Hello. My Name Is Dive And I'm A Pastaholic.

Fuck, I'm fat!

Hokay, time for an intervention. Time for all of my more reasonably proportioned body parts to gather round and gawp in disgusted awe at my utter rotundity.

Holy shit … I wouldn't look out of place in a Mid-West strip mall, shopping for cheese in a spray can. Not being one for mirrors and only having a top view of the corpulent crisis going on in my midriff I had been only vaguely aware of the effects of rampant inflation … until this weekend.

Last Sunday, given the choice between Easter church service and traditional family roast dinner, I sensibly opted for neither and instead moseyed on down to the studio to make an unholy racket with my disreputable friends (or at least one disreputable friend and my equally disreputable little brother).

Phil has gone all gadget-happy and spent his groats on one of those new fangled moving picture screens (an Apple eye patch I think he called it). Anyhoo, he propped the thing up on an amp while we spent a pleasantly unproductive afternoon busking old songs that none of us could really remember and songs that none of us actually knew … pretty much par for the course.

It would appear that the piratical eye patch captured some of the shambolic mess on video. The upshot of which is that I caught sight of myself standing sideways on to the camera and screamed like a girl.

Fuck, I'm FAT!

As a friend has since put it: “Most people would simply opt for conventional gender reassignment, but you? You have to be different. I mean the man-boobs were bad enough, but how the hell did you manage to get yourself pregnant?”

I took a screen grab of my planet-shaped pregnancy and stuck it on the fridge door with a big red sign that simply states “DON'T YOU FUCKING DARE!” I have another sign on the kitchen door which reads “Don’t even think about it. Turn around one-eighty and get your fat, ugly arse into the gym, lardboy!”

On an unrelated note, Nokia recently took over the company I used to use to post all my music on my blog and - to improve their service - are pulling the plug on the whole thing. So if anyone clicks on my old music tracks all they'll get is a bunch of Swedish incompetence and no noise whatsoever.

Whilst the more culturally advanced among you might consider that an improvement, I'm a sadistic bastard, so here's some of last Sunday's cacophonous crap to annoy the hell out of you and to remind me to lock myself out of the kitchen.
Knowing myself pretty well, however, I predict that dieting will be a non-starter and will be replaced by the simple expedient of never again standing sideways on to a camera.

Toodle pip.

More Noise

Yesterday I spent my third blog birthday with those old reprobates the Four Heads.
Well three of them anyway, as John's on holiday Down Under.

So it was Old Dive standing in for him at Tia and Andy's wedding reception.

The weather was perfect (actually it was about three hundred degrees hotter than Hell and as humid as a sauna, but the sun shone all day) and the whole day was completely wonderful.

Except of course the band. Hee hee.

You've seen us rehearsing this one, now witness the fact that rehearsing songs makes no difference whatsoever to these guys.

Growing Old Disgracefully

Off to see Phil's new band tonight.

In the meantime, here's the last of the ludicrous rehearsal videos of me playing with Tony's band of very elderly reprobates. Boys grow old but we never grow up.
The only good bit is when it cuts off before the end as my camera ran out of memory. Yay!

I make no excuse for its utter awfulness; in fact I rather revel in it.

Guitar Porn Frenzy

Hokay … Some of my more venerable Blogville neighbours can skip this post as it is primarily for Jacques-Arthur and any recent neighbours who may not have inhaled the heady, if noxious vapours from the fœtid and unsavoury depths of my archives.

It is just guitar porn and also a load of links to me actually playing guitar rather than just dicking around like in yesterday's post.
Sheesh! What a mess that was!

Katie has twisted my arm to post the other two videos I took yesterday morning so those will be coming in the next week or two.
Suffer!
They are truly awful.

Before we get on to the guitar porn, here are a few tracks where I play some much better guitar than on the video.
If anyone is fool enough to want any more, there are lots more under the "Let's Make A Racket" label, but you'll have to scroll back a few pages.

First up is "Cold. Cold Feeling".



