Our friend and fellow musketeer, Pete Gioconda recently released 10 live video clips to the website currently known as YouTube. After a series of arguments, settled by a no-holds-barred egg-n-spoon race, the band decided its favourite was 'Twitch Doctor' (though 'End of Nowhere' also gets a special mention).
Some people make shopping mall music. Big, calm, blandly elegant. Reassuring. Somewhere to pass the time and feel comfortable.
Pete does not make that kind of music.
He makes the music of cobble stone streets; winding alleys, shady lanes. Dimly lit bars. The music of cold, still dawns. Of desolate, wild country.
I've stood in some shopping malls and found then strangely beautiful. But it's a short lived feeling. And before long I want to leave.
But I keep returning to the Red House Session clips. Especially 'Twitch Doctor' and 'End of Nowhere'. I find Pete's performances as moving now as when the band used to gig with him in the Bristolian Republic. It's music which always gets through to me.
I wouldn't want to leave behind a shopping mall. Maybe a paper shop, but even then you wonder what it would really mean. Empires that went before us left temples, cathederals; even whole cities. But the names of those who crafted them are long gone. Dead to the ages.
I would have been very proud to have written 'Twitch Doctor'. And what I'd leave behind is a singer, battling with a cheap P.A, in a dimly lit bar, nestled down at the end of one of those shady lanes. It's not a comfortable place to be, but as they near the end of the song, and sing the line "do not reject the hero in your soul" someone understands. And after that they're never quite the same again.
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