does mean that some areas, areas that might’ve benefitted from deeper exploration – had this been commissioned in the Attenborough at the helm era of BBC2, it might have been a 13 part sledgehammer! – are glossed over way too briefly and simplistically.

One of these relates to how as we grow in age and experience, our identification with certain types of music evolves. Hearing simply that we love music, and we especially love it in groups (not an exact quote, but a simplification of a recurrent theme) left me wondering why for me this is not really the case. Certain kinds of music are anathema to me, frankly. And I know it has a lot to do with what they signify to me regarding belonging (or not) to certain groups.

Still, all in all, this was a good series. Too short, perhaps, and maybe even a little too personality driven [1] and ‘lite’. But very good nonetheless. Lots in there to enjoy. Lots to think on.

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NOTES:

[1] Copeland nearly always seems borderline manic, and his effervescent energy bubbles away throughout the series. At times you can see him consciously reining it in. Whilst occasionally it bubbles over in a less controlled manner. Sometimes this is great. But occasionally one senses it masks or precludes other possibilities… if you know what I mean?

 

Some years ago I built a set of four sound treatment panels, all like the one pictured above. They were up in the walls of my music/drum studio, when we lived in Cambourne. We’ve been in our home in March three years now. And I’m finally getting around to feeling I must have a working studio space again.

The small box room, which is a library-cum-office at present, and now has my Mapex kit set up in it, is going to be the only place I can realistically have a studio immediately. I could use our guest room, perhaps? But we want to be free to let that out if need be. And I don’t want all my music gear in a room that’s got virtual strangers passing through.

The box room is tiny, and full of bookshelves and books. Indeed, it was full of sundry other stuff as well, until very recently. I had a clear out, and these treatment panels were in there. Rather than try and find somewhere else to store them, I thought why not cover them in a nicer looking material, and use them in the box room?

Amazon wound up being the cheapest place I could source the hessian sacking type material I’ve opted to use. The coarse weave allows sound through, but breaks it up. Plus it looks quite nice! And I love the colour. There’s no wall space empty, so they’ll be going up on the hideously textured artex ceiling. Yay! The less of that visible the better.

Two panels are done so far. The first came out very nicely. I’m using a staple gun to fasten the hessian. The second, whilst an improvement in some ways, has creases still visible in the cloth on the front. Which is annoying. How many of the four I’ll be able to get on the ceiling, I don’t know. And whether there’s room to suspend any of them, as is often advised with such sound treatment panels, I very much doubt.

But as ever, making stuff oneself is fun and satisfying.

I bought a Mapex Meridian kit a few years back, with a 24″ bass drum (woah!), for gigs where I needed kick to cut through even if un-amplified. I’ve hardly ever gigged it, truth be told. In part because the snare had no snare beds, and sounded terrible as a result. It had a kind of sandpapery asthmatic wheeze on every hit; no real definition.

Marking out and filing down the snare beds.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to cut snare beds myself, or find someone to do it for me. In the end, as usual, I watched a load of YouTube vids, and did nothing. Until now, that is. I finally sorted it out, and it was a piece of cake. And it’s totally sorted the snare out.

Pics show the stages, from masking the shell and drawing where the beds go, to filing them down (by hand), and then examining them on a flat slab (marble) with a light inside the drum.

Checking the beds on a marble slab, with a light.

Must admit, I’m dead chuffed…

PS – Anyone else ever bought off the shelf drums that don’t have snare beds but really ought to? I actually got this kit second hand. It seems the previous owner never noticed or was bothered by the issue (they said they’d had and regularly played it for a couple of years!).

Over on my wargames/models blog, I just reviewed a book about The Holocaust (read the review and comments here, if you’re interested), pictured above. A passing statement at the end of my review drew down the ire of one of my occasional followers/readers.

I didn’t want to respond in depth on the review post. I try to keep that blog relatively apolitical. But here, on my more personal blog, I’m happier to enter into potential debates. So, here, in fuller terms, is my response:

Entrusting the decision about our place in the EU to a referendum was always first and foremost a populist ploy by the Tories. Many of the prominent Tories who’ve ‘masterminded’ the whole debacle, or banged on about ‘getting Brexit done’, from Bojo to Cameron and beyond, have at numerous points in time pointed out many reasons why leaving the EU might not be in our own best interests.

