Music – Page 9 – David Bradley

Bridge of Sighs – A new song

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

Classic Chords #25 – Another Chord on the Wall

I’ve featured Dave Gilmour’s guitar chords before in the Classic Chords series, specifically, the arpeggiated G-min-13 (Gm13) that opens Shine on You Crazy Diamond, the homage to erstwhile and founding member Syd Barrett who was the one who roped in Gilmour all those years ago. Another iconic song from the band, the one that held The Police off the Xmas Number One slot in the UK as the last dying embers of the punk era that was to “get rid of the rock dinosaurs” faded: “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”.*

It’s classic rock but, it’s funky, it has an awesome bassline, beautiful bluesy guitar solo (that Rich in my band plays sublimely, and because it’s a track about school produced by Bob Ezrin it has a kids’ choir singing, just as he’d done with Alice Cooper’s School’s Out seven years earlier.

Now, ostensibly it’s a D-minor chord at the fifth fret that opens the funk in that song. But, listen carefully and you can hear it’s not always quite a simple D-minor, with its D-A-F, I-III-V triad of the D minor scale. Aside from the out-of-phase phasing of Gilmour’s Black Strat in the “between” pickups position, there’s an extra harmony. Obviously really, it’s a C note on the third string, the G-string. This makes it a D-minor 7th chord: a seventh chord with a minor third, perfect fifth, and minor seventh. Minor seventh chords are everywhere, they add a little extra to any funky riff that would otherwise be the plain or vanilla minor chord, they also lend themselves to substitution and progression so that, for example, the Dm7 easily goes to an F major and you might use either depending on exactly what you want out of your chords. It’s mainly the D-minor, but the 7th note creeps in occasionally.

Incidentally, Gilmour is auctioning off most of his guitar collection to raise money for his Foundation. The auction will include the 12-string on which he wrote Wish You Were Here at EMI Abbey Road Studios, the 1955 Gold-top Les Paul that was used for the solo on Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2), and of course, his famous black Fender Strat, which he bought at Manny’s in New York on his first trip to the States when TWA lost his Fender Telecaster (a 21st birthday present from his parents apparently). There’ll also be the chance to be the first Fender Stratocaster, serial number 0001, which is in Gilmour’s collection.

More Classic Chords here.

Was Ian Dury being facetious about Floyd’s partwork in Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3), I can well imagine that he wouldn’t have been keen to listen to the other parts or the whole album. But, who knows? Odd though that Chas Jankel and The Blockheads in general were funk driven just as is this Floyd song.

Worzel Gummidge

As many of you know, one of my musical outlets is playing with the Cottenham Theatre Workshop pit band led by Aunty Babs. This was a finale jam we did on last night of our Worzel Gummidge performance back in December 2018 with Babs on piano, Rob on clarinet, Adam on drums and Darren on bass, me on electric guitar and camera.

For CTW updates check out their website or follow them on Facebook. They’re rehearsing hard for their spring 2019 show right now!

Christmas Songs

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…

London Community Gospel Choir

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.

Shooting Waste – a song

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.

Worzel Gummidge – Cottenham Theatre

We’re coming to the end of rehearsals right now, two more, then it’s show time. It’s really grown on me from my privileged position deep in the bowels of the orchestra pit from where I got some snaps of the cast in their costumes. Taking photos with a Canon 6D SLR and a Canon 24-105mm L lens. No flash (obvs). Low light and the fact that I am officially supposed to be playing guitar in the band rather than bouncing about taking photos makes it quite a task. Still, I get a few closeups and odd angles that the tech guys at the back of the hall running light and sound don’t get from their vantage point. Been doing this since 2013, with one year off when we didn’t have a pit band.

This week: Wednesday (28th Dec) to Saturday (1st Dec) evenings and a matinee on Saturday. Tickets here

European Robin – Erithacus rubecula

It occurs to me occasionally and I forget to mention it, that this is probably the species of bird we Brits probably picture when we hear the song Rockin’ Robin.

I suspect, however, that the guy who wrote the song, Leon René (aka Jimmie Thomas), was actually thinking of the American Robin (Turdus migratorius), which is like a British Blackbird (T. merulea) or a Song Thrush (T. philomela) but with a red/orange breast.

Anyway, the American Robin’s song is much closer to the refrain “Tweet, tweedle-lee-dee” in the hit, than the rambling and melodic song of the European Robin. One more thing, check out the cover artwork of the record by original Rockin’ Robin artist, Bobby Day, he’s got macaws, parrots, but no sign of a Robin, American, European or otherwise as far as I can see.

Now, here’s a thing…mammals have a single set of vocal folds in the larynx of their trachea. That means they can only really ever bark, moo, yelp, or sing with one voice using that set of vocal folds. The “voicebox” of birds is further down their pipes at the place where the trachea branches into two bronchi. Birds have a syrinx* rather than a larynx, which allows them to create two tones at once.

The European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) is an old world flycatcher. Like I say, not to be confused with the American Robin demonstrating what is possible with a syrinx. Listen out for his neighbours calling at the points in the video when he stops singing. It’s impossible to know who sang first, maybe he’s replying, or maybe it’s them calling back to him.

For Rush fans, yes, that is the reference! The Temples of Syrinx from the 2112 opus. In classical Greek mythology, Syrinx was a nymph and a follower of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt.

Syrinx was known for her chastity, making her the perfect object of worship for the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx who by the year 2112 have banned pleasure (specifically music played on guitars) from the world in deference to computers. In Greek mythology Syrinx was pursued by Pan, the god of the wild and music.

To evade his advances, she fled into the river Ladon, where she asked the gods to turn her into reeds. Pan, of course, took those reeds and from them fashioned his panpipes, ultimately possessing Syrinx for his own pleasure. This myth is why the word syrinx is used for the double vocal flute of birds.

Original Periodic Table song – Tom Lehrer’s The Elements

TL:DR – American musician and songwriter Thomas Andrew Lehrer wrote a humourous song in which he sings the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the Major-General’s Song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance.

Periodic Table Song

I’ve been meaning to learn and record a cover of this song, but am yet to get around to it. Meanwhile, here are the original lyrics to The Elements.

The Elements (To be sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s A Modern Major General)

by Tom Lehrer

There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium
And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and caesium
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium, and
Tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There’s sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium
And also mendelevium, einsteinium and nobelium
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper,
Tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard,
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered.

You can listen to Lehrer here (3700kb Quicktime Mov file). Search on The Vatican Rag and Masochism Tango for more of Lehrer’s wonderful material

Check out a fantastic animated version of The Elements here. (Someone should do a Peter Kay to this song and get it back in the Top Twenty, that would do wonders for the image of chemistry, I’m sure).

Read about the discoveries of elements 111 and 115, and our historical timeline showing the discovery of the elements. An updated version to cope with the new elements was written and recorded by Helen Arney.

Here comes the flood

Peter Gabriel’s 1977 song “Here Comes the Flood” is nothing to do with the outcome of over-zealous climatic precipitation, downpours, weather, or indeed floods. Rather, the lyrics muse on the fantastical notion of universal telepathy suddenly occurring across the human race and the devastation to us as individuals that would ensue with such a vast information and emotional overload.

This is a cover version of the song I recorded in May 2013.

“Here Comes The Flood”

When the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There’s no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.

I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It’ll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
use up what we used to be.