Diary

4/7/09 : Recording

We're going into the studio to record some tracks next week with Paul from Stolen Recordings, who I recorded the Fanfarlo single 'Harold T. Wilkins' with last year and who has also just recorded and produced the debut My Sad Captains album. I'm excited to be working with him again, he has a great ear for capturing the life of a song and also some interesting techniques - including taping turkish flat bread to the drums to deaden the sound and get them sounding just right!

We're aiming to record a proper version of 'Secret Steps' as well as 'Oh Sally' and 'Up For Air', two of the songs that have been working well live. So expect some more mp3s to be available soon. Can't wait, it's going to be good to get back into recording.


26/6/09 : Red And Cyan and Booked Out

As well as singing, I recently seem to have become an actor. At the moment, I'm in the middle of filming a cool short film called Red & Cyan as 'Ross'. Red & Cyan is "A modern day tale of an innocent descending in a dark murky world where nothing makes sense". Filming has been going well and we have just one day of shooting to go.

I've also recently got the part of 'Jacob' in the indie feature film Booked Out due to start filming in September - I'm really looking forward to it, it's going to be good to spend a full month really getting to grips with the character.

In the mean time here are some photos from the filming of Red & Cyan...


24/6/09 : Krankenhouse

We played a gig last weekend at a place called Krankenhouse in Crouch End - it's a kind of legal (ish) squat that used to be a nursing home, now transformed into a centre holding things like drum workshops and life drawing classes. We took it over for the day for a Wonderland party and The Lost Cavalry played outside, our first acoustic gig.

We decided against playing up on the stage that had been constructed on the outside of the building as it seemed that playing down on the ground nearer to people might be a bit more fun. It went well! It's good to know that our songs work well stripped down, and it was good to re-work them with some accordion added and plenty of percussion... and it's always nice to just sing really loud :-)

Our next gig is acoustic too, at The Fellow in Kings Cross, for NoOneDied - it should be a good day. Hopefully we'll have a new song 'Only Forward' ready to play, we were working on it tonight and it was going well, it's about sailing away to an Island called Antillia...


20/6/09 : Sign Of Death

Every time I drive along the A40 at the moment I get a weird reminder of a day that I nearly died. Well, I could have died anyway... I certainly thought I might at the time.

I was on holiday after my a-levels with my friends and we took a day trip to Greece. There's a beach with a wrecked ship washed up on it that you can only get to by boat, so we had to swim from the boat to the beach. It didn't look too far and I'm an ok swimmer so I jumped in and swam from the boat - but about half way along realised that I was no where near as good a swimmer as I had thought.

I probably would have been ok, except that I thought I would probably be near enough to the beach to stand already, so tried to put my feet down... and instead went under. I remember really vividly opening my eyes under the water and seeing the floor still quite far below me, and knowing I was in trouble. I managed to get up to the surface again and shout for help, and keep afloat, but by that time I was knackered and had swallowed a load of water. Fortunately a guy from the main boat zipped out in a small dinghy and literally rescued me.

So now they've decided to use a photo of that beach on an advert for holidays to Greece - so every time I drive into town I have to pass a huge picture of it. But at least it makes me remember it's good to be alive!


29/5/09 : Xup in Manchester

I've been playing live drums at gigs for my friend's solo project 'Xup' for a while now - we used to be in Wolfie together and it's good to keep up with playing the drums - I think out of every instrument I've had a go at, drumming is the most fun - it's kinda like dancing while sitting down. Actually, singing might be more fun, but drumming is a close second. Anyway, this weekend we went up to Manchester for a gig.

Ms Xup herself and Oliver (guitar player in Xup) had headed up the day before, so I caught the coach and slept most of the way as I always seem to on coaches and trains. The venue was a bit dingy but outside the streets of Manchester were sunny, loud, vibrant and predominantly full of gay men drinking and (for some reason) line dancing. I had a wander and a drink, Manchester is nice and though I've played there three or four times now I never seem to recognise where I am. In an effort not to get lost I was wandering around trying to follow my sat nav... I felt a bit stupid but it did seem to work. I met up with Oliver and we had a drink and a chat in the sun. He's a really good guy.

Down into the darkness and extreme smelliness of Retro Bar we played our set, which went ok, though the sound on stage was terrible. Also the drum kit was HUGE... a crazy over-sized one kindly lent by the headliners 'Elvis In Disguise', who turned out to be absolutely great - Elvis covers complete with lip-curling and knicker-throwing. Then there was more drinking, then there was dancing and eventually there was going back to someone's hotel for even more drinking. The next morning I staggered into the sunlight and tried to eat some fried eggs, then Oliver picked me up and drove me back to London. It was a good trip and I met some great people.


27/2/09 : Duke Of Uke

I bought myself a cheapo yellow Ukulele last year and I've been playing it a bit so thought I'd treat myself to a proper one.

I'd been to The Duke Of Uke near to Brick Lane in East London before as I'd recorded in Soup studios which is downstairs and in fact we used to have early Fanfarlo band practices there. I had a look at a few and was only really intending to have a think about which one to get, but there was one that was just right and kept winking at me, even though it was £100 more than the maximum I wanted to spend ;-)

I tried to pretend I wasn't going to buy it but then gave up and handed over the cash. Now I'm home and get to open the case and smell the new wood smells... mmmm! Now I just need to put the effort in to get good at playing it! It's a soprano with a spruce top, walnut back and sides, 17 frets and a shadow piezo pickup. The best thing of course is that you can actually tune it, as opposed to the yellow one I had before!

The Duke Of Uke is a great little shop by the way, really friendly guys who know everything about Ukuleles. They do stuff like in-store gigs too and Uke lessons, everything a music shop should be these days to survive against the big Internet shops.


17/2/09 : Loop pedals are ace

It's my next solo gig on Monday and it's acoustic, so I've go to work out how to play my songs without the drums machines and so on... but I can't resist just a few pedals...


06/2/09 : Spending money on new things

It's all about physical possessions... well, it's all about trying to own every type of instrument that exists anyway... recently I bought myself a Xylophone (I think it came from a school as it had 'Xylophone' written on the side on a laminated label!) and for Christmas I got a new mellodica, a stylophone and an e-bow (which I've always had my eye on since I started playing guitar all those years ago) and then yesterday my new microphone arrived an SE2200A. Very nice. It even comes with it's own special silver carry case, mmmmmm.... This will of course make everything I record an extra 50% better. At the moment it's just demos being recorded, so we can learn the new songs with my new band (which is going well by the way), but I'll get down to some proper recording soon so you can hear the new material in all it's folky glory.


30/1/09 : Archive Fanfarlo accordion madness

A while ago in Fanfarlo we recorded an acoustic set in Simon's living room in Camden for PSL, a Swedish TV company - they've just released a couple of the songs onto the Internet so I thought I'd post one up here so you can see my accordion playing debut... slightly out of tune, but that's vintage accordions for you! Anyway here's the video...


19/1/09 : Good gig

My Notting Hill Arts Club gig went well. Kelman and The Tamborines were great guys too. Thanks if you came down. I played three new songs as well as two older ones and a cover of bravecaptain's 'Good Life'. One new song included my debut concertina performance onstage, which almost went wrong when something got caught on the side of it meaning it almost wouldn't play. (photos: Ellie Atkins and Underexposed):



Older >><< Newer  

Contact:

For any project, big or small - or to ask any questions at all, please contact me:

  mark@mixedcasesspaces.co.uk