Music: A Fine Bromance
Moseley band Big Tent and the Gypsy Lantern launch their debut album ‘Richest Man Today’
We’re at the Ort cafe on the Moseley Road and preparations are in full swing for tonight’s event. It’s just two and a half hours before the launch of Big Tent and the Gypsy Lantern’s debut album. Tensions should be rising, tempers fraying, cracks appearing, but they’re not. The atmosphere is one of good natured, polite professionalism, interspersed with ‘What do you think?’, ‘Is that OK?’ and lots of thank yous. In fact, they even have time to sit down and eat some of Ort’s tasty butternut squash curry together. In between moving furniture, plugging in amps and tweaking lighting controls, they fill me in on how tonight’s event has come about.
Big Tent and the Gypsy Lantern are Paul (guitar), George (percussion), Danny (trumpet) and Tom (‘everything else’), and were recently shortlisted for this year’s Glastonbury Festival ‘Emerging Talent’ competition. Although originally hailing from various parts of the country, they have lived together in Moseley for years and consider themselves very much a local band. When they’re not Big Tenting, George earns his money as a session percussionist for orchestras, West End shows and the RSC. Danny is a peripatetic music teacher and also plays in an unconventional brass band which recently featured on Hollyoaks. Tom is shortly going to leave his bar job at the Fighting Cocks to become a singing teacher, and also plays gigs as a solo artist. Having completed his degree in Classical Guitar, Paul has stayed on at Birmingham Conservatoire to do a Masters in Composition.
They were friends before they were a band. Tom and Paul knew each other from childhood and, more by accident than by design, ended up at the same university, studying Music at the Conservatoire.
On the day Paul moved into his hall of residence, George was standing outside, surrounded by his belongings, waiting for his dad to park the car. He tells how “Paul’s brother spotted me and, because I was skinny and wearing glasses, he thought I looked like Paul and decided we should be friends.” Paul’s brother struck up a conversation then introduced them to each other. “I knew we would be firm friends when, just a couple of days later, George greeted me by tickling my belly.” says Paul. “He’s the strangest person I’ve ever met, but I love him for it.”
Meanwhile, at another hall of residence, Danny and Tom were thrown together through a mutual desire to make new friends. “I took some stuff to the shared kitchen as a pretext for meeting people,” explains Danny, “and Tom had propped his door open so that he would meet people. I saw the open door, wandered in and we got chatting.”
As Tom and Paul already knew each other, it wasn’t long before all four were hanging out together and, at the end of their first year they decided to move out of halls and share a house, along with four other male friends. “With eight boys all living together it was the messiest place you could find,” says Tom. “I mean really, you can’t imagine. The house was falling down as well, but I loved it. It was the people that made it.” A couple of years later, eight had become three, then George split up with his girlfriend and moved into the spare room, finally forming the household destined to become Big Tent and the Gypsy Lantern. The transition from flat mates to band mates was a natural, almost inevitable, process.
“I’d always written and gigged as a singer-songwriter,” says Paul, “but had put it on hold while I trained as a classical guitarist at university. By the time I graduated, I needed something else, a different musical outlet, and Tom and George were in the same position.”
Tom agrees. “I didn’t write songs before I went to the Conservatoire, it was mainly concert or art music. I enjoyed it, but then you have to hand it over to other musicians to play. What I love about the band is that we get to write the songs and play them ourselves, so they sound how we want them to.”
Danny was the last to officially join. “The others had played a couple of gigs together and were jamming one day and I just started improvising with the trumpet, and it worked. Then with ‘Brightly Coloured Wall’ and ‘24ft March’ I was involved in the writing process from the beginning. It just kind of evolved like that.”
But although the band was formed almost as an antidote to their formal training, what they learned at university has a huge influence on their music. George’s studies focused on World Music, enabling him to bring a wide range of non-standard percussion instruments to the group, while Danny’s trumpet is electronically manipulated, giving their ensemble a unique and unusual sound.
