mostly david ephgrave

It's probably not surprising I feel largely devoid of comedy right now, what with all the difficult things going on within my family, but today has been a tough day when it comes to my mental health. One of depression's nastiest traits is its relentlessness, and its tendency to make you forget how far you've come when you're in a trough. It's evil like that. So it was for me today, and I would have kept this to myself instead of mentioning it here if I had the energy to filter it. But it took up too much of my day for me to feel able to do that. I'm not usually one for exhibiting the common symptom of lethargy, but I found it hard to lift my head today. I did get a brief hiatus when listening to my old band Big Day Out's 'Seven Heavenly Lemony Lemons from a Seven-Eleven in Devon' CD from 2002 for the first time in years. The recordings are by no means perfect, but I still enjoyed it, and it still made me laugh in the right places; we were definitel...

I was very sad to hear the news via Twitter yesterday that one of the UK’s best small-scale music venues, The Square in Harlow, had finally been pulled down. This had been on the cards for quite some time - I remember discussing its closure with Phill Jupitus when Glyn and I interviewed him for the More Than Mostly Comedy Podcast back in January 2014 - but that didn’t soften the blow; you mightn’t have thought what wasn’t exactly the prettiest building in the prettiest of towns would be held in such affection by so many, but it really was; in its time, The Square played host to the likes of Blur, Coldplay, Eddie Izzard and more, including a band called Big Day Out that featured me in its ranks. We played the Square numerous times and recorded the drums for our ‘Seven Heavenly Lemony Lemons from a Seven-Eleven in Devon’ CD there, with Chris’ kit set up on the stage while I played a guide guitar into his headphones; it was our second home, in a musical sens...

BIg Day Out's 'Simplicity' was probably the closest I ever got to writing anything funky or sexy. (Phwoar. Funky, sexy David.) Like the majority of our demos, the studio version didn’t quite do the material justice, as a lot of the energy was lost. It didn’t help that in this instance, we mixed down everything bar the drum tracks in one session, and then overlaid a separate mix of the drums again later. God knows why we did this ; we must have been off our heads on disco biscuits. It revolved around a riff we had already used in a different song, Sensible Shoes, which was scrapped when our lead guitarist left and the group became a three-piece. Sensible Shoes - like a lot of our earlier incarnation’s material - was more of a novelty song than anything, but when we slowed the original riff down, we started to get a bit of a groove on. (I just said that in all seriousness.)   The song was about being left hanging by a girl that you liked, who wa...

Whenever anyone asks me what my favourite accidental barbershop harmony is – and let’s face it, this happens a lot – I point them toward the 45-second mark of the secret track at the end of my old band Big Day Out’s Seven Heavenly Lemony Lemons From a Seven-Eleven in Devon album. (Listening to that just cheered me up.) The scene where the above recording took place was colloquially known as the Red Room in my old flat (appropriately above a Barbershop in Hitchin) and the date was late 2001. The personnel behind the doo-wop were me, the band’s drummer Chris Hollis, and my flatmate, the actor David Garrud – and the inspiration behind it was McDonald's now long-defunct Supersize Deal. I can’t remember what brought the song about, but I suspect we'd just had McDonald's takeaway. Whatever the reason, one thing led to another and I picked up my acoustic and started to chug my way through a simple 12-bar blues riff. It wasn’t unusu...

In the next week, I’ll perform stand-up at two London venues I played regularly with my old band Big Day Out, which will be an interesting experience. I would never have anticipated I’d do this when I visited them first time around, though what we did wasn’t hugely different. Big Day Out were serious about music, less so about performance. The Supernaturals’ lead guitarist (90s namedrop) once remarked that if our amps packed in mid-set we’d get by doing half an hour’s stand-up. This was almost a premonition – though I had two band members, a handful of songs and a shedload of instruments to protect me back then. Now I just have a mic and my mind, plus a few accompanying body parts. It’s a more exposing scenario. The venues in question are the Hope & Anchor and The Water Rats. Both hold a lot of memories. We launched our CD ‘Seven Heavenly Lemony Lemons at a Seven-Eleven in Devon’ at The Water Rats. A coachload of people came from Hitchin to sup...