mostly david ephgrave

Today's birthday's officially known as "The one before forty"; shit it. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it; I don't know where the time's gone. My thirtieth (which I spent on stage in the Netherlands, having Happy Birthday sung to me by a theatre-full of Dutch people who went into an inexplicable mass-chant afterwards) seems like only yesterday. And now I'm a year away from achieving the lifespan of John Lennon. Part of the problem with being an actor is for your first few jobs you're probably the youngest person in the cast, so you feel the need to age up. Then before you know it, you're somewhere in the oldest 25%. As long as I can spend the rest of my career cast in shows about the elderly, I can maintain the illusion of youth (though if my over-washed lockdown hands are anything to go by, I'll be making my living as an octagenarian hand-double). I even scuppered myself by choosing Glyn as my double act partner as he...

I'm regularly drawn back to Sixties-era Motown and more specifically to songs like this. I know my chosen example’s hardly obscure but it’s still worth another listen to remind you how note-for-note perfect it is. It’s not just the song; it’s the performance and production, which manages to capture the sentiment of head-over-heels love in a vivid snapshot. There’s something about the sound the Motown studio committed to tape back then that’s so different to what the UK produced - it probably helps that it’s almost always the same backing band, though that’s not just it - and while the mics and engineers were partially responsible, I think it's largely due to the musicality of the lead vocalists and backing singers that blend so perfectly. This song brings back memories of the first time I toured the Netherlands in 2004 as the bassist on a Sixties compilation show. We were staying in the Dutch equivalent to a Center Parcs with the band spread across four or five log cab...

As far as pictures of me playing the bass go, this is one of my favourites. They call me Mellow Yellow (quite rightly). It was taken during a soundcheck on the 19th May 2011 in a theatre in the Netherlands whilst on a short tour there that crossed with my thirtieth birthday. The actor and guitarist Tim Pont took the photo of me playing whilst seated on the stool I had to use for much of the run, thanks to the onset of labyrinthitis, which meant I couldn’t play standing up due to dizziness; I’m about as un-rock-&-roll as un-rock-&-roll can get. I didn’t really want to be away for such a significant birthday, but the tour fell at a time when I could do with the money, plus the run was brief enough to not get in the way of my other commitments. It just so happened I had a few days off close to a gig in Amsterdam, so my wife came over for that, thus making at least that part of the run a bit of a working holiday. The show was a Be...

When it comes to pop music everyone has a guilty pleasure - and yesterday afternoon I was listening to the radio when they happened to play one of mine: Kim Wilde's 'Kids in America'. I should probably be ashamed, but I’m not. ‘Kids in America’ was first released in 1981; a couple of months before I was born, so I was too young to be aware of it. My main interests back then were crying and soiling myself; nothing much has changed in the intervening years. A couple of years ago I played bass on a short tour of the Netherlands as part of a 70s & 80s show - and both this and 'Come on, Eileen' were setlist highlights; neither song has much credibility, but they both have enjoyable bass parts. (Not a euphemism.) Arriving at a Dutch venue. My enjoyment of this song wasn’t strictly professional: everything bar the guitarist, drummer and myself was on click-track – and me and the lead guitarist, Tim , would be in stiches watching D...