Introducing.....

Evening Strumpets,

So I`ve been out and bought a new guitar and banjo. You all know I was laid off from work, and I felt like I deserved a treat. I didn`t go mad, I bought a reasonably priced Fender something or other semi accoustic, and a Kay late sixties/early seventies KB54.

If that`s a sudden intake of breath, then yes I know, i`ve read and heard about the dreaded KB54 as well. More than likely made in Eastern Germany, not a lot of people have nice things to say about them. However, as soon as I saw it in the shop, I was smitten. It looks ugly as hell, but it plays as sweet as a mars bar dipped in treacle. I like it, I actually really like it. here`s a couple of vids with the new merchandise on show. I`ll get some lovely pictures up next week.

The first one hopefully makes Shady Grove a little more understandable to any budding new musicians out there. I now realise that I am singing the chorus entirely wrong, but I`ll post it done properly next week.



I love that song.

Next up, here`s a song written last year, which still makes me laugh. man alive that`s a good pause of the Davies lad on the YT Clip.



if only eh?

Till the next one, learn something new.

Mark.

Shady Grove.

Evening Strumpets,

Here`s a good reason for picking up a new instrument. You find music and artists you feel you`ve known all your life, but you`ve never heard before. If I had never picked up this drum on a stick I would never have heard of Sufjan Stevens, or Patrick Costello, or the amazing Doc Watson, whom I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of before. What a performer, and who, I`m reliably informed, turned 88 last week.

Here`s a version of one of his most well known songs (I`m informed again). It`s rough as I`d only just worked it out, and apart from the, I think anyway,(ahem) Kubrickian editing style of the clip, I know it`s being played far too fast, but what can I tell you, learning new songs gets me excited, and it takes a while to get the tempo right, especially when playing solo. (Is it me or is this all sounding a bit double entendre-ish, for all the British readers FNARR FNARR)!

Anyway here it is.



Hope you like,

Mark.

jammin` jamboree

Evening Strumpets,

The Alice Charmers are playing their second gig on the 31st of this month at Doc Browns in sunny Middlesbrough, so we met up for the first of a couple of "run through of setlist" sessions last night. We finished that in (worryingly) about fifteen minutes, with a repeat lasting (a much more appropriate) 27 minutes (with a couple of other songs included). Which meant we had a couple of hours to mess about in the room.

Carl spent about half an hour trying to get reverb from an amp which was cattle trucked and a further forty minutes (I may be exaggerating) getting a sound from another amp using my guitar which is equally cattle trucked. But it was worth it, because the sound he got was, in my opinion, tremendous.

Here`s an example which shows what I mean (it would have shown more if I hadn`t brought the wrong lead for the Camcorder and the battery hadn`t run out.)



Hopefully see you at Doc Browns,

Till the next one learn something new.

Mark.

A Smarter Future

Evening Strumpets,

I never got around to posting the stuff that`s been happening over the past couple of weeks last night, so thanks for your patience, and away we go.

After working in the NHS for 13 years, I was made redundant on the 1st of March due to Public Health Cuts. The Condition Management Programme (of which I was a Practitioner)could only prove qualitatively that it was incredibly effective in improving peoples lives, but the Conservatives want quantitative figures. Try doing that with (predominantly)mental health initiatives.

It has been my pleasure over the past couple of years to work within a team which didn`t adopt an attitude of helping people, more so an attitude of helping people to help themselves. It also encouraged me to develop myself in a professional manner I never dreamt I was capable of.

Here`s the irony. Having spent the last couple of years working in Job Centres helping people to find work, I had to sign on last week. I must be honest, by the time I got to meet face to face with a fellow human, they were quite brilliant, and could not have gone more out of their way to help me, but Christ the amount of gumpf and telephone nonsense I had to go through just to get there was soul destroying. Still, I`ve always said you can`t fake empathy, so as far as I`m concerned it gives me another string to my therapeutic bow; although it`s beginning to resemble a harp these days more than a bow, I think I`ve got enough strings now whoever is guiding my life!

So what next? Well, as much as it pains me to write this, I`m setting up a LTD Company to continue the brilliant work CMP was providing. Yes I know it`s exactly what the Conservatives want (ie private companies sourced out to provide services previously provided by Public Health), but I`ve worked too hard and seen what the principles behind CMP can achieve. To paraphrase Rutger Hauer, if I don`t do this I`m afraid that all CMP achieved will be lost like tears in the rain.

The Company is called "A Smarter Future", and I`m not ashamed to admit provides all the things I provided within CMP, ie Chronic Pain Management, Understanding and Coping with Anxiety, Understanding and Tackling Depression, Sleep Management, Anger Management, Raising Self Esteem and Confidence, and General Activity and Pacing Techniques. Not bad eh? All I need now is a foot in the door.

I`m so busy networking and trying to find ways of funding this project, alongside providing Daddy daycare for my Kids that Posts may be few and far between, but I`ll try and let you all know how I`m getting on, as well as how the Alice Charmers are getting on also.

In the meantime.......

Here`s a couple of presents for the Strumpets.

By far and away the song which gets the most positive reaction from the old live stuff. It`s been posted before, but recorded on a rubbish Mobile.
Hope you like it.



And how good is Grace getting? Look at the different fingers being used!!!



All comments really gratefully received regarding everything, as usual, and why not follow the GNS, you can do it by clicking on the follow icon below followers on the right hand side of the screen underneath "search this blog". I have nearly ten thousand page views, and fourteen followers!

Till the next one, learn something new,

Mark.

