Bellowhead Blog No. 1 - By Pete Flood
Pete Flood of writes:
It's the day after the latest Bellowhead ten-date tour of Britain, and I'm a broken man - grey complexion, red-rimmed eyes and aches all over - not a good look to take back home to my girlfriend and daughter. It's shameful really, considering that many bands have a tour schedule that makes us look like hobbyists, but there's something of a collective frenzy that happens on a Bellowhead tour, particularly onstage, where we'd feel like we were cheating an audience if we didn't spend much of the gig jumping around like fools.
This last tour was the first time we'd played many of the tunes from our newest album, Matachin, live. There's some dense and difficult stuff there, from both musician's and the listener's perspective (Rachael's forever cursing me for the RSI-inducing tremelando passages in Widow's Curse and Spectre Review, and I'm always messing up the million-odd stick changes needed in Fakenham Fair). It was a real worry to us that we wouldn't be able to translate the album into a live experience to live up to all the dancey numbers on Burlesque. What's been wonderful and magical is the way that the tunes have grown organically from the controlled arrangements they were in the studio, to the juggernauts they need to be in a live setting.
It was also a tour marked by some astonishingly silly dancing, with new moves springing up nightly. Sadly, or not, many of these highly skillful displays, such as Brendan's Chambermaid, or Rachael's Camelwalk/Charleston combo have been lost forever, but .
The most spectacular move, however, was Brendan's crowd-surf during our London gig - possibly the first ever incidence of crowd-surfing at a folk concert, and probably the last at a Bellowhead gig after he hit and nearly crushed a group of septuagenarians. We're sorry about that, and promise that from now on we'll keep him shackled to his monitor.
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