This is one of my favourite tracks; just a simple, slow blues, played on my Strat.
Nothing fancy, just long, heartfelt notes.
For once I actually managed to leave my ego at the door for this one (I have an annoying habit of playing a hundred notes where one would do, so this track is a rarity and all the nicer for it), though before the final solo you can just hear Paul yell at me to "Give it some sex!" which was his way of telling me to turn it up and go for it.
Hey ho.

Next up is my PRS (the one in the video).



This time I'm playing it properly, waltzing through cheesy old "Parisienne Walkway", live at the Connaught, back in 2000.



Here's Old Les (see the porn shots below for which guitar is which), widdling all over "Wild About You Baby" from a rehearsal at the Ethel Rump Memorial Hall (I kid you not).

Another Old Les track; this time standing in with the Dave Thomas Band on a completely unrehearsed amble through John Martyn's lovely "Ballad of an Elder Woman".



No flash, this time; just simple hippie fingerpicking and all the better for it.

An acoustic blues now, featuring my gorgeous Martin D-18 and recorded in my home studio with Michael on slide as part of our occasional delta blues duo "The Blind Willies".



This is Blind Willie McTell's beautiful "Mama, t'Aint Long 'Fore Day."

Finally, the infamous "Too Many Monkeys In My Tree", for more information about which, see the even more infamous "ponytail, goatee and pointy sideburns" post.



This is the song that gave birth to my current on-and-off project, "The Groovy Fuckers."

There are at least thirty-five tracks (I've lost count) hidden away in the nether regions of this blog if any of you wish to delve further.

Anyhoo:
Guitar porn …

Jacques-Arthur: these are some friends of mine who I hope you'll get to meet and play with one day.

First up is my main squeeze, a Paul Reed Smith custom built for me at the factory; serial number: PRS 44115.
It took six months of trying out various Private Stock guitars they shipped over to sort out the final spec. and another six months to hand build it, but it was well worth the wait.

The body is pre-CITES Brazilian mahogany with a thick, hand-carved Michigan big-leaf maple top in vintage cherry sunburst (machine routing tends to affect the sonic qualities of the wood; hand carving with violin-makers' finger-planes is much gentler, though inevitably obscenely expensive and only available as a special order).
The neck and fingerboard are pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood (I had A-B tested a Private Stock Brazilian Rosewood neck against an Indian rosewood neck and the Brazilian was so much more responsive; I had to have it even though it added another £1,700 to the total cost (which you don't want to know).
PRS has only got 250 pre-CITES Brazilian rosewood neck blocks and this is number 67, hence the signed and numbered back-plate.

Shit, this stuff is so BORING, but I'm a guitar nerd so please forgive me.
There's even more boring tech info on it here.

And here it is laying on my bed. Guitar porn.

Here it is again, in the studio with Phil's new Pearl Reference drum kit and another old friend, my 1984 Fender Flame Élite, truly a gorgeous guitar which I mostly use for jazz. It plays so sweetly.

And here is my beloved old custom Strat, which can be heard singing on the first of the tracks above (Cold, Cold Feeling).
This is a truly awesome stage guitar and has seen extremely heavy action over the decades.

It has Fender Lace Gold pickups and a Bartolini active circuit.
The first two of those lovely vintage Telecaster knobs do their usual job of volume and tone but the third one cranks in the active circuit so I can get infinite sustain and perfectly controlled harmonic feedback.
Cheaty, but cool!
The long note at the start of the second solo in Cold, Cold Feeling is this knob turned up to about "3". It's great for songs like Boston's "More Than A Feeling", where you need to hold notes for bloody ages, or shove it up to ten if you want to seriously party!
That sucker eats valves for breakfast, though, so I use it sparingly as new sets of Boogie bottles don't come cheap.

The guitar body is refinished in Lotus Sports Cars "Opalescent Pearl" paint (it was originally white). Phil bribed security with chocolate, sneaked it into the factory one night and used around £150 worth of paint on the job (don't tell anyone).
It looks beautiful under stage lights; all the gorgeous pearl colours wash over it as it moves.
It is finished with a hand-applied cellulose lacquer; hard to get these days outside of vintage car restorers but sonically so much better than the plastic crap they put on guitars nowadays.

