I live in Aberdare, about 20 miles NW of Cardiff. When there was a proper music shop in Aberdare I had lots of enquiries for lessons. We haven’t had a local music shop for some years so no new students for a long time. However, I’ve always had the option to deliver guitar teaching at a family address in Cardiff and recently I decided to take up this option.

So if you live in or near Cardiff and believe you yourself or your children could benefit I would be delighted.

There are lots of good guitar players – not so many real inspirational teachers. I am a qualified teacher with my own tried and tested teaching methods, strategies and materials. Students of all ages have enjoyed the lessons and made good progress.

I am registered with RGT – Registry of Guitar Tutors – and have a current CRB police check for working with children and vulnerable persons. My teaching covers a range of styles and genres, electric and acoustic, plectrum and fingerstyle; jazz, blues, rock, classical.

If you’d like to know more please visit my teaching website www.cdf-gtr.com.

There has been some rescheduling. The proper album recording has been delayed until later in the year.

Before then I would like to get some informal pre-view gigs in – to thoroughly roadtest the songs – so that I am well honed and slick by the time the album is officially released.

I’ve done a fair few open mics but only a couple of single set gigs in the Small Symphonies format. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be giving my best in these preview gigs but there may be teething troubles. I’m hoping to have projected images in the background for some songs…never done that before. That said, anybody who has seen any of the other hundreds of gigs will know that I soldier on through adversity and  deliver the goods.

These pre-view gigs can be free of charge to any good cause;  private bookings  at a very preferential rate.

What is a good cause? Humanist, Environmental, Socialist. That sort of thing…I know, typical bloody Guardian Reader hippy.

A gig can be at a normal venue: club, pub or community centre; or at your home. I don’t take up very much room and I don’t have to be loud so even the smallest performance space could be viable.

To promote this phase of the project I’ve organised a Demo set of songs on my SoundCloud (see above ). These are Work in Progress recordings from last year – they’re not perfect. There is also a rough cut of a video which is in process of production by Welsh Icons. That should give you the flavour.

I would stress it is NOT EASY LISTENING. Lots of people have felt uplifted by my songs but party music it ain’t. There may be disturbing images in the back projections. Strike that – if Norris has anything to do with the visuals there will be disturbing images aplenty.

If you or your organisation are interested please Private Message me through Facebook.

my lady saw me weep 2.1 (c) 2010 written and performed by Cameron Pyke, this recording (c) 15 Sept 2010 by Cameron Pyke & Ambisonix, remastered by Ambisonix.

my lady saw me weep 2.0 (c) 2010 written and performed by Cameron Pyke, this recording (c) 15 Sept 2010 by Cameron Pyke & Ambisonix.

Work in Progress, complete with mistakes and issues as one take, no edits or overdubs.

22 October 2010

This piece has been ‘up’ for some time now without any comment on my part. It’s doing quite well on the stats – second highest performer – my thanks to everyone who’s brought this about.

It’s a pretty little tune.  I think I can say that fairly safely without compromising my modesty – at least the public face of it. Hey, nobody does this sort of thing without a grossly inflated ego.

The title is an inversion of ‘I Saw My Lady Weep’ by John Dowland. It’s not entirely serious,  not really a pastiche …and, let’s face it, not fit to be compared with the Dowland.  Maybe it conjures up Tudor ladies tripping some stately moves round their handbags. However, the harmony is  a ragbag of clunky triads and jazz chords.  Add to this some quasi-Flamenco razzing and you’ve got a real mongrel. But it hangs together!

On a scale of moderate self harm to full slitting of the wrists how suicidal does it seem? Nah, not really.

There are words. It was a song once. I played a recording to some people. Once. It was so ‘orrible I decided to amputate the tune from the words. But being a frugal sort and not averse to a bit of affectation I kept the words with the tune. You’ve heard of Mendelsohn’s Songs Without Words? This a Song What is Not Meant to be Sung But Has Got Words Anyway. You may appreciate the conceit even if the label needs working on.

