The Captain's Blog
I have been writing this now for four years charting the progress of the band you can read events for previous years here:
I intend to keep this page as simple as possible and just add news to it as it happens. Latest News on the top of course.
The set list looks like this:
Oh God (The Risk Song), Just Words, Triangle, Insufficient Data, The Machine Stops, On the Blink, Happy, Harpies, Man in a Cage, Blank Moments, The Rage, This Torch, The Writing, Sulphur and Heat, Another Slow Day (for fast women), Follow My Leader (in the dark), (Just some of those) Skeletons. Click here for the Lyrics Page
16/09/2011
After a period of quiet we are cleaning out the Lion’s Den and brushing off the Ringmaster’s costume so we can get the Lion’s Travelling Circus and Freak Show back on the road.
Chris’ arm has healed to the degree that we got through a full evening’s rehearsal although he still sports a bandage and we are preparing ourselves for a few gigs in October. Here are the details:
Saturday 1st Oct. The Woodbine Inn, Honey Lane, Waltham Abbey, EN9 3QT –
This is a new venue for us but there is a buzz of enthusiasm for the show on Facebook.
Sunday 2nd October, The Bridgehouse II, Bidder Street, Canning Town, London E16 4ST
Back to the venue we have played many times before
Friday 28th October, The Real Music Club. Upstairs@ The Hydrant, 75 London Road, Brighton, BN1 4JF (with Stone Cold and Running With Scissors)
The Hydrant is a cracking venue and the other bands on are pretty strong so this should be a good show ( http://thehydrantbrighton.co.uk/ )
Now we are back into rehearsal mode we will be continuing to work on new songs and I hope to get some of these into the set soon.
The CD will be available for sale at all of the venues we are playing We hope to get some more gigs into the diary in the coming months. There is also some interest in gigs in Russia and we will keep you informed about these.
Join us on Facebook, as they say, and we will see you at a gig soon.
17/07/2011
There has not been an awful lot of news coming out of the Wooden Lion HQ of late but we have been working on new songs and preparing for, what looked like, a busy end to July. Then it all threw us another wobbly. Our drummer, Chris Mott, has damaged one of his arms and it is currently badly swollen and in a sling. He will be unable to play for at least three weeks which means that the shows we had booked for July have all now had to be cancelled. Missing out on the Kozmic Ken gig was particularly annoying. Tony Morley, our usual stand in when a band member goes AWOL or is ill, is also busy on these dates so we are well and truly stuffed.
We will be getting on with writing stuff for the second album, which we hope to start recording sometime next year and I will keep you posted on that. In the meantime We will start looking at booking some shows for late August and through till the end of the year.
21/5/2011
We had a pretty busy spate of gigs in April. Kicked off at the Bridgehouse II with our old friends, Bruise opening the evening in sweet acoustic style and going on to close the evening with their savage electric set. It was a shame that there were not more people there to see it but an Easter Sunday with half the transport system in London not working did us no favours. We played our best set in a while. Chris Cottage, who suddenly left the band in December last year, rejoined for this show. We have been rehearsing with Dave Loach from In Cahoots on bass duties but the time constraint meant that he did not quite have enough of the set under his belt.
The following weekend we were at the Bishops Stortfold Music Festival. all a bit rushed but we played a good set which was, unfortunately cut short because of time restraints. Still we collected a good crowd and will be back up that area again. after the show Chris Cottage decided he would rejoin the band so we are, once more, back to the original 5 piece that set out on this journey. The revolving door continues to spin.
We rounded off the bunch of gigs with a return to the Classic Rock Club. It is always a pleasure to go back there. There were one or two train wrecks during that show, precipitated by a lack of sound check caused by various members being held up in traffic. Still that is what music is all about, the interplay, or brief pause in it, between a bunch of musicians. We will be back there again.
Right now we are working on new material with an eye to what will be on the next CD Two songs are already in the making and we are working on other ideas.
We have no shows planned for June as yet but there are three confirmed for July.
