Bang goes another week. The space I left on my shelf for that elusive Grammy Award remains vacant and gathering dust. The studio walls still await the first platinum disc. The pathway to my door remains unbeaten by would-be wonders looking for that one hit.
However, on the recording front I do feel as if some progress has been made this week. My good friend and fellow music collaborator Mark “Marky G” Adams has sent me yet another new dance track to work on; in return, I have sent him two new songs for him to work his wonders. Take that, Marky G! And that!!
This time round, rather than just adding my usual pithy lyrics delivered in my usual Bernard-Sumner-from-New-Order-only-a-little-more-in-tune style, I’ve had the temerity to add a little bit of funky electric guitar to boot. Outrageous!
I know it looks like I’m jumping on the Daft Punk Get Lucky bandwagon, but I was a big fan of Nile Rodgers and his band Chic back in the days when it was really really uncool to admit such a thing. Not that I did admit it at the time: I went to an all boys grammar school, you see, where the cool thing was to carry round albums such as Led Zeppelin’s In Through The Out Door or that Rush album with the cover photo of a naked bloke standing on top of a giant brain… no seriously, there was such an album cover.
Carrying around Risqué by Chic was not recommended (though funnily enough, from a distance it might be mistaken for In Through The Out Door), unless you were desperately looking to get bogwashed.
So yeah, I’ve been getting into the groove, baby! And while I’m not quite in ol’ Nile’s league, the guitar parts do sound pretty authentic to my ears. Makes quite a change from my usual James Taylor-esque fingerpicking noodlings. I’ll let you hear for yourself soon as it’s finished.
Right, I’m off to put on my my my my boogie shoes… I mean, green flash badminton trainers.
Chic & Zep both knew how to groove; the trouble was, at schoolboy age you don’t realise that the same pulse is being shared by lots of different bands, but the marketing machine can become the immature deciding factor as to what is deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Unfortunately, it can take a few years before you realise that there is no shame in being open about what makes your pulse tick. I often listen to Zep & Chic, back-to-back whilst doing the….errrrmmmm….vacuum cleaning?
I think if you combine Chic and Zep, you get something like Duran Duran or Red Hot Chili Peppers. No bad thing.