Oh, hello! Didn’t see you there. Where did you come from? Facebook, probably. Welcome home!
We have been relatively active on the old Bookface, less so on Instagram and absolutely, stone-cold silent on here. Apologies. With this in mind we thought we would treat you to a classic Kootch rundown of what we have been up to this weekend.
Just in case you didn’t come from Facebook, we are going to recycle the same joke here:
There are several ways to find out when we are playing at The Heights of Abraham:
1) Check ye’ olde Face’bewk
2) Check ye’ olde Kootch website gig page
3) Check ye’ olde BBC weather* forecast - if it’s raining, we’re playing The Heights. *Other reliable ways to check the weather are available. This includes, but is not limited to, Met Office, The Weather Network, Looking out of Your Window, Asking Your Local Weatherman, Clive.
So the weather for Saturday was set to be Grim, with a capital G. Not to be confused with the Grim Brothers - those two lads from your secondary school that never washed.
It is perhaps prudent to mention at this point that instruments - if you didn’t know - are made of wood. This means they are not only incredible financial burdens, but they are also very needy creatures. They are not a fan of moisture, humidity, rain, sun, slight cloud… Weather. They are not really a fan of weather. Which is unfortunate when you live in England. So much weather. All the time.
Of course the exception being Katy’s bow - which is made of HAIR. This absolutely does not work when even a little bit moist. Ian’s banjo is custom made, Beth has a new guitar that has financially crippled not just her, but also Dean. Dean has a 12 string. This doesn’t really mean anything, but he seems to like it and we didn’t want him to feel left out.
To take some time to be a little more serious, though. The Heights was a pleasure, as always. The trope for the next few weekends is a Day at the Seaside. There is sandpit, a Punch and Judy man, and most importantly, two freezing cold actors dressed in Victorian swim suits - at the top of a mountain - in the pouring rain. We all suffered for our art that day.
You would struggle to find a more professional sound man the Mr Graham Marriott. For a four piece we switch and change instruments a lot (we play in some weird tunings and it saves our strings, especially when playing in the RAIN). He informed us that between the four of us we use twelve inputs. TWELVE. Again, this means nothing to us, but we hope there is a sound engineer somewhere reading this going ‘bloody hell’.
Anyway - during our second set we had an impromptu performance from two lovely girls in the audience. The lyric went something like ‘Izzy is really annoying, Lizzie smells of poo’. It was deep, soulful, and will be appearing on our next album ‘Kootch - The Copyright Infringement’. A huge THANKS to everyone that came, listened, stayed and called for more! Despite the rain, you lovely lot, you.
SUNDAY
The day of rest. But it’s a hard knock life for orphans and musicians alike, and off to the studio we went!
Infirmary Records - we cannot recommend them and Martyn enough. Studio work is hard. Plumping for a ‘live’ sound for the album we have to play our instrumentation together, without the lyrics. This may seem easy to those looking in, but fifteen verse murder ballads that have the same melodic structure for both the verses and chorus are very difficult to remember where you are in the song without the lyrics!
Interestingly, winner for the most impressive instrumentation goes to Dean… For the tambourine. Turns out his talent lies in supersonic tambourine shaking. An instrument he doesn’t even play in the band. Amazing.
The boring/exciting bit, depending on how much you want a CD/MP3/memory stick/gag gift for someone you dislike.
The end goal is an album that we can be proud of. The reality is this will be a long process and we can’t see this being ready soon. Gigging comes first - we enjoy this part of our lives the most (and, honestly, it pays for the time in the studio). By the start of September we are hoping to have finished a few songs with more on the way. We are taking it a step at a time and there might be some teasers to come if we feel the full album is taking so long that AI has become sentient and taken over the planet - creating art while we fill the most tedious of jobs - OH WAIT. (Remember when we thought we created robots to take over the manual jobs so that we could enjoy our leisure - being creative and making art? Now the robots are making art and we are still slogging away at the 9-5. It’s happening we tell you! It’s happening now! Oh, er, better get releasing some songs… Don’t tell Siri we said this, he might not treat us favourably when he takes over the world).
Who gave the neurodivergent the task of writing the blogs?! Where were we?
Oh, yeah, the album will be a while, so don’t sit on the edge of your seats - your bums will go numb long before we release it. Unless you are sitting on the edge of your seat in preparation to fight the robots. We recommend doing that. Or maybe learn coding? Or every time you get a cold, sneeze in a jar, to throw at the robots later. Or is that how you kill aliens?
We digress… Again… Sack the blog writer!
Next up for us is the MASSIVE Nottingham Riverside Festival. We will be on the Big Top Stage on Saturday. The festival is FREE so there is absolutely no reason not to come - other than you HATE us - which is understandable.
Love, Harmonies, Cwtch
Kootch x
