It's Monday 16th October and I realised that I've already not been keeping up with the blogging on the new site. I think that's mainly because I'm struggling to work out what to put on this blog as opposed to the private blog I write so I'll post this on both and be done with it. I'm off to Copenhagen tomorrow and feeling ill today - however, I really do need to take the time to write up a gig that I went to on Wednesday with Fiona, Tony and Matt.
The Cellar Bar in Portsmouth wouldn't appear to the passing motorist to be a likely place for hosting a personally spiritual experience (those of you who know it will know what I mean from the outside) but last Wednesday, I think I came as close to a spiritual experience as I've had in the last few years through music.
Being a songwriter (and also being known in your life as the only person you know that has persistently held that dubious reputation) it's rare to find yourself connecting with the emotional content of someones character in music quite as much as the handful of selected musical deities you feel society obliges you to admire. The likes of Lennon/McCartney, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Tori Amos, Alanis M, Sheryl Crow etc are all people I grew up admiring because they were globally accepted as the best in their genre - each having a quality beyond your average churned out chart-pop that made them popular to mostly everyone you knew. To someone like me they were all equally as great musically as they were/are wordsmiths.
And then you grow up a bit and start to learn that you need a new fix. You look for independence or consolidation of 'self' and you rebel a little. You fall in love for the first time(s), meet people you start to class as proper friends rather than school mates and things begin pissing you off more than you ever thought possible with the littlest amount of provocation and you realise your adolescence is in full swing. That's when Ben Folds entered my life - as an 18 year old geeky music student at Uni looking for someone who'd take me into 'f*ck you too, give me my money back you bitch' territory. No one upholds the middle class white man ethic quite as well as Ben and he continues to write the songs that I wish I could, symptomatic of the fact his life turned out interesting and so far mine has struggled to get out of second gear.
Writing about your life is something that is the mainstay of a soulful songwriter and having turned away from writing for 'entertainment' following the four Housewife years spent playing gigs full of comedy and self deprecation with Alex Edwards, Simon Heeley and Andy Baker idolising the likes of Matt Hales [Aqualung] when he was in his original band Ruth, Manson, Bennett, Dean Friedman, Dodgy, Divine Comedy and Ben Folds Five for their geek-riddled nerdiness, at 23 I seemed to completely lose sight of music and got stuck in a vacuum of chart pop, MTV, VH1, Smash Hits and slowly dating music from my time at University. During this period I could neither write nor listen to anything with passion and so began the most barren 5 years of my existence - working far too hard, playing very softly and living in a bubble of capitalism.
During this time, only one new face made its name in my hall of talent, that person being John Mayer - whose first album I heard prerelease on Yahoo Music over the internet in the early 2000's before he was famous and immediately he struck a chord. Mayer, now up there with BF as a major hero was matched only by the influence of the 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou' soundtrack and the emergence of Alison Krauss & Union Station who took my understanding of songwriting off down a well beaten track that I knew little or nothing about. But still, void of anything truly fresh on the singer/songwriter front. Even Thom Yorke seemed incapable of really sounding engaging. Only the glorious sound that was The Sunday's could enchant me during this time and the voice of Harriet Wheeler (which still makes me shiver) was pretty much all I was left with.
Then, about 2.5 years ago - due to a whole variety of reasons, I woke up as a person. I started taking risks, losing anxieties, travelling and challenging self-perceptions of who and what I was all about and had to cope with some pretty disgusting challenges both personally and professionally. This was a key to realising that my lack of personal experience in life had meant that I had never listened to a single song in my life properly. The meanings of some of the songs I'd held in such high regard were brand new again and everything from the Beatles upwards took on a whole new perspective.
Around this time, I drove to Manchester and had been given a copy of Imogen Heap's first album. I listened to it over and over from Surrey to Manchester and back and realised that something brand new was available, finally. 'Hide and Seek' is probably one of the greatest songs I've heard in the last decade and following on from that I started embracing the singer/songwriter in me once more. Finally I began writing again and things escalated from there culminating in the EP that's now on iTunes. I'd already written about 200 songs in my life til that point but it felt less important to impress listeners and more important to write for myself for a change and about the people I value.
