Thankfully it's been a bit warmer this week. I'm not a fan whatsoever of snow and ice and the past two weeks have seen plenty of that. We in West Yorkshire (sheltered by the Pennines) avoided the worst of it but the one night it did choose to come down of course I had a gig! Sadly I had to turn back from going to play with Atlanta Soul in Stockport but the following night's solo gig at nearby Greetland went ahead as planned.

There's not been that many gigs of late but that's about to change with a busier week or so ahead. This Saturday it's Altanta Soul again, this time on my side of the hills and the The BitterSweet Shop is back and playing at The Ship in Leeds on Tuesday night (the 21st). On Thursday 23rd it's the return of the Acoustic Trio at the Chemic and then on Saturday I'll be performing with Morris & The Minors in Bingley.

I've been listening to some interesting music lately. I finally heard my first Ryan Adams album 'Ashes And Fire' a few weeks ago. After years of mistakenly thinking people were talking about Bryan (I'm joking slightly, but it did once happen!) I thought it was time to find out why so many people rate him so highly. Well, I can sort of see what they mean but I think if you've already heard plenty of Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan the result is less impressive. Also the lyrics didn't move me in the slightest. The production is excellent and it's all real instruments and vintage sounds but I'm afraid I'll stick my old man mentality and say music 'ain't what it used to be' and 'it's all been done before'.

I moved on to listen to Noah & The Whale's 'Last Night On Earth' album. I was forewarned this was more derivative and there is one track which is a dead ringer for Tom Petty's 'Don't Come Around Here No More.' It's a good album though, and short too. There's no unwanted songs on there.

After what I said about Adams, Ryan I thought it would be a good idea to dig out some Bob Dylan. I selected his 80s release 'Oh Mercy' and was immediately more moved by the lyrics. There wasn't one song on here that I'd heard before but there were several I would listen to repeatedly, which shows the sheer depth of his writing if nothing else.

Inspired by the Strictly Come Dancing touring band (!) I also listened to 'Club Classics Volume 1' by Soul 2 Soul. This was never my thing back in the day but bloody hell fire it is now. What a brilliant record, with very little evidence of 80s dating in the sound. It may have taken me 22 years, but I'm now a big fan of this album!!

Well it's been a long while since the last blog. I'd like to wish my reader a happy new year and hope he had a good Christmas too!

There's not many gigs planned at the moment as I'm working off my 'quota' from before Christmas. On the schedule I work from, I reckon I'm the equivalent of about 6 weeks over-quota at the moment! Now that may well sound like a cop-out but when there's lots of gigs and an outbreak of rehearsals with various projects other things I'd like to be doing get put off. (I think I wrote in one of the previous couple of blogs about the number of bands I'm in at the moment).

The things that get put off are namely recording/songwriting and practicing. The latter may come as a shock to you, but yes-getting to do some proper, structured, productive practice is not very easy to fit in when you're hanging round some hotel waiting to play a gig.

The writing and recording process is of course more time-consuming. I'm fairly quick at writing songs (not necessarily any good, but quick) but the arrangement and production process takes a lot longer. There's so many decisions to make every step of the way, and then there might be some backing vocals to arrange and record, or a dreaded tambourine part. Anyway, the main thing is that I would at some stage soon like to put some new songs out as it's getting on for 3 years since the last album and I always find it exciting working towards the next album.

So I'm not being idle, honest!!

There were a couple of great gigs with Atlanta Soul just before 2011 ended. The Cafe Artisan gig on Dec 17th was excellent with a great sound, and the New Year's Eve gig at Heywood Civic was also a belter, and easily the best NYE gig I've ever done. I've had some really dodgy Dec 31st gigs (mentioning no caravan clubs) so perhaps this wasn't the stiffest competition, but I think it's still worth saying how much I enjoyed it.


SOCIAL NETWORKING

Things are changing rapidly on the social networking front so I thought I'd fill my reader in on this area too. The current state of play from my point of view is:

nb: click the title to link to my page for each one!

1) MYSPACE (remember that one?): Completely deserted and one-legged compared to it's heyday with numerous programming issues. A shadow of it's former self. However, still better than Facebook for promoting music (see below!).

2) FACEBOOK: The biggest site and easily my least favourite. Any site that persistantly tells you what to do, who you can or can't add and only lets you add people you 'know' is no good to me for promoting my music. The whole bloody idea is to attract people you don't 'know' who then you get to 'know' if they decide they like the songs. People I already 'know' I 'know' already and therefore I don't need to pester them to get to 'know' me when they already 'know' me anyway. This whole 'say no to strangers' culture has meant that in nearly 2 years of daily persistance, I've managed to attract 200 people onto my group page. I could do that on Myspace in a couple of days. For me, Facebook only works if you have a circle of friends to gossip to about nothing in particular. I have a different medium for doing that, it's called a pub. Everytime I trawl down the 'home' page I feel like I've gatecrashed a gigantic coffee morning.
No wonder I keep getting banned!