The electorate should, both in theory and in practice, elect a body – they’re called the government – to make these decisions for us, based on the vast amounts of expertise required for such a complex issue. The fact that the muppets many in the UK voted into office (not me!) chose to ‘delegate’ this responsibility – abnegate is a better more accurate word – is only further evidence of their unfitness to govern.

Asking the public to decide this issue is like asking a taxi-driver to perform brain surgery.

Most members of the public – and that will include both me and you, I would hazard to guess – haven’t got the faintest idea about all the many and varied ways in which we and Europe interact. We may know little bits here and there. But it’s far to big and complex for the ‘man in the street’ to know sufficient about, let alone judge competently. Especially not the man on the street indoctrinated by TV news and The Daily Mail, et al.

The right wing in both the US and the UK, who are unquestionably in the ascendant politically, have been using race and populist fears around race issues – immigration in particular, but also everything from the whole anti-semitism thing (completely hypocritically, in the case of the whole Corbyn farago, as plenty of Tories are happy to be photographed dedicating statues to known anti-semites like the Astors) to denigrating whole racial groups (both Trump and Bojo have done so many times) – to bolster their positions politically. And they do all this backed by the billionaire owned gutter press, and loathsome bile-merchants like Piers Morgan, whose personal vendettas are somehow turned into daily ‘news’.

The EU – like the NHS (also under attack from these same right wing hooligans), and like so many post-WWII collective endeavours – was a direct response to WWI and WWII, and was formed very largely out of a desire not to let petty nationalism usher in WWIII. The UK’s abandoning of this project most emphatically does bring us closer to atomised nation states potentially in conflict.

Leaving the potential break up of Europe aside momentarily, Brexit is also threatening the United Kingdom’s integrity – Scotland, Wales and Ireland were all overwhelmingly remain, and this is currently being ignored in a cavalier and blasé way by our Tory government – meaning further breakdown, within a once United Kingdom, never mind within Europe, is entirely plausible.

And, beyond our own rather pathetically parochial island-mentality back garden, there is clearly a rise across not just the US and the UK, but also very clearly in Russia and throughout Europe, of racially motivated right wing nationalism.

The Tories will see their recent election victory – and it’s already being openly stated by them – as a mandate for pushing through their more ‘radical’ goals. These are essentially to dismember and flog off anything they can profit from, the NHS being very high on that list (already brutally butchered by the 75% Tory time in govt since 1945). All of this is returning both Europe and the UK to a situation that is more like the 1930s, politically, than the 1950s or after.

Fortunately we don’t have – as far as I’m aware? – a racially monomaniac Hitler type figure in the mix. But Trump and Bojo are amoral/immoral opportunists, both of whom have been accused of lying and financial fraud. Any electorate handing people like them the reins of power is asking for trouble.

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Having got that lot off my chest, I can now raise my sights and consider something a bit more potentially personal: when I’ve attended wargaming or model shows in the Brexit-era, I’ve seen t-shirts proclaiming such things as ‘leave means leave’. I think I may even have seen whole stands devoted to the subject. I’ll also, at these same events, have noticed some Europeans, and perhaps even folk from further afield.

I strongly suspect, on the basis of this visual evidence, that there’s a pretty conervative element within these hobbies. But it’s also possible they’re just a more than usually bellicose minority.  The truth is, I don’t know! I felt like I ought to wear a pro-European T-shirt. But I didn’t.

The guy whose comment on my review promoted the above post describes the EU as ‘odious’. To my mind Farage, Boris and Brexit are what’s odious. I’m sure the EU is imperfect. Large bureaucracies always are. But the impression I’ve long had is that a number of the key/major benefits of belonging were around issues like worker’s rights and human rights. Rather than leaving the EU empowering many ordinary UK subjects – we are cituzens of the EU, but subjects of her majesty’s government (I’d rather be a citizen than a subject) – we will be forfeiting rights.

Toryism is, and always has been, all about getting rid of that troublesome red tape that uppity-commoners want to introduce to protect them from the age-old robber barons riding roughshod over them to the bank.

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* The picture of this book cover underneath the post title is, I know, a provocative combination. However, whilst I am saying Brexit takes us several steps toward WWIII (nevermind anything else it signifies), I’m not saying Brexit = Nazism.

Broken ukulele…

I finally got me a uke’ – long after the fad has peaked, I might add – off of Freecycle. The neck was coming away from the body. Rather than just trying to glue it back in place, I decided to take it off altogether, and totally renovate and restore the instrument, making it much more personal in the process.

