A few years ago I played with Brian Eno at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan. It was the best time I’d ever had on stage, until last month when I was lucky enough to be a part of his Pure Scenius concert at the Sydney Opera House. The actual concert has been exhaustively documented elsewhere (improvised, 3 concerts in a day, tea-making facilities & tent on stage, etc) so here are a few observations from the ‘inside’.

I arrived feeling bleary and made my way into a very brightly-lit room containing lots of equipment. Everyone else in the band was extremely nice but obviously we were all somewhat nervous. The 2 days ‘rehearsing’ were actually more of a way to get acquainted with each other’s musical personalities. A few general pointers did emerge though, often based on Brian’s ability to spot people’s strengths and create space for them to be highlighted. The best example of this was the piano duet, which came about after Brian mentioned Jon Hopkins’ extraordinary ability to echo very complex chords. So like a beautiful little musical tennis match Chris Abrahams would play sparse, beautifully Feldmanesque chords, and Jon would softly and perfectly reiterate them. Karl Hyde and Brian acted as ‘frontmen’ with a difference, and whereas they each had texts to deploy at will, the manner of deployment was no more planned than it would have been had there been no rehearsal at all. The heart of the band was The Necks, whose experience with large-scale improvised music lent a coherence and assurance to the music. Their sense of space seemed to radiate out across the rest of us, and it was extraordinary how sparse and deliberate much of the music sounded, considering how many musicians there were, and how many ideas must have been going through everyone’s heads.

There was rather a strange atmosphere at the start of the first concert I remember, and for a few minutes it seemed that some of the confidence and invention that had been overflowing in rehearsal might have gone missing in the cavernous concert hall. But we felt our way into our new surroundings after a little while. It was interesting to witness the effect of playing 3 concerts in a row on the psychology of the performance. During the first I felt like we were all on our ‘best behaviour’; the second was probably themost successful, a good balance struck between nerves and assurance; the third felt more like the rehearsals because we were so used to the environment. This meant there were some brave things that worked brilliantly, and some that meandered. Personally I felt that it was really saved by the brutal encore, with everyone utterly determined to end on a high. The decisions to remain onstage while the audiences came and went, and to have tea-making facilities and sofas, were both witty and extremely clever. I shall never forget drinking tea whilst watching The Necks in front of a packed Opera House, chatting to Brian and Jon, my old schoolfriend, about how we thought the gig was going. What please me most was that Brian enjoyed it. He deserved to – for taking a huge chance with a brave concept, for being able not only to compose but more importantly to create space and conditions for good things to happen, and for making what could have been an intimidating engagement nothing other than fun and fascinating. Thank you Brian.

Returning from Sydney at 5am after a sleepless 26 hours (4 babies doing tag-team tantrums), I had to get straight on the Eurostar to Paris for shows with Marianne Faithfull. The other guitarist was Marc Ribot, who I had never met and who is the guitarist I admire and love most in the world. It was distinctly odd meeting him when I was in such a dishevelled state, but (predictably) he turned out to be a lovely, generous, witty person. He played so well that on a few occasions I had to choke back tears. It’s just a wonderful and humbling thing to witness someone so good at what they do, and it has inspired me to really make an effort to get better at my instrument. It was one of those times when, feeling like you’re at the bottom of a mountain, instead of getting discouraged by the prospect of the climb you just see beauty. And knowing that he liked some of the stuff I did gave me a simple, innocent satisfaction that no amount of applause from a crowd ever seems to bring.

When I got home from all that, I got stuck straight into my new record. To my surprise I am really enjoying singing and writing lyrics. It takes effort and a little courage to persuade myself to set up the mic and give it a go, but once I’m there I can get into it more, and listening back afterwards it seems to be getting closer and closer to what I’d imagined. There’s always a lot of tidying to do towards the end of a project, so for every day performing or recording other people there seem to be another 2 spent editing. But my plan to ‘force’ myself to finish by booking other musicians in has paid off and it’s nearly finished.

In fact it might even be finished next week were it not for Marianne’s tour, which has just started. My plan to minimise the insanity of constant air travel and hanging about involves a Russian language course and about 8 hours of audio from the Scenius concerts and rehearsals, which I am going to try and edit into shape. I find that if I can get something worthwhile done in the day, then I really enjoy the concert at the end of it – which of course is how it should be.

I had another improvised gig this month, with Leafcutter John. As with Scenius, it was partly guided by verbal suggestion and partly by a moving graphic score. Notes are not specified, but approximate pitch, velocity and attitude are determined by coloured shapes that scroll across the screen. John is brilliant at devising these and it is surprisingly tricky to follow well. It’s particularly fun for the audience to see the score I think, because there is an intuitive understanding of how it works, but some things remain a mystery. I seem to be doing more and more improvised gigs; I played one with Seb Rochford and Tom Herbert from Polar Bear a while back which was the most fun I’ve had in ages. It seemed to allow me to play more like ‘myself’, and later in the year I’m going to try and capture some of that in the studio.

I also did a couple of sessions for a great tv and film composer called Daniel Pemberton. Those sorts of sessions, whith an orchestra, are run incredibly precisely and session lengths are strictly enforced. If things go even 30 seconds overtime the atmosphere perceptibly changes as technically, musicians are meant to be paid overtime. It is so completely different to the usual ‘turn up at about 11, set up, have lunch and you should be free by 9′. On the one hand it’s quite fun because I get to feel like a ‘professional’, but on the other it seems a little ‘jobsworth’-y at times. Many of the musicians have crosswords or books on the go suring the session, I guess because they find the music so easy compared to what they were trained to do. I guess it’s not that different to me having a glass of wine on stage. And they always sounds great. But the emotion comes from the musical score, via the players’ technical competence, rather than the musicians as individuals. By contrast, in a band situation everyone is essentially a soloist, and expected to contribute more than a somple rendering of the notes, no matter how efficient or sympathetic (when there are ‘notes’ to render at all). This leads to 2 different kinds of ego problem!

Lastly, for Pure Scenius one plan was to try and come up with new musical forms, that we would present in concert as if giving a lecture from even further in the future. That didn’t quite work out, but here were my ideas anyway:

Communist Pointillism (most notably manifested as North Korean StutterPop): planned harmony is rejected as bourgeois. Musicians are each required to play no more than one note at a time – minimal deviation from which is tolerated. the resulting ‘chords’ and ‘melodies’ will be true products of the people, a musical triumph of collectivism.

Sub-Club: a nightclub playing loud mechanistic dub where no frequencies between 200Hz and 10000Hz are permitted, enabling civilised conversation to occur at the same time as furious pumping.

World Serialism: the music of the Second Viennese School has finally become part of the populist vernacular, and serialism is valued as a true artistic reflection of post-lapsarian liberation. Particularly popular in conjunction with Persian rhythms.

Dynamic Incongruity: an exercise in group- and self-regulation; playing with maximum musical aggression at the lowest possible volume, and conversely rendering the tenderest phrases as brutal sonic assaults. Gradual and sudden collective shifts between the two, with a conductor acting as a human ‘master fader’.

Practise Rooms: a recreation of what it’s like to walk through the halls of a music college – each player absolutely in their own world, creating a cacophonous melange of styles and tones (perhaps only a short demonstration would be desirable).

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