mostly david ephgrave

Despite being a bassist for twenty-five years, and probably considering it my first instrument (though that's a bit of a fluid subject), I've only ever owned one bass guitar: my trusty Tanglewood replica of a violin bass. So I think I was entitled to upgrade to a real Hofner, which I finally did this week. Arty Hofner shot (as it's known in the trade). I approached this purchase with guilt and trepidation, as I do when I buy anything significant, despite paying in instalments and not being expensive for what it is. Surely I'm allowed a new bass every quarter-century? Particularly when it's literally* for work. And yet I can't shake the sense that I'm treating myself at a time when money's tight (and that's before today's massive fall in the pound's value on the stock market, which I probably triggered by buying it). However, I bought it to be better equipped next time some muso work comes up. While my old bass has done remarkably well conside...

I mentioned a little while ago that I'd rediscovered a cassette of my old band Big Day Out's early demos and was struck by the songs and their energy. One such track was I Get High: a burst of musical sunshine that's very evocative of the time and captures what those first few years of BDO were all about. David Ephgrave · I Get High The demo comes from a session we did with our then-manager Martin Goodrich in 1997ish. Martin was one of the first people to buy into the band and support us. He was a lovely guy with a fair bit of musical knowledge, who also owned an analogue 8-track recorder, which was a dream come true for the band's two songwriters, Rich and me, to get to play with. My friendship with Rich must have seemed unlikely at the time - he was one of the cool kids at school whereas I definitely wasn't - but it was a sparklingly productive thing. We first got chatting in Design Technology classes (when we should have been working) when we found out we both ...

While sorting through some old things today, I stumbled across a cassette of early Big Day Out demos I haven't heard for years and, after putting magnetic-tape-to-tape-head using my first HiFi (which I rescued from my garage last week), I discovered they're still bloody good. The songs were recorded using our friend, one-time band manager and adopted-father-figure Martin Goodrich's 8-track in around 1997ish, and sound remarkably polished considering our tender age and the technical limitations. The joy and energy bursts from the speakers like the band are playing in your front room today and, while there are inevitable Britpop-style musical quotes we'd soaked up at the time - like the odd Oasis-Esque vowel sound - something sparkling and original still comes out the other side of it. And the songs - which are unashamedly out-and-out pop - are catchier than coronavirus. (Too soon?) Before I sound smug, I should point out the driving force at that time wasn't me, but ...

One notable thing I took from watching Bill Bailey live in Stevenage last night was how he often uses music just because it's good without feeling the need to do anything comedic with it. I found this encouraging when considering how to approach this year's show. Perhaps the main reason I’ve used my musical ability so sparingly in comedy in the past was because I was trying to distance myself from the actor / muso rut I found myself in, plus I didn't want to force-write a load of funny songs. While I’ve written the odd comedy song in the past - the most prominent being Ukulele Girl that I co-wrote with Chris Hollis, which featured on Spandex Ballet’s album ‘Seriously, Don’t Release This’ and occasionally in Glyn’s and my live work - they were composed for my own amusement, with no intention to foist them on the outside world. When I used to do solo acoustic gigs - or even when I was in Big Day Out - it was always the banter that was fun...

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...

It’s hard to fathom, but in a few months it will be a decade since my old band Big Day Out got together one last time for a special reunion gig to raise money for Glyn’s and my first Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t how it can be so long ago; it’s frightening really. And that anniversary’s just the half of it, as while our reunion gig may have been ten years ago, we actually officially split up six years before that. Sixteen years have passed since we were still a going concern, which is as long as I’ve been out of drama school too. It was a sad end to something very special that, at the time, meant the world to me. When we broke up I was ripped apart, and what made it worse was I was the reason it ended, after the two consecutive UK tours I took after leaving college left the rest of the band thinking they could no longer wait for me. In retrospect this seems silly when, in reality, we could have easily found a way around it. But back then, faced...

I miss collaboration, which is something I haven’t had in my creative life for quite some time. While I’ve always been someone who generates ideas - be for it songs when I was in a band and music was my priority, or comedy for the various shows, sketches and stand-up I’ve written on my own or as a double act - I’ve always felt at my best when I’m part of a collective. For one, it’s more enjoyable to work with someone else, for both the social aspect and for the sense of a shared input. It’s also nice to not to be solely responsible for whatever it is you’re doing, and to have someone to bounce off when you do it: without this, it can be hard to find the motivation to see things through. Unfortunately, I haven’t had that shared input for quite a while. On one hand, it hasn’t stopped me; I’ve written three solo shows over the past three years, kept my blog up almost daily for nearly five, and have built the comedy club up to the point where it consistently hosts big acts; bu...

The song that turned things around when my old band Big Day Out became a three-piece and told us we could continue without our lead guitarist (and one-time driving force) was this: Prior to his leaving, I didn’t have much confidence in my ability as a songwriter or a front-man. While I’d co-written a lot of the material with him, I'd never felt comfortable with our partnership, mainly because I was intimidated by his ability. He was always coming up with ideas he was hugely cocksure about (which is intended as a compliment), and while there was a crossover in our musical taste, I was more into songs that were truthful while he was more motivated by a good riff.   His leaving was ultimately a good thing as it cleared the field and took away my fear. The three of us who remained were on the same page and shared the same sense of humour. It gave us a burst of energy that could have driven us to great things if the tours I took when I left drama school hadn’t got in the w...