Uke’ stripped

Getting the neck off was far from easy. Indeed, I did a wee bit of damage to the portion of the neck that overhangs the body. But naught that can’t be fixed. I stripped off the glossy red lacquer finish, right down to bare wood. My plan was to use some veneers I’ve had kicking around for years on the top and the headstock.

& the neck…

Sanding the wood took ages. And I didn’t do that terrific a job of it. Being a bit impatient. But this is just a cheap instrument in the first place, that I got for nowt. So I see it as a nice opportunity to practice some of the methods and techniques I might need when I finally get around to building complete instruments.

Body

I figured that with the veneer on the top, and the back and sides stained with an antique pine finish I have a surplus of, it’d look a lot nicer. Having removed the bridge and headstock hardware and neck, stripped back to the bare wood, and sanded it, it was time to apply the figured wood veneer. Sadly I have no idea what wood type it is! I’ll have to send a photo to the company I got the veneers from, and find out.

Gluing the veneer in place, with heavy art books!

Damn… turned out shite!

Uh-oh… I really screwed that up! The veneer would normally be applied to the top of a guitar before the sides and back were added. I had to add it to a fully constructed body. Obviously the top can give somewhat. And I think that is partly why the veneer is so buckled. Oh, and of course, veneers tend to change shape and move during gluing, as they absorb moisture. Maybe there are better glues for this sort of job!?

Headstock..

For the headstock I glued three layers; light, dark, light, to give a nice banding type look to the edges. And I used the same golden coloured figured veneer for the top layers as I’m using on the body. It was a lot easier to keep these layers flat, given they’re much smaller, and I could clamp around a solid block rather than a hollow box.

Back o’ the neck.

Before replacing the headstock fixtures I gave the whole lot, excepting the fretboard, several coats of clear gloss varnish. These have been painted on, and only very lightly sanded. So my protective coat is very rustic looking, compared with the sprayed finish the shop-sold instrument had. I am hoping that eventually I’ll be able to build up a more ‘piano’ sheen type finish.

Side neck

If you enlarge this image, you can hopefully see the striped edge-banding effect of the layered veneers on the headstock. Sanding has removed the fifth and seventh fret dots. I’ve been wondering about making Hofner style full-width markers for the front of the fretboard.

My solution for the wrinkled top veneer was to cut out a strip about as wide as the sound hole, running from the heel of the neck to the butt end of the instrument. This serves a double purpose: allowing me to – hopefully? – flatten the buckled veneer, and thereby avoid having to remove or replace it. And then allowing me to fill the resulting gap with a darker veneer, that will look like a continuation of the neck. Which, I’m hoping, might look pretty funky. We shall see!

Clamping the neck.

It certainly looked like gluing the neck, where the factory assembled joint had failed, was never going to be easy, especially given the shape of the heel, at the end of the neck. As it turned out, I was able to clamp it all up relatively straightforwardly. But will the resulting joint be strong enough to hold under string tension and playing conditions? Again, we shall see

Bridge back in place.

With the neck still gluing, I decided to hazard re-attaching the bridge. I’d been dumb enough not to mark its original position in any way. But in the end I was able work up a template from photos of the body as it was before, and that seems to have worked out fine.

Staining the body.

After several layers of hand painted gloss lacquer, I sprayed something like 15-20 layers of aerosol lacquer. I didn’t sandbetween every coat, but about every fourth or fifth coat. And then at the end it got a multiple stage sanding and polishing. Sadly, however, I’m far from attaining the piano gloss I’d hoped for. Instead I’ve got a silky sheen. Hey-ho. You live ‘n’ learn!

And, finally, the finished uke’, up on the wall on its own cute little mini wall mount.

Ta-dah… the finished new look mended/refurbished uke’.

During the run up to the election I was made aware of Jonathan Pie. First time I saw one of his videos I just thought he was an independent media type pundit who’d decided to present news as if the BBC were really as Left as some (on the Right) claim it is. [1]

But with the second one I began to suspect all was not quite as it appeared. And shortly thereafter I discovered he’s in fact the creation of a guy called Tom Walker; a fictional news reporter, ‘captured’ as if speaking his mind, off-air, in the moments just before or after a broadcast.

It’s a very clever and effective idea.

The first piece of Pie I consumed was A Decade of the Tories, above. I can’t recall exactly what I saw next. But the next one to hit with as much impact as Decade was Election Aftermath, below.

Although I find Pie’s intense and rather hectoring style a bit much, I’m essentially in near complete agreement with what he actually says. In a similar but more clearly satirical vein, I just saw this:

Again, very funny. But, underneath the humour, bone-chillingly depressing.

