Wilful Missing seeks drummer for maternity cover

Poking around on the web I came across this podcast last weekend, which drew me because of the interview with ahab but kicked off with something else rather striking.

Wilful Missing, it turns out, are a Bradford band whose music has been picked up by TV - they've had four songs on Waterloo Road - and while in the US this would be enough to make your professional career (check out the part in that interview about getting one song on Grey's Anatomy), in the UK this has simply meant slightly larger audiences at their gigs, which are quite rare as the band all have day jobs.

Also Wilful Missing are looking for a drummer because Ruth Viquiera is off to have a baby.

"It's been a bit of a revolving drum stool, really," said Albert Freeman, who plays bass and flute. "We had two male drummers, then a drum machine, which we used to call Catherine. In 2007 we found Ruth, who's been a stalwart of the band ever since. She designed all our artwork as well as playing.

"So including the drum machine we've had two female drummers and it's been great having a female member of the band. Ruth's provided a bit of balance and perspective, made the band a bit easier to be in. So who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and find another female drummer - but I realise that we might have to settle for a man this time."

Albert said that they hoped Ruth would be coming back eventually, but who knows?

So, practicalities. Four of the band live in Bradford and one in Hebden Bridge; and they have a permanent rehearsal space at the Kala Sangam centre in Bradford.

"We don't gig really heavily because we've all got day jobs and the band has to fit around family life. I work for Bradford library service, Sam Kipling works for the Environment Agency, which is how come we've got a song about potash. Ruth works at Leeds Metropolitan University and Sam Lawrence makes Uilleann pipes for a living. When I met him he was at university but also apprenticed as a pipe maker.

"We're between 29 and 40 years old and technically we're looking for someone tight and creative: we'd like to have someone who can have a creative input into the songs. It's important that we all get along with each other but, also, we've never had a drummer with a car, which is kind of hard to believe because you'd think with that amount of kit it would be important. So having a car would be a bonus.

"The most technically complicated song we do for a drummer is probably Powerful Pill."

There's a studio version of it here. And the whole of their most recent album can be heard here.

"In terms of influences, the other band we all like the most is The National. We also like Fionn Regan and Bob Dylan. We've been played on Radio Two and Radio Six a few times and we went to London once, about four years ago I think, on tour."

If you're interested you should contact Wilful Missing through their website or on Twitter @wilfulmissing. Ruth's baby is due in a week or so and they've got one audition lined up already for next week, so don't hang about.

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Bob Dylan in Crouch End

I heard a great story the other day about Bob Dylan in London's glittering Crouch End, which I'm aware now - as the result of a friend from Crouch End groaning and saying "Not that old chestnut again" - has been doing the rounds.

The tale, as told to me by a genuine pillar of the local community, runs thus. About 20 years ago Bob Dylan was mates with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, who owned and ran a recording studio in Crouch End called The Crypt. It has since been sold to David Gray, who in his rather dull way has been trying to have it converted into flats.

Be that as it may, Dylan apparently tried to get to the studio from an airport once by taxi. But instead of being taken to 145 Crouch Hill, which is the location of this rather wonderful building containing the studio,

he was dropped off at 145 Crouch End Hill,

which makes a fork in the road with Crouch Hill about 50 yards away. Dylan - I was told by my pillar-ish friend - rang on the door, which was answered by the lady of the house, whereupon he asked whether Dave was in. As it happened, the lady's husband was called Dave but had popped out to the shops, so she invited Dylan in and gave him a cup of tea. When her husband returned she greeted him at the door with the words "Bob Dylan's here to see you."

Boom boom tish!

It's just about teetering on the edge of plausiblity, isn't it? Isn't it?

Someone friendly sounding called Anthony Lerner answered the telephone when I rang the Crypt. "Aha!" he said, when I mentioned Dylan. "I think I know what story this is going to be."

He was right. "I heard it from the man who was Dave Stewart's chief sound engineer at that time," he said, promisingly.

