More Gallows Less Humour: Bandcamp Friday Funday.

I've made some new music. The band, Blasted Heath, is myself and my friend Ben. The music we make is unspoken* and instinctive: I don't think we had a single conversation about the sort of music we wanted to create, beyond production quibbles, but between us we have about sixty years experience of making & taping noise and it's never not exciting. For me, as with writing or painting, you never know what's going to happen. You start out with wide open vistas, limitless possibilities, and with every note, every notion, conscious and unconscious, infinity contracts, reduces, contains you. You end up with another self portrait, as unique as that is. It is always a failure and often a joy. Something new is in the world and it looks a bit like you. You love it but you hope to do better next time. It's like having a child. 

There are four songs on the EP, More Gallows Less Humour. Two of them are incredible, the other two merely great. I'm sounding confident there, I know. It won't last but, you see, I am very proud of them. Some of my best words are on on these songs and occasionally I sing well. 

All four songs are different: Suitors is a brooding epic, as befits its subject matter. Winter Conversations is a throbbing Gothic mass, a carol for endless eons of troglodyte humanity forced together by the cold. All Passion Spent is a delicate and airy biographical sketch of a once loved and now mostly forgotten actor. It features good singing. Eddie and the Boys is defeated glam rock: ice 'n' a slice and nuffin' nice. 

Ben's music and production is layered, subtle and deft. His patience is extraordinary. His choices exacting. These songs are what they are because he is a strange and brilliant musician. The songs are what they are because of what we've listened to and what we've tried to do, our limitations and our sense of style. They are what they are because I've been singing and writing lyrics for decades and have never been spoiled by anything so obvious as success. The longest apprenticeship in rock 'n' roll - we'd be outsider artists if we weren't such shut ins. Boo-ley, Radley, Deeply. 

We are not relevant. We are not the next big thing.  We were never the last big thing. I don't read the music press anymore and I have no idea what, if anything, is in the charts. My only intersection with modern music is from adverts and trips to the barber's (and there have precious few of those over the last year). I don't care. I feel we're adrift, unmoored and scene-free. I don't care what's happening. In a way the people in Blasted Heath are something as boring as "songwriters". We put words to music and try to do it well. In intent we're the same as Ralph McTell or Ricky Ross: dull, earnest, middle-aged men with a tale to tell. If we're interesting at all its because we still don't really know what we're doing - our limitations define our style (occasionally vice versa) and our odd tics and strange accretions nudge us into less traveled directions. We just don't want to bore you. 

Hopefully we don't. You can get the first EP on Bandcamp. We're already working on the next. Eventually there will be an albums worth. But we work quite slowly, what with our busy lives. The album will be a while. Defer your pleasure, sit back with this amusing amuse bouche. Suck it and see. Like Lance Percival's "Round-the-world-cake" there's something for everyone.** 

Here's a handy link to Bandcamp. Buy it in droves. https://thisblastedheath.bandcamp.com

*it is sung, Beautifully sung. 

**Don't worry about not understanding this. It's an obscure reference to a bad film. There are literally HUNDREDS of these in my songs. They're a paper-chase of pointlessly referential nonsenses. Sometimes I wish post-modernism had happened to someone else.