Page 6. “Suitcase Full of Blues” and “Unfinished Business”
Suitcase Full of Blues:
I retired from full time work early in 2013 and was sitting in the Greenshed one morning when I had a phone call from Fran Silvester. I didn’t know Fran, but she explained to me that a former workmate of mine suggested she contact because I played bass and Fran’s band was looking for a fill-in bass player for a gig. The band was Suitcase Full of Blues. It consisted of Fran (vocals), her partner James Cox (sax and clarinet), Bronwen Allgate (keyboards, flute and sax as required), Ken Holden (drums) and a guitarist Dave? (whose surname I’ve forgotten). The band was based around Maldon/Castlemaine. I was pretty keen to play as often as I could, having made playing and recording music my main aim after retirement from full-time work.
I went along to the first rehearsal, travelling with Bronwen who also lived in Ballarat. I took both my upright bass and 5-string bass guitar (I had shouted myself to the 5-string as a retirement present, and, of course, asked Noycey to build it!). The rehearsal went pretty well as did the gig at a winery (Idavue Estate, Heathcote). The regular bass player had commitments that prevented him playing regularly, and I got the ongoing job.
An off-shoot of the Suitcases, consisting of Fran, James, Dave and I played several Sunday evenings at the “Radio Springs Hotel”, Lyonville. We couldn’t fit keys or drums into the tiny space available, so a modified repertoire, and we needed to keep the level way down.
Dave, the guitarist, had a disagreement with Fran and left, to be replaced by Nicholas “Nico” Cathary, and that remained the line up for the Suitcases until Ken quit and Fran and James moved to Adelaide in 2018. My drummer mate Pud Holcombe played the last two gigs with the Suitcases after Ken left.
The Suitcases were a working band with pretty frequent gigs at places like wineries, farmer’s markets, pubs and, memorably, a couple of Castlemaine Jazz Festivals. I learnt a lot from the musicianship of Bronwen, James and Nico, especially regarding jazz harmonies and chord sequences, loved Fran’s husky vocals and formed a good rhythmic bond with Ken. The five years with the Suitcases were very satisfying for me. We did some recording in the Greenshed (check it out with this link), and go to the Suitcase pages using the button below.
Unfinished Business:
Jack Harvey had been writing songs for many years. Noycey and I would get together with Jack and jam some of them over time, and we talked about making good recordings one day. For me, that opportunity came after I retired from full-time work and started to collect the necessaries for recording the bands I was involved with. We asked John Ducardus and Dave Dahlenburg from the Surf Shadows to join us and set about it in the Greenshed. Our objective was to record enough to produce an album as a record of Jack’s songwriting. We tossed around a few names for the project (I remember “Trajectories” and “Long Haul”) before Jack settled on Unfinished Business.
Unfinished Business was really my first serious attempt at recording for a production. I bought a set of drum mikes, an expanded digital interface, additional plug-ins for Cubase DAW and put together some acoustic screens. I had a double-glazed glass screen installed between the band room and my office where the recording and mixing took place. And Unfinished Business was in business!
We recorded mainly live. Jack said he was a folk singer who believed in the organic process of playing live. We did some over-dubbing–I would usually re-do my bass because my focus was split between playing bass and hoping the recording was happening (we didn’t have anyone else to see that it was). We over-dubbed harmony vocals and Noycey often over-dubbed his harmonica or sax.
As the tracks came together I would do some mixing and send it around for comment. I reckon I made many mistakes common to beginners, like over-processing with multiple effects, and I can remember getting quite stressed about the amount of bleed there was between the various mikes. My attempts to try to isolate an instrument from bleed from other instruments were futile! These days I’m much more inclined to just live with the bleed and choose mikes that minimise it in the first place.
Most of the recording was done in 2014, and the album was produced in 2015. We had it commercially burned and printed, never intending to sell it for profit. We all dobbed in to cover costs and sold a few copies cheaply, but the intention was to produce them for friends and family. We were never intending to play the songs live or do gigs or anything of the sort, so we weren’t promoting a band, just tidying up some unfinished business. We have played around with doing Volume 2, but COVID and life has got in the way and it may never happen. Jack still has many songs in his folders and on his clipboard though! The business remains unfinished!
Greenshed Music 