Ep25 Sashimi Trouble 6s & 9s & the big break- Andy Hill

Listen to the episode here

Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to another episode of the Impro Pod podcast. My guest today is Andy Hill. So you are a journalist and musician, right? That's right. Yes. So tell me a bit about the magazine you write for.

Andy 00:00:15  So there's a few magazines that I write for. The main one, I suppose, at the moment is the Virgin Atlantic in-flight magazine, which is a kind of magazine about travel and culture. And then I do various other writing jobs that at the moment I'm, I'm ghostwriting motivational speeches for this corporate guru guy. And that's a really interesting job, actually. He just talks to me. And then I put his words into a format that work really nicely.

Luke 00:00:46  So I'm going to play a piece of music, and I wanted to tell me what it makes you think of.

Andy 00:02:16  It made me think of city skylines. The beginning of it was really reminding me of George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue and so on. I was really associate George Gershwin with New York, the gigantic blocks of these epics at 100 story buildings.

Andy 00:02:33  So I was imagining that, and something about the way you build up the progression made me think of the sun coming up in this city. So I'm down on a street and I'm looking up at this forest of skyscrapers, and the sun is just coming up and hitting them in different ways and at different angles.

Luke 00:02:55  So I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and then I'm going to break the story down into sections and improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Andy 00:03:03  The year is 2012. My then girlfriend, my now wife Sarah, decided to go traveling just before she started her job as a doctor. So we went traveling in China because I was just really curious. I was like, what's it like to be in this pseudo dictatorship at this particular point in history, as it's just on its way up its ascendancy to being the kind of dominant world power? So we bought tickets and we spent two and a bit months, I think, travelling around China. And towards the end we went to a city called Chongqing.

Andy 00:03:36  We arrived there at the end of a murderously long train journey. We were staying in this really ropey hostel and we just wanted to treat ourselves to a nice dinner. So we wandered out into the town and it was very much like a lot of Chinese cities, in that there's a kind of old bit and there's this crazy intense new bit that's just all like Louis Vuitton stores.

Luke 00:04:00  And just this.

Andy 00:04:00  Astonishing conspicuous wealth. And we found a sashimi restaurant, like a sushi restaurant, where diners sit in a horseshoe shape. And in the middle of the horseshoe shape there is a hot plate which is metal, and you don't touch it. And the chefs in front of you cook sushi, basically, or cook like fish on it. And it was quite an indulgence at this point in our traveling thing. But there was a deal and you got unlimited drinks and unlimited sashimi. I did what I did a lot at that period of my life, and I just got really hammered, just drank a vast amount of wine, and me and my lovely young girlfriend just had a really nice time.

Andy 00:04:42  There was just there was a few other kind of Western people, and there was the wealthy, the kind of great and good of Chongqing society gathered around and I was chatting. I was holding forth about something. And then in my wild gesticulation, I knocked over my fat glass of wine onto the sashimi hot plate, which caused the glass to shatter into a million pieces, and the glass just went all over everyone's food, the hot plate. And it was just the worst thing, because there was all these people, just like every single eyeball around the table, swiveled towards me like, you absolute moron. And then obviously everyone was hungry and ready for dinner, but the kitchen couldn't serve any of the food because it was probably contaminated with broken glass. So the chefs and the crew had a busy around cleaning up all this broken glass and food, and there was a very palpable air of who was this asshole? The staff were really nice about it, and I just got another glass of wine and just sat there.

Andy 00:05:43  That's the story, a very humiliating moment that I returned to in my mind often and cringe. I would have been in my late 20s. I would have been extremely scruffy. Having been traveling for six weeks. I would have looked terrible. I would have had a really shaggy, awful beard and really long hair. I would have been a fairly obnoxious presence. Sarah, my then girlfriend, now wife. She found it quite funny. She wasn't massively embarrassed by it. She enjoyed my discomfort and when we eventually left the restaurant, we just went out. I think we went dancing and had quite a nice evening actually in the end.

Luke 00:06:15  So I'm going to break it down into sections so you have a bit disheveled. You've come off the long journey and there's this contrast between the really affluent modern buildings and then the old side to it. And so you go to the restaurant and you have a good time and you meet these people, and then the glass incident happens. And yeah, there's some chaos and some regret there.

Luke 00:06:38  Okay.

Andy 00:08:24  There's some lovely discordance in there. It's risky in it, but if you get the right one, the overall that repetition legitimizes, I think is so true in music. Whatever you're doing, if you just keep doing it in a regular pattern of some description that the brain can pick up on, even doing something just twice, it has that effect. The human brain is wired to find patterns in things, so if you give it the outline of even what looks like a pattern, it'd be like found a pattern for a pun. And then the audience gets a little buzz because they've spotted something.

Luke 00:08:53  Even the most weird abstract stuff. You just play it again, the pattern emerges, the.

Andy 00:08:57  Pattern emerges, and the buzz of listening is not necessarily anything to do with anything like an intrinsic aesthetic quality of the music itself. It's just the pattern.

Luke 00:09:07  The difference between soloing like. And. How did that piece of music reflect your experience?

Andy 00:09:40  I think you did a good job of rendering China. I was expecting for the broken glass more of a chaotic chromatic thing.

Luke 00:09:48  I went low down to the piano. More glass like would be something like.

Andy 00:09:57  The ripple, isn't it? Not playing all the notes in a chord at any one time, this idea.

Luke 00:10:01  Of being sharp but delicate. Do you have another story you can tell?