There was nothing for it, I reasoned, but to go down there and knock on the door of 145 Crouch End Hill to ask the people who lived there whether it was true. Surely, even if the original occupants had moved, they would have mentioned it to the present owners while they were trying to sell them the place? That would nail it. After all, the story has many of the qualities of an urban myth while also being possibly the only one I've ever heard with the potential to be properly checked out. None of your crocodiles-in-the-sewers type will-o-the-wisps here.

Also, frankly, I thought it would be fun.

So on a chilly afternoon about a week ago I found myself trudging up and down Crouch End Hill, which is in an area where they sell things like this,

presumably because the locals like to buy them (don't get that kind of tat in Bethnal Green). Imagine my disappointment - and cold extremities - then, when I discovered that while Crouch End Hill has two schools, a church and several shops, there are very few residential properties and definitely not a number 145.

This made me sad.

So sad that I had to retreat sadly to Banners restaurant nearby, of which I had heard good things, for a beer. It has this mural on the outside.

If you look closely you can see that the little figure in the window is a representation of Bob Dylan and there is a bubble coming out of his mouth containing the words "Don't you know who I am?" (Now say that out loud in a Bob Dylan voice: "Don't you knoooow who I aaaaam?")

"Oh yes," said one of several waitresses within. "That's because back in 1993 Bob Dylan was here one evening and he wanted booze. But we're only allowed to serve alcohol with food, because of our licence. He didn't want any food, though, and he said 'Don't you know who I am?'"

Which is always worth a go, I guess, even if you're not Bob Dylan.

"He was sitting at this table," she explained, leading me toward the back of the restaurant, which was about half full of customers chatting to each other, to show me this.

Which is a plaque on the wall that is slightly easier to read in this.

Although for the avoidance of doubt the inscription reads "Bob Dylan sat at this table, August 1993". This was, I was informed, during the same visit when the incident with the taxi and the wrong Dave took place.

While I was having my beer there was a gentle discussion for my benefit between two other waitresses who were on their breaks, about the nature of urban myths in the area. "For instance," I was told, "we're always overhearing people saying things about this place that just aren't right... The other day I heard someone say that it was owned by Nik Kershaw, when they were just confused because the owner - Juliette Banner - used to go out with Andy Kershaw."

Which is worth knowing, I suppose.

Anyway. I can recommend their Nordic beer which is strong and served extremely cold. But not so much their quesadilla, which was much more like a big old pancake than I was expecting.

I also set to thinking how weird it must be to be Bob Dylan. I mean, I have difficulty sometimes with the idea that I did some of the things I did 20 years ago. Imagine what it must be like having people making stuff up, mythologising the things you did - or didn't do - simply because they enjoy the idea of you - as if life weren't confusing enough already.

And because I believe in doing this stuff in a certain way, I also put in a call to Dylan's publicist, a man called Tom Cording at Sony music, though for all the response I got, Cording himself could be a mythological figure.

However, I haven't given up hope and am thinking that if I send him a link to this blog he - or someone else - may be moved to forward it to Bob Dylan to see if he has any idea how this story got started?

Stranger things have happened.

* If you enjoyed this blogpost you may also enjoy this interview with Margo Timmins of The Cowboy Junkies.

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The Pogues: love the music, fear the lifestyle implications

The first word of James Fearnley's memoir about The Pogues, Here Comes Everybody, is "Shane". It opens with a band pow-wow in a cramped Japanese hotel room, at which it is decided to expel their front man for the colossal drunken ineptitude that led him to miss a flight to the US, where they were supporting Bob Dylan. If this sounds harsh, it should be said that it was only the most serious of many acts of unconscious - and I mean that in an often literal sense - psychological terrorism that would have completely broken the spirit of a group of less tightly bonded musicians.

For his part, Shane MacGowan - who is going under the nom de guerre "O'Hooligan" when we first meet him - arrives in the book of Fearnley's life apparently fully formed, already defined by a chronic alcohol dependence, his stunted brown teeth ill-concealed by a set of crowns. His response to the news of his expulsion, a wheezing "What took you so long?"

