8th October 2024 Keith's Blues Night

Didn’t It Rain Children!

Arrived bright and keen at half past six to find the ever-heroic Jason lugging stuff about in the setting up process. People started drifting in and eventually we had over twenty performers listed. A very good turn-out. Standing around compering, watching the board and the performers. you get many sightings of a stuffed animal in a glass case behind the ‘stage’. A Stretch-Limo of a mammal. Stoat? Polecat? Weasel? Pine Martin? Ferret? Boll-Weevil? How is a blues-soaked ex-townie to know? Can anyone enlighten me? 

Not only were performers arriving but an array of instruments with jam potential. Martin arrived with his Fender bass and amp and set up in key sideman position. My keyboard went next to him. A cajon arrived. Kat’s electric piano was soon added. Jason opened the lid of the Bell’s cronky old upright piano for the use of the fearless.

Martin played his Fender electric bass on many songs and really enhanced the overall sound. He has an excellent ear (“The left one”, he jovially quipped when I mentioned it). He never puts a finger wrong, even on songs he’s never heard before. Thank you, Martin. He joined me on my opener: Albert Collins’ Too Many Dirty Dishes, a song of excessive washing-up as evidence of infidelity.

Many of tonight’s artistes shamelessly eschewed the blues and Kat was no exception. Accompanied by Adam on an impressively-white acoustic-bodied guitar, she gave flawless voice to Seal’s Kiss from the Rose and the much-performed, but still touching, Over the Rainbow.

Manus is a jazzer at heart and ably-equipped for the blues and all its friends and relations. He started with Tired of Talking (by Robbin Ford and the Blue Line) and, for his second piece, gave us a song by Chicago bluesman Robert Cray, whose writing is rooted in the blues legacy, but moves far and wide into all sorts of chord sequences and feels. Manus did well, and added a nice guitar flourish at the end.

Chris Martin, performs no covers but rather performs selections from his own, over a hundred, self-written songs. Not content with this vast store to draw on, he wrote a blues today and performed it this evening: Electric Blues and Me. He followed up with Life Ain’t Been Easy, written in 1991.

Martin left his bass in the corner and picked up his guitar for two self-written songs. Not Far Away is a love song for his wife, which he still hasn’t played to her – he wrote it in 2016. Martin has a talent for writing catchy and singable choruses and the audience soon picked up on this one, even adding a few harmonies. Wish You Were Here is based on his daughter’s fantasies about having an elder sister (she doesn’t), with whom she could spend weekends in Brighton. The title’s been done before, but the content definitely ain’t.

Heather appeared, complete with hat, to sing a capella Janice Joplin’s iconic satire on consumerism Lord Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz. The irony is that Mercedes used the song in a post-ironic (or was it a double-ironic) advert a few decades after the blues heroine died. She followed up with a new blues No Reason Blues written today accompanied by her husband Chris Martin, who brought a guitar, and a similar hat to hers, to the stage (same shape, different colour). The blues was written when she woke up this morning.

Jason gave us John Henry, the legendary tale of the American railroad worker who died trying to shift more steel than a steam-drill, very much in the proposed spirit of the evening and then a song that actually has ‘Blues’ in the title: Jessie Fuller’s San Francisco Bay Blues. Remember Jessie Fuller, the one-man band, who sang, played guitar, harmonica, kazoo, and hi-hat and invented an amazing device called the Fotdella, which played a bass-like instrument with a foot pedal?

Frank called for Bass, Keys and Cajon to accompany his fuzzed-up electric guitar on Need Your Love So Bad. Many choruses and solos followed with Frank’s enthusiastic overdrive turned up to 11. I think we broke the record for dB on an acoustic evening.

Ali walked up for her first appearance at the Bells and, if I understood correctly, anywhere. More power to her. Singing in the Shallow by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, she was ably accompanied by Kat on electric piano. Her second song was Leonard Cohen’s Alleluia - a great opportunity for community singing, to which the audience responded enthusiastically. Kat then took the microphone herself for a Kate Bush number Running Up that Hill.

