An Evening with Ranger Spacey.

Tour pt 2 - Canberra.

THE PHOENIX // 12 MAY

Briscoe, Waterford + Lavers

In contrast, Canberra was loud, small and sweaty. The place was heaving because it was nothing degrees outside and Groovin the Moo was on the following day so people arrived a day early to gee up and take all of the accommodation. This meant the gig would be a rager but we'd be homeless afterwards. Lucky we found a friend living in Palmerston with 27 couches in her otherwise modest house.

Lavers played first, in 2-piece double acoustic mode. Dom the singer is mega likeable on stage and their songs are solid but they were fighting against a rising tide of punters trying to find somewhere to settle and continue their conversations from outside. This is where a drumkit comes in handy. Dee and I were loving on Waterford's album 'Say OK' on the way down and their set cemented these songs in our minds, this one especially. 

<<<

They are literate, classy songwriters, breezy performers and such nice guys. I have a ton of time for them.

For us, squeezing on to the Phoenix stage means there's basically 6 layers of denim keeping the gig from becoming a group sex show, but it is one of my favourite places to play just because you feel like anything goes. Get up, get loose, get loud in a very confined space, sweat, swear, bump into shit... it's a gig with absolutely no pretence and a venue that actually supports original music and treats you better than you probably deserve. 

Lots of people thought that my Jacob t-shirt was actually Elliott Smith...

Bev (Ranger Spacey's drummer, right) who was down with his much better half Kat, got painted up and started a mosh during Seven of You. I appreciated it, even if the people he was jumping on didn't. Never change Bevis!

READ PART 3 HERE

This is happening.

BRISCOE GIG #1 
The Lansdowne Hotel - 19/01/12
The Owls
Briscoe
Jimi Linton (Solo)


I can see the Lansdowne from my office. I looked at it a lot on this day.

We were actually supposed to play our first show on a Thursday in mid December, but Jacob was hospitalised with gallstones on the tuesday night. He admitted himself after a rehearsal spent looking (but not sounding) particularly pale and disconcerted. He's a committed bastard godluvim.

We practiced our arses off leading up to that December false-start but with Yak in hospital and the standard xmas/new years absences, we didn't play together again until this Lansdowne gig.

But it was amazing.

I play with Jimi in Ranger Spacey so i know how good he is. If you see his solo stuff, pay attention. Listen to the lyrics. Hear him strap a vocal to a chord progression like an angry patient to a bed then administer the morphine til it sinks back into the covers. Heavyweight songs. Raucous rock'n'rollers from the north, The Owls played after us and they smashed it too. Plus they are total gentlemen. We've since shared the stage with them in Newcastle and if we never play a gig without them again i will be a happy kid.

____

Well. What a fucking thing your first gig is. What an absolute mess, what a jumble. You're brain trying to untangle your stupid fingers while recalling and spitting out lyrics in the right order, and close enough to in-key that people can listen to it. Then you look around at your friends, concentrating hard, sweating onto their instruments, making noise to join with your noise and occasionally acknowledging each other - brother and sisterhood in extremis. We knew the songs, no one else did. We were shouting secrets, we were letting cats out of bags, we were the only ones in the cabin who knew how to land the thing - it's the crazy rush you can only have at the beginning.

The shambles, though, is something I never want to lose. I don't think i ever want to be tight, when shit is on the brink of falling apart that's when you feel alive. It's also why i like a big band with lots of elements, SO MANY THINGS CAN GO WRONG IT'S THE BEST. I have this image in my head of the six of us at the top of a hill with our jackets caught in a car door. Handbrake: off. You'd wanna watch that right?

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale.

Briscoe Gig #1
Saturday in Design 20/08/11
w/ Kate Gogarty and Ben Walsh

yes, i have a student melodica.

Kate (our pianologist) works for a company that puts on aesthetically pleasing events in unexpected places and gets excellent bands to play at them. Hence this sweet design exhibition at a carpet tile showroom featuring Briscoe.

This was, as far as I was concerned, the ideal first gig scenario for a few reasons.

Reason 1: It was a stripped down line-up - only me on acoustic, Jacob on electric and Dave on bass. Fewer instruments means less potential for gut-wrenching technical f*%k-ups, fewer gut-wrenching technical f*%k-ups means reduced risk of teary-eyed post-gig instrument incineration.

