Ep5 Tom Waits & the Old Bakery - Stuart Bell

Listen to the episode on Spotify

Automatically Transcribed With Podsqueeze

Luke 00:00:05  Welcome to episode five of the Impro Pod podcast. This is the first remote session I'm doing, and I've got Stu Bell. Is it Stu or Stuart?

Stoo 00:00:15  Proper name. Stuart. But for some purposes it's Stu. I'll answer to anything.

Luke 00:00:21  And whereabouts are you, Stu?

Stoo 00:00:22  I am in Dunfermline in Scotland. So it's just north of Edinburgh.

Luke 00:00:27  All right. Great.

Luke 00:00:28  Okay, so I'm going to play a piece of music, and I want you to tell me what this makes you think of. Okay, here we go. What do you think of that?

Stoo 00:01:18  Yeah.

Stoo 00:01:19  The first picture I got was a girl or a woman running through a forest trying to escape something. Probably in autumn. It's a bit wet and damp. She's looking over her shoulder. And then it got to where I think it resolved more major chords. And I got that bit where she'd fallen on the ground and was taking a breath. Yeah, it was really vivid.

Stoo 00:01:41  Nice.

Luke 00:01:42  Do you normally have vivid reactions to music?

Stoo 00:01:44  I'm the kind of person who gets shivers from music.

Stoo 00:01:47  You know, if you hear certain songs or certain pieces of music, I get a real visceral connection to it. And yeah, I suppose it's a visual thing, isn't it? It paints pictures in your head. I suppose that's what it's about.

Luke 00:01:59  Because you're a musician yourself.

Stoo 00:02:01  I am, yeah. Songwriter, guitarist, vocalist.

Luke 00:02:05  and what's your relationship to improvisation? Are you an improviser?

Stoo 00:02:10  I, possibly a solo improviser. Probably around same old chord shapes on the guitar. certainly not something that I've done really with other people, because my musical knowledge isn't as developed as it could be. So knowing where to go with improvisation, I think is the tricky bit for me. And certainly when I'm writing and trying melodies, I'll sometimes sit and just pick out notes at the piano, or sometimes even when I'm writing, has happened a few times where I've made at first, which seems like a really bad mistake on the guitar, you know, hitting the wrong note on a chord, but it works.

Luke 00:02:51  Okay, so you up for telling me a story, but something that you think would work with the soundtrack? You try. Don't overthink it.

Stoo 00:02:58  It's about how I really first came to know and appreciate Tom waits. One night I was at a friend's in Glasgow for a meal. I was a student at the time and he was from Germany and had a very eclectic taste in music, from really gentle Tom waits songs through to the most extreme German death metal. But he decided this night to put on Tom waits song and he said, Joe, you have to listen to this song, you have to listen to this song. And when I heard that it was one of the most gorgeous songs I'd ever heard in my life, and the words are about those were the days of roses, poetry and prose. And Martha, all I had was you, and all you had was me. I remember saying to him, what is that song called? I need to go and get the song. And he said, I think it's called Days of Roses.

Stoo 00:03:51  And at the time in Glasgow, there was a massive Tower Records store, and I went there the next day thinking, right, I'll go and find an album with Tom waits song in it called Days of Roses. And of course I went and this was 1991. So by that time he may be hard, I don't know, 15 or 16 albums. I'm going through them all. Like which album is this, which one it has. None of them had a song in it called Days of Roses. So eventually I picked one of his albums at random called Closing Time, and it's his first album, I think from 1973, and took it back, put it on the record player and lo and behold, the song was on the album by complete chance. It was a song called Martha. So I could have picked up probably one of his more inaccessible albums, because he does off quite a lot of noisy, gruff, discordant music and probably had a picked up one of those albums first. I might not have gone on the same exploration, but it was a good, easy start.

Stoo 00:04:53  So yeah, that's how I came to Tom waits. The amazing thing about Tom waits, how he can weave these most Amazing, beautiful, evocative, poetic lyrics. And amongst his strange music and a way he almost hides them. And they're almost like little bits of treasure. You have to scrape the dirt off and find these little bits of gold in.

Stoo 00:05:21  Them, I see. Right? Yeah, it's.

Luke 00:05:22  A good story. so the idea is I compose a piece of music to the story on the spot. It's quite a tricky thing because he's got such a distinctive sound. If I was going to write something about the story, then would have to be influenced by him in some way. So the way he plays on the piano, how would you describe that?

Stoo 00:05:42  It's probably quite rhythmic. There's a slight touch. I don't know if honkytonk is the right word, maybe heavy handed. I don't know if heavy handed is right, but it's got jazz undertones to it and 20s 30s kind of music and as well, almost like a thumbtack piano feel.

Stoo 00:06:00  A barroom piano sometimes.