Fearnley, the Pogues' multi-instrumentalist accordian player, narrates his tale of substance abuse and the seething emotional condition of a band containing several highly volatile characters, with an even-ness that speaks of the very long time over which the book was written: apparently more than eighteen years. It has the quality of a well-worn pebble, something polished by time and the forces of life, and is none the worse for that in these days of instant online media. The story is structured in such a way that Fearnley, a Mancunian recently ex-public schoolboy at the outset, jets off into the west to live with his Californian princess - the actress daughter of a successful movie producer - as the credits roll, whereas years of alcoholic excess and life on the road must surely have made the transition to a new life a little more complicated than that. Yet there is an absence of ego at the heart of his writing that legitimises his version of events: a story has to begin and end somewhere, right?

It's certainly impossible to believe that someone who was drinking as heavily as Fearnley (below in 1988, further down today) says he was, could recall so much detail, for instance about the behaviour of individual band members - facial expressions, eye-contact - at gigs that, after a while of everyone standing in the same relation to each other on stage night after night, would have rolled seamlessly into one.

And yet there is so much colour dancing in his perfect prose, so much emotional accuracy about appallingly messy events and so much acute pain - emotional and physical - here that it's impossible to doubt the book's veracity in relation to the things that matter. Fearnley admits that, of necessity, it's partly fictionalised and MacGowan's quote on the back cover - "It's just how I imagine I'd remember it" - says it all really.

Among the many priceless set-pieces are an unflinching description of MacGowan urinating on a roadside, heedless of the usual niceties, another occasion on which his stock with the band was so low that repeated slurred demands for a cigarette yielded nothing more than a refusal by the others to betray each other by giving him anything, and the transition of Cait O'Riordan, The Pogues' only female member, from emotionally inept wild-child to beatnik Cleopatra opposite Elvis Costello's Antony. (Reader, she married him.) Her psychological footprint presses nearly as deeply as MacGowan's in the earlier chapters. There are also painful passages about Fearnley rooming with his gay band-mate Philip Chevron, who proceeded to fall in love with him, which are delicately and respectfully handled.

Witty turns of phrase combine neatly with their subject matter to become unforgettable. Of his early years in London Fearnley wrote: "Gigs, so far, had been ordeals of unrequitedness, a series of sporadic confrontations with an audience's neutrality." The Dubliners were "older men, hirsute, portly, moist of consonant"; whereas Bono's singing with U2 was "the grand incantation of phrases resembling advertising copy" (god I wish I'd written that).

From this rich palate bigger themes emerge: the dynamic of a band under threat from within, the recognition of and responsive roar by The Pogues' audience to their fierce Anglo-Irish underdoggedness, the tolerance required to manage extremity.

But lurking disturbingly at the centre of it all is the conundrum of the attractive-repulsive Shane MacGowan. As Fearnley writes: "More and more the question on people's lips was whether Shane wrote so beautifully because of the amount he drank, or despite it." There are clues, though nothing vastly illuminating, to what in his background leads him to value his health so little - how is it possible that he's still alive today? - or to have such a relentlessly negative world view. "I couldn't understand how anyone could let himself become so bereft of responsibility for anything and yet write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening pity for the human condition," writes Fearnley. MacGowan's family makes a brief appearance during a description of a gig in Ireland but are sketched mainly in terms of their clothes and we're told that his childhood "had sometimes been difficult" - though frankly whose wasn't?

I loved The Pogues as a teenager and I love them still, for the albums and for their terrifying, riotous live shows. I learnt more detail about the extremes of substance abuse reading Here Comes Everybody than I did during several years as a nurse, but am glad to have done so in such witty and erudite company.

James Fearnley is a brilliant writer, this book is a gem and I urge you to read it.

* Here Comes Everybody is published by Faber.

* If you enjoyed this post you may also be interested in this, which is about the London Feis in Finsbury Park and includes a vivid description of a Shane McGowan performance.

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Heidi Talbot casts spell of loveliness over Bethnal Green

If there were any East Londoners in the Shoreditch/Bethnal Green area last Thursday who were disconcerted that the traffic roared less loudly, the autumnal sunlight was a more shimmering gold and strangers were friendlier: relax, I can explain.

