From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V6 #169 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Monday, July 2 2001 Volume 06 : Number 169 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Alloy: Ravivar Fiore ["Blagg & Norling" ] Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part III [jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 19:14:37 +0100 From: "Blagg & Norling" Subject: Re: Alloy: Ravivar Fiore Robin et Europa, I won this item on Ebay myself about a month ago but have never received it. However I do have an old copy on tape that I have since mastered to CD. For whatever reason I have the lady singer down as a certain 'Csilla Kecskesi' with Paddy McAloon and Thomas responsible for the music. I don't know why but I had always imagined this to be in 'Hungarian', probably because it was the B side of My Brain is Like a Sieve which came of the Aliens album which had Budapest By Blimp on it.....Doesn't she sound like the same person?..... Just checked Aliens Sleeve notes and it does appear to be Csilla who sings on BBB. However it could just be that I took it for granted at the time of recording Ravivae Fiore to CD that it was the same woman. Trevor.... - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary A. Brown" To: Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2001 8:39 PM Subject: Alloy: Ravivar Fiore > > Robyn, > Excellent question! I've wanted to know more about this track myself. > I believe though, that the language is Italian and the title, with > the help of Stephen's Italian/English dictionary, translates to > something like "Reviving Flower". > > It sounds like it is Wendy Smith from Prefab Sprout singing on it to > my ear. I definitely agree it's the melody from "Blueberry Pies". > It is otherworldly, isn't it? It also calls to mind some snippet > from the movie "Fever Pitch" but I can't dredge it up from memory > right now. > > Anyone else have info that's more enlightening? > Europa ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2001 00:55:55 +0300 From: jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com Subject: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part III Hi all, Good morning all and here is part III which ended with the following question: Jon: Does that [statement] preclude you ever having a couple of nights in a club when you just sit down at the piano and do what you feel? Thomas: No! Far from it. Even in a situation like that I would be in control. I would be in control of sound, lights, order or the set, tempo, key... If you just suddenly turn the spotlight on me and say, "Thomas, turn around and play, entertain me." I would be at a complete loss. I can't do that. Jon: (looking at the electric piano and the Fairlight behind Thomas) Damn! That was my next question! - no, not really! I can see that if you like to control your, for want of a better word, 'product', as you so obviously do that [to ad-lib in a live situation] is a bit of a wild-card I suppose. Thomas: Those spontaneous musical skills, I've never developed specifically because I've spent my time developing other areas. So, I think that's unlike a lot of other musicians. I have no doubt that if I was marooned on a desert island with Elton John and a harmonium or Eric Clapton with a dobro that they could entertain me for hours because they have 'those skills', they are that flexible... Jon: That is their core competence. Thomas: Absolutely. If Elton is in the studio and the producer needs to spend a couple of hours doing a composite of two vocal tracks he's probably off in the back room playing ragtime or something; whereas for me, I'm the one doing the composite. So that's a trade off really. Having said that, when the expectations aren't too high I do get a kick out of doing things spontaneously. The Soft Boys came through here the other day and Mathew [Seligman] called me up from Seattle which was like two stops up from San Francisco on the tour and said, "hey, why don't you do something with us on the tour?" He e-mailed me some MP3's of their live set and I spent a couple of hours learning something in the afternoon and turned up to the sound check and ran them once and then came on stage and played three songs with them. I really enjoyed that but the main thing was that I wasn't in the spotlight. Their music is very very simple, a lot of it was three or four chords. It was mainly Robin's personality that really carries it and their audience is very loose. The expectation is a certain way that makes it OK to do that sort of stuff but the choices in the past that I have always made for my own music... It's a lot to bite off on. Jon: Who do you play with on a regular basis? Is there anybody that you get together with regularly and play with? Thomas: No. Jon: No? Is that not your thing? Have you never done that or is there just no time these days? Thomas: I've never done that. Jon: I don't know but I can imagine as a non-musician that that is quite unusual. Musicians tend to naturally congregate together and play. Thomas: Yeah, I think that that probably is quite unusual. Jon: What was it like performing with David Bowie? Thomas: Do you mean this last time? Oh it was great! I never thought that it would come together. I was convinced that something would go wrong and it sot of happened by accident as Beatnik were working with his website company... Jon: Oh, BowieNet, that's a terrific site. Thomas: Yeah, it's a really good website and they had some sonified stuff, an e-mix and so-on. We needed to do a press release about this event that we sort of helped sponsor. It was a special event for BowieNet subscribers where he was going to play an extra gig at Roseland Ballroom in New York - for his loyal fans basically. He was doing two shows anyway that were open to the public as a warm up for Glastonbury last summer, and Beatnik was sponsoring it, and we needed to get a press release out. Our PR people were having some trouble getting through the layers of management to get some approval so I thought 'oh, I have his e-mail address' so I thought I would drop him a line and cut though this [red-tape] and get him to approve something. In Silicon Valley it is very common to do press releases where you have what they call a straw-man piece of text... If you are doing a press-release that needs five different people to OK it including a quote from... Bill Gates, or whatever, you