Category: Dry The Life EP

 

GIG: 20TH DECEMBER 2016 at Heather Skowood’s jewellery studio, Manchester 

 

DRY THE LIFE

 

You can dry the life out of me

You can take the salt from the sea

I’m thirsty till the rain

Comes back to me again

You can dry the life out of me

 

 

You can pour your poison in the well

You can signal danger with a bell

I’m thirsty till its full

Among the cattle skulls

You can pour your poison in the well

 

Chorus

 

You could make it safe for the one in ten

You could bring good health to their children

So when you cash your shares

Or turn the tap upstairs

Think about the danger you put them in

 

Chorus

 

GUNS

 

On a barren moor

In a wilderness

Where rolling land

Greets its guests

 

Men from cities

Men from afar

Barbour coats and four by fours

With their big guns

 

Marlborough made

Eton broke

Stalking caps

Beating coats

 

Glorious Twelfth

On a shooting stick

Bag a brace or two for the sport of the rich

With their big guns

 

We won’t walk

In peace again

On Otterburn Moor

Or Salisbury Plain

 

Red flags fly

And sirens sound

Serving up fodder for foreign lands

With their big guns

 

 

 NIGHT

 

The hillside shades the setting sun

Firey dance ignites the sky

Till shadow light and harvest moon

Twilight in a darkened room

 

Silence fractured by a breeze

Endless rippling of a stream

Firewood crackling in the fire

A distant owl, an eerie cry

 

The cockerel called the breaking day

And waking larks rise through the grey

Weary bones and tired eyes

Back to work. It’s time to rise

 

 

THE SMILE

 

It’s still raining heavily beneath the trees

It’s still raining

It’s still raining

It’s still raining heavily beneath the trees

 

There’s a life behind the smile upon the face

There’s a life behind the smile

There’s a life behind the smile

There’s a life behind the smile upon the face

 

There are rays of sun behind the clouds above

There are rays of sun

There are rays of sun

There are rays of sun behind the clouds above

 

Chorus

 

There’s a shining in the dark beneath the waves

There’s a shining in the dark

There’s a shining in the dark

There’s a shining in the dark beneath the waves

 

Chorus

 

 

THE BREEDING GROUND OF VILE

 

You stand there at the Mansion House

Delivering the blows

Stuffed into your shirt and tails

All tied up with a bow

You slash and burn and cut and close

The audience applauds you

Out the room and down the stairs

‘Cos they’re all in accord

 

It’s who you know not what you know

That helped create your pile

Encouraged by your masters

At the breeding ground of vile

Encouraged by your masters

At the breeding ground of vile

 

It’s not about a silver spoon

Or a life of privilege

It’s not about the stately home

Or your life peerage

Your mind is wired for personal gain

Whoever’s in the way

De-sensitised, demoralised

It’s the poor and sick that pay

 

Chorus

 

And when your day is nearly done

And you’re put out to grass

With servants following in your wake

And you like to call that class?

 

Chorus

 

 

THE MADNESS

 

Fear in darkness

Fear in the cold

Terror for the young

Despair for the old

Life under windows

Or down in a hole

Trying to survive

In a world without soul

 

Then the madness returns

As the city burns

And the madness remains

As the city is razed

And the madness may go

But it will come back again

And the madness kills

Generations slain

 

Silence creeps

From the depths of craters

To shelled facades

And burned out spaces

Barricades rise

From the rubble of night

And dust storms clear

In a world without light

 

Chorus

 

 

 

© JOHN REED 2016. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

“One week on, and how do you feel after your first gig in 34 years?” is what I’ve been asked several times now. It’s hard to say really because for much of the past week I have been battling computer problems, with my old one going on strike at the weekend and my new one’s set up being partially unfathomable. Now back in the land of being able to use the technology I have paid for I am in the process of retrieving stuff that will enable me to fulfil a number of business presentations that I had promised before Christmas. While I’ve never aspired to be a geek, I am normally familiar with the new technologies so on this experience, God help anyone who isn’t!

I suppose one answer to the gig question can be found in the fact that I have arranged to do another gig on 20^th December live from a Manchester jewellery studio. The space is tiny so we won’t be inviting an audience, but this will be the first of a number of gigs under the banner “SMALL PLACES TO 1,000 FACES”. The deal is that I get to play in small places I want to play for a fee of ‘plenty of cups of tea’, while in return providing the host with a physical copy of my latest EP, signed if they want even though that feels a bit narcissistic.

