2. Berties Bar, underneath The Prince of Wales in Wimbledon.

I couldn’t get there last night until ten-thirty, just in time to catch Sam Sallon play the final three songs of his set.

I stood in front of the little corner stage in a sparsely attended, yet noisy bar room and gave him my full attention.

I watched as he soldiered on seemingly regardless of the noise and minimal attendance. This guy is currently being played on radio.

Sam is a dear friend and a wonderful player, forever smiling and talking ninety to the dozen.

He will be appearing at a couple more dates on the tour.

I then go to the bar and ask the barman if it’s true that the musicians don’t even get a drink for playing here.

He confidently assures me that yes it’s true.

I order a pint of Guinness and go out for a smoke, thinking it’s time to have a word with Bertie.

Hidden Away Music is the title adopted by David who organizes this weekly / monthly event.  He hadn’t even bothered to post up anywhere that we were playing that night, nor would it have made a great deal of difference.

However crummy a joint this is, it occupies an important place in these tales.

This is the second time I’ve played here, even though after the first I decided I wouldn’t come again and both times I have had an unexpectedly good time.

The first time round I was having a miserable time in my life.

I remember staring at a brick pillar while I went through my set.

Afterwards a lovely girl called Catherine came up to say how wonderful my music was and our fingers lingered slightly when we shook hands. I spent the rest of the evening chatting with her and her sister.

The pillar of brick is still there.

I barely even bother to tune the guitar properly.

Clearly there is no reason to express anything other than what I feel and I feel like making a raucous racket.

Without a word, no! Tell a lie, I say something like “I should have gone for a piss rather than a smoke”

I tear through ‘Waiting For The Cavalry’ and then hammer out ‘Feet on The Ground’

I observe a slight tinge of violence in my playing, traces of anger perhaps and, yes there is no getting away from nerves.

Ah, okay, right, I’m human.

‘These Scars’ is, a little more gentle.

Then….

‘Woman Of The High Plains’

This is its second time around.

There’s something about this song. Power. It feels like it could shake a mountain.

It’s the rhythm. it’s the blues after all…

I discovered something Last year.

I was playing at The Wheelbarrow in Camden.

I watched a young kid before me play to an oblivious noisy Pub; he may as well not have been there.

I went on, expecting to have the same experience.

I started playing a song called ‘Big Girl Now’ but in a way I had never played it before. The rhythm came, just came, from somewhere much deeper, I played it for a long, long time before I started singing.  The whole place gradually shut up.

There was no way you’d be able to maintain a conversation while that rhythm persisted.

So Yes, ‘Woman Of The High Plains’

It goes on and on mercilessly until finally folding.

By this time I have almost everyone’s attention, so I say:

“Do you know the musicians playing here don’t even get a drink?”

And quickly inform them that it’s not the barman’s decision, adding that there are areas in Ireland where, if I had said that, they’d take the place apart.

I once played a gig in a remote pub near Sligo on the West Coast of Ireland.

A woman was bringing me pints of Guinness (no I don't have any affiliation with a brewery) while I played for about three hours. Afterwards she said she felt sorry for me for having to play this gig, that her husband, a musician in a well-known band, only comes and plays this one when he’s “at a loose end”

And this gig was paying fifty pounds and I was being fed and watered.

‘Woman Of The High Plains’ is done and I’m wondering what to finish with.

I’m looking around shrugging my shoulders.

Sam Pipes up:

“How about ‘China Ship’”

“You coming to join me?”

It’s great to sing together. I wish he wasn’t so concerned about spoiling it and would sing straight into the mic we’re sharing.

The gig is over.

I unexpectedly sell a couple of CDs (one to the barman) and swap one for a joint.

M.A


Ps.  hope the message gets through to Bertie

1. UK Tour 2013. Day 1.The High Barn. Great Bardfield

Our hero’s journey takes us to Great Bardfield. 
The name itself evoking images of an ancient place, where poets and storytellers, bards in fact, would gather and invoke the muses.

I feel a sense of honor to have been called to appear among that worthy procession.

On leaving London at three in the afternoon I have thoughts of the mead halls spoken of in the Norse legends.

The traffic is quite heavy around Old street. I stop for some fish curry at Mile End, which I eat in the car and finally reach the M11 at five thirty, turning off at Junction eight and reaching Great Dunmow as the sky begins to grow dark.

From here the road ascends almost imperceptibly with a subtle and increasing, remoteness. There is a feeling both of leaving behind and arriving, something carried, now shed.

I come to a stop on a windswept plateau; there is snow in the air.

Inside the warm glow in contrast adds to the impression that nothing could have been closer to what I had earlier in my mind.

The venue is The High Barn, whose beautiful timbers date back almost a thousand years.
 

A few seconds into the sound check informs me that the sound here is wonderful and in the capable and efficient hands of John the sound engineer.

There follows an interesting and familiar period that I feel obliged to face alone.

