We’ve been hard at work recording on an ambitious scale, and we’re proud to present early fruits of these efforts in the form of a four-track EP which comes in a lovingly hand-crafted CD sleeve. It’s a fiver including p&p to anywhere in the world. Click the Paypal link below to order and you should receive it through the letterbox in a few days!
The tracklisting is:
1. Dudley And His Magic Pants
2. Gooseberry Rag
3. The History Of Europe
4. Bad Joke
Here’s some rambly notes on the songs.
A Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra gig is imminent!
We will be playing a set of songs at the beautiful Union Chapel in Islington at lunchtime on October the 15th as part of the Daylight Music series of concerts.
Oh, and it’s free!
Tremendous fun at the Lexington last night, supporting a favourite band of my student days, the inimitable David Devant & His Spirit Wife. We played a set of our own songs and later in the evening joined Devant for their encore (see video of one of those collaborations here)
Our own set was:
An Adventure On The Transcarpathian Express Part 1
The Taste Of Hair
Maybe
An Adventure On The Transcarpathian Express Part 3
Thank-You For Not Discussing The Outside World
If I Could Step Inside Your Mind
Dudley And His Magic Pants
Master Flea’s Song About The Wisdom Of Animals
Flea National Anthem
Couple of new ones in there, both from long-form collaborations with lyricist Reggie Chamberlain-King. The Transcarpathian Express story is going to be a big half-hour epic, the text for which is written and which I am gradually setting to music. I’ve skipped the French and German leg of the journey for now while I figure out some musical stuff, so last night we went straight to Part 3, the Swiss leg of the journey, in which the train is attacked by Alpine cannibals. Response from the crowd was encouraging so we’ll keep plugging away at it, and hopefully perform the whole finished piece later in the year.
Our next gig is at Comedy Rush at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London – it’s sixty acts in sixty minutes and we’ll be doing a one-minute long orchestral piece as part of the shenanigens. The line-up for the night is terrific!
Lots of fun getting the gang back together for a raucous set at the Montague Arms in New Cross amidst taxidermy and nautical ephemera.
The set list was:
An Adventure On The Trans-Carpathian Express Part 1
The Taste Of Hair
Thank-You For Not Discussing The Outside World
Zone 1 (a new one written and arranged especially for the MFMO by Deborah Grayson, one of our violinists)
Maybe
Dudley And His Magic Pants (a new one)
The Flea Tamer
Master Flea’s Song About The Wisdom Of Animals
The Flea National Anthem
Earlier in the evening we provided orchestral backing for Mr Solo aka The Vessel on some David Devant & His Spirit Wife tunes, including two brand new ones. Always an honour to be part of cult classics like Pimlico on stage. The composer of Pimlico himself, Foz Foster, was also in attendance, charming the crowd as one half of double-act Foster and Gilvan.
More pictures courtesy of Vikki Morris here.
You can now buy the Thank-You For Not Discussing The Outside World EP as a download from Corporate Records.
Also, we are headlining the Montague Arms Festival in New Cross tomorrow, Saturday October the 2nd. We’ll be playing some songs with Mr Solo (including some David Devant favourites old and new) at around 9pm and then doing a headline set of MFMO songs at 10pm. Only a fiver to get in, details and tickets here: www.frogmorris.net/gig.php
The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra will be hosting a great night of music at Dingwalls in Camden, London, along with Edinburgh’s The Graeme Mearns Band and Jim Bob from Carter USM! The night will feature a set of songs from the musical Gutted (which I composed the tunes for), performed by members of the Edinburgh cast. MFMO will also be providing orchestral backing for some of Jim Bob’s songs. It’s going to be a wonderful one-off night, don’t miss it!
Tickets £10 from here.
Headed down to Foz’s house in Brighton for some recording in his little home studio. Foz is the guitarist in David Devant And His Spirit Wife, and I met him when I started guesting with that band on accordion, though the link goes further back than that, as we discovered: he used to play guitar in The Monochrome Set, cult eighties Bid-fronted forerunner of my old band Scarlet’s Well. Foz also plays guitar for Karaoke Circus, a live karaoke night which I help to run and which often features guest players from the MFMO and occasionally the full-on orchestra. But the reason I was in Brighton is because as a songwriter he is very much a kindred spirit, and if you’ve heard my songs and the songs he performs in his darkly whimsical double-act Foster & Gilvan then you’d hear the same psychedelic Bonzos-esque influence.
There’s a track written with Reggie Chamberlain-King called ‘I’ll Say She Does’ which doesn’t quite fit into the symphonic idiom of the other songs I write for the MFMO. It’s a ukulele-led forties-style pastiche, with a kind of charleston rhythm, and because I’m very much out of my depth writing that kind of music I decided to enlist Foz as producer. As and when this album gets done, I thought it might be nice to have a track on the album that breaks up the relentless symphonic sweep of everything else, and this one seemed like a good candidate for that. Foz has a great ear for music-hall whimsy with a slightly sinister edge and so I’ve left everything in his capable hands. Another reason for delegating production to Foz is that my ukulele skills are limited to gentle tum-te-tum-te-tum strumming, and this song requires some proper Formby action, which Foz is kindly providing. I recorded some toy piano and glockenspiel for the track, aswell as a guide piano track and vocal to indicate chords and structure but Foz will no doubt chop everything up into little bits and put it back together in a far nicer order. I’ll be back down there again soon to record the vocals over the top of whatever loveliness he comes up with.
Now, on to organising the woodwind and brass sessions. Strings will come last as that’s going to be a pretty ginormous undertaking itself…
Got to Onecat Studio in Brixton at nine to set up. We had a recording session a year ago to record some drums and harp and then I just dropped the ball completely and no work has been done on the album since then.