There will be a return to the Bridgehouse II with Slam on July 22nd for the pre High Velocity Festival night.
Then it is the Horningsea Music Festival in Cambridge on the following day, 23rd July.
The following weekend sees us at Kosmic Ken's Psychedelic Dream Festival in Devon with a whole host of bands. Tony Morley will be taking on bass duties for that show because Chris Cottage's daughter gets married on the same day.
Other shows are in the pipeline. There will be an autumn show in Brighton at the Hydrant (poss September), on at the 12- bar in Swindon with the astounding Whimwise and a monthly slot at the Bridgehouse II. I will put the dates up on the gig page when I have them.
The CD is selling well and we have had some very positive responses. I hope to see you at a gig again soon.
28/03/2011
I had intended to make this a much more regular journal this year but the last month has been a bit hectic to say the least. anyhow here is the news.
It would seem to be the year of the incredible shifting gig. The first show of this year had to be moved so we could fit it in with Bruise. If you have not seen them before then you should definitely come along. They are one of my favourite bands. This will be a special show because we are planning to open with their acoustic set, then launch into the TLWL set and then bring Bruise back on for their full on electric set. They are a superb band and well worth seeing. This will also be the first outing for our new bass player, Dave Loach.
Next up we have a show at the Classic Rock Club – always good to get back there. The original date was the 29th April but apparently a couple of toffs are getting hitched on that day so the club was not allowed to have the venue. This gig will now be on the 6th May.
There is another special show being planned for the Bridge House on the 22nd July but we cannot announce details as yet. I will let you know as soon as possible but it threatens to be an interesting reunion for a long long time ago – and before you Dogwatchers out there start to get excited – it predates Dogwatch by a few years too..
Later that month. 30th July to be precise, we will be playing Kozmic Ken’s Psychedelic Dream festival in Devon details of that are on the website but there are some great bands playing there over three days. More dates are being looked into including a gig in Swindon with the superb ‘Whimwise’, a Real Music Club show in Brighton, and a couple of other festivals in Essex and Cambridgeshire.
I was recently interviewed on the Real Music Club Radio Show and you can listen to that here:
I am doing a few more shows of my own as part of the Real Music Club radio spot and I will post the links to these as and when they come up.
The CD is selling well and we are now available in digital format on i-Tunes,.
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/writing-in-a-skeleton-key/id421253281
Amazon and various other outlets including, I believe, Spotify. I am not sure I can buy into this piecemeal digital download world. But times are there to be moved with and the zen in me can handle it. I suppose, in the end, if the music is out there it will find its own ears to nestle in.
I hope I will get to see you at a gig soon.
29/01/2011
The new CD has been flying out of the doors of Turquoise Road Music and we have had some very favorable comments. I have added a 'reviews' page so you can see what people have written about it. The first two comments are up there already so feel free to use the contact us tab to let us know what you think.
The first couple of gigs we have booked for the coming year are now up on the gigs page and I will be adding to these, hopefully, over the coming months.
Towards the end of last year Chris Cottage, our long standing bass player, decided he wanted to leave the band to pursue other projects. He has been a loyal member since we started up this current line up back in 2006 and is a great bassist, so we were sorry to see him go. We now welcome new recruit, Dave Loach, to the band. Dave has played with many different bands over the years and I will get him to post a list of those at some point soon but he also currently plays bass and keyboards with our label mates, 'In Cahoots' a very different band with two superb CDs out on Turquoise Road. I think he will bring something new to the band.
First rehearsals suggest he will be a good member of the team.
Don't forget to check out our Facebook and MySpace pages and leave messages, We like to hear from you. Let us know if you want to be on the mailing list too.
I will post more news as it happens.
07/01/2011
Happy New Year to you all
So we roll into another year with all sorts of stuff ahead. We are already looking into gigs and there will be more news of that at a later date
Better news:
After an age, after all that work we finally have physical CDs! Thank you all for your patience. I am really very pleased with how the sleeve has come out and it has all been, somehow, worth trauma and work. I hope you will enjoy it. Those of you who have already ordered copies will receive them in the next day or so. They have already left the building via Elvis, our friendly postman.