The DRY THE LIFE EP will not be released now until 1^st January, when everyone is looking for something to get them over the overt commercialism anxt of Christmas. We had hoped to release earlier but a business trip to Mongolia meant that mixing could not take place until the end of November and we were not able to have the physical CDs delivered until after my gig on 30^th – finally arriving on Saturday 3^rd. But that’s all fine, because you can pre-order on Bandcamp so you get it on the day of release.

Back to the next gig, I quite like the idea of mixing the way I present my music to the world, playing in different places either with my excellent backing band The Folded Arms – spontaneously named following my 30^th November gig – with a few of the ‘Arms’, or as a solo artist in tiny places streamed live. It is not my intention to go on the gig circuit, partly because I don’t want to and partly because my business commitments won’t allow me the time. However, I have applied to a number of festivals so there may be opportunities ahead to play to larger audiences. Festivals are inundated with applications to play so I will feel lucky if I am accepted to play at any of them.

Last night I had the pleasure of watching the Arms’ guitarist Kieran Heaney play an acoustic blues set with two Simons that we know! It was at a small bar in Blackpool called Montagues where they have a monthly open mic session. The atmosphere in the packed bar was excellent and the musicians of a really good standard. It felt like a nice place to target for when I have a cittern with a pickup! The blues set was exceptional, and I hope to get back there either as a face in the crowd or to play sometime next year.

Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled here for a one day summer music festival at a place somewhere near me.

DRY THE LIFE EP now available to pre-order via Bandcamp, with two songs released immediately to those who want to take this route. Dry The Life (N’Goni version) is the original version and is about world water shortage, and The Smile is a song of hope for those whose illnesses cannot be seen, that they will one day enjoy better health.

 

 

 

 

 

“Blink and you’ll miss it”. It’s how the last couple of years have been. Three years ago, if you had told me I would be preparing for my first gig in 34 years having released my debut album and now an EP, I would have thought you were stark raving mad. But here we are, just a few days away from the first stage of the launch of the Dry The Life EP with a live performance. There will be other things going on between now and the New Year when the EP will be fully out there!

I have hardly been a prolific live performer. This will be my third ever gig, and I was pissed for the first two! I performed in the club tent at the Norwich Folk Festival in 1979 (pretty sure about the year – could have been 1980). In theory I was stage manager, but it was really a mix of me, Kieran, and a bunch of friends whose stellar moment was to build an entire living room behind the stage curtains as a number of musicians (including the fabulous Martin Simpson) cranked up “I Shall Be Released” as the year’s finale song. The look on their faces was a joy to behold as the curtains opened to reveal comfy chairs, a table hosting a stuffed peahen, a rapidly reversing grandfather clock, and bizarrely a coffin we found in the set room.

The previous evening me and Gary Brown my songwriting partner in crime at that time had done a short gig in the club tent. I can remember feeling reasonably calm on the night but I had been drinking all day. The only reason we wanted to do that gig was to annoy the guy on the mixing desk about whom we had written a not entirely complimentary song. This guy annoyed for England and gave folk music a bad name, and as he sat behind the mixing desk he seemed to feel unable to pull the power chord as we poured gentle derision in his direction!

My second live performance was at a Greenpeace gig in Bristol in 1982. I lived in an attic bedsit at the time on Fishponds Road. Shep and Sarah on the floor below me were organizing the event. I had worked on road surveys in and around the city since I moved there the previous year as a near destitute, heavily overdrawn, directionless and incredibly skinny waif because my sister Mary lived in Eastville and friends Gary and his brothers Nigel and Ian lived in Redland. Sarah was also on the road survey team and helped me get that apartment (my fourth of seven places I lived in Bristol in just 18 months – I was a restless soul).

Shep and Sarah used to hear me playing and singing my songs, and one day he knocked at my door to ask if I would start the Greenpeace gig off for him with a few of my songs. In order for me to get on that stage I think I had eight pints of Guinness and a couple of whiskies in a pub round the corner from the venue, until I felt sufficiently ‘relaxed’. It was all going swimmingly well until I played the final chord of my last of three songs, whereupon Shep gestured to me and whispered that the next band hadn’t shown up so could I do a few more songs. Oh wow. The trouble was that Shep knew my repertoire was quite wide so I couldn’t really say no, but at the same time he had probably not listened closely to many of my lyrics, most of which were largely unrepeatable in public. But I pressed on, and plucked three more songs out of the ether for him. That was the last time I stood on a stage to perform, but thankfully I averted disaster.

