Category: Music

I was raised in the picturesque fishing village of Cullercoats on the North East coast of England at the southern edge of the ancient county of Northumberland.

NEVER MIND THE WAFFLE, JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE SONG

I recently caught sight of an intriguing painting by Henry Perlee Parker (1795—1873), a Devonport man who married a Woodbridge girl and eventually headed to Newcastle co-founding The Northumberland Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. The painting I saw was of women, Cullercoats fishwives, handling the catch from the local fishing boats known as cobles and temporarily storing it in tidal pools to keep it fresh while they gathered the rest of their catch for the creels.

This sounded like a quaint tail to tell in a modern folk song, but when Cullercoats man Arnold Brunton told me of tales of theft and skullduggery reported in the 19th Century, a quaint Cullercoats tradition took a dark turn making it even more perfect fodder for a folk song. It seems that while the heavy creels were being lugged up the bank to the top of the cliffs by the spate gatherers, the fish left on the spate was often stolen.

One can imagine the rage of the fishermen and the ensuing brawls that might have taken place outside the tiny fisherman’s cottages in the streets above the rocky scarps. Some of those homes have long since fallen into the sea taking with them the ghosts of the spate gatherers and the fishermen. The Spate Gatherers’ story is one of hard lives for both the men and the women. The men had to face the rage of the North Sea, the women had the bairns and the catch to concern them on dry land and the ever-present worry that the menfolk might one day never return, having lingered a little too long with the sirens.

The Spate Gatherers

Well the cobles come in and the fishwives they grin,
and they take on the catch from their man
On the scarp they all stand and they pass hand to hand
To keep the fish fresh as they can

It’s heavier work, than the work in the boats,
the men get to roll with the waves
Singing reels to the sirens away out to sea,
while the wives tread the rocks like they’re slaves

Then they’re lugging a load to the tops of the cliff,
it’s not easy to carry a creel
Well, it’s only a catch, but it’s fresh and it’s naturally
feeding the bairns; dance a reel!

Singing aye-diddle-aye-dai, aye-diddle-aye-dee,
A spate gatherer’s life’s not for me
Singing aye-iddle-aye-dai, aye-diddle-aye-dee
Give’uz the easier life out at sea

There’s a scratching of slate with the numbers, the date,
then they carry it south ’round the bay
They scrape over the pier and then disappear
from the view of those hiding away

What’s kept in the pools north of Jakey’s and scrapes,
is enough to pay for wor rent
But the bastards dive down and they take it to town,
another load slips through the net

Now, the tide’s on the turn and the lads they return
And they know who it is that’s to blame
With their beer inside ’em and no lack of pride, them’ll
kick two shades of spate out of them!

Fellow science writer Michael Gross recently realised (on a visit to a museum) that the Casio VL-Tone, VL-1, he owned. It was a sort of whimsical-seeming hybrid between calculator and musical instrument but was actually the first commercially available digital synthesizer. He tweeted and blogged about it, and did some video with his still working VL-1.

It gave me such nostalgia pangs as I too had the VL-1 with its ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) digital sound envelope modelling. Indeed I remember as a kid pestering my parents to buy me one for Christmas, which they did, thank goodness, what would I have done without it? That and my sister’s cast-off classical guitar.

I dug mine out along with my old school programmable calculator fx-180p (one of the first). The calculator is still working, same batteries I had all those years ago (the best part of 40 years ago, in fact).

The VL-1 was battery operated but I seem to remember saving up to buy the power supply, which was expensive at the time, but far cheaper than the endless stream of 4x HP7 (double-A) torch batteries.

Aside from the ADSR, wich let you create your own weird sounds, the VL-1 also let you record a short melody and have it play up to four times in a row. It was almost a sequencer! I misremembered it having a quantization function, it didn’t but what it did have were two standalone keys that let you tap the time of a melody that you had recorded without having to finger the actual notes on the keyboard, which meant (if you weren’t a pianist) that you could get a better rhythm going.

