Boxing Day

It's the end of my first six months in my new job! I'm loving it and learning fast - the first gigs have gone really well with lots of things to learn from! One is that it would be a good idea to have some sort of contract/information pack to send out to bands I book for gigs at St Paul's - the sticking points so far have been re: guest lists and soundchecks, so all that could be nipped in the bud at the point of booking! SO much excitement, nerves and feeling sick about whether tickets will sell, but I've come out of 2010 just fine with three great and completely different to each other gigs under my belt!
I've been interviewed by the local press and by the web fanzine Mudkiss who also wrote up one of my gigs - that was so exciting and I've had so many positive comments that I know this is very right for me!

So what's coming up? here are the next few things - a small fraction of the fun to come! contact me if you'd like to come to the kitchen gig - tickets are £10 and only available in advance from me directly - all other tickets are available at wegottickets!

9th Jan - Mark Dignam/Phil Martin kitchen gig
27th Jan Jetsonics
4th Feb John Otway

Onwards

Wow - after all that excitement, the dramas leading up to the Dana Gillespie gig - it was a fantastic night - not without a hitch or two and a few lessons to be learned! Get the main act in and finished with sound-checking before 6 - have a fixed schedule for soundchecking! This will be so necessary esp in three band line-ups like 4th December - The Bitter Springs + BOHJ + Patrick Fitzgerald -double confirm their sound arrangements...anyway - everything was fabulous. My lindyhopping friends in their finery led the way with their dancing and the atmosphere was great - Dana and her band were wonderful - very polished and exciting - Dana herself powerful and also sensitive, genuine, warm...good news, she's coming back next year! Date to be confirmed and booked in the next day or two and will definitely be a weekend night.

So much adrenaline and enthusiasm about as interest in my projects builds - people are asking me to promote them, and I'm approaching others to come and perform - A photographer from Hounslow Chronicle is meeting me and Phil at church to take some pics for this Friday's edition and then I'm meeting my friend Anna from the Drama/Art dept at Brentford School for Girls to work out ways of involving their students in my events - hopefully one of them will be coming to film the Sean Millar gig this Friday! It feels a bit chaotic at times but a trusty to do list keeps me grounded as long as I remember to write things down.

So, Sean and Jim are coming from Ireland this Friday - it will be an emotional gig as Phil has not played with them professionally since the mid 90s and there'll be a lot of people there from Sean and Phil's different bands over the years -Sean hasn't played here in England for over 5 years and I can't wait! Hopefully all the flyering, pestering, facebooking etc will pay off and we'll see many of you there.

Exciting or nervewracking

I have been in a constant state of sicky excitement for the past fortnight - the big gigs, my first proper paying ones are nearly here...only two days until one of my all time heroines comes to sing at St Paul's - because of this gig, Angie Bowie, Dana's friend has asked me to promote her as well when she comes to London. Angie has been fantastic and publicised the Dana Gillespie gig on Facebook and elsewhere - I can't wait to meet her.

Back to the Dana gig then - the day after tomorrow: The support act (me, Phil, Serranda Serenaders, Brentford Blues Combo, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all) is ready and sounding really good - as long as we can keep it up and not crack with nerves - it'll be fine! Dana and the Brentford Blues Combo are going to play for about two hours non-stop including encores and I just can't wait - there is so much goodwill behind these gigs that it feels like the only way is up.

Serendipity - Kevin Swain who is a very experienced sound technician saw my poster during his one and only ever visit to Morrissons and contacted me to offer his services as a Hel's Angel - very welcome too! Turns out he is friends with Roy Hill (Chiswick gig next year) and probably many more that I know as well!

The gig after that is our fantastic acoustic night on 12th November - Sean(Doctor)Millar accompanied by Jim Walker with my Phil doing his own set ands also accompanying Sean on his set - this is going to be a really warm, special evening of beautiful music - Phil's set is going to incorporate numbers from all the bands he's been in, and there'll be musicians in the audience from all those bands as well as well-wishers and old acquaintances who have not had a chance to see Sean play in England for many years.

People are coming forward to help with the gigs and the Hel's Angels T-shirts are nearly ready! - what I really really want though (and I'm sure it will come to pass) is my own venue!

Covers Bands

It's a funny thing - I like a good covers band, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see one necessarily unless a friend was playing in one, but I enjoy them if I'm already at a pub/party or function and one happens to be on. I like them when they don't play the same karaoke type hits that everyone seems to want. Fine at a party though!

People are dismissive of them - I think unfairly and I wonder what is the difference between a jazz or blues singer doing a 'standard' and a covers band? I mean it - quite often the people who are dismissive of covers bands are the same ones who revere jazz and blus arrangements of very well known tunes. I like covers bands that rework an original in a different way rather than do a carbon copy of how the original band did it. Then there are tribute bands who take the covers thing a step further and have massive followings themselves - I saw the Grateful Dead tribute band once at a festival, they were fab and did their own improvisations/jams rather than copy the Dead's versions; I may even book the Let's Zep act and have a themed evening based on it, so watch this space. And covers bands, well I'm working on a night where we have a line up of several - battle of the covers bands maybe.