And so to Wednesday night, when I will be stone cold sober and backed by Matt Steady on violin and Rajendra Jadeja (Jad) on tabla. I bought my cittern in July 2014, and released my 15 track Moorscape album by April this year. Now I am a few days away from performing a songs from that album and my imminent Dry The Life EP at The Fuse in Partington, where my debut album was recorded. It feels really good! We are filming the gig and live streaming on the night, so please join us if you can. I will be posting the link to the stream in a couple of days both on here and via various social media platforms. I hope you enjoy what you see as much as I will performing it!

Dry The Life is a seven song EP, comprising three very different versions of the title track, a remix of a song from Moorscape, and three new songs. This EP has taken my work to a new dimension. I am moving into a more progressive folk phase, and I am looking forward to developing that mood with The Breeding Ground Of Vile album which we are recording next year. Exciting times!

Ali and I were having a phone conversation at the start of last week, during which we again decided that the Dry The Life EP could probably be mixed and released straight away. So anything that was added in our planned session with Emma and Kate on 5^th November would need to really hit the mark. Emma was kind enough to join us on the Moorscape album and I had seen them harmonise on disco hits live in Blackpool in the summer. So I was confident they would come up with something, and that whatever it was it would be a bonus. And what a bonus!

The recordings of both Moorscape and Dry The Life have been blessed with musicians who not only want to deliver the best of themselves, but who also have shown a real care for my music. From Kieran and Jad’s initial contributions to Moorscape, to Matt’s more recent addition of violin and pipes and now the girls’ stunning contributions to Dry The Life, each musician has brought with them ideas and skills that I would never have been able to achieve on my own, and none of us would have been able to bring to life without Ali’s amazing production. I feel very lucky.
Emma and Kate arrived prepared. They had listened to the songs, practiced a number of ideas, printed off the lyrics and made notes, all to try and make sure we got the best out of the day. In the seven hours where we were working, they enhanced five of the seven songs on the EP. Some of their recordings may also be used on the final mix of a sixth. Yet within those few hours we still managed to stay relaxed and have a lot of fun – there was even jam of Alright Now that came right out of the blue, possibly just after Kieran’s story about the 14 Skippies that had to be used in Skippy the Bush Kangaroo! The Sun Goes Round The Moon is one of the consistent top tracks on the EP for both me and Ali, and is the one track that we believed was complete. But the girls arrived with ideas for that too, and guess what? They absolutely nailed it.

It has occurred to me that I work on my music in a similar collaborative way to how I work in my business. Like Matt Steady who plays violin and pipes on the EP, I don’t like to act as ‘the ‘Big I am’. I actually like to see and hear other people’s ideas and interpretations because very often they deliver something I would never have thought of. So I have given each artist the freedom to create and in doing so I have had to change very little of what they have contributed.

But of all the surprises from our recording session, to have been given a Terry’s Chocolate Orange in a knitted Christmas pud cover really made the day extra memorable!

 So what’s next for us? Well mixing for the EP takes place at the end of the month and you should see copies flying around straight after that. Then I am playing live with guests at The Fuse in Partington on Wednesday 30^th November as part of that promotion, and we are putting something special together for January that involves working with my son @DuncanReedMusic. We will begin recording The Breeding Ground Of Vile as we move into the New Year. Every project is only as good as the people involved and we all have different timetables, so it may take longer than originally planned, but please watch this space!

…I genuinely did meet Matt Steady for the first time at Leicester Forest East services on the M1 with foundation on my face! Matt and I met virtually via Twitter and it didn’t take long to realise our kindred spirit – a desire to make good music and to do it the right way (hopefully!). I could hear a fiddle in some of my songs so I needed a fiddle player, and Matt seemed to fit the bill.

I was on one of my endless driving tours of the UK back in January working on various business projects and on the last Friday of the month had to drive home from Peterborough. Knowing that Matt lived in Leicester I suggested we should meet up by way of breaking my journey home. At that time Matt worked just around the corner from the services so it was an imperfect perfect venue for us both – imperfect because I have a deep and lasting loathing of motorway service stations!

I have a contract with an organization in Peterborough and was required that morning to have an official photograph taken for some publicity shots. Throughout the winter I had suffered from dry skin on my face and it had been getting worse. The previous evening I had stopped over in a hotel in Northamptonshire and the central heating in the room was like a mistral all night – I can rarely be bothered complaining about these things, although when I do it is generally attracts spectators! When I had showered I saw that my face was a bright shade of scarlett, and tried to soothe this angry visage with a range of hotel soaps and ointments from my overnight bag.

