Author: Paul
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Davey Hal – Materials Logic
It would be fair to say that our little seaside town is not short of talent. That’s why I was pleased to see that one of the most prominent voices on the local scene, Davey Hal, was working on his first solo album, and enthralled when he asked me to give Materials Logic an exclusive listen.
From the piano run on Soothe The Grey, the opener, you are invited into Hal’s world, a heady mix of late night love stories in a cocktail lounge. The harmonies present are ethereal, almost medieval in tone, grand. It’s strong without ever being overstated. The piano accompanies and underpins lyrics on royalty and death. This is immediately followed by Night Walking, a song with so much jazz club funk to its bassline that it forces a waltz quickstep into your feet as you attempt to move to the beat. It’s here that Hal’s voice is given the chance to sour, on a chorus that has been stuck in my head for at least the last fortnight. The song that was played on TIME107.5FM last week, finally bridging the gap between those who love Materials Logic and those who are yet to hear it. It has a In The Wee Small Hours.
White Walls sounds closer to the Davey Hal you might have seen at one of the many performances he blesses upon our town. A simple guitar track, with a strange likeness to something High Flying Birds would produce. It’s a song of attempted escape, an ode to love. The album takes a moment to recover with the instrumental track, Berdou, before Davey can pick up his guitar again and ask you to Run With Me. It’s the first real pop song of the album. It sounds like an instant classic, something beautiful and familiar. There’s a Paul Simon influence in there at times and yet another chorus worthy of being sung back by thousands of voices. Album title track Materials Logic slows matters down considerably, like a villain’s exposition in a performance, Hal’s voice starting out in a low chatter that sounds like it’s creeping before he soars, showcasing his range, crying out for an answer. The key change into the final refrain is particularly chilling.
“Head up, left foot against a wall” he begins on Fingertips before listing attributes of a lover in a seaside town. It’s equal parts affectionate and scathing, figuring that the subject is human anyway and does her hair while he’s asleep. Your Stone is close in tone to the title track, again going through the trials of some mystery woman Hal is observing and inspired by. Up Into Her Clouds is a straight-up love song, drawing on weather in the way only an Englishman can in order to explain his amore for anyone. The jaunty piano solo in the middle is reminiscent of something on Rubber Soul before Hal reveals that his admiration proved too much and turns the mood sour in the way love often does.Dear Mary creeps in like another performance piece, sung in the early hours and utilising everything Hal has to explain the situation to his Mary to the point of his own frustration. My Senses ambles in after her, the final thoughts of a man who has given everything of his own over eleven tracks and 42 minutes. It is close to Turner’s Submarine EP in production, nothing to overcomplicate and draw from the raw talent that is Davey Hal and the showcase of this that is Materials Logic.
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Blue Monday.
This week in my bizarre little double life, I have been lucky enough to stay up through the night working on re-drafts of a script, drunk whiskey in Ving Rhames’ favourite London pub and talked about guns, opera and the most effective way to simulate brain matter with a university lecturer.
We are still hard at work on the Delectably Dead project which has its opening night in about three weeks. Scott and I sat up all night playing around with the script and doing silly voices. We then read it to George and were all happy with what we had. Then I slept for the longest time.
When I came round, I caught up with one of my best friends at the OKH in London Bridge before heading to GBK and eating my weight in sweet potato fries. I have since become addicted to abbreviations. Over the course of our catch up we talked about love, money and zombies, the key topics which had changed since we last spoke. There’s something daunting about the idea of turning 30 so it was good to try and hash out some kind of plan for that with one of my nearest and dearest.
On my night off I hit the gym and then spent an hour on the phone to my dad explaining what a zombie dinner show is. Despite the fact he gets scared when Zombie Pete comes out of the shower curtain in Shaun Of The Dead he has agreed to come and see the show. I am so excited about it that I could vomit. In fact, I did, just last night, but that was because I got a little overzealous with the tongue scraper.
Scott, George and I met with a special effects director, fight choreographer and all round awesome guy who works locally and agreed to give us some pointers for the show. Without seeming pious in any way, shape or form he provided a list of things we needed to work towards pulling off as well as pulling out some of the most incredible anecdotes for us to enjoy. He has even said he is interested in coming to see the show and giving us lessons in stage combat. I’m a lover, not a fighter, but that is not to be missed.
With enough juice down us to satisfy our five a day we headed back to the unit and prepped some of the additional work required for the play. We want the project to be as immersive as possible so there are all kinds of tricks and games going on behind the scenes. I don’t want to give anything away but at midnight I was running around a car park with a Nerf gun, pretending to be a girl from above the Watford gap.