You can buy the CD direct from the website shop via PayPal.
I will put up a downloadable form at some point this weekend so that you can also order by cheque but, if the excitement is too much for you and you have no PayPal account and are compelled to whip out a your chequebook right now the details are:
The CD Costs £8.00 + £1.50 P&P
Send the cheque, made out to QBranch to
Turquoise Road Music
20 Locks Hill
Portslade
Sussex
BN41 2LB
Don’t forget to include your address.
We have also moved over into the dark side of things and have a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/That-Legendary-Wooden-Lion/122763097791560
This is a band profile so you can only come along and ‘like’ us but there is also a Roy Weard profile and from there you can link to the other members of the band. Do come on over and leave a message. <
That’s all for now. Gigs and more news will be up soon.
18/12/2010
Ever spoke too soon?
Way back in the days when music was delivered on a slab of black plastic that required infinite care and a needle to be heard a 12" disk containing forty five minutes music was called a 'Long Player'. Tempus has fugited its way through the years and we arrive at the state where you can get smaller, shinier digital disks with twenty extra minutes of music on them or even instant downloads. Well, the CD that we have laboured so long over has hit yet another obstacle. Reluctant as I am to mix my metaphors, the road we have travelled along to get to the final release of this CD has been littered with roadwork's, speed bumps and diversions. Just when we thought the end was finally in sight someone plonked a great boulder in the thoroughfare.
Bit of history here. We started out with four tracks recorded live at the Bridgehouse II in Canning Town. Soon after that we laid down another six backing tracks. At that point we thought it was going to be plain sailing. It then became a task getting the studio time together to put down the overdubs, vocals and finally get Nick Pynn and Darren Reynolds in to add violin, viola and double bass to a couple of tracks. This stretched on throughout 2009 and, when we were firmly into 2010, we started on the mixing. At that point I saw the release date as being late summer, maybe autumn. Mixing dragged on until the winter. I even built myself a new computer, bought the software, and taught myself to use it to enable me to do preliminary mixes. We fixed a release date and I was happy with the mixes, just the mastering to do. A couple of weeks before the release date we had it mastered - apart from one track which sounded wrong. I went back into the studio and remixed it from scratch and we remastered it. OK, much better. We missed the launch party release date but the CDs were ready to go.
During this process I was also getting the artwork assembled. Penny Marler's cover art was marvellous and I had assembled the lyric booklet. Turquoise Road sent the material off for manufacture all seemed set for Dec 15th release. The boulder came on the 13th December, in the shape of an email from the manufacturer. They had gone into administration. A short note to the effect that they had gone bust and they were 'sorry for any inconvenience caused'. Inconvenience!? The worst part was that we learned that , although the administrators were going to complete some projects that were ongoing these would only be for those who had not so far parted with the money for the goods. People like Turquoise Road Music who had paid upfront were out in the cold.
That was a bleak Monday. After a few more emails we learned that the company did not even make the disks themselves but subcontracted to a company in the Czech Republic and the CDs were partially made. After a bit of negotiation the production was restarted and we should receive the CDs in the first week of the New Year.
So we move on to a New Year. Christmas will be upon us next week in all its tinselled tackiness followed by the weeklong lull while people recover. I apologise to those people who have already placed an order but it will be another couple of weeks before I can start to ship the CDs to you. You can place an order for it from our shop.
2010 has not been the best year for us. I, for one, am determined to make 2011 much better.
I wish you all a great Christmas and a suitably frolicsome new year.
Roy
04/12/2010
It has been a long wait but the new CD is finally available for order!
You can buy it direct from our website at our shop.