Then, during a journey that saw me speculate on many new CD's to add to my 400 CD collection (bringing about the early adoption of an Ipod - now on my my friend Ruth. After an immediate trip to Amazon to buy both Tim's House and Clocktower Park - Kate Walsh arrived, pitched up and camped out on my car stereo and iPod for the best part of 6 months alongside messers Folds, Heap, Mayer and a mix of 1000's of random songs. There amongst the mist of the darkest days of my life came a voice that dialled in to me like a modem. And it was from Essex - daring to sing shamelessly about personal love and loss without compromise as if it was the first time humanity had ever felt such things.
For those of you who don't know who Kate Walsh is (I'm posting this on both the new blog with no followers and the old blog with lots of followers) from what I know, she started off in Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex before she settled in Brighton where she graduated from Brighton College Of Music. Clearly a gifted musician all round and like me, brought up with classical music as the fabric of her daily cosmos, Kate's first album 'Clocktower Park' was released through an established label and achieved reasonable acclaim. Having heard various accounts of what happened as a result of the aftermath of the album - none of which I can quite remember now, Kate teamed up with producer Tim Bidwell to record an album at his house to be released independently through the label Blueberry Pie. 'Tim's House' managed to knock Take That off the number 1 spot in iTunes following its release and as a result, Kate was rated highly for her success not only as a new singer / songwriter - but also in releasing the album on her own independent label. 'Your Song' - probably her best known track to date, has made its way into public conciousness in a variety of ways, surprising me when I heard it unexpectedly appear in the film adaption of Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging to give just one example. (I was bored when I watched it on Sky Box Office and it was actually pretty good if you accept the genre). 'Your Song' is, quite frankly, a suburban masterpiece.
So, where is all this leading... Kate released her third album 'Light & Dark' on 31st August 09 and a few days later, realising I'd not even known she was recording another album, I downloaded it following a link on iTunes at 11pm having been out with friends and with my wife away for work. Between 11:20 and midnight that night I sat in the dark with headphones on and listened to the album straight through from start to finish without stopping. Perfect silence between each track and a cooling September passing through the open window. At 12pm I texted friends to tell them they had to immediately go and buy it the next morning and sat for 20 mins in stunned silence at how moved I felt at having just listened to the inside of a young womans mind and felt a kinship that only music manages to build as a language.
To say that the album has had a profound effect on me would be an understatement. If I had been encouraged to feel in life rather than to think - maybe I could have produced something in the language of music that needed no explanation in the way Kate Walsh manages. I don't need to know who the people in her songs are but in my life, I've met them embodied in those I've loved myself. I don't need to know where the scenes they are but I know that I've been there and smelt the same salt air in my life. In this album, unlike any other, I learnt something about myself and how I feel about love, life and relationship. And how?
Kate can articulate the truth in ways I've spent two decades trying to find. It's almost as if she found words and notes that didn't exist in my vocabulary and filled the blanks for me despite the gender gap. I've paid several well qualified people good money per hour over several years to find out why there is a gap between the light and dark in my life. Their conclusion: I'm not ill, depressed or damaged but I've experienced things that mean I see the world differently. Part of my truth it would seem is also written firmly in between the lyrics and undulating melodies that lie in Kate Walsh's head. I've always assumed that the stuff I hold in me was unexpressable, that the light and dark sides to my character were figmanent of my imagination and that writing songs was just a method of recording my personal history in a factual way like a diary. But a guitar and voice with that much theraputic value, insight and honesty is worth waiting 32 years to listen to when you know its the coroborating evidence you needed to show that out there - there are others who in their lives use music as the tool to keep between the light and the dark.