Julian was up next with Don Henly’s The Heart of the Matter with his guitar in dropped D tuning. He lamented that you cannot do a six string D chord without dropping the 6th to D. This bought a gasp of protest from somewhere (Terry Lees?). I agree, although you either have to go a long way up to the dusty end of the fretboard, or court arthritis by bending your thumb illegally over on to 2nd fret on the 6th. He next played the very well-known May You Never by John Martin, which got several people singing along.

TJ, undaunted by Frank Xerox’s previous heavy band version, did another take on Need Your Love So Bad on acoustic guitar with Martin on bass and Manus on guitar. Manus, as always, came up with some very tasteful licks.

John performed what he described as “blues adjacent material”. His first was Lungs, a complex take on cancer by the soulful and poetic Townes van Zadt, followed by Mark Knopfler’s Why Aye Man, about how Geordies had to find work in Germany during the Thatcher era.

Emma claimed to be writing The Never-Ending Blues but – boom! boom! – hadn’t finished it yet. One she had finished was a rewrite of the Rodgers and Hart classic Blue Moon as Two Moons. Apparently, we have another moon visiting for a while under The Earth’s gravitational influence. Emma declaimed her views on this topic, accompanying herself on the ukulele. She then called up Nancy, who gave her - by now famous to the tune of 6 million You-Tube hits - exposition of Lancashire clog dancing. Never say there is not variety at the Bells, nor an eclectic interpretation of what the blues is.  

Mike Osbourne started on a long instrumental intro to a blues in G, which turned out to be Worried Life Blues an 8-bar standard recorded by Big Maceo Merriweather in 1941 (thank you Wikipedia) and performed by everybody of note including John Lee Hooker, BB King, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers etc. etc.  He finished with another BB King classic The Thrill Has Gone.

Nelson (Rock)King told a tale of going up to Gary Moore and asking him if he was; he replied “I was when I woke up this morning.” Nelson launched into Moore’s Dance Away the Blues.

It was understood that at some stage we would have to go to one song per performer. And here human nature showed itself in generosity when Ella Moonbridge and Simon Watt (both of whom wish to remain anonymous) gave up their one song so that people whose music they admired could do two. Ella bowed out to Paul and Simon donated his spot to Terry Lees. Paul Played January on slide guitar, followed by a ragtime piece, both repaying Simon’s generosity. After Paula, specially dressed in blue as her contribution to the night’s theme had sung her self-penned Night Story, Terry finished off the evening.

Terry played a song he often sings – and for me he can’t sing it enough – Richard Thompson’s Vincent Black Lightning. Terry had another Gary Moore story. In Bonner’s music shop in Eastbourne, he was there when Gary, four days before he died, was trying out a Gibson 335. He turned to Terry and said: “Terry, does that sound all right?” What a tribute!  Terry played the last piece of the evening, an instrumental Scottish bagpipe tune Eilean Donen.    

Many, many thanks to Jason for all his work setting up and adjusting the PA, and to Frank for recording the performers - and to the Bells for promoting live music in its many forms.
11pm. I walked out into the aftermath of blues weather. My car was swimming in the six inches of water that covered half the car park. The A267 was ripe for skids and aquaplaning. I drove slowly. In the words of Sister Rosetta Tharpe: “Didn’t it rain children? – Rain, oh my Lord!”

Parish notices:
Terry Lees is at the Venton Centre, Eastbourne this Saturday (12th October) 10-12am with local blues legend Penny Payne (she’ll also be guesting there on my spot, on Saturday 2nd November).

Martin is running the Laughton Open Mic (at Laughton Parish Hall, Church Lane, Laughton) on alternate Friday evenings. £5 admission and bring your own drink. The next one is on 18th October.
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(Totally unrelated to the blues) I run a poetry writers’ group High Weald Poets that meets one Wednesday morning a month, to read and discuss our new poems. Anyone interested?