Suffice to say that nothing was working, and during the hour long drive to Peterborough I arrived at a solution. The organisation’s head honcho is a lady I have known for many years and I was having a meeting with her before the shoot. “You’re going to need to let me use your foundation…” I said, pausing for effect, “…because otherwise you are going to have a very red faced export consultant in all your photos!” Thus she expertly applied her foundation to my face. If I had done it I’m sure I would have emerged from the meeting room looking like a bonbon.

And so the photos were taken and the whole day went off very well. I left Peterborough at about 3:15pm and made my way west then north, arriving at Leicester Forest East about 15 minutes before Matt. Knackered. As we sat and drank tea and ate something not especially nice, I suddenly remembered I hadn’t washed the foundation off my face as I had intended to do, and that I probably looked a bit freakish like the late David Guest (I’m still not entirely sure what that man ever did), so I spun this yarn about having to borrow a lady’s foundation in order to have an important photo taken! Thankfully, he bought it!

You can find Matt’s excellent blog at https://www.facebook.com/groups/BloodIsThickerThanGold/?ref=bookmarks

I am delighted that Matt has agreed to play violin on some of the songs on the Dry The Life EP. My part of the recording is done, so there is just Matt’s contribution to add plus the voices of Emma Perry, Kate Ferris, and some other special people, then we can release the EP in time for you all to buy it for someone as a Christmas present! You can keep up to date with Matt’s work at

https://www.facebook.com/groups/BloodIsThickerThanGold/?ref=bookmarks

 

DRY THE LIFE is a seven track EP that mixes the astonishing sound of the cittern with other folk instruments, voice, and some progressive sounds. The EP will be released in November.

Well that’s mainly my part of the recording done. The unmixed version of the Dry The Life EP will now go through rigorous car, headphone, background and studio testing for the next few weeks before we add contributions from other musicians and vocalists. It’s about reviewing the work away from the emotion, energy and pressures of the recording studio. We are looking for the things that sounded good on the day but which actually may not have worked so well, things that may start to irritate after a few listens. This way we know that we have created the best foundation for the others to weave their magic.

I listened obsessively to the pre-mix Moorscape album earlier this year, and being a novice to the whole recording thing at that time I didn’t pick up one or two very minor things that I might improve or change if we had our time all over again. It’s a bit like when you have decorated a room. Only you know where to look for the crooked paint lines and bodged bits of corner wallpaper, whereas visitors may think ‘oh what a lovely room.’ Music creations are slightly different because many people who listen to music pick up on the imperfections where only a trained painter and decorator would move a wardrobe to see what horror papering and painting might lie behind. But you probably get my drift.

One of the things that has surprised me about the Dry The Life EP is that the songs that sound more complex were actually much easier to record than the more simpler songs. When I was on the way to the studio for The Sun Goes Round The Moon session, I felt it threatened to be the EP’s weak link. I had the melodies and general ambience in my head like all the other songs but for some reason I felt less confident. Yet after just a few hours of seamless effort we had produced a humorous and gently blasphemous track that leans more towards progressive rock than folk-rock.

For both The Smile and the cittern version of Dry The Life, which are essentially very simple songs, it was a different story. One of the reasons for the difficulty was that we were trying to achieve a natural flow, recording the main cittern part right through in one hit. That requires a level of mental strength I am not sure I possess. Bizarrely, if you asked me to perform the same songs live singing and playing to an audience of one, I could do that easily. My timing has improved over the last year and I am comfortable with the cittern, so there seems little logic behind the difficulty I seem to have had in front of the microphones on those two days. Ali and I almost went into meltdown after I did a perfect run through for Dry The Life, matching every beat of the click track, then screwed up the ending!

We persevered and recorded multiple takes until we had one that was as perfect as we were ever going to get. That happened for both of those songs in different ways , but with Dry The Life I had the additional problem of finger cramp. The song’s chord sequence for the cittern is so simple that I believe even the most unmusical person on earth would be able to play it. Just your first and second fingers with only your second finger having to move one fret every so often. But you try pressing your fingers like that for a whole four minutes! It may not sound a long time, and it might have been worse for me because I am hardly in the prime of youth, but after the first couple of verses it started to feel like I wouldn’t be able to prise my hand off the neck of the cittern when the song finished.

