A Mostly Impressive Gig

Friday 28th November: I still find it difficult to believe that, until just over a year ago, I hadn't heard of Mostly Autumn. York-based, prog-rock (with more than a hint of folk), eleven years old, extremely talented and, somehow, completely off my radar until I took a chance and went to the launch of Offerings by Odin Dragonfly.

Yet, in some ways, it's not that surprising. Despite a country(world?)-wide hardcore of truly dedicated fans, the Mostlies still come across as a small band that have somehow made it reasonably big. The band members are people you could pass in the street and not have an inkling that they were, at least in the minds of some people, rock gods. Being York people, you occasionally see them in local pubs (usually when music is involved) and, if you timed it right, you could probably bump into some of them in the supermarket. Their style of music isn't the most popular around and, unless you listen to the likes of Planet Rock, you aren't likely to hear them on the radio. Modern progressive rock seems to exists solely on the foundations of word of mouth and links on the internet.

However, since I discovered them, Mostly Autumn have become one of my favourite bands and though them I have come across a few similar outfits. Currently, Mostly Autumn (or, perhaps more specifically, Bryan and Heather) appear to be the music centre of a whirlpool of talent. Past and present members link the band to Panic Room, Breathing Space, Fish, Coverdale's Night, Odin Dragonfly and, probably, many more. Just following links from those bands can open up a world of exciting and interesting music.

When Mostly Autumn played their York gig last year, I missed it and went to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band instead. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with the latter's performance and vowed that I would take the next opportunity to see the former. So, when tickets went on sale for tonight's gig at York's Grand Opera House, I bought mine almost straight away. Despite it being month's away, my anticipation was high.

Tonight's gig was the first after a four month break due to the birth of Heather's son in October. Heather herself looked radiant in a series of simple black and red dresses. The relatively small stage meant that, from where I was sitting, I could hardly see anything of Iain Jennings, only saw Anne-Marie Helder whenever she ventured from behind her keyboards to play flute or guitar or Livvy Sparnenn, who looked incredibly lonely so far back on the stage by herself. The rest of the band were fully visible, however, with Bryan and Heather front of stage (but who was that third microphone for?), Andy Smith alternating between pacing around like a caged tiger and retreating to his corner, Liam Davison rarely coming forward from his central position and Henry Bourne, of course, staying in place behind the drums.

The set itself contained about an even split of songs that I did know and ones that I didn't, although their were more from the latest album, Glass Shadows, than I had expected from reviews of other gigs. The vast majority of songs were excellent. My only complaint would be that the simple repetitive keyboards of Above The Blue was pretty much repeated a handful of songs later - once was just about bearable, the second time was bordering on monotonous. It should be said, though, that Heather's rendition of Above The Blue was absolutely superb. A lot of the band's songs are written, from the heart, as personal tributes or celebrations of life. Powerful songs that, in some ways, batter the audience on an emotional level (as Bryan himself pointed out). Heroes Never Die and Tearing At The Faerytale aren't the kind of songs you hear from "ordinary" bands and the audience loved them. A Different Sky is an entirely different type of song - the archetypal three-minute pop song - and was almost a breath of fresh air compared to some of the others. Songs such as Evergreen and The Spirit Of Autumn Past are typical of the style of the band and are personal favourites. There were (obviously) more but I either can't remember them or didn't know them.

Mostly Autumn are, without doubt, an ensemble band. Yes, Bryan is the heart and guitar of the band and Heather is the voice, but everybody has their part to play and, tonight, they did so admirably. Iain's keyboards soared, Anne-Marie's flute was used to great effect and the various guitarists were brilliant, while the backing vocals added just the right amount if variation to to the main ones. Towards the end of the show, the mystery of that third microphone was solved - Troy Donockley appeared on stage to perform a tune on the Uillean Pipes and continued to play for the remainder of the gig, providing accompaniment on the pipes, various whistles and guitar. The whole performance was highlighted with a much smaller and much less subtle, but no less effective, light-show than you would normally expect from a rock concert.

Despite it still being November, Christmas was an ongoing theme during the gig. The first half was ended with Greg Lake's I Believe in Father Christmas, while the encore started with Heather singing Silent Night accompanied by former band-members Angela Gordon and Chris Johnson. Bryan then proceeded to tell us how the band see Christmas as a special time for family and friends before announcing that they were really going to "*&%$ing ram it down our throats..." What followed almost needed a bigger stage as the whole line-up ended the show with Fairytale Of New York and Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody, while wearing suitably festive headgear. At one point, Livvy was joined at the back by Heather, Angela and Anne-Marie - that's not a bad-looking backing vocals line-up in anybody's book.

Throughout the show the band appeared to be having fun on stage. At the end, the audience (finally) got to their feet and gave them resounding applause.

