INTRO SESSION SHENANIGANS
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by our resident session ace. This month: Playing Out From The Backline.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a fun thing to run a wee band and to perform a few times each year in the heart of London’s particularly fashionable but vehicularly inaccessible West End.
To that end, for 10 years I’ve been purveying my particular brand of jazz-melodic-groovebased-fusion-crazy-sounds for the audience to dig. Yet I still find myself driving home with the familiar sense of frustration that my personal performance level sits at a deflating 85-90% of where I’d really like it to be.
But before I succumb to an exercise in ritual self-abasement (something in which we guitarists are often known to indulge), I suggest that it’s not hard to understand why this is a constantly recurring personal theme in the small-but-imperfectly-formed world of Mitch Dalton & The Studio Kings. In the weeks that precede any gig, there’s a slow but relentless increase in time expended and pressure mounted.
First, we need to run through the proposed material. This involves attempting to herd a flock of musicians into a rehearsal space for a day. Try it some time. You’ll find that if you’re lucky you might succeed in obtaining the promise of simultaneous attendance on just one date out of a possible 20. And this after an email trail as long as a Frank Zappa guitar solo and the promise of some actual money to turn up. At which point one of the band’s founder members drops out. No names but he plays the bass guitar. He’s made the mystifying career choice to accept a week’s engagement in the South of France with Robbie Williams. Silly boy - he could have done all my work. I begin again.
Meanwhile, I continue with the challenge of writing three new tunes that I feel might prove acceptable to the general public. It’s a laborious, time-consuming business, made inglorious by the fact that I cannot compose without the adrenaline-fuelled rush of an impending deadline. And even with one, if I’m honest.
So, at very long last, and after more years than I care to remember of doing this, I decided to adopt a more rigorous approach to the ignoble art of band leading, in the hope of an improved performance experience on the night. I might add that although I can play to 10,000 arena patrons with few qualms, an intimate club setting in which the audience is seated a few feet away is a whole new mess of minims. You get the uneasy sense that they are boring deep into the very fabric of your musical soul. This is often compounded by the fact that some of them are either musicians or friends. Although rarely both, come the end of the night.
So, this is what I did and the learnings that arise therefrom.
First of all, I prepared like I’ve never done before. I popped over to Bill Puplett,