As I have mentioned recently, I am really enjoying where I am at currently. It’s sometimes surreal, often tiring, but I would not give it up for anything. Scott says you have to throw enough shit at a wall for something to stick. I’m trying to throw enough Schiernecker.
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#1 – Write a screenplay.
It has to be accepted among “creative people” that it is very rare to finish up the projects we start. I have lost count of the amount of times I have excitedly started something, only to lose the passion for it somewhere along the way. Some of those things will remain unfinished forever, and I have to be cool with that as an idea. We all have to be cool with that as an idea. I have started a number of things that I will never get around to finishing for one reason or another.
I suppose it was for that reason that when my dear friend Scott asked if I wanted to write a play with him that I assumed it was going to be one of many projects that never really comes to fruition. If the percentage of things I start and finish on my own is low, then the number of things I start and finish as part of a collaboration is even lower.
The maths is quite interesting. You take the chance of you ever finishing anything and times it by the chance of the other person ever finishing anything and then do some maths and the odds are pretty low. I’m not even going to complete that equation. It’s just another unfinished thing.Now the cool thing about Scott is that he co-owns Hide and Shriek with his friend George. The pair of them are like the odd couple. George needs numbers and calm. He works well on his own and very much speaks his mind. He’s like a cat I guess. Scott on the other hand is like a dog. He is silly and he loves people and he will do almost anything to get a cuddle. Somehow, the pair of them work together very well. George counts the beans and Scott watches YouTube videos and screams Sum 41 lyrics. Maybe that was more my influence than anything else.
The show they wanted me to help with was a dinner show. Dinner shows are popular at our local theatre, but they are mainly aimed at a British sitcom nostalgia audience. Things like Fawlty Towers and Father Ted are put on over the course of a three course meal. Hide and Shriek were contacted by the second largest theatre company in the UK to put together a zombie dinner show. I just happened to wander into their unit in Southend when Scott was putting ideas together for it. And the rest, as they say, is history. Scott told me about this before Christmas and it wasn’t really something that either of us picked up until into the New Year. It was then he told me that the first date for the show was 7th February 2017. I pretended that was absolutely fine.
In the last two weeks we have put together a script. We have redrafted and rewritten. We have spent entire days locked up in their tiny office with just electric storage heaters and a borrowed coffee machine for company. We went insane, we slept among rats and set pieces when we could. We watched a lot of YouTube videos. We danced to Avril Lavigne. We tried to work out if we fancied Josh Homme or Brody Dalle-Homme more. George would come in and poke us with a stick to make sure we were still alive, and then throw us a pack of NikNaks in the hopes it would give us enough energy to carry on.
We have held auditions, shot promo shots and a video, met with people from the theatre and considered dropping it all to write a drag show. It has been an incredible experience and we are now in a position where we not only have an amazing script and a brilliant opportunity but also an amazing cast who all immediately shone. I feel so excited to be a part of something that I truly believe in. There were tough days but I wouldn’t change it for anything else and am so grateful that I get to be involved with something that is gathering so much interest.
On top of that, Scott and George let me be the central focus of the promotional stuff. They even photoshopped my teeth.
Thanks guys.
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#14 – Research my family genealogy.
In my constant quest to get good post I sent away for a DNA Collection Kit from 23AndMe. I don’t know much about my family history. My paternal grandfather was born and raised in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. He never really shared a lot about what happened to him understandably. I know it was quite a hard thing to go through. He never spoke to us directly about it but he did eventually write about it. He was my last surviving grandparent so when he passed away, it left me with all these questions about where I came from. I thought I would eventually get round to addressing this.
I was actually contacted a year ago by a distant cousin, based in Holland. She had a lot of history on the family and was able to share pictures of my great great-grandfather and the Schiernecker family from the 1920s and earlier.
I have an ongoing conversation with my brothers about Britishness and what it means to be British. I describe myself as being a mongrel child of Europe. My brother is quite set in thinking he is British, which is ridiculous. Nobody is British, especially us.The kit consists of a small pot that at first I thought meant I had to give myself a blood test. I had to go thirty minutes without food or drink which was a struggle as I had celebrated opening the box by eating a pack of Hula Hoops. I had to spit to the fill line, which they advise is two to six minutes of spitting. I then had to ship the box back, ironically, to the Netherlands.
They then send you a test result back with a percentage breakdown for each country. Before I start, I would guess that I am a quarter Dutch and there’s some Germany in there. On my paternal grandmother’s side they are English but I’ve recently been told there is some Jewish heritage in there. My mum’s family is Jewish so I guess there are eastern European links there, maybe something Israeli originally. I think it’ll be a real hotchpotch of stuff in there.