Forget Chinese Democracy being the most anticipated album of the year. Tonight's gig was my most anticipated of the year and it lived up to those expectations. To my mind, there isn't another band quite like Mostly Autumn. Conversely, Mostly Autumn are like quite a lot of other bands, but I don't mean that in any disparaging way whatsoever.

Saturday Is A Sort Of Preview Of Next Friday

Saturday 22nd November: It's not that often that my wife and I can both say that we like the same band. It's also not often that you get to see fantastic original music, played live, for free. So, when the opportunity to see a fantastic band, that both my wife and I like, play live, original music, it's time to take advantage and organise a rare night out together.

So, after a good curry, we head off to the Roman Bath to see Breathing Space. It's as full a turn-out for the weekend gang as you are likely to see, with six of us squeezing into a rapidly filling pub.

This is our third time of seeing Breathing Space and, I think, their best performance to date. Not only were we treated to songs from the first (Breathing Space by Iain Jennings) and second album (Coming Up For Air by the now-steady line-up) but also at least one new song from the third album, which is currently being written. I'm sure that lead-vocalist Livvy told the story behind Butterflies but, it being the Bath, too many people were there just to try to be louder than the music and I missed what she said. It was a good song, though.

As were the rest of the songs played during a two-hour set. I can't remember whether bassist Paul Teasdale has contributed backing vocals before (and I can't remember which song he did for tonight) but he did so superbly. As which much keyboard-led prog rock, the songs seem to take on a life of their own when played live. It's always going to be hard to tell whether each song is played the same at each gig. The keyboard players, Iain and Ben Jennings are talented enough that they could be ad-libbing and you wouldn't know it. As usual, Livvy's vocals were excellent and the guitar playing, by both Teasdale and lead guitarist Mark Rowen, was superb. The whole thing was backed up by Barry Cassells on drums and added to by John Hart on sax and various electronica. As is traditional, the set ended with The Gap Is Too Wide, my personal favourite.

Next Friday, Livvy and Iain will be rejoining Mostly Autumn on stage at the Grand Opera House, as their tour restarts after being delayed to allow Heather Findlay to give birth. Which gives me a not-too-subtle link to...

Through These Eyes is the first solo album by Bryan Josh ("the heart and guitar of Mostly Autumn"). Apparently he has been working on this, the first of a series of albums, in secret and the first I heard about it was when an advertising email landed in my inbox earlier this week. Obviously, being the careful spender that I am, I ordered a copy straight away and, luckily, it arrived yesterday, giving me plenty of time to listen to it before taking it along to tonight's gig to get it signed by both Bryan and Livvy, who provides vocals on some of the tracks.

"Solo", in this case, means Bryan doing pretty much everything himself. He has written the whole album, performs almost all the vocals and plays almost all the instruments (except drums - Gavin Griffiths and Henry Bourne - and flute - Sarah Dean). He has also done most of the technical wizzy bits behind the scenes. Bryan is quick to settle fans' nerves by stating that this is not the end of Mostly Autumn, just a chance for him to explore other shades of music. However, on this album at least, it can be hard to separate the man from the band. Inevitably, much if not all of the songs have a resonance of the band's sound. That certainly doesn't detract from the quality of the release, though. Behind a welcoming front cover and brilliantly designed booklet, lies a top album.

I don't pretend to understand a lot of what Bryan has written about, although there is an undercurrent of loss and, perhaps, a yearning to allow friends, relatives and heroes to live again running through a lot of the songs. The CD opens with Merry She Goes, an eighty-five second instrumental track a little reminiscent of Dire Straits, which appears to be a tribute to a deceased pet. The title track (and my favourite on the album and again reminding me of Dire Straits but for another reason) appears to tell of a dream in which Bryan wanders around a gathering of his heroes (although quite why Hitler is there isn't answered) as they mingle with each other. At the end of the song the members of "tonight's band" are introduced - that's one band I would pay good money to see play. Not A Dream appears to be a message from Bryan to his father, telling him things that he couldn't tell him in life.

It's not all doom, gloom and memories, though. The Appian Way is this album's epic track if only in theme and not in length. It tells of a soldier forced to join the Roman army in their fight against the Gauls (although the Appian way actually led South from Rome so the Gauls could have been lost). As befits the song's story, the music reminds me of incessant marching which actually makes it sound boring. It is far from it. A "radio edit" of this song, with the one F-word blanked out, is included as the fourteenth track and, to me, is nothing but filler.

As I mentioned, many of the songs aren't too far removed from the sound of Mostly Autumn. Land of the Gods, Black Stone and Not A Dream could all sit comfortably on an MA release, with Bryan's trademark guitar playing, as well of the overall style of the songs, reminding me of the band's music.

