Setlist 2025…

I’ve a small number of live dates lined up for 2025. Just three at the moment – but I’m hoping to get some more arranged.

As such (and with the first one just a few weeks away), once Xmas was out the way I thought I’d better revisit the tunes I did for Gainsborough Voices at The Old Nick last year.

That was themed around the Lincolnshire dialect and for the most part I was using samples taken from a late sixties/early 70s recording of Tennyson’s poetry about farming life in the county. There’s nothing wrong with it – in fact it was pretty good all in all – but given it was taken from some poetry readings using a language that was quite difficult to decipher at times it didn’t mean the tracks were exactly bangers.

As I was listening back to them, I thought it might be an idea just to pop a couple of my older tracks in, especially maybe a couple of quicker ones.

I already experimented in doing a live version of Existence (in fact there’s a couple of YouTube videos go back a couple of years to show for that) so that was a bit of a shoo-in – though again it’s not exactly a banger.

So I started looking at other tunes that I thought I could play live. I must admit that when I wrote them I had no thoughts or intentions of playing live so I wasn’t really sure how easy they’d be to adapt.

One of my favourites from more recent times that was on the Digressions album I did for Werra Foxma – a track called Class 47.

When I wrote this, this was something that I bashed out in session view using just a few clips and then ended up building the song pretty much in arrangement view and doing some overdubs in there.

I was quite keen to play this live on the Push as well as playing the main melody lines on the keyboard so there was lots of selecting multiple tracks in arrangement view in Ableton and saving as a new scene for me to trigger when playing live.

Class 47 all cut up into neat little clips and scenes…

It ended up in a good place despite me wasting a bunch of time trying to program a split on my Novation Synth (you’d’ve thought it would be easy!) when I realised it was much simpler just to do it in Ableton itself!

Class 47 – a run though from the first rehearsals.

Nice tune though Class 47 is, I still felt I wanted a bigger track in the set list. Perhaps to end on. When you look back over my discography there’s one that properly jumps out. It was originally written for an Electronic Music Alliance compilation where the concept was every title track to have the same initials – EMA. Given this was written during Covid, Epidemics make Arseholes was born…

I was really unsure if I could pull this one off live and so resigned myself to being relaxed about using a playback track. When I first started thinking about playing live I was fairly adamant that everything was going to be triggered from the Push and that I wouldn’t use a playback track. However, chatting to a few people since I think it’s a lot more common than I realised in one form or another. And it does solve a lot of problems (lack of talent and timing included ) without really taking away from the performance.

And actually, Epidemics came together quite quickly, although I did make things a little trickier for myself by wanting to trigger all the samples as well as play the keys. 

A run-through of EMA taken from the first rehearsal session

Those are you who have already zoomed in on the set picture will notice there’s another track in there. I kind of wanted to get ‘What Are The Media?’ into the set list given the current Zeitgeist.  I’ve still to pull this one together so that’s half a chance it may yet be cut but it’s a moody little number that’ll sit quite nicely in the middle of the set. So will give it a good shot.

The only other outstanding thing is something I found playing the first gig at the Old Nick. I had a few seconds to fill in between the songs as I loaded the next one in on my laptop. I know one approach is to load every single song into one single massive set but I had a play with that and just didn’t get on with it at all – so I resigned myself to still loading separate tunes in.

Now, I have no problem gabbering on in between songs, which I could do in The Old Nick easily. It’s such a small theatre I could just raise my voice and everyone could hear me. But in a larger place that’s gonna be a bit trickier. I’ll need to faff about with a microphone – and anyway I don’t really want to have to pad in between every single song. 

So I’ve decided I’m going to use a little box I bought a while back that’s just sat on my shelf for too long a time to just do little interludes of layered arpeggiated loveliness. Which is fine on the face of it, but creating the tracks for that is another little job I need to get done in between now and my first gig this year in March.

This will save folk having to listen to me utter on in-between tunes…

So there we have it. If all goes to plan my set list will be as below. I’ll see about getting a little playlist together shortly…

  1. Hello 2:20
  2. Existence 5:20
  3. Days End 2:56
  4. What Are The Media 5:40
  5. Childer 3:23
  6. Class 47 4:30
  7. EMA 5:58

Running Time 34:07 + interludes

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