Rhodri arrived at ten, bass guitar in hand, and we started off by adding the bass guitar part to ‘Bad Joke’, which Ben had recorded the drums for during that 2009 session. ‘Bad Joke’ was written for an independent film called ‘Peacock Season’ but that doesn’t seem to have ever seen the light of day. I like the song though and it gets a good response live so we’re recording it anyway. Rhodri came up with some nice flourishes to play during the chorus which was a relief as I’m hopeless at coming up with imaginative basslines. I don’t really like to inhibit the rock sections of the band by being too prescriptive. When you’re dealing with the densely layered harmonies of the woodwinds, brass and strings you have no choice but to figure out every little lick and flourish in great detail to avoid clashes, but with drums and bass I always have the feeling that the musicians themselves will be able to come up with much better parts than I ever could, and as I am very lucky to have the services of Messrs Marsden and Handysides at my disposal I can afford to be very confident in that regard!
This proved especially the case when we got stuck into ‘An Adventure On The Trans-Carpathian Express Part 1′, the first chapter of what will eventually turn out to be an epic rock picaresque about an eventful train journey. We’ve performed it live once, and it appeared in instrumental form as the overture to ‘Nerdstock’ on BBC4 in January of this year. This first section of the song covers what our trumpeter Steve Pretty astutely termed ‘the most boring leg of the journey: the Kent leg’. At a London railway station, a nine-year-old called Theodore boards what he believes to be the train to his boarding school, but soon after departure he discovers he is in fact on a non-stop service to Constantinople. This first installment of the tale gets him as far as the bridge over the English Channel. Future sections will involve cannibals, spies and magic carpets – yes it is going to be as amazing as it sounds, and lyricist Reggie Chamberlain-King is hard at work on materials for a printed travel almanac that will accompany the final recording.
But first things first: rhythm section. We did this the way we should have done ‘Bad Joke’, by having Rhodri and Ben in the same room playing the song together. Amazingly, considering how many strange changes of tempo, time signature and musical genre the song covers, even in its first four minutes, Rhodri and Ben breezed through the whole thing in single takes. The song starts with a fanfare and march, some pomp and circumstance to introduce the big steam train, then it goes into a jaunty piano-led segment to introduce us to Theodore. I want the song to sound like something from a 1970s album for kids, the kind of thing Bernard Cribbins might have sung, and the first time we played it as a band (in a freezing cold rehearsal on the afternoon of the Hammersmith Apollo gig last December) I tried and failed to explain to Ben and Rhodri the kind of seventies funk vibe I was going for. When in January we rehearsed it again for a show at the Luminaire, I was encouraging Ben to play more fills on the toms when Rhodri said that it was sounding like the theme tune from ‘To The Manor Born’ – that was the key! It was Ronnie Hazelhurst that I was trying to channel all this time. The minute we figured that out there was no need to explain any more, Ben and Rhodri knew exactly what to do. So these verses of narration for Theodore’s character became known in the recording session as ‘the Penelope Keith sections’. We’ve ended up with something which could well pass for the theme tune from a seventies sitcom, so mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned. There’s an orchestra-only passage during which Theodore sings his school hymn to himself for morale, then we enter a dramatic passage for which I had written out an octave bassline which suddenly suggested disco percussion – more spirit of the seventies! It’s not how I imagined it when I wrote it but it’s certainly a lot better. Can’t wait to get the rest of the orchestra in to finish it off.
Other tracks we recorded bass and drums for in the session included The Lady Sleeps (a dramatic setting of Poe’s poem The Sleeper – it was composed for but rejected by my old band Scarlet’s Well and I’ve never liked the thought of it being buried alive so I’m doing it MFMO-style), The Taste Of Hair and three of the songs from the musical Master Flea: The Flea Tamer, The Flea National Anthem and Master Flea’s Song About The Wisdom Of Animals.
With these three strands to the recording becoming apparent (Flea stuff, Trans-Carpathian stuff and context-less bits and pieces) I’m not quite sure what to do with all the recordings when they’re done? Do we make an album that features bits and pieces of all of these projects or do we plough ahead and release them as separate projects? I’d really like to make a Master Flea concept album for kids, maybe get an actor to provide a Happiness Stan-style narration linking the songs. The Trans-Carpathian Express song is one day going to come out as a single recording with aforementioned accompanying travel companion but do I release the episodes individually as part of other albums? For now I’m just going to keep on recording stuff until I run out of money and then figure out how best to make sense of all the material.
The next Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra gig will be at Dickon Edwards’ new club night Against Nature at Proud Camden in London on June the 2nd. Tickets are only a fiver. We’ll be sometime after 9.30pm.
Saturday’s gig at the Musical Comedy Awards semi finals was unusual but still fun. We crammed four string players (Louisa, Tom, Dan and Cat), four brass players (Steve, Kate and The League Of Nathans), a clarinettist (Sarah), a drummer (Ben) and an accordionist (self) onto the little stage at the Wilmington Arms.
We played:
Gooseberry Rag
The History Of Europe
Maybe
The Taste Of Hair
Four Minutes And Thirty-Three Seconds
Considering the nature of the event it was a curiously difficult gig – the crowd had sat through nearly three hours of non-stop musical whimsy, and of course being out of competition we were the only act on the bill who hadn’t brought an army of supporters to cheer us on and vote for us, so it felt a bit Billy-No-Mates to begin with, but it was nice to chat to new fans afterwards – thank-you in particular if you bought a CD!
Hoping to announce some new gigs very shortly.