The neck is a deep, round-profiled flame maple and the fingerboard is pretty-pretty birds-eye maple, cut to my favourite 21" Les Paul radius rather than the usual 17" Fender radius and fitted with Gibson fat frets.
The dot markers are abalone and get smaller as they go up the neck like my Martin D18; a more elegant solution than a normal Strat.

The switch below the middle knob cuts out the active circuit when I don't need it and a pull-switch incorporated into the same knob gives a cut in tone shaped to sound like Robert Cray (that dates the guitar for you).

The trem is a Kahler Flyer. They don't make those any more, which is a damned shame. Its a "cam" style trem rather than a pivot like the Floyd-Rose, so if I break a string it stays in tune so I can finish the song. It also means double and triple stop bends don't detune the upper strings like they do on a Floyd.
Combine that with a graphite nut and Sperzel Trim-loks and I can change a string mid song while still comping with my left hand.

Here is my delicious old Martin D-18, bought from Christian Martin IV himself while he was on tour here in 1977.
I use Gordon Giltrap Hand Wound strings on this and it sounds simply beautiful.

And of course, Old Les himself, my oldest and dearest friend and companion with whom I have shared my every secret since I was a kid.

A 1969 prototype Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, built from leftover '59 and '60 parts (the neck's a deep, round fifty-nine vintage) with those sweet mini-humbuckers added.
Way too valuable to gig with any more, I spent the price of a decent new car on the PRS to replace it on stage, though I still play it all the time at home.

So there you have it.
A boring, re-hashed post of some of my guitar porn for any archive-phobics among you.

Enjoy / Suffer (delete where applicable).

Unlistenable Cacophony

In a few weeks I shall be standing in for a vacationing John in Tony's band (four retired headmasters who gig as "The Four Heads" … Yay!) at Neil's daughter's wedding.

The band decided a rehearsal was in order.
I've no idea why; they are truly ireedeemably shambolic (in the best possible way) and rehearsal seems to have done them no good in the past, but hey, let's go with the flow.

So this morning we turned up at the studio and … er … "rehearsed" (has anybody noticed that the word "rehearse" has "arse" in it?).

This (the little video at the bottom of the post) was the full extent of the rehearsal for an old blues number.

Neil suggested let's try "Walking By Myself."
I asked "What key?"
He said "E." to which I said "E? I've only ever played it in G; oh, well, let's give it a go", and turned on the video camera.

Sheesh! What a shambles. Hee hee.

Luckily the camera is tilted at such an angle that you cannot see much except the ceiling and occasionally my ass (easily my best feature), and - thanks to it being propped between my amp and Tony's drums, the sound is so bad that Neil's vocals are lost in the cacophony … which is probably just as well … he'll do much better on the night.

This is Tony (yes, Phil; he's on one of the studio's kits).

And this is my guitar with Rob and Neil in the background.
We make the Rolling Stones look like a bunch of teenagers.

I just love the band's verdict at the end of this unlistenable mess:

"S'alright, innit?"

God help the poor wedding guests!
Hee hee.

Kids, be warned … This is what old people do when you let them off the leash. If you have old people in your family be sure and keep them locked up and sedated.

Fuck Death; Let's Play Guitar

So farewell then John Martyn.

From leading light of the seventies folk revival to grizzled, wheelchair-bound monopod, one of our finest songwriters and most chaotic and drunken performers has died, aged just sixty.



Here, as inadequate tribute is a version of his song "Bless The Weather" I played when I guested with the Dave Thomas Band (for any fans of Old Dive's guitar playing, most of the guitar here is Dave Thomas but I do have a couple of solos - you'll know it's me because I'm a noisy bastard - starting at around three minutes in and at around nine minutes in … Dave does tend to go on a bit).

For any Colonials who may not have heard of the man, I've included three songs from throughout his career.
"Songs of misery and romance" as he calls them.
Beautiful and heartfelt.
Should you have the time or the inclination please play these.
They encapsulate so much of what was special about him (and his long term collaborator and drinking buddy, Danny Thompson); the last clip (especially his expression right at the end) shows just why I loved him.

Many of us will miss him an awful lot.

