An Introduction to Brouhaha

Brouhaha were a fab band, and my memories of our times together are very fond, if vague. We're talking late seventies, early eighties here, the dim and distant past. Bill Docherty, the guitarist, was the finest musician I have ever known. He could play like Robert Fripp without even thinking, and could conjure riffs out of thin air. I'm ashamed to admit that the name of the singer eludes me - I think he was called John. Like Bill, he hailed from Glasgow. I was friendly with a large bunch of Glaswegians at the time, and a fine group of people they were.

Chris was the drummer, a Londoner like myself, and various other musicians flitted in and out of the picture. In our early days, Wal played clarinet and Trevor played guitar. I was the bassist, an instrument I came to late, but loved to play. Early gigs involved long tribal jams around songs called, for example "We're the Fackawi" and the Velvet's "Sister Ray". More than one of these gigs involved much bleeding of the guitar/bass players fingers, and one memorable gig involved carrying a PA and an assortment of guitars across an ice-covered Stoke Newington.

I have very few physical reminders of Brouhaha. I have one tape that we recorded in Herne Bay, under extreme circumstances (therein lies another blog), and a couple of pictures taken at the famed 101 Club gig in Clapham - the only gig I've ever done where the crowd actually went completely mad and bounced up and down a bit. I hesitate to say it, but maybe we changed some lives out there, as I even found a mention of this gig on the website of one of the Jasmine Minks, a band who became better known than Brouhaha:

The Night the Jasmine Minks Got Their Name

This is a Picture of me immediately after the gig:











This is Brouahaha in full flight, showing (left to right) Chris the drummer, me on bass, and Tom on clarinet. Unfortunately I have no pictures of Bill the guitarist or John (?) the singer.













Miraculously, I do have an actual ticket from this gig!












Impressive eh? Not to mention good value. So, enough of the waffle, now you can hear some for yourself. This track was recorded in Herne Bay and played on John Peel (although I missed it). It is sampled from a tape that I've had for a quarter of a century, and that I must have played hundreds of times. Amazingly, it doesn't sound too distorted and awful. I love the freeform percussion and the bassline on this song.

The Reason (She Looks So Happy)

That's enough history for one night, children. In our next exciting episode I will be discussing (and illustrating) the completion of the compost bin, and the completion of our shed.

Frustration

I came up with a rather jolly 12 string guitar part last night. After practicing for a while, I decided to go for a take. Played it, recorded it, and halfway through *BUUUURRRRP* goes the PC. Same thing again next time. And the time after. After two hours of fiddling and faffing, the burpiness seemed to go away. I started recording again, got one minute into the piece, and guess what? I broke a string. At this point it was too late to do anything about it, as I have to get up quite early for work. Very frustrating.

Here's a question for all you musos. Should I spend two hours completely re-stringing the 12 string, or simply replace the broken G? I know I should replace the lot, but it's so time consuming!

Composer or Composter?

The last couple of days I've been working on a compost bin for our garden. Perhaps I should explain that we recently moved here to Surrey from London, and that the garden of the new house is a bit of a blank slate. We're soon to have a shed and greenhouse put up, we've had some Leylandii taken down, and we've planted a native species hedge. Now you've got some context, back to the compost.

Regrettably I couldn't get any recycled wood (pallets are hot property round here it seems), so we got some cheap planks from Homebase. Well, I say cheap, they actually seemed quite expensive. Anyhow, here is the work in progress. We've sawn the planks and batons, and nailed two side panels together. Matthew Squidling took the picture. The panels are stacked one in front of the other, and the abstract sculpture is also the work of a Squidling!

In case you are wondering, the 4th side of the compost bin will have a slidey bit for planks to go in and out of. That's a technical term, slidey bit.

You'll be glad to hear that I hope to return to the music with my next entry. I hope to post a recording of a band called Brouhaha who I played with in the eighties.

Here We Go

First things first. My main motivation behind this blog is to post links to my music as soon as it gets recorded - fresh out of the oven. So, here is something I've just finished off. This is unusual for me in that it is in a rather fetching song structure, as opposed to my usual unstructured chaos. People might even enjoy this one.

It is a song called glitterman, which is, again unusually for me, somewhat autobiographical.

glitterman

And no, before anyone asks, this doesn't have anything to do with Gary Glitter.

Any crackles on this recording are due to a problem with my soundcard/pc which I am currently wrestling with. Any Delta 1010/Cubase users want to help?

Here's a picture from Wisley last weekend, just for the hell of it

Welcome to SquidBlog!

Hello and welcome to SquidBlog. My name is Squid Tempest, and I currently live in Surrey. I'm hoping to use this space to write about the things that interest me. The main topic is therefore likely to be music, in many and varied flavours. I'm also keen on gardening and art, and may well write about my day to day experiences; joys and moans too.

I currently curate a website for an internet music community called Noiseweb. If you visit the site you can hear all sorts of music that the members of the community have contributed, including audio streams of the three CDs we have produced so far.

http://www.noiseweb.co.uk

I am hoping to start a new section to the website for my own music. This will be called SquidWeb. If all goes to plan, I'd like to start up a podcast to chart the various phases of my musical career, old and new.