Heidi Talbot played in St Matthew's church, at the Shoreditch end of the Bethnal Green Road, and enveloped the whole area in a shimmering cloud of female loveliness.

Almost miraculously, someone recorded the event on camera, so here she is singing The Shepherd Lad, a song that culminates with the line "Kind sir, you are a fool without and I'm a maid within', which always makes me grin.

The venue, which is the church where both Kray twins' funerals took place, had recently completed a refurbishment that was itself little short of miraculous. This is because (1) it's extremely beautiful (inside and out), welcoming and thought-provoking with a staircase that looks as if it was built be decked in holly and ivy with a Christmassy choir ranged up it. And (2) the builders went bust, leaving at least one other local church - St John's at Bethnal Green tube - up the proverbial waterway without a paddle. The local church wardens have been summoning hitherto unsuspected levels of guile and low cunning to navigate their way through the situation, in at least one case threatening the scaffolders that if they didn't take the stuff away (they were refusing because they hadn't been paid) they would dismantle it themselves and sell it to the competition.

However, all this was forgotten when Talbot, accompanied by Boo Hewardine and Matheu Watson,  made the place her own. Delicious-looking sandwiches and beer were laid on at the back of the church, providing a carbohydrate-based serotonin boost, as if one were needed, and all was well with the world.

The gig was a part of the Orain series, organised by St Margaret's House, a local charity that, among other things, organises on behalf of the mentally handicapped: there are lovingly snapped pictures of many of their "clients" on the walls of the hall behind Bethnal Green's Gallery Cafe. James Yorkston will be playing St Matthew's next on October 27.

Quite apart from the music, which was magical - her voice like dancing water, the original songs beautiful and absorbing in equal measure - Ms Talbot also sported a very fine pair of shoes. So fine, in fact, that I overcame my notorious shyness to try and take a photograph of them, with her permission. But it was too dark and my friend Keith took the piss out of me for having done it, in any case. So you'll have to make do with this shot from the shop's website.

I feel it would be only decent to leave you in contemplation for a moment...

Leaving it for me only to say that it may very well be true that John McCusker abandoned this tour with his wife (for he and Talbot are married) because he had received some piffling offer from - who was it? - Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler. But I saw Bob Dylan earlier this year at the Feis in Finsbury Park, he was rubbish and anyway, I ask you: is it possible to purchase, from a table at the back of his gigs, a self-branded tea towel?

I rest my case.

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The London Feis, Finsbury Park

This festival had a split personality. It was called the London Feis when everyone knew it was still the Fleadh. The name had changed because the organiser, Vince Power, sold the rights to the word Fleadh, in what looks now like a slight of hand akin to the apocryphal selling of London Bridge to an American who thought he was getting Tower Bridge.

Then there was the line-up, which was amazing. Bob Dylan, The Waterboys, Christy Moore, Thin Lizzy and Van Morrison all on the same bill. But there was also a lack of consideration for ticket-holders that started with a very long queue to get in (late) on Saturday, continued with an absence of big screens - meaning that I couldn't really tell which one of the two blokes in a hat on stage was Bob Dylan - and ended in a public health disaster that evening. The tiny number of toilets meant that many - including women - gave up the painful attempt to queue and the entire perimeter fence became a giant urinal, something I haven't seen since the 1980s. (When the sun had baked the ground dry the next day some people were sitting propped against the fence, making me want to explain why they probably shouldn't be doing that. But the pervasive smell of vinegar should have been a give-away #pissinginthewind)

The most puzzling thing was that, although I've heard there is a shortage of portable toilets and fencing as a result of there being so many festivals these days, the feis's organisers must have strings they could pull to get the facilities they needed after all these years in the business. This made me think that the outcome was probably a calculated decision to save money: they needed about four times as many toilets as they had on Saturday. It was squalid and made my previous concerns about taking children to festivals seem laughably understated. There was a moment when I saw a female child frolicking in a puddle near a wall where eight men were urinating. Very unpleasant.

And finally - vis a vis split personality - Saturday and the Sunday seemed like two different festivals because birthday boy Bob Dylan's only scheduled UK performance this year drew, I'd estimate, nearly twice as many people on Saturday as there were the following day.