Let's Make A Racket - XXXV

Plug your ears, Dive's got his bloody guitar out again.
It's Thursday, so it must be time to make a racket.
Here's something short and silly while our Colonial friends are celebrating Thanksgiving.

Hey, Happy "We've Taken Their Food, Now Let's Take Their Land" Day, folks!

As you'll be eating that most ungainly fowl, I thought it only apt to share a couple of aural turkeys with you in the spirit of Thanksgiving.
Both tracks are from an old concert I played with Sharon and Rod; very much a "rackety raucous" kind of fun thing.

First up is Shazza belting out a mercifully brief version of Nutbush City Limits with Michael supplying the utterly hilarious keyboard solo.
Then it's one I've posted before, my awful demolition of Parisienne Walkway.

Enjoy your turkeys!

Let's Make A Racket - XXXIV

Yesterday: kittens; today: dogs.
Sheesh! Now my blog's covered in hair.

This is the same line-up as one of my all time favourite Blues Club Rackets, from earlier in that gig; a song about a dawg and its stupid owner.

Let's Make A Racket - XXXIII

Shit …

Time to cringe from another year.
I don't have any songs called "It's my fiftieth birthday; someone please shoot me in the head"; the nearest I have is The Blind Willies doing '44 Blues.

So that's what you're getting.



While you endure that, here's a photo of the birthday cake mum made for me.

Yup … sushi and noodles fruit cake …
And you wonder why I'm like I am …

Let's Make A Racket - XXXII

Fuck politics; let's dance!

For this Thursday's Racket I'd got a slow acoustic blues lined up: The Blind Willies attempt at Robert Johnson's "Come On In My Kitchen".

That's a lovely song, but I fancy something a little noisier, so I'll do another two for the price of one post and add one you've probably heard already, but which is pretty apt for the US voting public after eight years of rank insanity: "Done Got Wise".

Toodle pip!

Let's Make A Racket - XXXI

Hey, nonny nonny.

Tis Thursday and that means Racket day.
Tis also fucking freezing so I've been forced at last to put the heating on.

To compensate for last week's downer, here's a very silly song. It's Michael, Steve, Jason, Laurie and me belting out a quite ludicrous boogie-woogie version of that old blues standard "Owl Stew" (which Michael assures me is one of those bluesman's euphemisms; in this case for the Lingus family's lovely daughter, Connie … ahem).

I just had to go back and edit this in GarageBand and chop the end off as I realised Steve gives a rundown of the musicians and my "real identity" was on it.
Which is why it now cuts off neatly after Jason's name.

So … Sing along to a song about everybody's favourite snack.



The rest of you can ignore these, but Neetzy has asked if she can try painting a guitar from one of my photos.
Of course you can, Neetzy. Paint whatever you want.
There are lots of photos if you follow the "guitar" link at the bottom of the post but here are four just for me, as I can never get enough of staring at my beautiful PRS.

Sigh …

Mmmmmmm …

Yummy …

Er … Sorry about this one; it's from way back in the day when for some reason bloggers were posting nekkid photos of themselves.
It's a nice one of the guitar, though, and that's what it looks like from my perspective when I play it.

Happy Thursday, Blogville.

Let's Make A Racket - XXX

From the sublime to the ridiculous today.

It's Thursday Racket time and today is another two-track bonus special.
I think you deserve it after all the crap of the past few days.

However, in keeping with the week's theme of bleakness our song will be Steve's "Lay By Me."

Some of you may remember that one of the rules of Blues Club is that at least one song per evening must be totally made up on the spot, lyrics and all.

The first version of Lay By Me you'll hear is the one Steve made up on the spot the week he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
It's a song for his wonderful wife, Sonia, basically saying "what do we do now?"

One day you go in for a checkup and the next thing you know you're told you have a terminal and terrifying ravaging disease that will in all likelihood be inherited by your three sons.

You'll know Steve's story from past posts so I won't go into any more detail here.
Suffice to say that this version brought out some fine playing by all concerned.
This was the night when Blues Club went from being just a bit of fun to becoming a serious money-raising event for research into a disease which as yet not only has no cure but doesn't even have any palliative treatment.