Reason 2: I got to sit down. I have never played a gig standing. I’ve either been drumming or keysing, always seated, so this was a welcome transitional opportunity. I am actually nervous about standing- i once strapped on a guitar in a Kid C rehearsal and Ray pissed himself laughing. "You only move from the waist up", he said, before launching into a withering (and dickish) imitation of me-as-inflatable car-yard noodle man. This shame was branded into the rump of my self-confidence that day and it's been festering there ever since. If Ray hadn’t done so much to build my confidence up in other ways i’d probably still be sore about this.

Reason 3: It was (kinda) anonymous. Aside from a few creepy Briscoe stalkers, no one there knew us from pile of carpet tiles. This was good because personally, I had no idea how shit or otherwise I was going to be at fronting a band. I still have no idea really, but i at least know now that i can get through 30 minutes of frontmanship without spewing everywhere and offending everyone. This was an important revelation for me.

Thanks to all the aforementioned stalker-types who made it despite my attempted cover-up job, in the end we were stoked that you managed to hack my email account to be there. We're playing in this format again in Canberra in September – the 24th at Phoenix. Dusker and Ranger Spacey will be playing too so DEF worth a road trip. Look at me! Promoting gigs like we are a real band!*

SETLIST 20/08/11:
The New Tragedy
Someone’s Wall
Triggers
Uh Oh. Mexico
Philadelphia Shangri-La
Break My Word
One Man Show feat. Student Melodica
Animal


*we are a real band.

The Times, or Be like Bruce.

Floundering/rocking.

On Monday night, I tried to record "The Times", the ninth and final song for the album. With Dave and Kate overseas, and the rest of the songs nearing mixedness, time is running out to get this one recorded. After clearing it with bandmates, I decided to play it all myself with the help of my friend and Ranger Spacey bandmate Karl, who offered his work's warehouse as a venue. This aligned nicely with my ongoing pursuit of ever-higher levels Bruce Springsteenissitude (Born in the USA was recorded in a converted factory called the Powerstation), so after work on Monday, i set up a makeshift studio there to record this last song.

I didn't realise, however, that Karl's unassuming IT warehouse in the back streets of Marrickville adjoins Boeing's Australiasian turbine testing plant on one side and CERN's southern hemisphere large hadron colliding facility on the other. These are assumptions i made based on my analysis of the loud droning sound that persisted all freakin night. This was fail #1.

Editing the turbine solo.

Fail #2 was that i had only demoed this song acoustically and hadn't really given a lot of thought to a drums/bass/guitar arrangement. There was a lot of tense floundering going on as i tried to write parts on the run... I was even considering changing the key of the song to accommodate the droning. It was becoming obvious that a more developed demo was the only thing we were going to get out of this session.

This is probably not how Bruce did it.

maths, recording and tales in space

Algebraically speaking if Briscoe is x and Dusker is y and Rosario Ferraro is R then:

x - y = R

In other words, I was playing drums in the very excellent band Dusker when I was trying to start briscoe. I loved everyone in Dusker so I bullied them into joining briscoe. This reconfiguration needed a drummer though, and despite protestations from my stroppy ego, I asked monster Rosario Ferraro to join. This overlapping of Dusker/briscoe personnel will hopefully lead to logistically simple touring and a few WTFs from confused gig-goers.

Luke in his natural habitat with dave, kate and me

I have been mixing the briscoe stuff with Luke Bertoz at Zapata Studios in Coogee. I was also in there on the weekend recording with Dusker. It was the first session for an album, and we finished one great song written by Dee and Jacob which will likely be the first single. Luke is also recording and mixing the up-coming Ranger Spacey E.P. which is going to rule.

Luke is a crazy production angel, he makes the best suggestions and tells it like it is. He is very friendly and accommodating and will work his butt off all day as long as you feed him regularly with subway and breath mints out of a flat open palm. He is also in a great band called TALES IN SPACE.

Yesterday he told me about Google Alerts and how that if anyone anywhere writes "TALES IN SPACE" on the internet, Google tells him. So this is a test. Luke, you have 24 hrs to comment on this post or i will prime my musket and hunt you for sport...

new year at peats ridge

I spent the year's change-over period at the Peats Ridge Sustainable Music Festival in the Glenworth Valley north of Sydney. I won't link to their site because whoever put it together has not yet discovered the wonders of jpeg file compression and you will miss important moments in your children's lives waiting for the home page to load. Maybe image compression has carbon footprint implications that i don't know about?

ANYHOO...