There are now triple-CD Halloween compilations for the discerning DJ who wants to make a good impression at bookings in late October. But when I got a fright-night booking in 2003 I had to rake through my old vinyl and do some primitive conversions to MP3 for the gig.
Cumbria is bounded by the sea on three sides, all them a long way from my base in the east near the boundary with Yorkshire. When you say you’re from Cumbria, everyone says “Oh, the Lake District!” But there’s far more to it than that. It stretches from the Badlands near the Scottish border in the north to Barrow in Furness in the south; from the rural and well-named paradise of the Eden Valley in the east to Whitehaven on the Atlantic coast.
The county has struggled economically and welcomes a lot of state investment – ship-building and weaponry for the Royal Navy in Barrow, and Europe’s largest nuclear power site at Sellafield near Whitehaven. My booking was in the village of Gosforth, halfway between the two and 76 miles from my home near Kirkby Stephen.
Construction of the venue, Gosforth Hall, began in 1658 so its architecture lent itself well to a spooky party. Surely there were real ghosts here? The manager had done a fantastic job of decoration for the evening – cobwebs everywhere, candles galore, and a giant TV screen showing horror movie The Crow on a loop. The Goths of west Cumbria who made up the audience had made a big effort with their fancy dress.
My contributions were obvious things like the Specials’ Ghost Town, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in the House. Spooky has always been a favourite of mine, either as recorded by the inimitable Dusty Springfield in 1970 or in the Atlanta Rhythm Section cover version of 1979. And of course there’s always The Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett.
It’s hard not to like The Monster Mash. It was a cheesy novelty record from the outset, but it has some good jokes told over a classic rock’n’roll chord sequence. You can dance and smile to it, and if the mood is right the DJ may even persuade you to sing along with its female backing group. It was that sort of a night in Gosforth and I think I played it two or three times.
I saw The Crow two or three times that night too, and so did most of the customers; it was a smallish crowd and the big screen kept them away from the dance floor. But the whole evening was very good natured. It can be quite liberating, when people don’t need the insistent beat of dance music, to be able to play something different for a change. You become more of a radio DJ and in Gosforth I was more than happy to play requests which would normally have cleared the dance floor for me.
The Monster Mash was a fixture elsewhere, in my repertoire as a guitarist. A year earlier I had joined forces with another musician who wanted to launch a monthly open mic night. We made an unlikely duo, about twenty years apart in age and with a very eclectic range of instruments between us: Linnhe played banjo and acoustic guitar, and I contributed various guitars, percussion, bouzouki and vocals. We played everything from folk music to heavy metal, and our bouzouki/banjo rendition of Smoke on the Water was … innovative.
The event, The Mostly Acoustic Jam Night, ran for at least five years in various formats and venues. It started at the White Lion pub in Kirkby Stephen (now called the Taggy Man). Linnhe and I introduced each evening with a short set of two or three numbers. We made an effort to be seasonal and at Halloween our selection usually included Ghost Town and The Monster Mash.
The latter follows a very conventional chord progression shared by many rock’n’roll hits including Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock; and as well as getting our audience to sing along with the backing vocals of The Monster Mash we inserted the falsetto “LA-A-A, la-la-la-la LA-A-A” from the Sedaka and Elton songs, to the delight of those present. You could say it was a mash-up.
No comments:
Post a Comment