The place has not yet opened its doors to the public and there is a nervous milling about among the staff and I have many mixed thoughts on my mind.

I go to the bar and buy a pint of Guinness. My awareness becomes acute as I pass some coins across the counter. Do they really not even offer a drink to the artists?

I begin to fear for my sanity.  This is not a paid gig, though they are expecting numbers of a hundred plus and the tickets are six pounds fifty, the artists, which are the reason they have come will see nothing of that.
It will have cost me about twenty five pounds in petrol for the journey.

And this is what I do for a living?

Yet I am not a well-known artist.
It is fact that may have saved me from many calamities and is a subject I address in some of my songs, for example ‘Waiting For The Cavalry’ and in ‘Watching The World Moving’

“Money is just oil in a machine

Fame a prison so serene”

Is this an opportunity to see if I really practice what I preach?

Do I live what I write?

Though I have been playing for many years, it is unlikely that many, if any of the audience know me. Indeed it is strangely fortunate to come in front of an attentive audience.

Ah! Here is a familiar face, James Partridge who put me on at Live At The Institute.

At the same time I am preparing in my mind a performance.

I want to share with the audience something of the wonder of arriving at this place and living this life.

Sentences begin to form in my mind. Yet I know that it will be contrived so speak them as they are. There is always the question of weather to speak contrived sentences or to find something in the moment or say nothing.

Tonight I resolve to face the challenge of feeling awkward hearing myself speak contrived sentences.

Ali comes up to me. He is partly responsible for running this evening and also one of the acts performing tonight.

He apologizes for not having had time to meet me properly and says there are drinks tokens for the acts.

As if by magic I feel any traces of lingering resentment leave my being. I feel welcome here and happy to play.

Funny that. All I need is a pint of Guinness.

The Barn is almost full and I nip out front for a cigarette in the snowy night wind. A group approach uneasily. I observe interestedly. One asks about entry, obviously thinking I am on the door.

I say: “no, I’m just playing”

He is attentive and notices something unusual in my voice.

“Do you smoke?” he asks

I say: “yeah what you got?”

We both bust out laughing.

He is Horatio Anton and I forget the third name, a singer from Jamaica who tells me the story of how he wrote a song which became a hit and he didn’t get credited.

We discuss music and it’s origins.

Meanwhile the first act has gone on, Anna Pancaldi, her voice is sweet with interestingly constructed melodies and chord structures. We go in to hear her perform a nice cover of Bob Marley’s ‘I don’t wanna wait in vain’.

I let my body move gently to her rhythm; it helps the nerves. I’m up next. The place is packed.
 

I’m on stage.

The audience is silent.

I’m struggling with my contrived sentences. It amuses us all. Laughter begins to emerge as I plough through tales of arriving at mead halls in Norse myths.

I have decided to open with a new song (risky business) No that’s not the title.

But first it seems I have a lot to say about it. 
About it being a blues. 
About how, after a long time of playing, I have come to write the occasional blues song and how all this time I’d judged the blues as being unoriginal, and mostly what you hear is, but discovering that I'd actually avoided it due to it's difficulty. It is certainly not easy to play the blues well and by well I mean authentic and authentic means not so much how you move your fingers but whether somewhere along the line there were real tears.

I am brimming with the excitement of discovery concerning artifacts from the stone-age, frequently found stone carvings of a well rounded female figure and that the blues is thought to have originated from the rhythm of the steam trains in America but No! It must have come from much earlier than that and is more about the rhythm and gentle sway of a woman walking, because the blues are a-crying.

And who you gonna cry to?

Anyway, I can’t say I got much of this across very well and still I hadn’t yet played a note.

So, yes, opening with a new song. It’s like a foal whose birthing fluids are not yet dry. It takes at least one go live before it is set.

And a slow blues at that.

What a trooper!

‘ Woman of the High Plains’

She’s now baptised. 

I remember it’s a twenty-minute set but I’m unable to tell where I am in that.

My next song is ‘somethin’ about you’ another slow jazzy affair which sounds like it could have been a standard written in the forties. I say  ‘this one is for the ladies’ and a table of women somewhere in the middle of the barn start to giggle hysterically.

The song ambles along at a ridiculously slow pace  but the atmosphere in the room is to die for.

Yes, I know, I'm reviewing my own gig.

Next a short and snappy one entitled ‘These Scars’ involving some nifty guitar moves and then ‘Waiting for The Cavalry’ which never fails to bring whoops from the crowd.

I’m starting to feel that in two more songs I will be totally ‘In The Zone’

The very pretty ‘She’s a Rose’ followed by ‘We All Fall Down’

The Audience are with me. I take a bow, they shout for more. I leave. There are three more acts to follow, all good to listen to.

I return home feeling rich, with a pocket full of money from selling CDs. I have always felt that money from music is worth several times more than other money

It’s enough to live on for a week.

I don't need much.

L.H.M.

MA.