But ah... the music. Saturday's showers meant that the tent drew a grateful crowd and an early assertion of the festival's personality. Irish voices were to be heard all around and when The Fureys sang Sweet Sixteen and The Green Fields of France it seemed that everyone knew the words. The band did indeed play the fife flowly and the pipes played the flowers of the forest *blubs quietly*

Outside, the Waterboys then proceeded to rock. They played a song from the forthcoming album An Appointment with Mr Yeats with the lyric of the Yeats poem September 1913, which we were told "is as well known in Ireland as the Hamlet soliloquy is in the UK". Now there's an idea for a song... However, a more general flavour of the day was provided when a drunk twenty-something girl next to me shouted "Play something we know!" while a stage full of Waterboys played Dylan's You're a Big Girl Now. What came on next was Bang on the Ear, which under the circumstances seemed about right.

Nanci Griffith reminded me how much I like hearing her do From a Distance, right up to the point at which she sang God is watching us, God is watching us, which seemed a little paranoid, even in a tent full of Catholics.

Then Shane MacGowan came on stage and made it clear that this was the gig that he was born to play. Doubtless many were drawn by the same morbid curiosity that had been vocalised a thousand times in the run up to this weekend: "Bob Dylan's playing, he's taken a lot of drugs and just turned 70. This might be my last chance to see him..." But with MacGowan there's an accompanying incredulity that he's been with us for the last ten years at all.

"Ang you erry much," he said to the moshing, crowd-surfing, middle-aged yet copiously tattooed crowd in front of him, many of whom seemed intent on reliving a moment they'd had in Kilburn circa 1986. He's got a laugh like a football rattle, talk-like-a-pirate day could have been invented to acclimatise him to the 21st century and there was a lingering suspicion that when he spoke he was saying something rude about Nanci Griffith. I've never been more grateful for the international language of music because, to be frank, I couldn't understand a word. But a string of Pogues songs - Rainy Night in Soho, London Girl - went down like an ice pack on the ripped a*** of a Soho rentboy and when Dirty Old Town started someone threw their entire plastic pint of lager in the air with joy. Come to think of it, it probably wasn't lager but I'm done writing about that kind of thing for one festival...

Afro Celt Sound System was a revelation, although having heard what Simon Emmerson came up with when he was invited to write some music for a spa I really shouldn't be surprised any more. At one point there was some kind of a fight between a boran, a sikh drum and a bongo, in which I thought the boran came out on top. And one of my favourite sounds in the world, trance bagpipes, also made a guest appearance. "It's great to be at the fleadh!" Emmerson said, putting his finger on it.

Then it was out to the main stage for an encounter with Bob Dylan. My first impression was that the singer in the band sounded like a cross between Bob Dylan and Scooby Doo. Then I got disorientated when I heard a bunch of words that I thought I knew from another Dylan song - blues/shoes/side of the road -  and thought "cuh! The great man's obviously reached the limit of his songwriting genius" before realising that he was actually playing Tangled up in Blue but to an entirely different tune to the one on Blood on the Tracks.

And this was how it went: it was as if he were riffing on the theme of himself. If anyone else had done to those songs what he did to them on Saturday, you'd probably say that they'd massacred them. But, since the emperor had a lovely new outfit to wear and it was his birthday, no one would dream of it. So it must have been my fault that I lost interest. My legs and feet hurt from standing up all day, I couldn't see the stage properly and I'd been upset by, among other things, dark thoughts about contracting trench foot from the rivulets flowing into the tent. I used to care, but things have changed sang Dylan, as if he were his own shadow on the back of the stage. I didn't find it hard to believe: he didn't want to talk to us between songs. I felt properly guilty but I'm afraid I left before the end, feeling uninvolved. If he keeps taking the vitamins I may yet catch him for his 80th.

Right. Sunday was sunnier from the outset, which put a gentler complexion on things. The Hothouse Flowers on the main stage sounded much mellower, jazzier and more like world music than I remember. Then the talent-show-winning Mulkerrin Brothers from Aran, the youngest of whom looked about ten, belted out standards from the third stage and went down a storm.

