Happy Birthday to "The Grown Ups": Northern Exposure

As a way of celebrating the first birthday of my debut album, The Grown Ups, I thought I would write a little "behind the scenes" feature about each of the songs on the LP. You can listen, download or buy the album over at www.mickterry.co.uk

NORTHERN EXPOSURE

I have always, and still do, suffer from a lack of self belief which manifests itself, at best, as a lack of confidence or, at worst, as a crunching, right hook from the hand of low self-esteem. You could put me in a room of 10 musicians and I would immediately relegate myself to 10th position without hearing any of them play a note. When I started playing live again back in 2009, I performed at "open mic" night where the acts went from the sublime to the ridiculous. On my arrival at the venue, I was greeted by the sight of a young boy walking around the room with his guitar strapped on, but, slung behind his back with the headstock facing the floor. I thought this kid must be seriously fucking good! Maybe this is how a young Stevie Winwood would have strutted around back in the early 60's? Nothing could be further from the truth. When the would-be Hendrix actually began to play, it was clear that he knew three chords and he played each of his cover songs with said three chords. Even if the song actually required more than those three chords or different chords altogether, he played those songs and sang a melody which bore no relation to the original song. You had to admire his bravado. He was fearless. He was stupid. Maybe equal measures of both, but, as we all know, presentation is everything.

Back in the early 90's there was TV show called Northern Exposure. In one episode, the Ed Chigiak character sees his low self esteem brought to life in the form of a sneering, sniping and vitriolic dwarf. Once Ed realises how much this self loathing is affecting his life, the scene ends with the little guy, tail between his legs, wandering off into the woods. My little guy is still around, and probably always will be, but, nowadays, when I hit the stage to perform, I look that little fucker right between the eyes and give him the middle finger....

Happy Birthday to "The Grown Ups": Hoxton Song

As a way of celebrating the first birthday of my debut album, The Grown Ups, I thought I would write a little "behind the scenes" feature about each of the songs on the LP. You can listen, download or buy the album over at www.mickterry.co.uk

HOXTON SONG

Sometime in late 2008, on a whim, I bought a piano . I hadn't really written anything substantial in over five years, other than the beginnings of a song that would eventually become "Ringing Like a Bell" , and I had begun to wonder if my writer's block had applied for permanent residence. Not being a piano player by any stretch of the imagination, I found that just by changing the bass notes over a floating chord immediately freed me from the tired guitar chord progressions I would normally veer towards. Sometimes you just need to hear the same notes in a different order. Who knew?

Around the same time I had started to use Facebook and hooked up with a few old friends I grew up with in Hoxton. On one of the groups, somebody had posted a copy of the photo which would become the front cover for The Grown Ups. Whilst discussing this with one of my old school pals, he said that he still remembered me being drunk on top of the postbox after my sister's wedding and trying to convince the police that I was merely overcome with emotion, rather than a heavily intoxicated 14 year old. That afternoon, returning to the piano, I sang the line "That's me drunk on top of the postbox. " over a descending bass line and Hoxton Song tumbled out in about 20 minutes flat. In little more than the time that it takes to cook a Vesta meal, I had finally emerged from the songwriting wilderness.

A few years previously, whilst driving through North Carolina, I spotted a Grizzly Adams type character emerging from the woods, carrying four rusty car exhaust tail pipes on his shoulder. To this day, it still puzzles me as to exactly how the donor cars ended up in the middle of a forest. In my head, I see myself with a full-on trapper's beard, emerging from the woods and dragging an old piano behind me.

Songwriting is like that....

"You're gonna die up there."

What is it about the moon that is so inspiring? Is it the fact that it seems so big that you could almost touch it, or that, unless you happen to drive around in an Apollo landing craft, you will never set foot on it. Either way, that gravitational pull has us all, at one time or another, reaching for something completely beyond our grasp.

Romantic notions aside, it is a cold, dark place where no known life form can exist. After all, "There is no Dark Side Of The Moon, it's all dark". So, why on earth would you want to visit such a god forsaken place? I think that because it is such a permanent fixture in our lives from the very beginning, it has an almost siren-like quality. On a clear night it can always be found smiling down on you, trying to tempt you with it's other worldly charms. When I was a kid, I used to picture the man in the moon as a kind of spiv-like character, opening his coat to reveal stars and moonbeams for sale, each one of them hanging perfectly from the inner lining.

Perhaps, it's a symbol of a time when we believed anything was possible, when TV fed that dream and promised us that a brave new world was just around the corner. We watched, in our millions, as man set foot on the moon and believed that we'd all be whizzing towards the thin blue line within the next 5 years.

Fast forward to 2011 and we seem to be looking back with an almost, whimsical longing to a planet inhabited by Martin Landau and his band of brothers. Perhaps, the reason we send robots deep into the far corners of the galaxy is that we now know, without uncertainty, that the Solar System is a very, very lonely place. Careful what you wish for Space Cadets....

Kontiki - Cotton Mather

The world of popular music is littered with great, lost albums, terrific records which somehow dipped beneath the public radar, only to be unearthed years later when the band members were either too old to rock out or had actually rocked completetly off of this mortal coil. Maybe the lost album is, in itself, a lost art. With the way music is now released in the digital domain and stored for perpetuity, no recording should ever be deleted and, therefore, lost? Think of Big Star and their first two records; two of the most glorious slices of Power Pop heaven you are ever likely to taste (I'm still not convinced about the "Third"). Out of step with the music of the early '70's, their hooks, melodies and achingly, beautiful harmonies languished in record collections of only the very knowing, until a fan chanced his arm and wrote a letter asking them to reform. The subsequent reformation unfortunately came to late for founding member Chris Bell who was killed in a motor accident in 198. Even if you were lucky enough to catch the new line up, Alex Chilton could never understand how these early and, to him at least, embarrassing songs were held in such high esteem.