Here's the first version, being written as we played it:



Fortunately, Steve has never been one to turn down a laugh when one's available and the second version comes from a year or so later, when - in his infinite wisdom (and his sparkly new electric wheelchair that he said gave "taking the dog for a run" a hilarious if sadistic new meaning) - he decided we should play the song reggae style.



He's still with us, hanging on and playing when he's up to it.
Enjoy the song. It means a lot to all of us.

Let's Make A Racket - IXXX

Shit!
What the hell am I going to write about now?
I've spent seven solid days writing up "The Adventures of Katie and Dive" and now it's all over I feel somewhat adrift.

Thank goodness it's Thursday so I can simply cop out and just post some trashy music.

Here's yet another one from the "miscellaneous odds and sods" recordings from the Blues Club; a jolly little ditty about hunting down the devil and kicking him up the arse.



For any newbies who can't be bothered to follow links and find 'em, I'll include a bonus track from one of the earlier posts (which were a lot better as I was still interested in my new project back then).



Here's the original post in case anyone's interested. It's got pretty pictures of guitars on it.

Let's Make A Racket - XXVIII

Oh, crap!

I forgot to post a racket.
Having been suitably slapped, here's a quickie that's pretty apt for the crappy way I was feeling before hitting London with the wonderful Katie.

"Sometimes I Wish That I Was Dead."

Hee hee hee.

Let's Make A Racket - XXVII

It's Thursday so it must be time once again to endure a Racket.
It's been over six months since I started this crap and looking back over the past twenty-six weekly cacophonies it is with tremendous pride that I notice the standard has been steadily declining since day one.

This week we hit a new and fœtid layer in the splattery brown depths of The Death Of Music with a lurching, shambolic and magnificently awful version of Tom Waits' "Heartattack And Vine".

I'm not sure if Steve even knows the words to this one.
It is one of those tracks from the more copiously lubricated end of a Blues Club session where he would simply launch into a song without any consideration as to whether any of us actually know it (including - specifically in this case - himself).

At least it's got a couple of guitar solos spattered across it that I kinda like … Nothing flashy, just lazy fingerpicking with a few examples of that nice finger-vibrato that ze weemen seem to think is my best feature (I can't think why).

Laurie plays some nice tasteful sax, too. As for the rest of it: I think it's best listened to after drinking a lot (the same way it was played).

Let's Make A Racket - XXVI

A brief "musical" (HA) interlude in between all of this car porn as it's Thursday and that's what we do on a Thursday around these parts.
Another double-header today. Generous to a fault, that's me. The quality might be crap but you get a lot of it!

First up, a quickie; just a fun throwaway track. It's Michael and Dive down at the Blues Club way back when. This time we are ruining Robert Johnson's wonderful "Preaching Blues" by boogying it up.
Have we no respect?
No, we have not.



For dessert today, I've dug up something that's purely for my own nostalgic pleasure, rather than anything worth listening to.
This is an out-take from a rehearsal tape of our old lounge-jazz sanity band and when I blew the dust off it and put it in the deck I just had to laugh out loud and cringe at the God-awful Syn-Drum that Dave was playing. Holy crap that dates it so terribly. Whoever thought those were a good idea should have been strung up.

Even more embarrassing, this is us all dragged up for an end of year bash at my parents' old pub, where we used to play for laughs (and beer) as "Angie And The Amateurs" on our nights off from proper gigs. It was great to just let our hair down and play for the fun of it (no doubt this will prompt a nostalgia-fest from mum and yes, mum, I DO have the photo of the trashed remains of Steve at the end of that particularly well-lubricated night).
Angie on the left, then Steve, Old Dive (or rather Young Dive back then) and Dave B.
I was wearing a particularly sluttish sequinned evening gown with garter and sexy red wig. I think it was the beard and hairy legs that made me totally irresistible.

Apologies for the fact that this is a total shambles and that Angie's voice is barely audible, it was a rehearsal so nothing was miked up or mixed properly, just a cassette recorder plonked in the middle of the floor.
The song is Morrissey Mullen's "Stop And Look Around", a title which sounds like one of those crappy BBC kids' science and nature programmes from the sixties … and our version here is about as professional. Hey ho.