What Happened Next - new job part two

Well, I'd given in my notice and started to plan for the next gig. I thought that the ideal thing would be to organise gigs and events featuring musicians I really like. One of my favourite singers is a very soulful blues singer, Dana Gillespie. I've been going to her gigs on and off since I was about 17 and hanging around with my friends Fran, Nick and Julian -that is Julian Clary - I met them all at what used to be the Group 64 am dram theatre in Putney, decided I wanted to be on stage and left school - anyway, I digress - I e-mailed Dana through her website telling her all this and the next day her manager/agent called me and we booked a date, this being 4th November - I was so excited! I set about booking the venue, got Matt to work on the flyers and started telling people about it. This has been interesting, and people have variously asked 'what Dizzy's sister?' or 'what, THE Dana Gillespie' which of course is great, because anyone who's been to see this woman perform will know how brilliant she is! Anyway while I've been planning that gig, more bands have approached me to put them on, many intrigued by the use of the Church as a venue; others less so, but still very keen to play in a big venue in west London now that the Red Lion has been replaced by MacDonalds and the live music part of the Watermans Arts centre is a restaurant. So following on from booking the Dana gig, I asked the Bitter Springs to do a gig with me - my hubby Phil is the fiddler with them and I think they're a brilliant, literary and slightly punky rock band, who at one time were an incarnation of Vic Godard's Subway Sect as well as themselves. The last time they played on their West London home turf was over 5 years ago, at the Brentford FC Stripes bar, so a long overdue return - they're going to have great special guest acts in Band of Holy Joy, and Kitchens of Distinction frontman Patrick Fitzgerald.
So what is my day like? well I get up at the same time I always have, check my e-mails, have a delicious coffee made for me by Phil and then plan the day. Sometimes this involves business lunches, Wow! A few weeks ago, Adam Donovan from the Jetsonics put me in touch with Toby Burton who has a networking website called Rock'til you Drop - a fantastic resource for the more mature musician, and also for promoters - he has a very lively forum and blog as well - (see my links page)
It was great fun meeting Toby on a sunny autumn day at the South Bank and knowing that this is an aspect of my work now. My first event in my new self-employed state is the WaterAid ceilidh this coming Saturday. I'm slightly nervous about it, as ticket sales have been slow, but many have said they're coming on the night! I had fun going to Majestic WInes and choosing booze for the occasion. I love a ceilidh and this will be the first one I've been to this year in spite of having been at Whitby folk week. My hip and leg have been so sore with bursitis and now sciatica that I'm in some doubt as to how much do-si do-ing there'll be on Saturday.

My new job part one

Once upon a time, I was a little girl who liked putting on shows at home with my younger brothers, for parents and random visitors - now I'm allegedly a grown up, I've given up my grown up job and started putting on shows again.

Why? well... I'm lucky enough to be married to Phil Martin - fiddle/guitar/tambourine and triangle player in a few great bands, past and present. He started composing some of his own stuff including a Nativity musical, and I thought Phil and some of the bands he's in needed a bigger audience. I organised a gig with Roy Hill about a year ago at our Church, St Paul's in Brentford, as a fundraiser for the Open House community cafe, and about 100 people came - Phil and I organised the support act with the Brentford Belles gospel group doing a few numbers with Phil - the gig was a great success and quite a few people said it seemed like a natural thing for me to be doing. Others commented that the Church felt lke a great place to have gigs in. It was so satisfying seeing the whole thing through, right from the buzz of contacting Roy, to the end of the night when we'd cashed up and were too hyped up to sleep. At the time of that gig I was having a hideous time at my day job, and organising gigs was like escaping to fairyland - a counterpoint to the everyday stresses I was dealing with. After that Phil and I started the open mic nights at St Paul's Church which have been so diverse and rewarding. I was on a roll! Throughout the 12 years I've been with Phil, I've harboured thoughts of putting on a gig with fellow Brentford resident, Nick Lowe . I put a note through Nick's door and asked him if he'd come and play at a fundraising gig, and he agreed - again a massive buzz which felt quite out of control in the build up at times as I had to hold back tickets as they were going so fast! - This was a major operation - I had to get a personal license, organise a bar and build a huge team of volunteers, now known as Hel's Angels to help on the night. I was aided throughout by my right hand woman, Rebecca David; engineer at Bulmers by day, rock and roll superwoman by night. Phil and I also built a brilliant support act, again with the Belles and Phil and I did a couple of duets - very exciting. We raised £6k on the night, and really it was all over for the day job - encouraged by a new locum boss, I started to plan - I signed up with a temp agency and handed in my notice - I set up Helen Martin Productions and here I am!