Making a CD is never easy. It started off as a track or two recorded live at a gig in the Bridgehouse II in Canning Town London. I invited Cliff Dowding, who was in the final year of his degree in music production to come along and record the show on a 24 track Hard Disk Recorder. This simple collaboration turned into an offer to record a track in Northbrook Studio that he would put into his degree submission. This turned into six tracks, numerous vocal overdubs and before we knew it we had the basis of this album. I then invited my good friend and exemplary violinist and multi-instrumentalist, Nick Pynn, along to one of my Birthday Parties to play. He got up and played a couple of songs with the band and came along to the studio to add electric violin, acoustic violin and viola to a couple of tracks on the album. Darren Reynolds then stepped forward to play bowed double bass for us making Blank Moments something of a full moment.
Mixing, as always, takes a while. You walk off with a track you think works and then find, when you listen to it the next day, in your car, in the house, wherever, that it is wrong somehow. What sounded vibrant in the studio sounds flat in my car, what sounded perfectly mixed in my car on the way home sounds uneven when I hear it on the stereo in the kitchen - but not the one on my desk here in Chateau Coeur de Lion.
Standing behind a desk at a live gig is so much easier.
In the middle of all this Nick finished his wonderful CD 'Colours of the Night'. I had heard many of the earlier versions of this, from demo to final mix, and was impressed by those. When he played me the mastered version as we were driving up to London for a gig it sounded just great - but he was not happy. Some small detail was wrong to his ears and he wanted to change it. The man who had mastered it came up with some sage advice. 'Let it go. There is no such thing as a perfect album'
So I went along with Cliff and mastered it. In the end I had to remix one track because it was not quite right and then I let it go. Of course then I had to deal with the printers who made me change the artwork slightly and the CD manufacturers who said they could do what I wanted only to say they could not later. So I had to find someone who could. Still we got there in the end.
So many thanks to the people who stood behind me on this. To Cliff for his patience in putting up with me pushing him to give up his spare time to do a little remix here or tweak a track there. To the two eminent doctors who leant me bones for the CD photos - yes, real bones on my bedroom floor being photographed for the artwork - and to Penny Marler for painting such a superb sleeve for us.
We give you 'Writing in a Skeleton Key'
Order a copy from our website now.
09/10/10
Well time has crawled on again and tonight we will be playing the Bridge House. This was originally planned as the CD release but a last minute glitch with one of the tracks has meant that we will not have it physically available on the night. 9 of the tracks are mixed and mastered and I have updated the website with track listings and information, but, after spending most of the last week playing with one of the tracks I have decided I have to do a complete remix to fix it. These things happen and I will post a full update later in the week. The cover and lyric booklet are all ready to go so it is a source of great frustration that this last minute hitch has meant we have to hold it over. We will be playing the Bridge House II on Saturday October 9th with two other bands and we will be on stage at around 9pm so do come along. Plans are afoot to record the gig for a Bridge House Live release. John Trelawney, famed violin and brass player from Dogwatch had promised to make a guest appearance but I just heard that he will not be able to make it. He has said he would like to come and play with us soon though so maybe we can arrange something. All in all it should be a good night. I will post more details of the CD as soon as it becomes available.
08/08/10
We had a cracking gig at the Classic Rock Club last week thanks to Mark for inviting us along. Great to play there again and I hope we can do it again before the year is up. I have three DVD of pictures, courtesy of Tony Firshman who came along especially to take the shots. With DJ Chilli’s lights going it really took me back to the sixties. I will post a few of the best ones on the website and the MySpace site when I get around to sorting them out . Newsletters have been a bit sparse this year, as have the gigs. Some of this has been down to a few problems that the various band members have had with their own personal lives but we hope to ratchet up the gig rate from the end of the summer and we will keep you informed of this. One little glitch has been with the forthcoming Bridgefest. I got the dates mixed up and not only advertised the wrong date but also told everyone in the band that we were playing the Sunday. During this week it was confirmed to me that we are, in fact, booked for the Saturday. Two members of the band cannot make this date and we tried hard to work out a compromise but were unable to do so. This means that we will not be playing the festival. I will be there all three days running the sound rig so do come up and say hi if you are going. We do have a date booked in at the Bridgehouse for October 9th and we will be making an announcement about that a bit later. There is also talk of a special show at Christmas. In the meantime we will continue to work on more dates. The album is at the mastering stage now and I am actively working on the cover. More news on that soon. Thanks for your patience and do get in touch with us. See you all soon.
