Acoustic Soup

One of the bands I play with on a semi-regular basis is Acoustic Soup, which consists of me on guitar and vocals, my brother Arthur on mandolin, dobro and vocals, my son Nils on bass guitar (and a few vocals here & there!) and my good friend Carl Warner on percussion.

We don’t play gigs very often, maybe once every couple of months or so, but when we do it’s usually at a venue in Tunbridge Wells called the Grey Lady, on an evening run by local musician and promoter Paul Dunton.

The man who used to take care of all the sound engineering at these gigs was until recently a lovely bloke and hugely talented musician called Ollie Nicholls. Tragically however, he was killed in a road accident in the early hours of 30th March 2008.

Ollie’s sudden death had a profound impact on all who knew him.

This song, Sleep Softly, was written by Arthur in his memory.

Ollie Nicholls

Listen Now:

To listen to the song, click on the player icon below.

 Acoustic Soup - Sleep Softly [4:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

At the weekend, I went along to a meeting of the UK Podcasters Association. The first of the two sessions was presented by Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group, who spoke about EU and UK media regulation and how this might impact upon UK podcasters and media producers.

The video of the session is available here.

Some key unanswered points/questions that came out of this discussion:

- Will proposed EU legislation affect everyone (whether individuals or firms) putting audio/video media on the web? If not, who will be/won’t be affected by the legislation?

- If different rules are to be applied for audio versus video, where does one end and the other begin? Would (for example) an enhanced audio podcast containing changing images be considered “video”?

- Will potential new rules regarding sponsorship and “product placement” lead to any sort of ban on sponsored podcasts/videocasts?

- How will this affect the growing number of firms who put audio and video content on their own websites? Will everything produced by those firms have to be clearly labelled as “commercial”?

- What about video and audio from sponsored events? If you have (for example) a panel session sponsored by a vendor where the vendor contributes to the discussion, how will that media be regulated?

Lots of unanswered questions there.  It will be interesting to see how this legislation evolves.

Tomorrow morning (Friday 28th March), the “Social Media Cafe” in London’s Soho district will open for (I think) the 6th time.

What is the Social Media Cafe? Well, a few months back, a visionary chap by the name of Lloyd Davis came up with the idea that it would be good to have a fixed location where social media types (bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, geeks, techies, creative folk, entrepreneurs, shameless self-promoters et al) could get together to chat, swap ideas, socialise, co-work, make deals and generally inspire each other. (See Lloyd’s original post on the subject).

It’s an excellent idea and Lloyd has done a fantastic job in making it happen. It’s now a weekly occurence, upstairs at the Coach & Horses in Greek Street every Friday between 10am and about midday. Although I’ve only been along to one so far (number 3 I think, which was indeed a very rewarding experience), reports from attendees are always overwhelmingly positive.

There’s always a danger with Social Media tools like Twitter and Facebook of only connecting with people online. What I love about the Social Media Cafe is it gives people the opportunity to go along and meet face-to-face and make real personal connections. Whilst “Web 2.0″ is great for connecting with and communicating with people, there’s no substitute (and I don’t think there ever will be) for real human contact.

So I’ll be going along tomorrow morning in the hope of meeting some interesting people and having some stimulating conversations. See you there?

As anyone who’s ever visited this sight will notice, I’m not really much of a blogger. I update this site maybe once every few weeks, mostly to write a brief report on a recent gig I’ve played.

I originally set it up as a kind of central repository for all the various things I’m involved with, on both the business and personal/music fronts, but to be honest I’ve been a bit lax in updating and maintaining it.

Then I read this post by Chris Brogan this morning, which has really inspired me to take things in a new direction and to update my blog on a much more regular basis.

Some of the key points I took away from Chris’s post:

- Start writing posts that cover your space and establish yourself as the thought leader, only humble. Be the “thought learner”.

I love the idea of being a “thought learner”. One of the wonderful things about this whole social media/web 2.0 phenomenon is that there are so many people out there willing to connect and to share their knowledge and experience.

- STOP writing posts that are horribly off-topic, or at least keep it a 10:1 ratio of on- to off-topic.

Hmmm, I guess I’ve been guilty of that with this blog. As there’s no real central topic, you could argue that ALL of my posts have been off-topic. Or then again, you could argue that as the topic is Mike O’Hara, maybe all my posts have been ON-topic!

But I think that’s the problem and the reason I rarely update it. I don’t want to write about me, it gets boring. Why would anyone be interested? You know what? That’s where I’ve been going wrong! (Lightbulb over the head moment here!)

Hence the chage of focus. This blog will no longer be about me and my activities. From now on, I’ll be writing about my spheres of interest - podcasting, social media, music, anything else that grabs my attention.

(Which means that there’s STILL no central topic. Ah well, at least it’ll be more interesting than talking about myself all the time.)

- Link to other blogs that cover your space as well, and say complimentary things when you can.

Excellent advice. I’ll start by linking to Chris’s blog as he inspired me to write this.

- Make sure your passion shows through. That’s what people buy.

For me, this is difficult with the written word. I’m told my passion shows through when I talk about stuff (I have an expressive face and I gesticulate a lot!) but I’m not the world’s greatest writer. Still, practise makes perfect as they say.

So, a new start and a change in direction on the blogging front. Let’s see where we go from here!

I originally posted this gig report on the Little Fish Big Pond website, but I thought I might as well stick it up on here as well!