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[1] Oh, the irony! It’s true there are elements of leftism, especially in the kind of group-think PC area. But anyone who knows their political onions will know that many of the BBCs prime news and politics figures for some time now – from Paxo to Andrew Neil and Laura Kuensberg – are card-carrying Tories.

In this, my final post in this series, I want to address a subject that was in fact the catalyst for my doing the whole series in the first place. One inspiration, as already mentioned several times now, was Margaret Charlston’s series of lists of book covers. But another was an incredibly potent series of dreams I had, on the Friday night before I commenced the series of posts here.

These dreams were so vivid and compelling they eventually woke me up. My mind remained, as it had been in the dreams, a roiling, churning, tempestuous sea of fragmented images and thoughts for some considerable time – several hours – as I lay half-awake in bed. Usually, on awaking, the conscious mind asserts itself more quickly. But on this occasion I was revelling in the post-dreamscape state of mind, and wanted to prolong that transitional state as long as I could manage. Amidst all the chaotically jumbled images and feelings, as a more conscious mode gradually ate into inchoate, the phrase ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’, derived from Funkadelic, became a motif. Rather bizarrely, as is the way in the dream-world, as I slowly returned to a more normal fully awake state, this morphed into ‘comb your mind, and your ass will follow’!

Rather than evoking an Alan Partridge-esque side parting (cue hands-free note to self; get haircut!), this was, in my mind at least, derived in part from an image on the spine of a book – Destructive Emotions – in which Bhuddist style meditations are suggested as a means for transforming a wildly chaotic and distressed mind into an ordered and calm one. Also feeding into all this were a series of Hitchcock movies Teresa had been watching at the time, all of which had pronounced psychological themes of a rather heavy-handed nature (but no less entertaining for that), from Marnie and Vertigo to Spellbound. ‘That Freud stuff’s a lot of hooey!’ Peck opines, rather over emotionally, in the latter!

Suffice to say that in the end, all of this got me thinking that, having written Frued, Jung et al off, as at best whimsical and at worst merely themselves obsessional and deluded, I ought instead of dismissing them outright, to revisit their writings. So, I’ve come full circle; as with Walt Whitman, there are, in Jung, Freud, and doubtless many others, thinkers and writers whose thoughts I want to return to, and re-examine. I’d like to conclude by thanking Margaret for her series of book covers, which acted as the catalyst motivating me to make these posts.

My super-minimalist home set up.

Been getting pretty fed up of not having a kit at home I can just hop on to when the mood takes me. So I’ve come up with this very minimalist deployment, which I’ve squeezed into a corner of the lounge.

Gretsch Catalina Club jazz kick (18″), with riser, and snare, Zildjian A 13″ hats, K Custom dry ride, and an unknown crash/ride w rivets. Just enough gear to get a groove on!

A slightly wider view.

Trying to make it feel a little vibey. Also nice to have a guitar or three nearby. So far just got the Epi’ T270 up. Might also hang an acoustic nearby. Plus I’m currently renovating a ukulele I got off Freecycle. Reckon I can squeeze that in as well. Just below the Epi’, perhaps?

Having digressed massively from my initial inspiration – Margaret’s posts on books she’s loved – this post brings me back, in a round-about way, to literature.

Before it does, however…

I’ve recently been enjoying listening to the old 1968 BBC Radio 4 adaptation of The Hobbit, with Paul Daneman as Bilbo, and the delightfully named Heron Carvic as Gandalf.

I love Michael Hordern as Gandalf, in the later BBC R4 LOTR, preferring him and the series as a whole to Peter Jackson’s cinematic blockbuster vision. Curmudgeonly Tolkien snob that I am, I’m a bit miffed by the mainstream popularisation the Jackson films have brought about.

Heron Carvic and Paul Daneman are, for me, much closer in vibe to my initial childhood imaginings. And the music in this earlier Tolkienian adaptation – some of Stephen Oliver’s stuff in the aforementioned BBC R4 LOTR is sublime – just totally hits the sweet spot for me.*

But back to the literature: one of the qualities so attractive to me in Tolkien, masterfully summed up on the back cover blurb of my original childhood edition of LOTR, is the marriage of ‘the epic and the homely’. And these qualities remain, despite the passage of much time, both generally historically, and for me personally since first readings, at the heart of what enchants me in Tolkien’s writings.