Little Sean did a dance with a broom, which coupled with the fact that they were the only band to have been scheduled to play three times during the festival, left the door wide open for jokes about the usefulness of youngsters in relation to chimneys. Obviously I'm not going to go there... Let's hope they were being paid properly.

Jimmy Cliff did reggae on the main stage but made a fool of himself, in my opinion, by including Libya, Syria and Jerusalem in his lazy list of places in which he thought it was important to "stop the war". And Teddy Thompson, son of Richard and Linda, did a thoughtful indoor set including a song about looking for a girlfriend who drinks, smokes, takes drugs and enjoys sex. Wikipedia says he lives in New York but I was sure I heard him say Leicester. Either way, it could be time for a move.

Clannad kicked off 20 minutes late, although the string section was on stage at the right time, suggesting that they're on contract. The delay gave an opportunity to reflect that Moya (previously Maire) Brennan's harp looked like a guerilla advert for Guinness, sitting there all golden against the black backdrop: I'd be interested to know whether there was a bump in sales.

They did a medley of songs from their Robin of Sherwood album that didn't do too well in competition with a loud backstage generator but they were a very welcome change of pace and cast a noticeable spell over the mid-afternoon beer buzz. Then - oh joy - Liam O Maonla from the Hothouse Flowers added to the gaiety of the proceedings by turning up to sing the Bono part of In a Lifetime without having learnt the words or the tune and with his flies undone. I know it's kind of wrong to laugh but surely you'd mention it to someone if you knew they were going on stage. Wouldn't you?

Then it was back to the tent to catch the tail-end of Mary Coughlan, who was filling the place with her torch-song sensibility, accompanied by a band who looked frankly delighted to be there. She's got a way with men, she growled, and she's just got away with mine. Then it was Eddi Reader, who could have been the lady from Mary Coughlan's song and whom I'm pretty sure tweeted that she was on her sick bed earlier in the week.

I'm glad she got up, not least for the story about two elderly relatives of hers, Molly and James, to whom she dedicated the song Dragonflies, written by Boo Hewardine on guitar. They wound up in an old folks' home together, only for it to become apparent that Molly had deducted ten years from her age many decades earlier and was therefore 96 when James shuffled off this mortal coil, but with a fantastic collection of shoes. Eddi Reader has a lightness and joy about her that goes with her wonderful voice in such a way that she lifts you up. I could have had an entire evening of that...

Or so I thought, until Van Morrison came on. What a dude, with his gold microphone stand bearing his initials and his collection of unanswerable bluesy hits. As the late afternoon sunshine suffused the crowd with a sense of well-being and a swallow swooped overhead, the two very tall men to my left decided it might be fun to sit on each other's shoulders, which gave them a combined height of around 11 feet and a strong risk of imminent collapse. The temporary distraction of a copy of Private Eye sticking out of the back pocket of the one underneath (best chance of a free copy all week) abated when Moondance started up and Christopher Ecclestone arrived in the crowd nearby during a storm of unrelated applause. He'll always be Dr Woo-Hoo! to me now...

I mainly missed Thin Lizzy because I went to see Camille O'Sullivan do her burlesque/rock mashup and found myself unexpectedly unable to leave. It could have been the thrilling possibility that her clothes might come off completely while she sang The Port of Amsterdam (the little red dress really didn't sit very comfortably on top of what was clearly *important underwear* of a corseted nature), the mugging for the audience, or the kitten and puppy noises that she kept making and encouraging the audience to join in with. A lady behind me said to her partner "I'm finding this a bit annoying" at one stage, but interestingly they didn't leave. Then throughout the second half of the set an enormous green balloon appeared from nowhere, to be batted around between the audience, the stage and its security, almost exactly as if one of the Wicked Witch of the West's breasts had escaped - a la Woody Allan - and was intent on doing a cabaret spot of its own.

By the time Ms O'Sullivan relinquished us there was only time for me to notice that Thin Lizzy had aged quite well and that their audience appeared to be howling like dogs without being prompted from the stage, before the whole thing was over.

I wonder whether Vince Power was actually there?

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