With that ordeal behind me, I thought it would be a breeze to record just a few bars of picking, with a ditty I had put together a couple of nights before. The trouble is, it requires a little finger stretch, so playing it a few times is fine but any more and the cramp set in again! The night before I had also decided to see if a bit of mandolin lead would work. It wasn’t until a few minutes before we recorded the mandolin for Dry The Life that I knew exactly how I was going to play it. You guessed it…more little finger stretching.

I bought my mandolin in 1986 when I lived in Reading. It isn’t a very good one, mass produced in Romania and with quite a high action at the sound hole end of the fretboard. I saw it in a junk shop just a couple of blocks away and paid far too much for it. £40 I think. I have decided I want each of my instruments to feature somewhere in the music I make, and yesterday it was the mandolin’s turn.

So that’s my whinge about the occasional pain that come with trying to be a recording artist. We are probably going to mix the Dry The Life EP in October or November. Much depends on the availability of the others. Matt is playing violin on a couple of tracks of the EP and also on Duncan’s EP – more about him another time because his stuff is absolutely stunning! Emma and Kate will be joining us to add a mix of vocals to a number of tracks. Meanwhile, Kieran is over in New York for a few weeks having already made most of his contribution, and Jad is with family in Florida until the weekend. There really isn’t any hurry to finish off, and we would rather delay and get everything right than rush through the process to produce something that could be better.

Keep looking in though, because there will be a few snippets uploaded here before the release date.

Work commitments meant that our usual Thursday recording blitz was moved to Friday this week. We are now just two songs away from mixing the EP, and while we are really pleased with the output so far yesterday’s song The Smile has always felt like one of those that you can sing accompanied by almost any instrument.

Originally written on a 12-string guitar I first played the cittern version while I was deciding which songs to sing on 107FM Meridian Radio back in July. When Dave Roberts asked “So what are you going to play for us tonight?” I had six songs lined up, but selected Dry The Life from the current EP, Guns from Moorscape, and The Breeding Ground Of Vile from the album of that title which is planned for next year. The reserve songs for that day were Watergrove Farm from Moorscape, The Madness from the new album, and The Smile which I felt stood apart from the others.

The Smile is a song about dignity in illness. You probably walk past people every day whose lives have been blighted in some way by a persistent disabling illness, but in many cases you wouldn’t know it. Visibly physical disabilities are something we can all relate to because for example, we can understand that a person in a wheelchair is probably either unable to walk at all or has severely restricted movement. Too many types of disability go unnoticed, and I was originally going to call this song ‘The Hidden’ because there are too many people having to live a life within four walls and out of sight, out of mind. Maybe that is another song for another day, but think about that for a moment. Think about how you would cope with that level of isolation.

Although The Smile is more about the illnesses we can’t see, it is equally relevant to those with physical disabilities. In both cases, there is a personality behind the smile as well as a life we don’t know. In some ways a smile is a mask for what lies beneath, but this song is simply about the dignity with which some people carry their debilitating condition. It is also a song of hope for them that they will enjoy a brighter future.

So The Smile is for people with ME, for people with MS, for people with autism or Aspergers, for people who suffer from depression, for people with blood diseases, for many people suffering with cancers, for people with AIDS, for the people with any illnesses that are not immediately obvious, and for the others that are, for people whose illness keeps them behind closed doors and for the others who are still fortunate enough to walk free. I hope the song in some way helps to raise awareness and open people’s eyes to who is around them, to show more kindness, compassion and understanding in this increasingly selfish and insensitive world.

As I drove towards Ali’s studio at lunchtime yesterday, I was stopped by the lights at Lapwing Lane in Didsbury. Waiting to cross were two black women and their charge of four Downs Syndrome adults, two of whom had the biggest, happiest smiles. They were clearly being very well looked after. Just around the corner there was a dog with three legs being taken on a walk, then turning right onto Burton Road a blind lady with a white stick walked along the pavement by the shops. It felt like an affirmation of the song I was about to record. Although a simple song, The Smile was actually one of the most difficult I have ever recorded.

It was The Smile that led me to think in terms of releasing the Dry The Life EP in the first place. I had written all the other songs back in March or before that, and because none of them really suited a protest album like The Breeding Ground Of Vile I felt a need to bring them to light in a different way. We have a lot of plans for The Smile as we move from the recording process to mixing and then performing live, and you will learn about those soon enough!

The Dry The Life EP is expected to be released in November, but like all our work it will be released when it is ready.