And then there are, scattered liberally throughout his work, many little epithets replete with a homely wisdom, as when Gandalf admonishes Frodo thus: ‘All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us’. Or ‘Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. … do not be too eager to deal out death and judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends’.

On the debit side, there are also times when certain characters make pronouncements I find less attractive or understandable. Another example, from Gandalf again, is when he says to Saruman ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom’.

Whilst the first two of the above wizardy quotes do indeed seem wise, the third sounds like religious conservatism when it attacks science. That old unweaving the rainbow chestnut, methinks.  Still, as the winter nights draw in, it’s the perfect time to hunker down beside the fire, and bathe in that ancient storytelling magic at which Professor Tolkien so excelled.

The Hobbit is a great autumn/winter treat of a read. As is the LOTR. But the latter, being such an enormous epic, involves an investment of time – and having read it multiple times in my youth – I can’t manage right now. So I’m considering re-reading my ‘First Edition’ style reissue, of The Hobbit.

Tolkien’s heirs have worked on completing some of their father’s larger unfinished projects, and there are some, such as The Children of Hurin, which are really rather wonderful. I originally read a good number of these in their incomplete form in a book called Unfinished Tales.

Christopher Tolkien in particular has done an amazing job of finishing some such works. So I quite fancy reading another of these, which I first encountered as Of Tour, and His Coming to Gondolin, subsequently completed and published now as The Fall of Gondolin. Another similar work has appeared telling the tale of Beren and Luthien. Rather sweetly, Tolkien and his wife have these names engraved on their headstone!

* It’s really rather quite odd stuff, composed by David Cain, and played by Andrew Munrow and the Early Music Consort. This music really does sound otherworldly. And that’s wherein the magic of it lies. Donald Swan’s Tolkien sanctioned ditties, by contrast, sound to me like horribly dated Victorian or Edwardian parlour music baubles.

Electric guitars have been a part of my life since my mid-teens. Obviously they’ve really been a part of my entire life, inasmuch as their sounds form a backdrop to most of our lives, etc. But I’m being more specific here, and talking about my own playing of the instrument. As a kid acoustic guitars – both steel and nylon strung – were very much part of the childhood environment. So early efforts to learn guitar, and occasional tinkering with instruments that were lying around were part of the fabric of young life. A penchant for mellower jazzy sounds lead to a love affair with the nylon strung ‘classical’ style guitar that persists to this day. But the electric was nearly always there as well, floating around.

Bizarrely, despite this long relationship, it’s only very recently that, thanks in part to Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck fame, my longstanding relation to the electric guitar finally clarified itself somewhat. In one of his excellent Holy Trinity videos Stratton describes his approach to or view of electric guitar, as in effect a pitched/harmonic tambourine. This immediately chimed massively with my own history with the instrument, wherein it’s always been primarily rhythmic and chordal. Whereas for some guitarists, including some I love deeply, Grant Green springing to mind, it’s all about melody lines and soloing, for me it’s always been primarily about rhythm parts and chords.

That’s finally beginning to change: over many years I’ve occasionally dabbled in constructing licks, and even brief solos, in my private recordings. But just recently I’ve actually started practising scales. Something I’ve sedulously avoided until now! I’ve also started to take a deeper interest in the instrument itself, such that I’ve just enjoyed setting up a recently acquired Squier Strat (pictured above), adjusting the truss-rod, bridge settings, etc.

Having long wanted to build my own guitars, I’ve slowly been gathering the necessary gear to do so. But the idea had always been to make acoustics. Seeing folk online, and others, inc. people like my step-father Malcolm, building electrics has me fantasising about that as well now! So far all my electric guitars (excepting basses) have been Strats, or Strat-derived. I have deep and growing hankerings for a Tele’, a Les Paul type, and some form of hollow-bodied jazz axe. I had long-term loan of a beautiful Heritage jazz style guitar from our pal Patrick. One like that, of the deeper bodied Gibson or Epihone variety as played by, say George Benson, as opposed to the thinner 335 style, is high on my wish list.

Hofner 191

A recent obsession with learning parts to Fela Kuti tracks, amongst other stuff – bass, guitar and drums, and more – has even got me fantasising about making a twin necked axe (like the Hofner 191 pictured above), for use with a loop pedal,  so I can record live grooves and then drum along to them; a rhythm section that never bores of modal grooving… That really appeals to me! And to conclude this post… I love how YouTube contributes to both the exploration of the history of these fabulous instruments, and also provides abundant resources for learning how to play them.