The words are published as a separate post. Feel free to have a look. It’s lament on middle age graced by maybe one snatch of grim humour. I make no apologies. The likes of Roger Waters have got very rich bleating on in much the same vein.

And yet it’s a pretty tune. This reminds me of when I used to (several lifetimes ago) sell fine art reproductions – packaged in a rather dubious format.  I really shouldn’t be owning up to this, serious artist and all that.  It paid the rent.

Anyway, Kandinsky pictures sold like hot cakes. Well, they would. They’re… PRETTY!

Certain influential Russians didn’t like Kandinsky because he was individualistic and bourgeois. The Nazis exhibited and then burnt (Arts Council take note) some of his work because it was degenerate.  I cannot honestly admit to being moved by any profound political message emanating from a Kandinsky picture. Maybe it’s because I’ve never seen an original. Personally I find about as much controversy in a Kandinsky picture as an episode of Sesame Street. That doesn’t mean it’s not great art.

Conversely, I heard a customer say “Oh, I love that Guernica…have you got a Guernica? What about a nice big Guernica for the dining room wall?…so relaxing…”  Not for me to tell her that Guernica was a snapshot of genocide in progress.  And for that reason I would never have  had a Guernica on the stall. Shame, missed a sale there.

awash with empty sorrow

nothing she had done or said

nothing she could do or say

nothing she could ease or soothe

nothing she could give or take away

my lady saw me weep

I eat and sleep of nights

I veg and watch TV

couch maniac and sex potato

I’ll probably live a little yet

life’s knocked the stuffing out of me

the straw man has become the man of spam

not defeated yet but giving ground

to gain an inch I have to fight a mile

a coward spoiling for a fight

so much is wrong and I

am tired and uninspired to put it right

a many splintered thing is misery

and so I float

light as a ghost

nobody does sad like me

kind words and happy endings get me

going everytime

so many have just cause to cry

so much of grief that all

human tears were far too dry

so tongue in cheek,  I

slyly peep

smile the melancholic

crocodile

old head on young shoulders

young mind in an old frame

the pristine and decrepit

co-mingled middle age

my lady saw me weep

awash with empty sorrow

nothing she had done or said

nothing she could do or say

nothing she could ease or soothe

nothing she could give or take away

my lady saw me weep

poor boy –  in a rich kids’ country town

aching  journey from my valleys home

greedy people – how they hate each other so

all end up in the same place – why -  I don’t know

I’m long gone

out of this place

freezing in a barn on a winter Sunday afternoon

schoolboy band – gonna make the bigtime soon

we gave a show – they just talked the whole way through

no boppy twelve bar

gonna put your hate across for you

There was a lady – I wanted her so

she carried her reality in a dream along with her too – like me

and the jocks said can these two freaks

ever really get it on?

she left soon – I need to think

it caused her some pain

walking between classrooms on a dripping february day

Ma’s bought me my Les Paul – my head is full of fire

y’know it’s gonna be

like Johnny B. Goode

the poor boy’s gonna buy this town – spraycan all over

Liar.

(c) 1979, 1993, 2010 Cameron Pyke, Small Symphonies.

This miserable song is about my schooldays. It was written within three years of me leaving school.

For the bleeding heart stuff I can make no apology. Raw as it is,  it only hints at the damage, to me and to others.

I was a bright kid and I won a scholarship which gave me a place in what was, at the time, South Wales’ most prestigious state grammar school. The drawback was that the family lived in Aberdare and the school was in Cowbridge – some thirty five miles of dreary B roads away.

Cowbridge Grammar School had a Boarding House of about 50 boys, mostly culled from the best 11+ results across the region and I became one of these Boarders. In addition there was the normal intake of Dayboys from the surrounding area which brought the numbers up to about 500.

The Gothic school buildings and the quiet country town were, on the surface, charming.