03/06/10
It has been a while since we last put out a message. I apologize to those who have wondered what has been going on with the Lion in the this year. Among the things we have been doing is mixing the CD. I must confess it is beginning to feel like the bad old days of the 70s when bands spent ages putting an album together. Although it has not been completely like that but I have been in and out of the studio changing things and then deciding I didn't like them and going back in. In the end, though, you just have to let go. To that end I hope to have one last session of tweaks and then master the disc and get on with getting it out there. We all sat down last week and listened to it and decided that, with a few minor modifications it was pretty much there. I will put a couple of the tracks on MySpace by this weekend. They may even be remixes of the old tracks. We have also been working on a couple of new songs and reviving one old one that Steve and I wrote at the close of the Last Post days. At the moment these are still in the prototyping stage but I expect that at least two will make onto the live stage. I am very aware that we need to be looking at material for the second CD - especially if we are going to be this slow about it. The Good news it that there are a couple of gigs up on the MySpace page. We have been invited back to both the Classic Rock Club and BridgeFest which is good news. Details will be up on the MySpace site and the Gigs section of the website. Look forward to seeing you all again soon.
16/03/10
Those of you who knew 'Roy Weard and Last Post' from the White Hart pub in Woodford will surely recall the landlord of that venue Ron Richardson. I was just told by Terry Murphy that he sadly passed away last week and was buried today. As always with these things the sadness of someone dying is tinged by the memories of the times we played the White Hart and all of the good people we knew from that place. Ron Richardson was one of the good guys. Without people like him, Terry Murphy and Joe Lucy there would have been a lot less music around and a lot of good bands would never had got their first taste of performing. For that I, personally, thank them and I am sure that will go for many of you out there too. As always, a death makes me more aware of getting the most out of the time and the life that we have here. More inclined to make more music, hear more music and have more fun. We will be back with a less sombre bulletin soon.
03/03/10
Buzz! Click! Whirr! Fizz! Scplatt! Sizzle!
We have been cooling our heels far too long here in Lion Land. After the 'Feed Your Head' gig, hosted by the wonderful Deviant Amps we had decided to take a month off and find a new drummer. We tried a few. It became obvious that the stuff we were playing was not quite as straightforward as we though it was. The snow did not help. It may have brought a touch of pristine beauty to the industrial wastelands of Dagenham but it effectively locked us out of rehearsals for a few weeks. (I am sure that Mous - Lady of the Light for Dogwatch and the Post, and who now lives in the Orkneys would think it a mere dusting). Anyhow we set up again and started a few rehearsals with Wal Blimey-Yeah - original Wooden Lion drummer. He was doing well and it was great hooking up with him again after all this time but it was clear it would take a while to put the band back on its feet. Then up popped the Mighty Mott again. He was now free of the problems that prevented him continuing to play with us and could rejoin the band. So we are five again - as Enid Blyton would have it. We are planning a few rehearsals over the next few weeks and hope we can get a new song or two dealt with by the time we hit the boards again. Obviously gigs will not be immediate. On the album front I have two days booked in at the end of March to run the final mixes down and then it is all down to mastering, artwork and pressing. Hopefully that will all go smoothly and we will have the album out in the Spring. On another, slightly diverse note, I was recently contacted by Al Haines who was with me in the band 'Grope' way back in the beginning. He provided me with a bunch of memories and sparked off a few more of my own. To that end we are collaborating on a new page for the site dedicated to the 'Grope' stuff. It will feature some even more cringe worthy photos of me (fortunately blurred with age). I will let you know when it is up there.
Previous year's Blogs 2009 2008