Simon Little

The Divine Comedy headlined the Wychwood Festival at Cheltenham Racecourse last night. It was only the forth year the festival has been running and from the sound of it it’s getting bigger every year.
Last night was The Divine Comedy’s only UK show this year. We’ll be playing two shows late September at the Cite De La Musique in Paris, but for the time being Neil is concentrating ..ing Swallows & Amazons.
We had three action-packed days rehearsing before the show. We haven’t played together as a band for a whole year so things were a bit rusty to begin with. I got a shock when the intended set list came through from Mr Hannon. The Drinking Song had reared it’s ugly head once again (I swear I have nightmares about that song… it has got so many changes it’s almost impossible not to cock it up) and there were a couple of tunes I’d never even heard before. Neil wanted to put in a couple of the ‘French’ songs in preparation for the Paris shows later this year. I’m using inverted commas because only one of the songs is actually in French: ‘Je Changerais D’Avis’ by Francoise Hardy (it might be a Morricone tune… we’re not quite sure). The other one was ‘Home’ which Neil wrote for Jane Birkin’s last album. By all accounts, our version is better! To be honest, I was hoping for a version of ‘The Songs That We Sing’, but I think this will have to wait until September.
My Bloody Valentine were rehearsing in the studio next door. I say rehearsing… apparently they had to spend an awfully long time trying to figure out how they actually played a lot of their songs, they used a lot of funny tunings and obviously a huge amount of guitar effects. I didn’t go in but Neil had to sneak a quick peak and said there were literally hundreds of pedals covering the floor in their studio. When they did finally start actually playing the sound was awesome. There were a few more coffee/fag breaks after that juncture to facilitate us standing around listening outside!
We had an eight-piece band this year, including the triumphant return of Ian ‘Squeezy’ Watson on accordian and Charlotte Glasson on saxes & flute.
Wychwood is quite a small festival. It takes about 10 minutes to walk around the whole thing. We were headlining on Saturday night. I arrived at the site at about 4pm just in time to hear the last couple of songs from Palladium. They sounded fantastic. Wish I’d got there half an hour earlier really. The Blockheads were on next, followed by Duffy. She put on a great (although very short) set with a fantastic band. Went out front to watch her with my friends Clare and Muddy who came to see me play. Duffy resorted to playing B-sides halfway through (she obviously doesn’t have that much material, hence the early festival slot) but I thought these were the best songs in her set.
Duffy was followed by Orchestra Baobob. I went backstage. They were great fun but to be perfectly honest I can only stand about half a song of that kind of music before it all starts sounding the same. And their set ran over….
We were on at 9.30 for a ninety minute set. As usual, I have no set list so I can’t tell you exactly what we played. All the usual suspects were in there, as well as some old favourites making a comeback: Billy Bird, Songs of Love, A Drinking Song. There were a few rarities dropped in too: Count Grassi’s Passage Over Piedmont made it’s debut live performance, we played Sweden for the first time in years (love that song) and we did a great new T Rex-y version of Europop which went down a storm.
The crowd were fantastic: shouting, screaming and singing along! We all had a ball. Neil even suddenly decided to give everyone a solo during National Express for the encore so I got a bit of ‘foot on monitor’ action in. I expect that will be the first and last time you will ever hear a bass solo on a Divine Comedy show! Definitely the only time you’ll hear me slapping!
We had a great show and hopefully we’ll play Wychwood again some time. We all agreed that if we were to do only one UK show this year, then last night was the way it should be. It’s been a while since I’ve done a big festival show like last night’s, and to honest I really miss it. Hopefully there’ll be some more in the near future…
For the meantime, we’re all looking forward to the Paris shows which by all accounts are shaping up to be a true TDC extravaganza! Miss it at your peril!
Until then….