South Wales at the time was class polarised.  Streetwise kids from the Valleys nowadays know that they need education. In the home town of my childhood many people had no time for education whatsoever. There was no need for it – the coal mines would provide – and they did. Few miners may actually have enjoyed working in the pits. But the unions were strong and housing was cheap. One of my abiding memories of Aberdare in the 60s and 70s was the number of new cars parked on the streets.

Education was for the Bosses. This attitude even pervaded grammar schools. I remember discussion about a grammar school kid (one of two that I knew of on the street) about to take an O level in English: would he pass (they don’t give O levels to just anybody, see) and why bother anyway?

With the hardcore working class so contemptuous of education and middle class values I suppose it was only natural for an environment like Cowbridge to develop.

There always were middle class ghettos. But my overriding impression is that go-getting ambitious  parents converged on Cowbridge and its precious Grammar School on a phenomenal scale – that the population of the town was unnaturally skewed towards the professional, academic and successful. I believe this influx was at its height in the late sixties – never more so than when the grammar school system was in its last gasps.

Cowbridge was a hothouse for the competitive, aggressive, greedy and just plain nasty. To this day I can’t get over how many obnoxious people all ended up in the same place.

And that’s just the town.

Let’s try a thought experiment in social engineering. Let’s gather together 50 children from pushy parents with high aspirations – parents who may have themselves grown up feeling suffocated by the working class fire blanket on individualism – people who had something to prove – and if they couldn’t, their children would. Let’s confine them to close quarters and shut the door on them. Let’s deprive them of normal contact with adults, especially parents. Let’s make sure that apart from schoolwork they are largely unoccupied. Let’s deprive them of all privacy. Let these 50 or so kids be exclusively male…male adolescents. One other thing…let them by and large police themselves.

You couldn’t make this up, could you?

During my time in the Boarding House of Cowbridge Grammar School I was witness to and sometimes victim of violence, bullying and mental cruelty on a persistent daily basis that the modern day professional – police officer, social worker, teacher – would find shocking and inexcusable.  Many years later I discovered in myself the outrage that this experience warranted, a way of life that was not normal, lawful or acceptable in a civilised country.

Part of the problem was the code – the unwritten gangster law which forbids whistleblowing and grassing up.  This was accepted by the staff. Perhaps they felt powerless to get to grips with what was going on daily right under their noses but I have since seen how serious, committed professionals work to subvert and break down the code. Rather, I think the same protocols that protected bullies amongst the boys also served to protect violent and abusive staff.

During my first week at Cowbridge Gammar School I was beaten up by a senior master for running in the wrong direction in a games lesson – struck to the ground and given repeated blows to the head. I was 11. What of it? Plenty of people saw it. Plenty of people had the same treatment. Other members of staff must have known what was going on. Nobody said anything. So I didn’t.

What did I learn at Cowbridge? I learnt to look the other way and stay out of harm’s way. I learned to keep my head down and get by. I learned to exist in fantasy because reality was intolerable. I was lobotomised of my enthusiasm, intelligence and energy. I believe I was seriously depressed and nobody noticed or cared.

Pastoral care was non existent. Nobody questioned how a kid with potential when he joined the school degenerated to an almost vegetative state. There were plenty of success stories to draw attention away from those who were quietly underachieving. With an intake frothing over with talent and ambition there was no need to focus on kids with problems. As long as the yearly quota of Oxford and Cambridge entrances was secured, the school could be seen to be delivering. Not that I ever wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge. I’d already had first hand experience of the kind of people who went there.

I am savagely angry about these seven years, even more because having been through all this I did not get the education I needed. Any education professional who had thought about it for a minute would have steered me in a creative arts direction. Instead I found myself  in an academic cul de sac with no idea how I had got there or how I would break free. To this day I am ashamed of my A levels – not the grades – the choices. Don’t ask.