I always wanted to be able to tape from the VL-1 and had a dodgy DIN cable that was so pathetic all I ever got into my Bush stereo cassette player was hiss and electrical noise. I was certainly not going to compete with Neue Deutsche Welle band Trio and their VL-1 hit “Da Da Da”.

So, today, having fired up the VL-1 I recorded a quick burst of the opening bars of Tubular Bells, which if I remember rightly are three bars of 9/8 time followed by a 13/8. Played it back into my USB musical interface and then processed it, just a tad in my mixing software. The upper one plays the wet mix, the lower one the dry, unprocessed, piano tone as it comes out of the Casio VL-1.

Wet tone:

Dry tone:

Oh, and here’s my old calculator spelling out the hilarious punchline of a classic calculator joke.

Also in the same treasure trove…a big box at the back of a cupboard…was a barely used Psion Organiser that I won when I sent a computer tip to a magazine around about 1989.

And, then there was my old Sanyo dictaphone, which I used to take with me to interview various academics and industrialists when I freelanced for the likes of New Scientist, Science, Chemistry & Industry and all those others back in the 1990s.

Bridge of Sighs 

I was grateful for everything I had with you
But then the winter came and their paucity of truth
Too many questions, so many trials they put me through
And all the forces that would hold me back,
I pray we can still pull through

I put our futures in my pocket,
there’s nothing else that I could do

In days of clover, I thought you would show me how to compromise
Think it over, then we’ll get out under the bridge of sighs
Give me a moment I can explain to you the hows and whys
Then under cover, our life anew, we can but fantasize

There was a journey
The price was paid (You couldn’t see through your fears)
A boat will take us. (Beyond your tears)
It’s time for you to be brave

I gave them everything
but they wanted more for passage on that wave
Someone to save us. There is no wreck.
We escape the salty grave

I took our futures from my pocket,
really nothing else that I could do

In days of clover, I thought you would show me how to compromise
Just think it over, then we’ll get out under the bridge of sighs
If you give me a moment I can explain to you the hows and whys
Then under cover, our life anew, we can but fantasize

I put our futures in my pocket…

Words, music, guitars (Martin and Taylor acoustic six strings, Fender Telecaster, Yamaha bass), lead vocal, harmonies, production, mix, and mastering by Dave Bradley

Special guest drummer – Klaus Tropp

Christmas songs, you say? Well, not quite, but I have written and recorded a few seasonally inspired songs over the years, just not the usual jingle bells stock though.

Seasons of Love, Christmas Present, It’s Never Too Cold to Snow, Golden Light, Winter Warmer, – on Bandcamp. I sang a few of these at a festive event on Sunday, not entirely sure they were what the audience was hoping for…

 

I feel rather privileged to have been among the choral guests of the London Community Gospel Choir in concert yesterday at Saffron Hall with TyrannoChorus and SBS Community Choir. We got to join them during rehearsals for “Oh, Happy Day” and then opened for them in front of a sold out auditorum with “El Noi” (Catalan, trad.) and James Taylor’s “Shed a Little Light”. We joined them again at the end for “Oh, Happy Day”.

They were incredibly welcoming and quite impressed by our performance too, I think. This is the same choir that sang on Blur’s “Tender” back in the day and has done many amazing performances over the years for Nelson Mandela, for Freddie Mercury etc.

The draft lyrics to this new song of mine started out as being some kind of concerned imagery about suicide, but once I started recording vocals and extending them, they morphed into something more global, something about the problems we see in the world today. There was indeed another shooting the week I started this but they seem even more poignant now that a US President has used chemical weapons against children on foreign soil. For actual fuck’s sake…

Here it is. It has been through about 15 remixes of the countless vocal takes and guitar solo re-records. I think it’s fairly strong now, but you decide. Available from the Sciencebase Soundcloud to stream or download Shooting Waste from Bandcamp, now part of my new mini-album When the Beat Hits Your Heart.