Folk Music and Me

My earliest memories of folk music are dancing around our sitting room when I was probably about three, to Skip to my Lou, performed by Pete and Peggy Seeger. My mother had an album of theirs, but the only other song I can remember on there was Froggy Went a Courting I wish I could remember some of the others ....as I grew older, and started buying records myself, the very first album I bought was Gather Me by Melanie Safka...I loved that record ( and still have it) In fact the one song on it I don't like so much is Brand New Key, her hit from the early 70s. I heard this album when I was in Greece with my family- my cousins, about 10 years older than me used to play it on their car 8 track cassette player as we drove to and from beaches from Athens for the day...not sure if it's exactly folk music, but what is the definition of that anyway-it had a folky feel to it. My cousins were very fashionable and cool in my eyes, I had to keep this record a bit secret from my dad, who hated pop music- we were, however, allowed to listen to stuff my mum liked and so then I began to buy Simon and Garfunkel records-wonderful, with intense, serious and clever lyrics...and beautiful voices singing lovely tunes. I was about 14 by then, and bought all of their albums...learning to play some of the melodies by ear. I still love Simon and Garfunkel-they sound fresh and relevant even 30 or so years on; I then abandoned folky sounding stuff for a few years while I listened to the Beatles, Stones and Velvets Underground, but then I found a strange way back- my friend Penny at school had an older brother Tom, who had a vast record collection- he was away at Oxford while we were 14-16, and some evenings I'd stay at Penny's and we'd go up to his room in the attic and riffle through the records...lots of 60s and 70s goodies; we tended to listen to the ones with the covers we liked, so there was Wake of the Flood - Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Genesis...we liked Lindisfarne and used to dance around the room to Fog on the Tyne-particularly Penny who used to demonstrate moves she'd learned as a child catwalk model!

A major event for local teenagers who went to St Margaret's church youth group in Putney in the 70s, was the Harvest Barn Dance- wonderful, and so much better than a disco; to do the dances properly, one had to actually touch and hold onto a member of the opposite sex and here was folk music! energetic and frantic at times...beat discos and disco music anyday. Somewhere along the line, maybe when I was about 17, I got friendly with the curate at our church- David Lee- he ran the youth group, and I helped him! He really loved the purer, more traditional folk music, and I can't remember which groups or singers in particular, but I used to go to Putney record library and borrow anything that looked serious! This music really chimed with an earlier (and abiding) love for traditional church music like plainsong, Tallis or Byrd-I found the music haunting somehow-got into my soul. This being Putney, home to the Half Moon pub, I also discovered Pentangle and Fairport Convention....Pentangle became an enduring obsession- and Bert Jansch as a solo artist- saw him again a couple of years ago at the South Bank more powerful if anything as a result of the passed years. Wierdly there was a bit of a co-incidence with him- I had a friend at primary and secondary schools, Charlotte who was born on the same day as me- our mothers had been friends back in the day- she ended up with Bert Jansch, possibly still together, who knows! Their son, who must be about 25 now, played at the South Bank gig...so if together, it's been a long time!

I also really liked American folk music; Bob Dylan, before and after the electrics, and Woody Guthrie

I am so lucky as I've always loved music, I always wanted to have a boyfriend who was in a band, and now I have a whole husband who is a musician-I remember when we were first going out, he thought I was pretending to like folk music to impress him, as he plays the fiddle... he was never as keen on folk music as me, although since we discovered Whitby we've both been learning a lot more about it-he's having occasional lessons with Pete Cooper...

Just watched Bruce Springsteen, the Seeger Sessions on DVD, he sums up various things about folk music in a way that makes sense- some of it is to do with it being people's music with none of the edges polished off as in the more anodyne offerings.

It's all happening in Brentford

Brentford has become an even livelier place - eco squatters moved onto empty land - waiting to be developed near Kew Bridge, and a sub group of them have moved into local mp Ann Keen's house; our children have become involved. This is a very interesting situation - some children are allowed to go, some have been urged not to, but go anyway. Some friends are supporters of Ann Keen, and some not. Interesting times and time to write my blog again.

All this excitement is happening at the same time as the 4th meeting of Book Group Two; indeed, our children invaded the book group several times to ask if they could go, and the answer was yes with varying degrees of enthusiasm from parents. I think it's a great thing so far; teenagers, the same ones that we have encouraged to be free-thinking, going to look at ways people are trying to live an alternative and sustainable lifestyle, getting away from their computers and doing these things within walking distance. Even the local police have been supportive of the squatters at both sites, some saying they would bring their families there to have a look later.

Anyway - Book Group Two- Ruth,  I  and others have tried to enforce the one person speaking at a time rule as in we go round the room with each person speaking in turn re: their impressions of the book...this is being met by some resistance from others. We will stand firm. It worked really well this time and it was good being able to hear everybody's views before enthusiastic chaos set in.

Must go, off to face the boiling day ahead; more soon

Our most recent book was Snow by Orhan Pamuk and a very lively discussion