So, five weeks later I got my results through. This was following a weird incident where I took the spit speciment out to a fancy London bar and had my bag checked. I digress.
It’s quite interesting looking at what I said before and what the results showed:
Now I’m going to assume that the 17.8% Broadly Northwestern European is going to be Dutch based on what I know of my family history.I had to look up Ashkenazi Jewish. It’s basically the Eastern European Jewish community who spoke Hebrew and Yiddish. It’s cool to see because I’ve always been interested in my ancestry, particularly my Jewish heritage. More than anything else that’s what I am composed of. I think my father’s side is the split and my mother’s is just Jew. Jew down the line.
I also got a list of famous people who are in the same Haplogroup on my mother’s side:
Imagine them at a dinner party.
It would explain some of the bumbling nonsense that comes out of my family that we are related to Prince Philip I guess.There are also family traits:
This is all above board. I can confirm my ear wax is wet.
My eye colour changes. It’s sort of blue and green and grey. A lovely little Spirograph.
I also have <1% chance of having red hair and am likely to smoke more if I am a smoker.I am 2.5% neanderthal which is lower than the average of 2.7%. This makes sense as I have a higher brow, narrow shoulders, taller than average.
So I guess the point of all this is that’s what makes up me and my brothers. If you go back then that’s who my dad is and on the other side, the Jewish side, is my mum. I would be interested to get both of them to do it to see what they have given me, aside from being pretty awesome parents.
Just remember, when we are threatening to leave Europe, that we are all from Europe, or further afield and there’s nothing wrong with that. We can all exist together. There’s not some ulterior motive in people that makes them want to be here. We have it pretty good. We are pretty fucking lucky. You’re talking about people who are related to you. You’re talking about people who are only split off from yourself by a couple of generations.
People say that charity begins at home. What is closer to home than the planet we inhabit? -
Mazel Tov Cocktails.
I have heard a lot of Christmas music this month. You don’t get a lot of Hanukkah music. Here’s my input.
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Lovely nostalgia.
What a weekend of lovely nostalgia.
I was lucky enough to have two of my childhood fantasy universes descend before my eyes. I am talking of course about the wizarding world of Harry Potter and a galaxy far, far away.
Now before I continue, I am going to offer up a warning and the chance for people to run for the hills if they are worried I am about to spoil anything. I hate having films ruined for me and do what I can to make sure they are not ruined for others. I’m trying to write with a broad brush in order to sugest some of the things I am excited at without directly ruining it ahead of a good viewing.
On Saturday I saw Rogue One with my fellow gentlemen George and Benjy. We met first for brunch which was basically lunch as it was after twelve. I need to give a shout out to Kelsey for a free meal.
We took the backseat of the cinema so we could all feel one another up in the joyous dark side and then the lights descended. The first thing I noted is that the upcoming feature from Illumination, Sing, looks like the worst pile of shit I’ve ever had the discomfort of sitting through. And that’s really saying something because I’ve seen Frozen. The Batman Lego movie on the other hand looks brilliant and I am hoping my godsons want to see it so I have a cover for going to see it.Now, Star Wars.
Fuck!
So good.
So many feels.
There’s a part of me that is filled with a stomach-flipping childlike joy whenever I see the words “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, It just gets me. It makes me feel.The characters are all developed and rogueish which is fitting for the title. There are loads of lovely little nods to the original trilogy, there are cameos aplenty and the mixture of real effects and CGI works really nicely. The story is entirely separate from anything covered in the Skywalker character-led films but obviously leads into A New Hope. It’s just a well-crafted and fun film. I couldn’t have asked for anything else.
Like a lot of people, I had concerns when Disney took over the franchise but if it means they will be bringing me a new film in the Star Wars universe once a year then I am all for it. Marvel are following a similar model and absolutely smashing it so why not do the same with Star Wars.
Yesterday I saw Fantastic Beasts which has already been out for a month but shows no sign of being pulled from my local picture house.
It’s set in the wizarding world but some seventy years before Harry Potter and his little mates were fooling around round the back of the owl sheds. Instead it follows the adorable Newt Scamander as he gets a ship over to New York for some reason.
The film does well to not talk down or oversell the idea and again there are a number of cute nods to everything we knew and loved about the seven books and eight films which made The Boy Who Lived a bearable character. I’m pretty sure Newt was wearing a Hufflepuff scarf.The fantastic beasts themselves were cute or terrifying in equal ,measures and a lot was done to establish them in the way they were featured in Newt’s book, as published several years ago by Rowling for Comic Relief. The idea that the series is going to be extended over five films is interesting given the thin volume that was the original source material but In JK We Trust.
