The Mitch Mitchell Experience

The 1967 album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced?, featured a virtuoso musician who changed the way we played rock music. His name was Mitch Mitchell. Yes, Jimi was pretty hot. But he never burned as brightly as he did when Mitch Mitchell was by his side, and in particular on that genuinely iconoclastic recording.

Whatever Hendrix could do on the guitar, Mitchell could match on the drums. And like Ginger Baker, Mitchell brought the skills, the attack and the bravado of jazz music to the rock arena.

Mitchell, the longest-surving member of the Experience, died at the end of a Hendrix tribute tour of America. And why mention him now? Because increasingly I feel his ghost present whenever we go out to play.

Unexpected Delights

A church? Yes, but not just any old church. This is St Mary's Church, in the village of Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire. What a little English village is doing with an enormous piece of perpendicular gothic architecture in its midst I am still trying to find out.

It was near here, a few weeks ago, that I met a senior police officer who had agreed to help me with the finishing touches to my novel, Like A Flower.

Researching and writing a novel leads to so many unexpected delights. Not only did the meeting open my eyes to a whole other world (and several possibilities for future stories), but I got to visit this amazing building...

Everything's Gonna Be

A dear friend who is a poet and very wise person passed on the quotation: "Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, then it's not the end."

And another dear friend who is a musician and very wise person pointed out that there are lots of songs telling you that "Everything gonna be all right" when a much better lyric would be "Everything's gonna be".

Everything certainly is "gonna be" whether we like it or not. And I really want to hear that song sung... if it's going to be...

Re-Writing The Wrongs

Writing can be enjoyable. But does anybody actually enjoy re-writing? A published author who has taken an interest in my novel, Like A Flower (an everyday story of life, death, love and gardening), said he thought the opening chapter was great and original and made him want to read more.

But the bad news was that he thought it needed two new pages at the beginning to set it up properly... and to get it past an agent. I don't enjoy re-writing, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that he was right. And I would be a fool not to take his advice.

So I've sat down and produced the required new intro. I was already tweaking the rest of the book, so now I just want to get through to the end one more time.

The problem is that my desire to have nothing more to do with it is almost as great as my desire to get it published. I think the attraction of publication at the moment is that it would be closure.

Rap Writer's Delight

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop for musicians interested in working with young offenders. And the bonus of working with a beatboxer called Marv-ill.

We were split up into pairs to work on the kind of creative things that we, in turn, might be able to get people in prison to do.

After storyboarding some visuals, we were asked to take one scene and turn it into a song. We had half an hour to get it ready.  Thanks to Garageband and Marv-ill, we created a minor classic called Jack and the Beans. I'd never written the lyrics for a rap before, and Marv-ill wasn't used to collaborating. But our temporary partnership worked well, and I think we both got something out of it, including the laughter that some of the rhymes drew from our audience.

Most impressive of all was the range of rhythmic sounds that Marv-ill could produce from his own body. It somehow made lugging a drum kit in and out of the car, and setting it up and taking it down, seem slightly crazy.

Sweetheart Disagreement

An old video of the old Shark Dentists line-up on YouTube has just passed 1,500 viewings. It was our version of Bob Dylan's wonderful song Sweetheart Like You.

The strange thing is not that a lot of people have watched it, or even that only two of them have bothered to comment. It's the comments themselves. One says: "Nice performance, guys." The other says: "Truly appalling."

Since the constant factor here is the video, it does seem the perfect illustration of the difference being in the person watching — and the baggage that this observer brings to the observation.

In the end, the observer is the observed... And there is no right or wrong...

And what's a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?

Turn It Up

In my previous post Quiet Please, I made a plea for turning down the background music in just about every public place. But I have to admit that the best thing about the excellent Middle East restaurant that I visited in Brighton the other night was the soundtrack supplied from the above album by Turkish clarinettist Barbaros Erkose.

Erkose has been around for 70 years or so, and I deeply regret my ignorance of his music up until now. His playing soaks up all kinds of influences and comes out in all sorts of styles. But this particular album has a transcendent cool jazz feel that is the equal of any Miles Davis classics.

After my iDrum experience of a few days ago (see my post iDrum, Therefore...), I'm beginning to think the best way to discover great music is just to walk into Brighton and open your ears...