This album contains some of the best use of Livvy's vocals I have heard. From the haunting voice on Slow Down, through the brilliant counterpoint to Bryan's voice on We Grow and through to the almost duet on Carry Me (which is also dedicated to her), her singing is superb and used well. Old Friends is sung entirely by Livvy - he only sing on the album not to feature any of Bryan's vocals.

Going Home, shows Bryan at his most poetic, with a gorgeous description of moonlight and the sun going down, while Only In The Loss is a short, spoken word track, almost a poem in its own right.

Which just leaves Into Your Arms. I think I would have ended the album with this track, rather than placing it in the middle. Its Queen-like guitar track and somehow familiar vocals (my wife suggests Oasis, I'm not sure and am still racking my brains) make it the most unlike Mostly Autumn track on the album and its soaring sound seems somehow out of place where it has been put on this release.

An excellent album.

Carrolls in November and Keyes to Intelligence

Monday 24th November: Because I currently have so many books waiting to be read, my usual modus operandi is to read everything that I own by any one author, one after the other. There are exceptions (for example, despite enjoying the Alistair Reynolds books that I read recently I haven't read the last one in my pile simply because they were each taking so long to get through) and there are probably reasons good reasons for not doing it, but it works for me. And so, after The Wooden Sea, I found myself reading two more novels by Jonathan Carroll.

White Apples (2004) tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, family-man but womaniser, who discovers that he has died and been brought back to life by his one true-love.

It is also, perhaps, the most frustrating book I have read in a long time. Containing some wonderful characters and sequences (I love the whole idea of the King of the Park), brought to life by some truly magical and lyrical writing, I found it disjointed and, ultimately, it went nowhere. I don't think that I rushed through the book but I still don't know why Vincent was brought back. The cover blurb gives an explanation but I struggle to remember any part of the story which relates back to the blurb.

Like The Wooden Sea, White Apples deals with big questions without giving any real answers but, whereas in the former novel, that didn't seem to matter, in this one it seems to leave an empty space where answers should be. The writing, however, is superb. Carroll's characters are always well-written. In this book, they are exceptional. The first ten pages are used to describe Ettrich meeting a woman and asking her out - how many other authors would take ten pages to do that?? Throughout the book there are snippets of sheer brilliance - a man writing on pills the memories that he knows are about to be taken from him; the description of death, heaven and purgatory; the aforementioned King of the Park - and, while I wouldn't recommend this book for its story, I would definitely recommend it for the writing.

On the other hand, Land of Laughs (1980, this version 2000), Carroll's first novel, is a good overall read. While not having fully developed the dream-like writing style of his later works, Carroll again manages to fill a (short) book with interesting characters.

School-teacher Thomas Abbey's favourite author is Marshall France, a reclusive writer of children's fantasy who died at the age of forty-eight. A chance encounter in a second-hand bookstore leads to a relationship with the slightly strange Saxony and, ultimately, to both of them travelling to Galen, where France spent much of his life, in an attempt to convince France's daughter to allow them to write a biography of the author. Once there, they discover that there is more to the town (or, more specifically, its inhabitants) than first appears.

This is fantasy with a slight edge of horror and Carroll's pacing means that it works extremely well. If the cover blurb hadn't stated that there was something strange to be found in the town, you would get halfway through the book thinking that there might be but never quite being sure. Then strange things start happening and the pace picks up towards a suitably creepy ending.

My version is a reprint in Gollancz's Fantasy Masterworks series and, while some may argue that there is much better fantasy that could have been used in the line, I would agree that this book deserves to be in there. Brilliant stuff.

As is Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966). Originally published as a short story in 1959 (and winning a Hugo in 1960, while the novel won the Nebula award) it uses a series of "progress reports" written by Charlie Gordon over the course of less than a year. At the beginning, Charlie is a janitor at a bakery with an IQ of just 68, but he is about to be the first human to undergo a surgical procedure designed to increase his intelligence. Within months Charlie is a genius-level intellect, far surpassing the team who carried out the procedure and who are monitoring him afterwards. The procedure had already been tested on mice but when the titular Algernon starts showing signs of regressing, Charlie realises that his intelligence may be fleeting.

The style of this novel, with all the words and thoughts being those of Charlie, makes it one of the most moving pieces of fiction I have ever come across. At the start of the novel Charlie is happy in his ignorance. He gets teased by his colleagues at the bakery but believes they are his friends while at the same time hoping that the surgery will make him better so that he can make more friends. As the surgery unlocks both his intelligence and his memories, showing his life with a family that abandoned him seventeen years ago, he comes to believe that he is better than those around him and he becomes less likable. As the inevitable decline happens, however, the reader's ideas of just who Charlie's friends are are turned on their head.

Although written in what could be regarded as a much simpler time, Flowers For Algernon still resonates today. If this story doesn't make you question your attitude to people less fortunate than yourself then you don't deserve the ability to read it. Superb stuff.