sort of put words in his mouth and you send it over to his people and you say, "look, you can OK this or rewrite it or have someone else do it or whatever." And that is basically how you do it. So I wrote this press-release with a Bowie quote in there which was really totally tongue-in-cheek; completely over the top... "Oh well, I haven't worked with Tom since Live-Aid in '85..." and I sent this over to Bowie's email address and he just replied to it and said, "OK..." I thought that this is great. It has come right from the horse's mouth. So I told our PR people, "here, it's approved!" I was mildly surprised but Kathleen was totally dumbfounded by this! She said, "oh, I think I'll just write a quote about myself from Meryl Streep! - The finest actress of her generation, and just get Meryl to approve it! Jon: Well, that's your creative element isn't it! That's the creative thing. The shortest point between A and B is not necessarily the traditional or obvious route! Thomas: Right! So shortly after that Bowie called and said, "by the way, are you going to be at this thing? If you are you ought to come on stage an do something with us." So I said that that would be great and I was going to be in New York at the time anyway. So I brought my red keyboard with me and he asked me to show up to the sound check so I showed up. The band were there and the guy that was MD-ing it said that David wants you to learn this and this... There were two really old songs, one of them was 'London Boys' which was from, like '67 or something, and they just had these chord charts... like A, B, G etc. and I'm not great at reading anyway; I was not familiar with the songs so I'm just thumping out these chords on the piano and he wasn't there, Bowie wasn't there, so I felt like a real idiot. I didn't even know where the vocal even came I was just playing... and we were doing this for about an hour when the road manager comes in and says, "there's some bad news guys, David's got laryngitis and there's no show tonight." This is on the second night at Roseland, at about six or seven o'clock in the evening on a Saturday night and there was a line around the block and somebody had to go out with a megaphone and tell them all to go home because he had overdone it the night before. The show that I was supposed to be playing at was two nights later on Monday night and I was convinced that it wasn't going to happen, so I hadn't even told anybody that this was going on. Kathleen knew but none of the Beatnik people knew. On the Monday I was still convinced it wasn't going to happen but we got together at the sound check. And David showed up... very late with dark glasses and a big scarf wrapped around his neck. He didn't really sing, he just sort of mouthed his way through a couple of songs and said, "well how was that?" (in a very hoarse voice) I said, "well, you know what, I would really rather just come on for the encores and blast through a couple of numbers that I know." ...and he said, "Oh! All right!" ...so he pulls out the set list and says, "what shall we do for an encore?" I said, "maybe Let's Dance...maybe Heroes..." He said, "Fine!" Jon: So it was that easy! Thomas: So it was that easy! We played through those a couple of times, you know, I know those inside out, and then it was really amusing because there were like twenty Beatnik people there and they are very brilliant at there jobs but rock and roll is just not what they're used to and it got very crowded. There were all these press people there and it started to get very schmoozy; everybody's got their backstage pass and their VIP table and so on. The Beatnik people were starting to drown in all of this and they had little idea of what was going on. I'd arranged for Kathleen's sister and a couple of friends from New York to come to the show and still Kathleen was the only one who knew that I was going to play. It turned out that our VIP table had been given away and the Beatnik PR people told me that would were going to have to stand; they were really stressed out, so I strolled over to one of the roadie-guys and had a word. He got on his walkie-talkie and they figured something out for us, a perfectly placed VIP table for five on the balcony. I sat through an hour of the set and I had a copy of the set-list... hidden so that no-one could see it. I was completely enjoying the show, loads of oldies and I was having a fantastic time and then I thought Oh, I'm on in a couple of minutes, so I excused myself and said that I was going to the bathroom, and went backstage where they had my keyboard ready - still Kathleen was the only one that knew. They came off after the regular set; the band came off stage pouring sweat and everything, drinks and towels... He [Bowie] said, "are you ready then?" I said, "Yeah", he said, "OK then" and ran back on stage and said, "I would like to introduce a special friend of mine, Thomas Dolby!" So I ran onto the stage and went straight into the opening bars of Heroes... I looked up into the balcony to where my friends and all the Beatnik people were, their jaws were all like hanging open. They all looked completely incredulous! Jon: Amazing! Thomas: I just had a blast. There have been two occasions where I have played that song [Heroes]. The other one was Live-Aid at Wembley and it was just transcendental. It was such an anthem of my teenage years. It is actually a deceptively difficult song structurally. The parts are not hard but remembering when the chorus comes and when there's a double verse and things... it's quite easy to trip up. But just let your fingers do the walking! Just feel your way through it. I had a great time! Jon: What a great story! Amazing! To change the subject a little now. Keith Stansell wondered when you read Alloy; you seem to read it quite regularly - from the responses that I've had anyway, what do you feel when you read people impressions and reactions to your art and your music. Do you feel compelled to answer all of them or is there some kind of limit which you set for yourself of how to react? ... end of part III . To be continued. ... So what does Thomas *really* think of Alloy! Part IV follows next Monday. What a Bowie story. That was really amazing to hear. Where else do you get an insight like this! Greetings and salutations from deep within the trees! Jon ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V6 #169 ***************************