Back in the late '90's(1997 to be exact)I got my hands on a copy of Cotton Mather's Kontiki CD and I was hooked from the very first listen. What the f*ck was going on in these songs? A vocalist (Robert Harrison) from Austin, Texas who sounded more like Lennon than Lennon, but also sounded like Sir Robert of Dylan in equal measures. Operatic interludes (I can dig that), audio bleed (lots of it), tape hiss (yum yum) and chock full of Power Pop hooks you'd sell your kids for. King Mono-Brow, Noel Gallagher liked it so much, he got Cotton Mather to support Oasis on tour! I saw the band in London about 4 times and even managed to have a great little chat with Robert Harrison about the recording of the record. Many years later I discovered him alive and well on MySpace and emailed him, mentioning our little chat. Gracious as ever, he even said he remembered it.

So, coming full circle and, even though he has been busy with his new band, Future Clouds and Radar, we find that Robert has decided to fund the re-release of Kontiki as a Kickstarter project. This basically enables fans to pledge money to the project in order to reach an agreed funding target. As long as you hit the target, the funds are released. The good news is that the target has already been met and the re-release is set for January 2012, thus ensuring that this great, lost album never goes M.I.A again.

On The Air

It's unlikely that meeting Jackson Browne would not be considered the highlight of my week, or, indeed, year, but, last night my song, Ringing Like A Bell, was played on BBC Radio. This was my first ever airplay and I couldn't be happier that it was played by the rather wonderful Ralph McLean on his BBC Radio Ulster "Classic Albums" show. Ralph is a genuine music fan and obviously wears his anorak with pride, just as I do. So, to have my song sandwiched between Brinsley Schwarz's mighty "Peace, Love and Understanding" and Shack's majestic "Comedy" was like a dream come true. The fact that I was listening to show live on the web only made the feeling that much sweeter. I felt like Mark Cavendish being launched into the final 50m by Mark Renshaw, only it was Nick Lowe who was my lead out man and you just can't fail to win when "Basher" is on your team. And you know what? I think I can see Paris from here....

The Great Pretender

Ever since I got back on the road myself, I don't get to see as many gigs as I used to. This week, however, I went to see the same bill twice at two very different venues. The artists in question were Dawes and Jonathan Wilson. On tuesday night I caught them in the basement of the Slaughtered lamb, just up the road from my beloved Hoxton. The Lamb has a real funky little vibe to it with leather seats and a few nooks and crannies to sit in. Dawes were superb, a real master class in both songwriting and musicianship. They went on to back Jonathan Wilson for the majority of his set and, as well as being their producer, he was equally steeped in those laurel canyon traditions as Dawes were. Then, to top off a great night of music, they brought out Jackson Browne. Now I have been a massive fan of Browne's ever since I got my hands on a heavily scratched copy of his masterpiece "The Pretender" and, even though I have seen him perform live before, to see him singing not more than 10 feet away from me was like a dream come true. They played one of Jonathan's tunes and then went into "These Days" and "Take It Easy", at which point the whole room was singing along. As they said in The Comic Strip " Everybody loves the Eagles".

When the show was done I watched as JB headed straight over to the young sound guy manning the PA and shook his hand. Here was a classic artist who has never forgotten his roots. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk to the great man, so I headed over and introduced myself, shook his hand and told him that I was going to shout out for "Linda Paloma", but, thought it wasn't fair as it was Dawes & Jonathan Wilson's show. I gave him a copy of my CD and he smiled and thanked me. I said goodbye and then walked up the stairs or maybe I floated up, I'm not sure which, but, I know that at that very moment I was the proud owner of the biggest smile in London Town.

As I walked into the Tube station, I put on my iPod and selected Jackson's "The Pretender" album and, as if the evening hadn't been serendipitous enough, the final track (The Pretender) finished at the exact same moment that I put the key into the lock of my front door.

I did it all again at the Borderline on Wednesday night, but, even though Jackson was the special guest again, it just couldn't top my fleeting moment in the California Sun with the Great Pretender the night before.


"Make room for my forty-fives
Along beside your seventy-eights"

Sharp Dressed Man

As an old Mod (1980's version, I'm not that old!), I still like to look the part, wherever possible. Whilst walking through St. Paul's this morning, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a shop window and realised that, even after all these years, I haven't strayed too far from the clean, crisp modernist lines of my youth.

I have an almost Imelda Marcos - like addiction for ankle boots. In fact, I think my entire teenage years were spent be-hooved in a pair of Chelsea boots. On my heels were the obligatory Blakey's shoe protectors (eulogised so well by my good friend Danny Wilson in his "Red Tree Song") which probably meant that my footsteps could be heard in outer space. On the very rare occasion that I do wear a pair of shoes, my ankles feel like they are naked and I have repeat the policeman's mantra of "nothing to see here, move along" over and over in my head to prevent myself from running to the nearest shoe shop and buying another pair of chelsea boots.

The morning's attire was topped off with my fave vintage leather jacket (with ankle boots too, of course) and as I walked on, a young lad looked at me and said "I love the jacket, Man". Which just goes to prove that once you have "it", you never lose "it".

"We are the Mods, We are the Mods, We are, We are, We are the Mods"