2012: How High?
'Jump!' said the man with the expensive suit and the Cadillac...
Mustn’t laugh…..
Aside from my three (hopefully soon to be four) solo albums, I recorded an album just before lockdown with my current band, and my musical colleague, Paul Stewart.. It was something of a reflection of our live shows, given that it’s composed of a mix of original material, and heavily extemporised covers of some of our favourite blues tunes… There’s an amusing story (I hope) behind the title track, ‘How High?’ That has its origins years ago when I did an ‘open mic’ spot at the Betsey Trotwood, a pub in the Farringdon Road near where it crosses The Clerkenwell Road, about a kilometer from the river. I think all of the performers had probably a three-song slot, and I was chatting with one of the other performers before going on, and we were discussing the fact that I had an iPad which I used to fix to the microphone stand, running an app called Teleprompt, which used to scroll the words of my songs in real time… My co-performer (I’m not sure I ever knew his name) seemed quite impressed, but wen it was his turn to play (before me) he set up a music stand, and an enormous piece of card balancing on it, with his lyrics writ VERY large, as it seems that he had diminished vision, and refused to wear glasses while performing.
The fourth wall
In theatrical parlance, the fourth wall is the view out over the audience. Occasionally, when necessary, Actors confide in the audience (such as in a pantomime) and thus they broach the fourth wall, but for a musical entertainer, a direct rapport with the audience is a permanent requisite, and nothing should really serve as a barrier… Thus It was demonstrated to me in rather comedic terms, that musicians who perform with lyrics in front of them actually create a fourth wall. It’s a barrier, strongly to be avoided, and I found myself after that evening increasingly bothered because I had given up on memorising lyrics, due to the assistance of the iPad…
Enter Mr Stewart….
A few years later, I had the opportunity to connect up with some old school friends from Hampton, who had been members of ‘The Others’, the legendary school band at Hampton that Brian May and myself had been real fanbois of. The guys had reformed the band, and were back out on the road, albeit in a modest capacity due to resources, and advancing years. I joined as a guitarist/vocalist. Occasionally, when the opportunity arose, Paul Stewart and I performed duo gigs without the rhythm section, and it wasn’t vwery long before the duo became the definitive format. The availability of small acoustic gigs far outstripped those that could host a loud rhythm & blues band, and it became a financial imperative as much as anything. This required me to sing more, and Paul was adamant that I ditch my reliance on the iPad and work hard at memorising my lyrics. I was petrified, since I had persuaded myself that I no longer had a functional memory for such things. Having said that I embarked on a sustained effort to comply. This met with varying degrees of success until one day, it all changed - virtually overnight… I had an epiphany: I would write a new song, and to guarantee that I would be able to remember the lyrics, I would make them deliberately mnemonic; that is to say, they would have simple indicators that I could remember on every line. The obvious answer was numbers - something like the ‘Twelve Days Of Christmas'‘, or ‘Ten Green Bottles’ - and so I set to work.
A Game Changer…
The result was ‘How High’ The title track of the album. In addition to numbering each of the lines, it is a ‘call & response’ song. The vocalist sings ‘And when the man in the cadillac says “Jump!” We all shout?’ and the audience sings ‘How High?’….at least that’s how it’s supposed to flow. The outcome of the exercise was a successful one - not only did it work - and was extremely well received as a song, but it seemed to break my internalised psychological conditioning from where I had persuaded myself I could no longer remember lyrics. I found the impasse had largely vanished, and although I still forget lyrics on occasion, the angst has largely evaporated….. It’s a classic case of the debilitating power of anxiety. Worrying about things won’t make them go away. You need a diversionary strategy.