So why didn’t I leave? Due to a perverse twist of financial fate following the death of my father, it was actually cheaper for me to stay in Cowbridge as a Boarder than live at home and attend a local grammar school. I did not, until very recently, tell my mother about the way things really were in Cowbridge. Had she known at the time there would have been no question of me staying.

As I’ve already said, I wrote Long Gone within three years of leaving school. It may have been an attempt to put the past behind me. In fact, I have never been able to shake myself free of my schooldays. As I get older I realise the depth and extent of the blight.  All the profound negativity, underachievement and lethargy that I wrestle with daily with can be traced back to those years.

Everyone has damage. Lots of people have it (had it) far, far worse. The truth is, I am as much haunted by things that happened to others as happened to myself.  I was never sexually abused.

Self pity is not my thing. Indeed, if I had been a whole lot less stoical and bleated appropriately at the appropriate times, things might have been different.

I accept that I am responsible  for my own life, that I am the master of my own destiny.

Education should empower me in that responsibility. Instead, my education has burdened me with despair and futility that drags at every effort to move on.

Nevertheless I have moved on and I am still moving on. It’s not over yet.

another country (c) 1993, 2009, 2010 written and performed by Cameron Pyke, this recording (c) 15 Sept 2010 by Cameron Pyke & Ambisonix.

Recordings on this WordPress so far are work in progress, complete with cock-ups and problems, recorded in one take, voice and guitar, no overdubs.  I always welcome advice on technical or artistic issues. If  you really love, or really hate something, please comment.  I may not agree with you but I’ll be very grateful for the input.  You could visit the small symphonies soundcloud and leave a timed comment right next to the bit that bothers/delights you.

You can read the words and listen to a previous version and there are notes about the development of the song on these posts.

This version reverts to some of the feel of the song when it was performed back in 1993 by my London band The Intrepid Box. The three piece rock band version was faster but at the same time wistful and atmospheric.  Last year’s recording was plain bonkers. I was puzzled at the time why I felt it should be that frenetic, considering the subject matter.

The texture of this new arrangement flicks back and fore between fairly conventional fingerpicking and razzing. ‘Razz’ is the word I use to describe a technique borrowed from Flamenco. I’m sure I don’t do it right, therefore it would be presumptious of me to call it ‘rasgueado’.

I’m a huge admirer of Flamenco but I have no ambitions to play it.

I am still working on the trick of switching from razz to rest stroke, which calls for a shift of RH position and the stumbling scale  at the beginning of the instrumental section is a clear example of this not happening.

 Work in Progress, complete with mistakes and issues as one take, no edits or overdubs.

I posted the words to this song over a year ago, along with some notes about its origins. Briefly, I stumbled on the poem 30 odd years ago and almost as I read I was hearing melody, piano  and orchestration. I couldn’t play piano, didn’t have an orchestra. It was put on a very slow back burner. A couple of years ago I dug my sketches out of the filing cabinet and reworked it for guitar.

This was recorded at the third Ambisonix session 15 Sept 10.  There were about five takes. One was better in terms of less mistakes, but this one has a slow, wistful feel. So although I mangle the word “Childerditch” and the guitar stumbles here and there, it had to be this one – for the moment. There will be other recordings.

I have performed this song twice at open mic nights. It is not exactly sing-along stuff. The first time was in a hardcore acoustic (no amps allowed) venue which should have been well attuned to the occasional oddity. The response was not ecstatic. However, the MC said it was beautiful and bought me a drink. The response was similar at another open mic  which is normally very receptive to my material.

It’s mostly arrythmic – tempo rubato – the melody is sometimes angular, sometimes chromatic. It’s ‘through composed’ – the melody does not follow a structure based on repetition and variation – like AABA.

As a pop song – it’s a dog. Nobody will be dancing round their handbags to this one.

Nevertheless, there is a melody and it is a melody, not a tune. The poem says something to me, even more than it did 30 years ago and I believe that the music well expresses that. In particular I am pleased with the line “she must find them before I do that is”. Suddenly here there is almost a romping rhythm where there was none before and simple wholesome 1st inversion triads. To me this conjures up the young girl skipping ahead of her middle aged father to find the flowering gorse.