So, the first LFBP gig of 2008 was an acoustic set at The Grey Lady in Tunbridge Wells, on one of Paul Dunton’s music nights.

We were the second of four acts playing that evening, the others being Maidstone duo Staring at Goats, Paul’s partner in crime Ollie Nichols and our buddies and regular Fishbowl performers Sound Sanctuary, who were headlining for the evening.

We’d had a rehearsal earlier in the week to decide on the set and run through it a couple of times - much needed as we hadn’t played together for weeks. The whole thing was very democratic, we each selected two songs for the eight-song set and voted on the choice of two covers.

First up was “Better Man” a song off the new album Eye Candy, which went OK. Bit of an “interesting” guitar solo from Craig on that one (I think he got away with it!). Then Martin got his bodhran out for “Point of Departure”, which swung along quite nicely, then it was Craig’s turn to take lead vocals for “Good News”. That song always seems to go down well with the crowd and tonight was no exception, we got a big cheer at the end of it.

Now that the audience were warmed up a bit, we played a couple of blasts from the past - “Still I Stay” and “Can’t Get Away” from our first album (In the Can), both pretty upbeat tunes that got some decent cheers. We had planned to play “24/7″ next, but time was running out, so Mr Dunton got up on stage to announce the two alternatives for our “people’s choice” (i.e. a cover song selected by the audience) - Teenage Kicks by The Undertones or It’s Only Natural by Crowded House.

Teenage Kicks was the hands-down winner, so we grooved into our very bijou-sounding acoustic version, then finished off with another old favourite from our first album, “Doing the Right Thing”. Excellent response from the crowd, great vibe, all in all a pretty successful gig!

We stuck around afterwards to listen to “melancholy Ollie” settle the audience down with his beautiful songs, and Sound Sanctuary finished the evening off by playing a blinding set, especially their Warren G/Nate Dogg cover (pure class!).

We recorded the evening and you can get the MP3 from the Little Fish Big Pond website.

Next gig we have planned is at Fishbowl Acoustic at the Trinity Arts in Tunbridge Wells on Saturday 19th April.

Well, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and I’m still buzzing from Sunday evening, when I played a gig with The Diarys for the first time in months.

A bit of background….

Rich (who pretty much IS The Diarys in that he writes and sings all the songs) moved from the UK out to Spain last October and this was his first trip back since then. So there’s been a definite lack of Diarys gigs over the last three or four months and this one was well anticipated.

Rich, Stu & Giles came over to my house for rehearsals on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, where we re-acquainted ourselves with a bunch of the old material and learnt four or five of Rich’s new songs. After a break for a delicious home-made curry, we ran through the entire set, which looked like this….

So, we had 22 songs, including just one cover (Rihanna’s “Umbrella” - very Live Lounge!), so we were all set.

Late Sunday afternoon I arrived at the venue (The House on The Hill in Sevenoaks) and the guys were already there setting up. Even at 5pm, the place was starting to fill up and there was a real buzz of anticipation in the air. We did a quick soundcheck, running through the new songs one more time and by 7:30, the stage was set…

Opening the show were Nick and Henry, otherwise known as “Walking on Sunday”. The played a great set of a mix of originals and covers, including a brilliant version of “Hit Me Baby One More Time”. Nick has a great, soulful rock voice, underpinned by some sweet guitar playing from Henry. I’ll definitely be checking the guys out again and hopefully getting them along to play a set at Fishbowl Acoustic at some future point.

Nick & Henry - Walking on Sunday

By 8pm or so, the place was packed out and it was our turn to take to the stage. I must admit, I was a bit nervous and my fingers felt quite shaky as playing with The Diarys is always quite a big deal for me.

But I needn’t have worried, it was a great crowd. Rich’s new songs (Shadow Man, Secrets, You Do and Cherish) went down a storm, so well in fact that we played them all again. And “Umbrella” was definitely a great choice of cover, we played that one twice too!

Towards the end of the evening (on about the third encore I think), a chap called Roland got up onstage with a trumpet and jammed along to “Kids & Dogs” and “Mainstream” (yep, we played those two twice as well!). And to top things off, when we finished, my lad Finlay (who’s only 10) got up on the drums and jammed with Roland on the trumpet! An excellent end to a fab night.

Lots more pics of the evening on my Flickr page.

A big thank you to Kenzie for taking some ace pics at the recent Acoustic Soup at Morello. This one’s my favourite…

You can find the rest of the photos that Kenzie took on her Flickr page. Some other great band/gig pics there too.

I’ve added a new page to the site, where you can download MP3s of various tracks I’ve recorded. There’s a couple of TV/Movie themes, some Genesis Elijah remixes, the recent Acoustic Soup recordings we did for the Fishbowl Podcast session, some solo acoustic guitar stuff & various other odds & sods.

Either click on the “Download My Music” link in the right-hand menu or go direct to the download page here.

Enjoy!

This month’s Fishbowl Acoustic podcast features my “other” band Acoustic Soup, playing a few songs and having a chat. We’ll be playing at Morello in Matfield, Kent, on Sunday 13th January, starting at about 7pm.

Also on the bill will be Jake Boyle, who last played the Fishbowl in Summer 2006. The first hour of the evening will be an “open mic” slot for anyone who wants to come along and play a couple of original songs. Entry is free and the food there is FAB so come along!

Check it out at www.fishbowlacoustic.com

I was out walking the dog this morning and the sunrise was incredible, so I had to take a picture of it. Sometimes it’s very handy to have a camera on your mobile phone!