A lonely number.

Afternoon Strumpets,

Firstly apologies for lack of posts recently but in what will be made clear later it`s been a mad couple of weeks in Strumland.

Here`s a version of a Nillson classic as requested by Melissa, and a couple of Alice Charmers recordings.









And finally a Nephrons song given the Charmers treatment.



Hope you like them, and I`ll post later this evening about what`s been going on, It miht be a long one though.

Till the next one learn something new.

Mark.

For Mr Steven Kirkbride.

Evening Strumpets,

Just completed the fourth Facebook quiz, and as usual the winner gets to pick a tune to be posted on the blog. Mr Steven Kirkbride won,his vast knowledge of Modern Pentathlon and Addams family members helped a lot, and requested this.



Hope you like it mate,

Till the next one, learn something new.

Mark.

Chip off the old block

Evening strumpets,

Grace has had her pink guitar for just over a year now, and has enjoyed messing about with it, although it`s never been in tune since day 1. So this afternoon, I`ve sat down with her, and taught her about tuning the strings and what they`re called, and we`ve worked on an E Major chord.

I have to say, she`s took it up really well, and here is her first interpretation of the song she loves us to sing to her at bedtime.



Till the next one, learn something new,

Mark.

Extremes.

Afternoon strumpets,

So here`s a couple of examples of the sheer diversity and delight that is known as the guitar. If any of you have kids, really, really really encourage them to pick up an instrument. I worked out Magic Fly when i got in from work, it took about five minutes to do it, and this is reflected in the slightly rough around the edges playing. i`ll get better, promise. I love the fact that it lends itself to the guitar so well.



Nebraska on the other hand, is just about the most beautifully dark piece of music there is, (especially when played by Mr Springsteen.) "Well sir I guess there`s just a meanness in this land" Shivers.




Till the next one, learn something new.

Mark.




Hope you like

Charming.

Evening Strumpets,

A couple of the Alice Charmers will be playing a gig at Doc Browns in Boro tomorrow evening. Unfortunately Andy is unable to make it as he`s got work commitments he just cannot get out of.

We`re really going to miss him, and it means we don`t get to play the more enjoyable (to play anyway) Charmers songs, (Toll the Line, little ditty, and John Henry),but me and Carl will still belt out a couple of tunes which hopefully should get their feet a tapping and their eyeballs a flapping.

Here`s a late addition to the set (though i`m still trying to persuade Carl to play Jamboree). Wish us luck.



Till the next one learn something new,

Mark.

Life begins at Fawlty? Or The 39 Stops!

Evening Strumpets,

As I was walking along the path to My Mother in Law`s house on Christmas Day just gone, I took a moment to look around and have a bit of a reflection on what this Christmas meant to me. The snow lay on the Ground, my breath misted causing a fluorish of crystaline as I exhaled, and the Sky was the blue God saw when he breathed life into the clay.

This was to be my Fourth Christmas since Mam died, and possibly (in fact very probably) the last Christmas the kids would both really experience the real "magic" of the Day. I figured it was about the third Christmas Morning on which I had woken to discover a white Christmas in my life. Then I thought, so how many haven`t I? And that`s when it hit me.

I had experienced (in one form or another) forty Christmas Day`s in my lifetime.

Now if you`re of an age where you`re tutting and thinking, "forty, you`re nowt but a bairn lad" then apologies, but what you have to realise is that somewhere there has been a mistake. You see, I`m actually only 22. Possibly 25 at a push. I`ve only just left Senior school, about seven months ago. Nearly forty? Christ I must have missed that meeting.

As an aside, it is with great pleasure that I tell you that My Senior/ secondary school was called Hustler. Yes that`s right, I gathered my fundamental understanding of French/English Literature/Music and Maths from a School named after a porno Mag. We shared a Campus with Readers Wives 6th form, Razzle & Fiesta technical College and St Bizarre Sex Dwarves.

That`s not really true. but my school was called Hustler.

How on earth am I Forty this year? Where`s that time gone? More importantly, how do I get it back? My neighbour has a theory of time speeding up the older you get. He has a four year old Grandson. A year to the little lad is a quarter of his life. It`s a 70th of the old boys.

Somebody once described our time on Earth to me as being like a toilet roll. The nearer you get to the end, the narrower the roll, the quicker it goes. you can insert your own toilet gag`s here. Go on I`ll wait for you..........right, are you done? OK, shall we carry on.

Then of course I think about where I`m at. I`m nearly Forty. I`ll have outlived Jesus by eight years (and a fact which even the most ardent of atheists cannot dispel, I`ve helped create two miracles in my lifetime). I`ll be the same age as Lennon when he was asked if he would sign Chapman`s copy of Double fantasy. I`ll be the same age as Basil Fawlty (In the SECOND SERIES). Dad hadn`t met me when he was forty (though he didn`t know it then, I was having a ball of a time: Bdumtisch Aaaythenkyew), and Mam had known me for about a year, inside and out.

But then I think, if I could have seen myself now being forty when I was twenty, apart from thinking when did I find the time to eat all those pies, would I be happy? If I could see me with my amazingly beautiful family, doing what I do for a living, Living where I do, still in touch with my closest friends of nearly thirty years, and their equally amazing and beautiful families (well nearly as amazing and beautiful). If I could see me doing the gigs and festivals, even playing a bloody banjo, then? Well, I think I`d have been pretty damned happy.

Here`s a song which I hope sums it up. (Man I looked pretty good with that beard).



Till the next one, learn something new,

Mark.