This is just the sound of Young Dive having a laugh with his friends. It was the first band Steve and I played in together and we stayed together through countless bands and recording sessions until the end, many decades later.

Let's Make A Racket - XXV

Here's an opening number from a typical night down at the Blues Club.

Opening numbers are always nice; nobody's trying to show off or play anything flash and we all get to know one another and groove along in a nice and friendly manner.

This is one of those nights when we had a couple of members who'd never played there before on Hammond and drums so at this stage of the evening we are all hanging back a little and chilling out.

My first guitar solo on this one is one of those "talky" solos, where each line is fingerpicked like a spoken line. Nothing showy, but I like playing like that from time to time.

So this is "Can't Quit Me, Baby".



Of course, by later in the evening we had loosened up considerably and I make no excuses for re-posting one of my all time favourites, the totally improvised (lyrics, too) fun-fest that is "Too Many Monkeys In My Tree".

Let's Make A Racket - XXIV

It's Thursday again (sheesh, these days it seems like we have a bloody Thursday every week) and today we'll be dipping once again into that cheesy old Cheese Mechanics live cassette tape known to discerning Norwich rhythm'n'blues fans as "Cheeses of Nazareth".

PLAY THIS LOUD AND DANCE!

No guitar solo to speak of in this one, but today it's party time with my favourite cheesy "sanity band"!
Short, sweet and somewhat pungent, this is an extract from a Cheeses' gig displaying us in what passed for our ridiculous pomp.

Believe it or not, Neil (who sings this) is a quietly-spoken abstract painter and film-maker, but put him up on stage and he gets progressively worked up into such a frenzy that the English language disappears and is replaced by "Neil-Speak"
"OoKAR jugs RAAAR by ookya GYAAAR!" as he sings at one point and as we say on Neil-World.

Our Neil and Our Dive (I know I've posted this pic before but it's the only one I've got of the two of us where we don't look like the miserable old sods we truly are).

This - especially toward the end - gives some idea of what a Cheese Mechanics gig was actually like.
Between all the guitar solos we'd whip in one of these; short, sharp and ludicrous.
It's a basic law of physics, stick a Bo Diddley riff into the last set and you're guaranteed a floor full of drunken girls in various states of undress, shrieking and giggling and occasionally flashing their boobs at one another.

In fact I enjoyed re-living this so much I'll also stick in the next track from that gig, even though I've posted this one before: "You Got Me Running", aka "Any Way You Want."

If you left a Cheeses' gig without a big fat cheesy grin plastered over your face then we weren't doing our job right.

Let's Make A Racket - XXIII

It's Thursday, it's Rackety Time, but I'm feeling kind of mellow this morning so let's chill out today with a couple of versions of an old Bob Dylan song.

The first version is from a session very late one night down at the Blues Club, featuring Michael, Steve, Dave, Laurie and myself.
At the end of the gig, after the standard, raucous encores the few remaining drunks still wanted more, so we all looked at one another quizzically until Michael said "How about Dylan's old Corinna, Corinna"?
We said "Sure." though none of us had ever played it before, but it's a song we all knew and loved so Michael started us off and away we went.
You can tell we are figuring out what to play as we go along, especially in my solo, but Laurie always plays such subtle sax and Michael's piano solo in this version is just beautiful.



In honour of that solo, here is a photo of him wearing a particularly splendid hat and seemingly lost in a little Michael-sized reverie.

A couple of weeks later we recorded a version at a Cheese Mechanics rehearsal with Neil on harmonica and Ron on drums. I played a slightly more together solo but it's the first bar of Neil's harmonica solo that floats my boat.

It's a song that we always play now whenever we get together. One of those gentle, swaying tunes that have us all nodding and smiling like the band in The Muppets.

Let's Make A Racket - XXII

It's Thursday, so it's time to slink off down to the Blues Club and witness another staggeringly shambolic mess from the embarrassing old guys.

Here are Steve, Michael, Dave, Laurie and Old Dive drunkenly stumbling around and occasionally bumping into "I'm Just Your Fool".