“We pride ourselves on our dynamic range,” says Paul, “being able to go from delicate and intricate to heavy and powerful and back again in a very short time. Our training extended the boundaries and the physical limits of what we can do with our instruments. I think it also affects the way we practise. We approach it like we would a classical ensemble, and we’re able to express in words exactly what we want. It makes for very efficient rehearsals. Although we leave the classical stuffiness at the door.”
And so we come to the album at the heart of tonight’s event. “It’s a collection of songs about our every day life,” explains George. “Break ups, living together, going out, student halls, slugs on the floor, our lives and experiences.” Even the album title, ‘Richest Man Today’, arose out of an ordinary conversation, as Tom recalls. “With the four of us, and all working odd jobs and getting paid at different times, there is usually one who has just been paid, while another might be completely broke, and that changes week by week, or even day by day. We were in the pub and I’d just been paid, so I offered to get the drinks. When one of the others protested I said ‘Don’t worry, I’m the richest man today, but I’ll be the poorest man tomorrow’, and the phrase just stuck.”
Just as the album title arises from the mutual support the guys offer each other, tonight’s launch is as much about family and friendship as music. There is merchandise on sale sporting the band’s logo, which was designed by fine artist friend Tom Venner Woodcock. Each tshirt, poster and album cover has been individually screen printed by another artist friend Glen Fry, who is also the band’s official photographer. Scattered throughout the audience are various parents, siblings, childhood friends and work colleagues, even their university tutor Michael Wolters.
As the band start playing, the audience are slumped on sofas and sitting cross-legged on floor cushions, but the energetic beat is infectious and before the end of the first song everyone is on their feet. Its conclusion is met with thunderous applause and enthusiastic whistles.
The banter between songs is led by George, perched on his cajon, while Tom retunes his guitar or swaps to a ukelele or accordion. For ballad ‘Gregory’ the band leave the stage area and perform in the middle of the room as the audience gently sways around them. During ‘Lemon’, George and Danny execute a rather shambolic waltz as Paul and Tom keep the music going, and there’s audience participation in ‘Beggars’ as they enthusiastically shout out “any one-syllable word”. ‘Who said a rude word?’ asks Paul afterwards, and there’s laughter as everyone in the crowd raises a hand.
After their set, there’s short beer/toilet/cigarette break as the projector is set up for the premiere of the video to ‘Brightly Coloured Wall’. It was made by local film maker Oliver Clark and shot partly in one of the disused function rooms upstairs at the Fighting Cocks, partly in Cannon Hill Park.
“The song is based on a recurring dream of Paul’s where he’s running away,” Oliver explains, “so I wanted to film them running, as though being chased. They had to run at about the same pace as the camera and look back occasionally. It was very funny, because how they ran gave a real insight into their personalities. Paul was a very matter-of-fact runner and just got on with it. Danny runs regularly so was able to take direction very well. Tom on the other hand couldn’t not make it a race - he kept getting further and further away from the camera. Filming George was hilarious because he just couldn’t not smile. It looks more like he’s playing kiss chase.”
With the video over and their gear packed away, the boys can finally relax and bask in the glowing praise from the audience. I talk to a couple of people to get their reactions. “They have such a wonderful live energy, so vibrant. I feel uplifted and refreshed.” says Rose, while Geraldine enthuses “The atmosphere was really good, it was really interactive and the band were really going for it. It felt like a special occasion.”
Now that their debut album has officially been released on the world, I ask the guys what they hope to achieve. Tom is very clear. “I want to make good music. I don’t want fame or money, although both would be welcome! But the reason I do this is because I would really like to take the thing we do to more people.” Danny agrees. “Loads of good bands never get found, and loads of awful music sells millions of copies. As long as I enjoy it, I honestly don’t mind either way.” For Paul “It’s all about friendship and meeting interesting people and doing interesting things.”
But as I leave them at Ort, tired but smiling, surrounded by friends, family and fairy lights, I think it’s George that sums it up best.
“I want to play music to as many different people as possible, but it’d mean nothing without the stories behind the songs. It’s about camaraderie. I just want to make music with the boys.”
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