3) YOUTUBE: The site that now means there's virtually no need to buy a CD ever again (oops, that's buggered up my next album!) and a musician's dream for learning coversongs quckly. It also had a modest but very useful social networking content called 'friends' and for the more commited you could be a 'subscriber'. With a little effort over the past few months inviting people with similar tastes in music to be my 'friend' I'd managed to treble my number of channel and video views....
Then wallop, they change the format, do away with the 'friends' function and make everyone be a 'subscriber'. This removes the social networking tool called being a 'friend' and leaves anyone attempting to reach out to people (me) with only the 'subscribe' function which makes me seem like a spammer. Of course the net result was no-one subscribed back (they were happy to be 'friends') and my traffic plummeted in the first week to a fraction of what it had been. Great.
The most frustrating thing about youtube now is that there's all these people saying exactly the same as me on commenting about favourite songs, but I've no effective way of reaching them.

4)GOOGLE+: I levelled with youtube (owned by Google) in thinking they must have tactically killed youtube as a networking site in order to lure people onto Google +. I joined a couple of weeks ago. Any site that offers to take on Facebook is a friend of mine! Unfortunately no-one uses it and it's a complete waste of time.

5) TWITTER: The last great white hope and, thankfully, one that appears to be working well. I've been on it only a few days and already I'm really enjoying it. I'm finding that the simple approach of short messages is the best way to communicate with people within this multitude of choice. Even better, by syncing it to Facebook I now don't have to go on Facebook. AND, better still, I can pretend I'm a personal friend of Sharron Davies, oops.


So there you go, have fun with whatever you're doing and remember: Do you know this person personally, and have you read our draconinan spam policy? xx

There's not been too much tangible to report on lately, which is curious seen as I'm actually very busy at the moment! The less time I spend on solo projects the busier everything else seems to be which is good but it can make balancing everything up a little tricky.

So I thought just for fun I'd list all the projects I'm currently involved in. They say blogs should always have a human interest angle after all! Let's call it 'a fascinating insight into the daily life of a (poor) working musician'!!

In no particular order:

1) Solo gigs:

These could be either original material or covers-orientated or a mixture of both. Either way I have to practice new and existing songs in order to do the gigs. Covers can also be sub-divided into well-known numbers (for the paying customer) and less well-known ones.

2) Paul Jeffery Trio gigs:

A similar scenario to the above, with it's own set of rehearsals, different songs, and the all-important vocal harmony rehearsals (not strictly necessary in the case of my solo gigs!).

3) The BitterSweetShop gigs:

This is my project with Katie Chadwick which involves yet more rehearsals, different songs and also an album project which is part finished.

4) Atlanta Soul Band gigs:

For which I am a member and we also rehearse for these.

5) Blueprint gigs:

Another covers band I play with and rehearse with.

6) Morris And The Minors gigs:

Yet another covers band I play with.

7) Songwriting and Recordings:

Yes, when I'm not gigging or rehearsing with 6 different live projects I'm writing, arranging and recording new original material! And just to sub-divide things further, these songs may be for me to sing or someone else to sing and could be for a variety of destinations. These include my own solo albums and also other possible future collaborations and side projects such as the Paradise Street one a few years back.

8) Throw in updating and networking via myspace, youtube and facebook, oh and typing this right now, that should give you some idea of why I've been busy lately! As I said that's just the music projects too!


I hope that was at least a bit interesting! I also think it helps explain why questions like 'what sort of music do you do' are not that straightforward to answer!

I was performing solo at Verve in Leeds on Thurs Oct 27th. I haven't done many solo gigs lately due to all the band commitments but I'm still as keen as ever to get back to doing more of that. I'm talking mainly about the 'originals' type of gig as opposed to the covers ones. I can't believe it's 5 years since I started making 2 or 3 trips on average per week into Leeds to play at open mics and songwriter/acoustic nights.

On the Saturday just gone it was back to the Rose & Crown at Greetland with the Trio where it was the busiest night I've seen so far in there. It took a while to warm up, but eventually the response we got was very enthusiastic, with a second set running to around an hour and a quarter!

This Week:
Coming up this Sunday (20th) is my final New Inn, Barwick-in-Elmet gig of the year.

Music:
I've just started re-listening to Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds. A musician friend of mine said recently that a good arranger is more valuable than a good composer, and if there is some truth in that then it's certainly born out on this album. Everybody with an interest in how music is arranged should go and listen to it. The choice of sounds alone is amazing, and of course the songwriting isn't exactly mediocre either.

Web News:
It's taken me over a year to realise it (!) but garageband.com has shut down. This is the site I once used quite regularly to get my music reviewed by other musicians (very brave) and to see how the songs ranked alongside others as they moved up and down the charts. I had two songs ranked as 'track of the day' which were 'Young Lost & Hopeful' and 'Coming Up For Air', the latter being under the Paradise Street name.