Yes, furze is gorse. I did not realise this for a long time. So Thomas sets his daughter a task which she cannot possibly fail.

Please note that all recordings on this WordPress so far are work in progress, complete with mistakes and issues, recorded in one take, voice and guitar, no overdubs.  If you feel you can help me with a technical or artistic tip, you really love something, or really hate it, please leave a comment.  I may not agree with you but I’ll be very grateful for the participation. If you want to rant about a particular semi-quaver or glitch you could visit the small symphonies soundcloud and leave a timed comment right next it.

20/9/10  You may have heard this one before. If you haven’t, you might like to cast a lug at the 2009 version , and an eyeball at the words.  I listened to it a few minutes ago and was struck by just how much this song has changed.  Its whole feel and outlook has changed.  The 2009 recording is perhaps angry and desperate (and technically woeful).  Now it is sad and reflective (with the signature crystalline Ambisonix treatment). 

This is one of my more immediately accessible songs – it is strophic – has verses, a chorus and a middle eight. So this is a song that I trot out regularly at open mic evenings. The subject matter is unashamedly …depressing? Actually, it’s not. There is a small glimmer of hope embedded in it – which I didn’t realise until recently – I’m going to write some additional sleeve notes about this.  Anyway, despite the catchy chorus it’s uncompromising social / political comment. Entertainment it ain’t.

Given that at these open mics we’re sort of trying to have a good time I tend to send myself up a little.  As I see it, we can have a laugh at my expense between songs – it shouldn’t detract from the impact and the message of the song when it’s being sung.  I have been taken to task for this. A guy who had worked in radio commented that it was a powerful song and I shouldn’t do it down, sell it short.

This was recorded at the second Ambisonix session. I wasn’t as stressed out as the first time but I wasn’t properly in the zone either. I can do this more polished. In particular, the ‘guitar solo’ stumbles and needs to be less tentative, more assured.

But as of 23:43 BST September 12 2010  it also stands for Acoustic Prog Fusion. Below is a screen shot of a Google search for Acoustic Prog Fusion. There are no exact matches. You read about it here first. 

So MOR, AOR, R’n'B, R’n'R, HM etc., etc., and now APF.

What can you say about APF? It’s acoustic; the songs are rather obscure, long and meandering; it’s associated with artists who would prefer not be categorised:-

“Yeah, we don’t like to be put in a box and labelled, man. One thing we are definitely not, most emphatically, absolutely not,  NOT APF – no way man.”

The movement originates in South Wales valleys in times of dire economic hardship where the Hammond C3, the MiniMoog and the Mellotron have were carted off to Cash Converters long ago. What look like stone circles on the mountainside are often encampments of proggers sheltering in their Altec bins.

“that bald singer had the whole room mesmerised at the end, pure genius. “ audience member, Green Rooms, Treforest

“Cop a listen to Cameron Pyke’s Small Symphonies – nothing else like it on the planet” Andy Brice (of  Zipper), Church Village

“Your tracks are so refreshingly original and imaginative – I’m really enjoying them!!” Brenda K, The Panache Orchestra

hear small symphonies    read the words

Used to be a classic rock guitarist with an SG and a Marshall.  And a plectrum.  And a White Van.

Now play the nylon guitar. With fingers. And a pushbike – no, that’s a lie – but you get the idea.

Used to play with bands. Mostly covers.  In pubs.

Don’t do bands anymore. Sing my own songs. In pubs.

Like to do some other places: art centres, festivals, house / home concerts.

Working on an album with Wookiemonstah of  Ambisonix as Recordist / Producer. The album will be one guitar, one voice, no overdubs. The working album title is Stranger on My Own Street.

This blog is intended to lay bare the workings of the project.

Cameron Pyke