Andy 00:10:09  The year is 2014, and it's the day I get my big break in journalism. And between my second and third year of university, I was in a band. All throughout my 20s, I was touring, I was doing all right. I went to America a couple of times, but it was just like, what does 40 look like? If you're still sleeping in the back of bands and playing gigs for like £40 and getting hammered? My fiance had encouraged me to go to university as a mature student in London, where we moved for her first job, so I did. I went to Goldsmiths University and had very happy three years there studying history, and I'd been writing for magazines for free, just partly for fun and partly to blag into gigs for free for a while.

Andy 00:10:53  Just because I like writing in the same way that I like music. An opportunity came up to do an internship, a time out magazine, which is the big culture magazine in London. And I got an interview and I went along to the interview, and I knew this was like a real opportunity for me, so I better not mess it up. I thought very hard about what to wear because I thought they weren't want me to dress formally. So I put on this kind of velvet jacket and it turns out the person interviewing me was wearing exactly the same velvet jacket. I thought, I'm on to a winner here. I didn't find out for a couple of days. I went to my job. I was working in a call centre at the time, so I leave the call centre job in the evening. I meant to go back for another shift and I get a message on my phone saying, call me, please. And it's one of the employment people who are managing the internship. So I pick up the phone and they said, Andy, you've got it, you've got the internship.

Andy 00:11:38  It was three months paid to work at this proper magazine. And I was like, thank you very much. And I turned my phone off. I didn't go back to my call centre job ever, because I didn't really like it and I just walked home. It was about three miles to my home across London, and it was a lovely sunny evening and the early summer, and I just felt so good. I've done the thing I wanted to do become a professional writer. I'm not fully there yet, but this is probably the single biggest step that I have to take. Just get in to one of these magazines so that I can prove myself. And I just remember absolutely walking on air, walking home through north London, through Islington, past all these lovely old kind of Victorian buildings. And I cut through a park, went along the canal for a bit, bought a pizza. So just walking on sunshine and being full of optimism.

Luke 00:12:22  What was it like working in the call centre?

Andy 00:12:23  So it was a charity fundraising call centre.

Andy 00:12:25  It was intense, like it was very numbers oriented. You had to convince a certain number of people per shift to sign up to a charity, and if you didn't, you were out. You were no good to anyone. And so the staff turnover was insane. At this company, every month they would hire 50 people, and by the end of the month, maybe 2 or 3 would be left. And I was good at it actually, and I learnt a lot, but it was also quite boring establishing. And also when you get people to sign up, it's great, but there's obviously a lot of people who tell you to bugger off. A lot of people don't like it.

Luke 00:13:00  I'm going to go for this really intense time in the call center, and then you get the phone call for the magazine, and then you've got this walk through London. What did you think? That. I think you.

Andy 00:15:25  Captured the intensity of cool, still alive, weird human battery farm, where you just sit people down and plug them into a machine.

Luke 00:15:35  So back to the music then. How did that sum up your experience? It was to play it again. Was there anything that you would improve on that little.

Andy 00:15:43  Ostinato you found? I didn't know where it was, and that reminded me of the kind of the architectural fabric of that part. London there's this late 19th century, early 20th century described as Queen Anne style, which has got red brick and kind of white trim and like quite big windows and that's what the.

Luke 00:16:00  Piece was.

Andy 00:16:00  Making me think of the major tonality of it is nice and it's quite refreshing to me, and I think when I sit down to a piano and improvise, my instinct generally tend towards minor and dark because I find minor and dark more kind of interesting. And I think it's actually somewhat difficult to come up with something positive in a major tonality that's not cheesy. So you, you write the cliche 145 which is boring, or you go non cliche and put in a major chord that's from a different key, but then that sounds like you're trying to be wonky for the sake of it.

Luke 00:16:35  Sometimes I find a good way of changing from one major chord to another is to use sixes and nines, and you get this kind of sound.

Andy 00:16:51  I call that an Edwardian sound. I really like that era of music, Cole Porter era songs. I just think that that is pure magic to me. The main way they they're in my day to day musical lexicon is there's an ending chord because the Beatles used them a lot as ending chords. It's just puts a nice little bow on the end, like when you're making a pie and you just put a little lattice on the top two, five, one and D minus seven, G seven and then C6.

Speaker 3 00:17:29  Hey.

Andy 00:17:30  I think my first encounter with that was the neighbors theme. That's my good neighbors become good friends. The sixth chord was like the hazy curtain you walk through on your way to Ramsay Street.

Luke 00:17:46  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Andy 00:17:48  I think you did a really nice job. I really enjoyed that first improvised piece you played and set the tone really nicely.

Andy 00:17:54  I think we had a good conversation about soloing and repetition and it's always good to articulate this stuff, I think, because even if you know it, the act of articulation beds it in a different way. Podcast experiences just reminded me what a gloriously versatile and beautiful instrument the piano is.

Luke 00:18:18  Do you have anything to promote?

Andy 00:18:19  So I'm also a musician and I play piano and sing, and I'm doing a pub singalong at Things Happen Here, aka meadowbrook on November the 18th. An old fashioned pub singalong. I'll get on the piano and I will do songs that people can sing along to as a little extra kind of gimmick. I'll do requests and we'll have a projector that projects lyrics onto the wall, and it's called Now That's What I Call a Pub Singalong, and you'll see posters for it around in the kind of now that's what I call music style of logo. I'm quite proud of those posters. November the 18th, friends.

Luke 00:18:53  Okay, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Andy 00:18:55  Enjoy. Thank you for having me, my man.

Luke 00:18:58  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.