Tonight saw the first Broadway Cinema & Theatre Mostly Comedy (in the company of Norman Lovett and Arthur Smith) and it’s fair to say that we all had a lovely evening. A Doggett & Ephgrave whistle duet (02.03.17) It was nice to present the club in a proper theatre and to able to use Glyn’s and my experience in th at kind of space with our other work in a Mostly Comedy context. On a personal level, it 's quite something to note the journey the club has taken since its early days in the tiny room above the George pub in Hitchin eight and a half years ago . The Br oadway's not a venue I’d ever anticipated working in, having always been a cinema up to its recent refit ; it was a definite step up from my only other gigs in Letchworth up to that point with Big Day Out at the Arena Tavern over the road , and with both Big Day Out and the Buddy show at Plinston Hall. Helping Norman find his glasses. It helped that we had exactly the right bill fo...

Today I received a message from my old band’s ex-manager, to say he’d heard one of our songs playing in the background of yesterday's episode of 'Saturday Kitchen' on BBC1. Take a moment to savour the above sentence. It’s not something I get to say often, if at all (except for then , when I just said it). I’ve never found myself in a position where my music was used as a bed for Nigel Slater to make a beef and lentil salad, and I doubt I will again; this is a once-in-a-lifetime moment and a great way to start the New Year. Except it isn’t, as it wasn’t ; my music, that is, though I genuinely did a double-take when I tracked down the offending article on iPlayer. Nearly everything was right, from the guitar sound, to the riff, to the fact both songs were played on instruments downtuned a semi-tone, so an open G chord became an F#; if I didn’t know better, I’d say someone went to the effort of recreating the title track of our 1998 Get Happy EP s...

After over twenty years in my possession, I have to face facts: my guitar amp has been lost or stolen.  Me and my Marshall Valvestate had a good innings. We'd been through a lot, from my earliest rhythm & lead guitar fumblings, to various incarnations of Big Day Out and beyond. It was my rehearsal companion, my vocal P.A. at small-scale gigs and - most recently - my piano stool when I didn't own a piano stool. It was also a cumbersome pain in the arse. We lost contact for a while, after I left it at a friend's house in Hove following a gig in Bognor...but we eventually had a tearful reunion. I then used it at a couple of previews of last year's stand-up show and left it at the venue because we had another date in the diary (which was eventually cancelled). I kept meaning to pick it up, didn't get around to it, and now it's vanished without a trace. Fuck it.  It's not the venue's fault; it's mine. I should have gone to get it sooner. The staff w...

We played one of my old band Big Day Out’s songs on Glyn's and my radio show on Sunday, which has been in my head ever since. Chocolate Filled Frown was one of the first things I wrote with Mark Smith back in 1999, when our lead guitarist Rich left the group and we became a three-piece. I have a very clear memory of the two of us sitting around a table in the kitchen of my old house in Stotfold, finishing it off. Mark had arrived with the verse riff and the first few lines in his mind, which we fleshed out in a single session, with him on guitar and me on bass. I suggested the bridge (which I sing) and we both came up with the chorus. It was an exciting time for the group. While we’d had a fair amount of local success as a four-piece (winning the ‘coveted’ prize of Best Band in Hertfordshire 1998, no less), things had started to go slightly skew-whiff. Rich wanted to steer us in an unconvincing musical direction he termed ‘Happy Metal’, which ...

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...

Today, I thought I’d share another one of my old band Big Day Out’s more obscure songs, Smiling On. It didn’t feature regularly in our sets, or on any of our CDs, but it was a fun song to play when we did it. It’s gentler and more introspective than a lot of the stuff we’d perform at our gigs, without quite falling into ballad territory. Listening to it now, I’m struck by its simplicity – and while the lead vocal irritates me, I like the groove of the main riff. While I always thought it was a bit ‘throwaway’, Roger King (who ran the local music fanzine Live Circuit) used to say it was his favourite Big Day Out song. Its funny how these things stick in your head. It goes to show you: one man’s meat is another man’s poison (or insert another maxim that makes sense).

Today, I thought I’d share a demo of one of my old band Big Day Out’s songs that, while never available on any of our CDs, was synonymous with us live from the moment we became a three-piece. The track – which is more of a jam, if anything – is called So Bad. It kicked off nearly every gig we played from 1999 until we split in 2002, before being briefly reinstated in 2008 when we reunited for one night only, to raise money for Glyn’s and my first Edinburgh show, The Balloon Debate. We were always fond of onstage gimmicks; in fact, The Supernaturals’ lead guitarist (who we occasionally gigged with) once said that if all our instruments packed up mid-set, we’d get by with half an hour’s stand-up (which was pretty prophetic). This song was no exception. I’d change the words of the first verse every night to incorporate the name of the venue (e.g. “Come on babe, now you’ve seen the flyers; the music’s playing in Bedford Esquires”) and we’d usually plan some comedy bu...

Another thing I found whilst flicking through my old photographs, was the proposed cover of my aborted 2004 / 05ish solo album, Mostly David Ephgrave. You may recognise the title (see the top of the webpage). The phrase started life as an ad-lib I said at the end of a solo acoustic gig. I wouldn’t have remembered it, if the show hadn't been recorded. When I listened back to it, those three words stuck out. It was the perfect name for a demo recorded ‘mostly’ by myself.   The other half of the recording venture was my friend, the then-sometime promoter / producer Ashley Mann. We started out as guitar teacher (me) and student (Ash). Ash was aware of my work with Big Day Out, and was a firm supporter of my songwriting ability; something I lost faith in after my band split up. He encouraged me to keep going. He also had the recording set-up to document it. Having Ash produce me was a luxury, after being at the helm of most of my past demos myself. The only thin...