ps. If anyone’s knocking about town tonight, I’ll be playing with Lea Delaria at the 606 in Chelsea. Our special guest is the amazing American blues singer/guitarist Chris Bergson. I was meant to play the Leicester City Blues Festival with him yesterday, but obviously I was otherwise engaged. Looking forward to it immensely…

pps. I’m really into Last.fm and Twitter at the moment. My Last.fm usermane is simonlittlebass if you want to be friends, and my Twitter page is at Twitter if you want to follow my updates…

I’ve just managed to put together a little podcast on Podbean. My intention in future is to post up some of the solo bass and Chapman Stick stuff I’ve been working on, but for the moment I’ll be occasionally posting a few little gems I have locked away here at Little Towers. It might take a while for me to get to grips with the whole home recording scenario, but fear not, I’m on the case.
There’s a Podcast player embedded on the main page here, but if you want to subscribe for future updates I would suggest going to my Podbean page and clicking the ‘Add To iTunes’ button. I’ve tested it and it seems to work fine. The address is Simon Little’s Podcast
Also, if there are any Twitter users out there, I’m using that now. My profile page is at Twitter if you want to follow my updates: find out what I had for breakfast, what hideous traffic jam I’m sat in etc..

Hello folks
Just got back from playing a festival in Struer with Maggie Reilly. Struer is a city in Region Midtjylland on the Jutland peninsula in Western Denmark (I nicked that little snippet from Wikipedia… to be perfectly honest I have no idea where most of these places are in reality… I just get get off the plane and play my bass. I also found out that Struer has a population of 11,364.. so there you have it). Anyway, it’s a very pretty little place by the sea.
Because of it’s location (particularly relative to Copenhagen), there really aren’t that many flights in or out at useful times of a weekend. Hence we’ve been away for three days to do the one show! And, let me tell you, three days in Struer is plenty. We soon discovered that there was really only the one place to be (day or night) and that was a little bar/restaurant called The Happy Penguin (translated into Danish of course). We managed to visit said establishment a grand total of five times in the time we spent there. Everything else seemed to shut as soon as they saw us coming.
The show was a big outdoor affair with just over two thousand people in the audience. There were five bands on that day with us being the only non-Danish act on the bill. We were preceded by a Danish band (the name has gone I’m afraid) who were apparently big in the 80’s and have just made a comeback. I really didn’t get the point of the band that went .. us. They were a tribute band for a start. The word on the street was that they were a very convincing copy of Denmark’s biggest ever band (again, the name escapes me I’m afraid) who were massive in the late seventies. It was that kind of generic bluesy rock that regularly graces the stages of many a sweaty pub up and down the country. But the audience went berserk. They were singing along to all the tunes. The locals were raving about how authentic the band sounded and looked. Didn’t get it I’m afraid. I could never imagine a tribute band playing on the same stage as proper bands at any festival in the UK. Needless to say, we made a swift exit about five tunes into their set.
We had a really great show (particularly since we hadn’t played together for six weeks!). The sound was one of the best I’ve ever had on a festival and what began as a really cold blustery day suddenly turned into a beautiful Summer afternoon the exact moment we stepped onto the stage. We got a fantastic response from the audience and everybody at the festival really looked after us. They put on a big show like this every year for the locals and this was the first time they’d had a foreign band so hopefully we’ll get to play there again another time.
The Danes have a great music scene. It seems a lot of the small town put on shows like this every year and a lot of them are state funded. They really support their local artists far more than we do in the UK and on a much grander scale. Danish folk music and jazz also has a massive following. They are very proud of their own music. I think we could learn a lot from that attitude.
After the show we retired once more to the Happy Penguin for some food and drinks. As the only decent place in town it soon filled up with merry festival goers and we had a great time chatting with the natives!
Our next show isn’t until July in Poland with Chris Norman from Smokie. Maggie’s been checking out the venue and she says it looks beautiful. It’s somewhere near Gdansk… that’s all I know. We’re all looking forward to that one. I’ve never been to Poland…
On another note, if anybody’s knocking about town on Tuesday, this month’s “Wall To Wall” show with Lea Delaria features Julian Seagal on sax and we’ll be playing the music of Stevie Wonder. Should be a corker!
Simon