Wolverine Blues
I Am Insatiable in My Need to Feed
Hello!
I’m going to jump in and apologise in advance for any typos. I’m the worst proofreader in the world and heavily rely and my wife Anikó to make my work readable. Right now, she’s juggling a dozen things herself and I haven’t got the heart to give her one more thing to do.
What’s up, Doc?
Well, the concert of The Night Bride and other stuff went of really well.
We had a sold out audience of a wide range of ages and everybody seemed to have a great time. It’s fun to be back doing some contemporary classical music. It scratches a very different itch for me than the rock, jazz and folk stuff.
It’s been a bit of a manic time recently with The Night Bride rehearsals, Breizharock gigs, Motocultor and book launches.
Breizharock are a band that fuse Breton music and rock and I recently joined them as their new bassist. It was a bit of a frantic learning curve for the first gig that took place on 14 August. I don’t really have a background in Breton dances, so it took a while for me to really grock it. However, grock it I did and the gig went really well and was super fun.
The very next day was the start of Motocultor. Motocultur is a rock and metal festival that takes place over four days and is often freferred to as “mini Hellfest”. The actual event ground is only 17 minutes from our house and studio, so we don’t have to do the camping bit. For me, this year’s highlights we Opeth, Clutch, Red Fang, Exodus, Jinjer, DeWolff and Moundrag.
Talking of DeWolff, you might remember I helped make a record with them over at Kerwax a couple of years ago. While we were hanging our after they opened the festival on the main stage, I found out from Pablo that that album had gone to number 1 in the Netherlands album chart. It’s kind of exciting to learn something that you worked on was a genuine hit.
The photo above with DeWolff was taken when we were watching one of my favourite bands from Brittany, Moundrag. One I’ve used to describe Moundrag to people that I think work pretty well is, “They’re like ELP, but fun.”
Once all the gig craziness was out of the way, we held a book launch for the press in our studio. The book in question was Duchess Anne: A Fabulous Destiny, which was written by Michel Priziac and translated into English from the original French by our resident polyglot, Anikó Tóth.
Oh, and talking of press…
Anyway, I’ve had a couple of days where I’ve been able to get back to making some improvements to the studio. One of these projects has been to create an airlock between the liveroom and the control room, as well as one between the live room and the outer doors.
We also found that the stones between the outer and inner walls of the studio needed building up. This was a pretty tedious job, but I was glad I had Anikó to work with on this one. She likes collecting stones, doing puzzles and has way more masonry experience than me, so she mostly stayed at the top of the scaffold doing the building, while I mixed cement and carried buckets of it up to her. Pretty good teamwork, I thought.
All this needs wrapping up tomorrow, as I’ve got to get the studio back together for some recording sessions starting on Wednesday. On Sunday, I have something very interesting starting, but more on that next week.
Who Do You Think You Are?
Just the other day (I say "the other day”, but it could be anywhere from a couple of weeks ago to months back), I stumbled on this when scrolling Instagram.
It’s an interesting enough video as it is and makes some good points, but it also got me thinking about my great-grandfather. “How so?”, I hear you ask. Well, I’ll get to that in my own sweet roundabout way.
My paternal grandmother’s father passed away when she was only 11 years old, so we didn’t have a huge amount of information about him. However, Nan did always keep a photograph of him on display until she herself passed away only a few years ago. What she did know of him was that he was an indigenous person from Canada, who had been born in a log cabin and lived around the area of St John’s in Newfoundland. At some point he joined the British merchant navy, found himself in Liverpool and married my great-grandmother, who was a widow at the time.
My sister and I have always thought it pretty exciting to have an ancestor indigenous to the Americas and have often threatened to take a trip to St John’s to see if we could find out more about this mystery man, but, so far, we’ve been all talk.
A couple of years back, Anikó and I were attending our Prof. Steve Davismoon’s inaugural concert at Liverpool Hope University, and, at the dinner, we found ourselves sitting next to a professor of ethnography and got chatting about my great-grandfather. On hearing what we knew about my ancestor, the professor said, “Oh, he was almost certainly of the Métis Nation”.
If you remember the Professor Neil video above, he argues that Wolverine is likely born into the Métis Nation in the area of Calgary. What we also know about Wolverine is that he’s short (5’ 3”) and has an insatiable appetite. Sound like anyone we know?
Now, I realise Calgary is over 6,000km from St. John’s, but I love the idea that that maybe, just maybe I have a distant cousin in the Wolverine.
Right, it’s almost 1 o’clock, my eyes are healing over and I need to make an early start of building tomorrow morning.
Until next week.
Stay noisy!
Steve
Nice work as always, bub.