With both my parents having been qualified at the Royal College of Music and having an honours music degree myself - I know good music when I hear it. But when you hear it recorded these days, thanks to ProTools and Logic you're never quite sure how much is real performance and how much is production. Anyone who ever heard Kula Shaker play live will know precisely the difference between studio and live performance capability. So it was a risk when I decided that I would buy 4 tickets to see Kate play in Portsmouth this October as part of the promotional tour for her album. They say you should never meet your hereos or heroines as you'll only be disappointed and baring in mind that you build up a mental picture of someone from a single picture on an album cover and the words in a lyric - arriving at an intimate venue like The Cellar Bar was an interesting proposition.
Fortunately, we all had to sit right down the front / side of the tiny stage area with an audience of no more than 100 people packing the tiny venue as all the room in front was taken following our journey down from Surrey. With the great and the good of previous acts plastered over the walls at the pub, Mick Flannery as the warm up act (good album too) and a curbside seat next to my brother - Kate took to the stage and sang almost every song from both Tim' House and Light & Dark with as much character and honesty as the recordings, note perfect and even with a moment of corpsing with laughter with Jocasta Whippey (cellist) half way through - the ambience of the night was never broken.
And so, as you might guess, I wasn't going to waste the opportunity to meet someone who, thanks to the people at iTunes, I felt I'd known something of since 1996/7 yet standing and watching her, you realise that writing and performing isn't just her job, Kate Walsh isn't just a character on a CD cover and the things she's written about aren't just literal translations of actual events - probably inspired by rather than melodic recreations of truths. Kate Walsh is a real person. An actual bonafide woman. She's shorter than me by some way and despite what you might gleem from the porthole of tempered promotional photography that one inevitably uses to build a mental picture - she smiles. A lot.
And then we met - her signing a limited edition EP for me and we briefly chatted. I'd mentioned that we'd exchanged a tweet on Twitter following a night where I'd been to see Tori Amos and then travelled straight from London to Brighton at 1am to my sister-in-laws wedding and got stuck in horrendus traffic on the M4 - turning to her album for company and it absorbing the traffic, the mileage and the night into what is now a wonderful memory dueting in harmony with her and Olly from Turin Brakes on Greatest Love in an Audi in the rain.
She didn't remember the exchange and I didn't expect her to - but she was talking with me and the others she met before and afterwards in a way that let you know she's no longer hiding behind something in her life.
We had parting words and she unexpectedly gave me a hug and said it was nice to meet me. I said thank you. It was nice to meet her too. I walked away back over to my brother, wife and long time friend Tony (husband of Ruth who had introduced me to Kate's music several years back) and we ambled out into the night rain to drive home.
It's rare these days to say thank you and really really mean it. I really really meant it.
I found out later that week that Kate had recently given up alcohol having struggled with it and has gone public in sharing the problems she has had keeping it at bay. I was right to think she is a girl who has just come out from behind something. Most of my problems as a person stem from the alcholism suffered by my father - a multi-talented professional musician who was the youngest person to get in to the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in the early 60's and who has spent his life balancing his passion for classical music with his passion for people and never quite finding the equilibrium to bring him happiness without using drink as a social lubricant that became the dark in his life.
Since learning this little bit of her story and having met Kate Walsh face to face, I'm glad that the mental picture I had created is now gone and the 20 seconds of meeting someone I admire so much left me feel 100% justified in knowing in the first 10 seconds of ever hearing her that she was facing life in a way I was too frightened to do for myself at the time. Two albums on, a twitter exchange and a single hug and I will never again write a song to cover up the way I feel. From here on in, I'm writing to tell it how it is and I look forward to a time when I next get to say thank you to someone as genuinely and wholeheartedly as I could when I parted company from the only other person I've met who can articulate what goes on between the light and dark through music in the way I want it spoken.
Grey, it is not. Living a real life, without shame, takes place in the space between the lighest and darkest days.
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Kate Walsh's 'Light & Dark' album is released on Blueberry Pie and available both on the High Street as well as on iTunes
Kate also continues her tour into the autumn. Find out more at www.katewalsh.co.uk
) he loved every minute of it. 