The reason I found this out is that I was looking to revive my presence there and get some of my new material reviewed. So I'm now on the lookout for a similar site to join, so please let me know if you can recommend one.

The Paul Jeffery Trio was out again last Friday night (Oct 21st) playing for the Keighley/Worth Valley Beer Festival in the Oxenhope railway shed. As venues go this was fairly unique. I can honestly say I've never played in a room with so many huge steam trains before, nor have I played in such a nice smelling room either (I like the oil smell). I have however played in many rooms that smelt terrible.

The room was also enormous and contained hundreds of people and Lord knows how many beers. We played for an hour and I was really pleased with our set. Music at beer festivals is largely for background purposes but it was still more or less well received.

This Week:

I've a fairly hectic week playing solo at Verve in Leeds tomorrow night (Thurs 27th) at about 9pm. I haven't done many solo original sets lately so I'm really looking forward to that. Then on Friday and Saturday I'm playing keyboards for a new band, Blueprint, with both gigs over Bingley way.

Music:

I heard the new Evanescence album. No really, I did. You must play it loud. Over the years there have been 2 occasions when it's been suggested I produce a song in their style. Unfortunately both times this occured after I'd finished the song and produced it in a different style. Now I've finally heard them properly and it's really impressive. I'm not sure if I'll get asked to produce something like that again, but just in case maybe I should do a version of all my songs like that.

I must apologise for the lack of blog action lately. I'm well behind with news updates although I can't believe it's over a month since I got chance to get on here....so I'll do my best to rattle through some of the happenings since what looks like Sept 14th!!

The BitterSweetShop did a gig at the New Conservatory in Leeds on Thurs Oct 6th. We were the 'headline' slot on what is basically an open mic night. Main feature of the venue is the grand piano which is in fairly good condition and would be even better facing side on rather than backwards with the player facing the back wall and having his/her back to the audience! Needless to say I didn't offer to turn it round!

We played 6 songs which went well and despite not being able to see the audience Katie tells me they were listening and watching!

I must just quickly mention the Atlanta Soul gig at the Hilton on Sat 8th in Manchester. This was an amazing night with such diverse acts as Anthony Costa (from Blue) and Bruce Airhead sharing the bill (and dressing room) with us. Please google Bruce Airhead to find out what he does because if I try and describe it in words on here you'll think I've totally lost it this time.

I was away for a few days on the Isle Of Man last week before returning and playing with the trio last Saturday at the Abbey Inn. It was a fairly quiet night but good to play a longer set of acoustic stuff. Highlight of the night happened before we'd played a note when a punter asked who the singer on the piped music was that she liked, well it was one of my songs.....needless to say she'd gone home by the time we went on stage. That is the true story of being a musician!

Plenty more going on but that's the last 5 weeks or so in a nutshell, cheers.

Firstly some photos from the aforementioned biker do with Atlanta Soul in Stockport!





Last (2) Weeks:

2 weeks to catch up on here, starting with my solo gig at the New Inn, Barwick-in-Elmet which was on Sunday 4th Sept. I always enjoy this gig as it's almost my 'local' gigwise. I've been playing there now for nearly 5 years, and I still haven't quite got it right...no, seriously, it's a great gig for me because I get to play a wide selection of originals and covers and I have a loyal following who listen to what I'm doing. As a gig that certainly would be classified as 'intimate' I also get to practice talking to an audience, which in the context of solo gigs is very important. I'm really keen to develop this side of my act, so that the stories and comments add to the songs I'm playing.

This particular gig also saw me attempting to develop another idea, which is that of doing happier songs! Anyone who knows my own material will know that it's not the most cheerful bunch of songs. Now there was a time when the more emotional, heart-ripping the song was the more I felt I could get behind it and perform it. Now I'm realising that it's wise not to always be like that and to develop my sunnier side as well! I'm in the process of addressing this regarding originals but more immediately I'm adding more happy covers, particularly for the full-length gigs like this.

I've noticed 2 things from playing gigs over the past couple of years: 1) Slow songs are often frowned upon and 2) Introspective ie 'depressing' songs are frowned on. Bugger. That's about 90% of my repertoire gone!! I have a theory both are connected to the recession we're in. Yes, you know the one the govt denies but the one we're actually in. People need cheering up and taking out of themselves at gigs, not taking into themselves and being made to think too much about the darker side of life.

So anyway, another enjoyable night at the New Inn, with some happier songs too! It's just a shame that there aren't more venues like that in the local area. I hope I'm wrong in saying that so if anyone knows of any intimate pubs within a fuel-affordable range of Brighouse that host solo/acoustic nights to an attentive audience, please let me know!

That pretty much takes us up to date for the time being, I'm more than freeman, thank you for listening*

*that last bit will mean nothing if you live outside the UK, and probably nothing if you do.