Shut Up 'N' Play Yer Guitar Some More

Ok, well, this is going to be something of a rarity for me - a relatively short blog posting. Let's face it, my sporadic, feature-length rambles through almost-coherent verbiage just don't fit with the low-attention-span, channel-flipping, "see it, want it, need it, buy it, love it, begin to realise it's not going to replace the mercilessly festering hole at the centre of your existence and move on swiftly to the next bright shiny toy" modern lifestyle. So here I am, attempting to adapt. A bit. Grudgingly. Clinging ridiculously to my adjectival addiction and 'tangential sub-clause' dependency. But still, it's a start. And it might make this blog more of a regular occurrence, too - wouldn't that be such a thrill for the world?

To maintain the general "rarity" theme, on Sunday I actually escaped from my "mundane domestic crises" duties long enough to wrap my fingers round a bass guitar in public for the first time in...er....a very long while. (Either that, or the Alzheimer's has kicked-in damned early. Oh, fair enough, not that early, not exactly New England Journal of Medicine 'research paper of the month' early, I grant you...but c'mon, give a man who's otherwise abiding on life's scrapheap a break, huh?).

It was, admittedly, what could be safely termed a "low-key" gig, (any "lower" and - insert a topical-political-satire comparison of your own choosing here - if I add one, then by the time anyone reads this whoever I've had a go at will be more popular than - insert name of local bland-but-successful entertainer with a bad toupé), and trying to play songs I knew rather less than perfectly (!) on a fretless instrument without any monitoring made for some "interesting" note choices at inconvenient moments (aka: "I've wandered inadvisedly above the 14th fret and I'm at least a quarter-tone sharp, but a quick slide down to somewhere in the general vicinity of the pitch I was originally aiming for and the audience'll be none the wiser") added to the sweatiness of an already-sticky Edinburgh night.

Still, it was indeed an excellent laugh. Playing some of my mate Martin Lennon's "nothing like as miserable as you first might think (or they might sound)" songs was most enjoyable, as well as pounding out an energetic rendition of that old WildGeese wedding favourite, "Psycho Killer".

In fact it would have been worth turning up just to hear main attraction Hannah O'Reilly's great songs, brilliant singing, and determinedly difficult-to-follow-at-a-glance, created-mostly-out-of-naive-cunning chord voicings. Go listen. She's bloody good!

Quite apart from that event, the weekend yielded a few sadly "unexpectedly poor and badly over-priced" guitars and basses, some very pleasant food that I didn't have to cook, and a slightly unusual fate for a wedding ring.

Oh, and that rarest of all things happened - I wrote a song! (Not saying it's any bloody good, mind...)

But that's all best kept for another day...