The important thing to take from this is that it is important to cultivate your childish joy in life. Both Harry potter and Star Wars were key to my development into the fine young man you see before you. I will always have a place for them in my heart and it is good to see them being so well cared for. -
Pixies | Live in Brixton
Not that you asked, and I’mma let you finish, but Doolittle is one of the greatest albums of all time. It can probably only be topped, to my mind, by Revolver, I’m Wide Awake and Transformer. It’s amazing. I was settled on the fact I would never get to hear the songs of Doolittle, or see Pixies live, until last night.
Before I go any further, it’s important to mention that I am currently recovering from a hernia operation I had last week. I was told on a number of occasions that I shouldn’t go to the gig because I could pop my stitches. What a rock ‘n’ roll way to go though. I stood at the back with the dads.
I went to see Pixies with my friend James, who as it turns out, isn’t very good at London. I had to go and collect him from Bank and see him safely through to Brixton so we could see the band. We got there just in time for the main act and shouldered our way through the bald patches and paunches in order to watch the band come on.
I love going to gigs with James. He absolutely loves music and you can see the joy on his face as a band launch into the songs he had been waiting on. To our right were two men who looked like the bullies from Hocus Pocus who take Max’s shoes. They took a lot of drugs.
Ahead of us were a group of dads who were reliving their youth. One of them looked dangerously old. When he backed out through the crowd, they parted like a sea and he road a Stannah stairlift to the toilets. He looked like Scorsese.The band were absolutely phenomenal. We got so excited each time they played something from Doolittle. Obviously everything else is great but Doolittle live. Boom!
Pixies were one of the few remaining bands on my To See list who aren’t actually dead. It made me very happy to catch them.
Pixies played:
Bone Machine
Monkey Gone To Heaven
Bel Esprit
Something Against You
Talent
Broken Face
(Unknown)
Might As Well Be Gone
Dead
Gouge Away
Isla De Encanta
Um Chagga Lagga
Caribou
Debaser
Where Is My Mind?
Winterlong
All The Saints
Wave Of Mutilation
Gouge Away
La La Love You
All I Think About Now
Classic Masher
Tenement Song
Velouria
Snakes
Magdalena 318
No. 13 Baby
Oona
Tame
Rock Music
Baal’s Back
Crackity Jones
Hey
Into The White
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The first rule of book club is…
In a weird twist of fate, I was asked a couple of months ago how I felt about a book group selecting one of my books to read. Understandably, I said I would be delighted. As the group was purely women I suggested Yallah! as being my most open and appropriate book for the audience. My other stuff is a bit too male-led and hideous in places. I was invited initially by Gina, a friend and colleague who is also a writer. I will often drop by her desk for a chat about books, mental health and anything else we feel like discussing.The group leader, Suzanne, read the opening chapter and said she would love for them to not only read the book but to also have me as a special guest at their meet up to discuss it.
The best part was I wouldn’t even need to put in for the lunchtime buffet they were ordering.It was still with some trepidation that I headed off to the meeting with both Gina and Michelle, who had also picked up Yallah and decided to join the group. I felt nervous as we entered the pub and walked straight through to the back room, wondering if I should get a drink first. The room was full of women. They were everywhere. As soon as we walked in, their collective gaze turned and I was terrified and enthralled all at once.
We started with food while Suzanne waxed lyrical about my writing style and the content of Yallah. She had purposely brought hummus to make me feel more comfortable. Every step of the way I was surprised by how much they knew about me. It made sense because they had read a book about me and my thoughts on my experiences. It still felt strange.
After we had dined on fine vegetarian cuisine the questions started coming. They wanted to know more about the trip and the people I had trekked with. They wanted to know more about Alan the camel. They wanted to know if Saaid and Omar were as much fun as they had seemed. If the food had been as good as I had made it out to be in the book. What it had been like to walk so far in such heat. I started to relax and in the end I had a really good time.
I was amazed with the way they connected with my writing. I originally wrote Yallah to serve as a reminder of the first trek I ever took part in. The idea of it being accessible outside of that group amazed me.
We posed for photographs together and they said they would be interested in reading more of my work. I felt like a celebrity. They told me I was an old soul and we had a number of deep conversations about spirituality.
I cannot tell you how incredible it was to sit with them and talk to them about what we went through in the Sahara. It was an incredible and surreal experience and one I will never forget. I would like to thank the Wormettes for taking the time to read my work and for inviting me to join them.
They are total sweethearts.
Paul Schiernecker 