Luke 00:06:02  Tell you what, let's do an experiment. So I'm going to play. Keep playing and I'll adjust the style slightly. And I want you to tell me how close I am to Tom waits. Right. This is like a version of the, you know, that hot, cold game you play when you were a kid. This is the musical.

Stoo 00:06:22  Version of Hot and Cold. Okay. That's quite far. That's quite cold. Oh, yeah. That's spot on I can hear I'm coming in with this.

Luke 00:07:03  It's quite bluesy that. Yeah, yeah. So when you go to the fifth or something or what do you do something a bit weirder. Where do you go.

Stoo 00:07:20  Yeah definitely.

Luke 00:07:30  Nice. It looks like I've got something there. Break down the story. This is a story about musical discovery really isn't it. Yeah. I'm going to set the scene. And then it should be obvious when you put the record on. And then we'll go from there. Okay. That's such a hard thing to do.

Stoo 00:10:28  Yeah. That's lovely.

Stoo 00:10:29  That's really nice.

Luke 00:10:30  What did you think to that? Because I've never done it before where I had to incorporate a style of music into the story. Yeah. So did you think that was effective?

Stoo 00:10:40  I think it was really good. I think you're playing is probably a bit more accomplished in some sort of way stuff. Certainly that first album has, you know, it's a lot of brush drums and double bass and kind of slow, almost swing, bluesy, jazzy, swingy. See, if you try and ask me about genres, I am hopeless.

Luke 00:11:07  Are you up for telling me another story?

Stoo 00:11:10  I don't need to think of one. there's an idea I could tell you about my granddad's bakery. Yeah. So my granddad was a master baker, and he owned this bakery in Kirkcaldy. And I can remember from when I was really, we always used to go and visit my, my gran and granddad on a Saturday. And quite often my granny would be in the shop as well.

Stoo 00:11:35  But we would always get through into the actual bakery. And I remember that because of the absolutely massive table that was right in the middle of the room, and then all the machines, all the mixers and all the things for row and the icing and the dough and everything were all round outside. And I distinctly remember the smell of it. And he had what was called a Scotch oven. And this oven. It's like the thing you see in the movies, like this massive cast iron doors that you would open and put things in with like paddles. The sovereign that he had was one of the last Scotch ovens in Scotland, but used to go up the stairs and the floors. It was like hell walking when you're up the stairs on the floors, because it was such an old building. He was terrible for dates and things like that. So me and my brother would go up and explore and go into these cupboards. We found one. I remember a big box of club biscuits, the chocolate biscuits, the fruit ones.

Stoo 00:12:31  Goodness knows how old they were. For our birthdays he would make us cakes, but really special cakes. Like one year we got a snooker table and had all the little snooker balls done in fondant. And in one year I was in a model railway. So I got a cake that are really tracking it with a a Hornby wagon on it, and my brother got a football field once and that's what he was really good at as a confectioner. He would make things out of icing. So Mum and Dad got married. He'd made them a model of the church out of icing his massive wedding cakes, and I would go with them and deliver the cakes with them. You still love it?

Luke 00:13:07  Time for some music. Then I'll see what I can conjure up.

Stoo 00:15:35  Tell me about the RPG bets you're doing. They're quite high, but what were you thinking there? Because it'd be interesting if you're thinking the same thing as me.

Luke 00:15:42  Well, I was thinking kind of sweet sugar.

Stoo 00:15:45  Yeah, it's exactly what? Exactly what I got.

Luke 00:15:47  Yeah. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that weird, mystical kind of stuff that goes on with what a kid in a bakery say. The sense of fantasy. I think it is that the sort of sweetness comes across. I was kind of going for the atmosphere as well. I imagine. It's quite heavy atmosphere.

Stoo 00:16:02  Yeah.

Stoo 00:16:02  Lots of flour and dust about, you know.

Luke 00:16:05  Did you find that came across in the music? The dust?

Stoo 00:16:07  Yeah. Like you see heavy, hot, thick.

Stoo 00:16:10  And then pleated, but it was a kind of nice sprinkles.

Luke 00:16:15  Yeah. So what did you feel you got out of this podcast?

Stoo 00:16:20  I know we've written stuff together and you've kind of said, here's an idea for a song. I've never sat and watched you play before. That, for me is a big thing and a real appreciation of the things I've been talking about, about the joining it all together. And obviously your knowledge and instinct of where things are, I think is amazing. I enjoy telling stories as part of what I do as a songwriter, and a lot of my songs have stories attached to them.

Stoo 00:16:44  So every story of Told You Tonight has got one of my songs is attached to one of those stories. I don't know if it's an emotional connection with the music, but how the music can echo what it is I'm seeing. I think that's really interesting.

Stoo 00:16:58  All right. Well, I.

Luke 00:16:59  Think I call it a day there. Thank you very much. Okay.

Stoo 00:17:01  Thank you. Really good.

Luke 00:17:03  Join us next week for another episode of Impro Pod. Thanks for listening.