Mitch and Jude and The Boilermakers

Matt and I have just had a wonderful evening listening to our Boilermaker's improvisation (I haven't told you about this yet - check future posts) and doing an arrangement of the new Mitch and Jude theme song which has an Addams Family flavour. The lyrics, so far, go:-

Come into our parlour
Cold and stark
Out of the sunshine
Into the dark

Boll weevil cake
Cockroach tea
Pet bats squinging
squeak squeak squeak

Perhaps you'd like to play
a little parlour game
Miserable Families
or Trivial Shame

Or if you find
charades a bore
we'll wake the monster
that lives under the floor

Scooby doo bah
Scooby doo way
Scooby doo wop wop
Scooby dooby dooby

Our butler
is English
He'll let you in with a bow -
But if he sees
you try to leave
He'll trap you here somehow

End of Christmas Shift

Hurrah! This Xmas Day and Boxing Day shift is over. I'm home now, and listening to Matt try out some lines on his bass for his session tomorrow with 'I Am a Kamura'. He has the hiccups which crosses his bass lines and makes for a complex and random rhythm.

I've just opened my pack for my archiving course to see the couple of items on Latin. I'm doing the Latin for Archivists module this term. So I am being incredibly bored. However I'd prefer to do Latin to one of the more general units such as those on Preservation. I've nearly finished this M Litt now, thank goodness, phew.

I'm going to listen to some files that my good friend Mitch Friedman has sent me, a karaoke version of 'The Spy' so I can sing it live without Mitch, but using his arrangement. And he says he has put in as a bonus a little video demo of our new 'Mitch and Jude' song, which he has written. Our idea is to do various pastiches of theme tunes together for a little ep. I'm going to write an Addams Family theme for us. He said that his version would be for a Monkees style show.

Ye Olde Shippe

Sweet Thursday at The Old Ship in Richmond. Didn't turn out to so hard to get to, neither. I had a bit of a thrill as the District Line crossed the shiney Thames in the early evening, and it was a mere short trot to the very comfy room above a woody panelled ye olde Englishe pub.

Alec looks great in his pointy beard and trilby. And we had a very festive time indeed with our array of performers. We were chosen at random up to the stage although Alec very kindly called me his 'secret weapon' and let me perform last so I kind of knew when I was up.

Guy Padfield kicked us off with his autoharp, playing an enchanting little piece. I had to restrain myself from joining in on improvised vocals. What a lovely light, ringing, open sound it has.

http://www.myspace.com/guypadfield

Then Mr Michael Wyndham served up some bonnes mots about his nan, who was very popular with the GIs during the war, and a version of Francois Villon's hanging ballad. How strange. These are exactly the two themes of the first two songs on my album, 'Doodlebug Alley'.

I loved it when my friend Maria Slovakova got up and treated us to her unique vocal renditions - especially I loved 'Poison Berries' because of the strange and compelling way she offers us the words. And a lovely long love piece about living in New York. She lived there before during and after 9/11, and that experience ran through the story.

Sally Smithson, now I hadn't seen her before, and what a comic genius and stupendous wordlady that woman is. So funny. So true. So apt. So ingenious. Loved her! From the very first, when she told us of the Aardvark curled up on its private bits as a pillow, that fart in its face when it's asleep .... I wanted to hear the rest of that children's alphabet.

I played some new material, which was fun for me, and always a good thing to do. That was the first airing in public that Tram 41 has got. I must work on it a little, especially the clicking, because that is a fun bit live. I should make it a little more like the Addam's Family, very Morticia!

My god I adored Morticia as a teenager ... now where is my hobble skirt ... Thing?!