mostly david ephgrave

The Proclaimers are a band I've developed a soft spot for (like that patch on the top of a baby's head). And of their music, two songs often make my early-morning playlist: 'On Causewayside' and 'There's a Touch'. While the songs are stark opposites, they both ignite the part of me that loves being in a band and make me tempted to call up some friends to see if we can cobble something together. Playing with other musicians is something I've taken for granted when you consider how often my work has put me in that position in the past, and it's such a distant prospect in the current circumstances. Pandemics and live music make unhappy bedfellows after all. I only stumbled across 'On Causewayside' recently while shuffling Proclaimers music on my household's trusty privacy-infringing Amazon Alexa. It stood out to me for several reasons: firstly, because Causewayside is a part of Edinburgh I've stayed in a few times while on the Fringe, wh...

I’ve managed to have a reasonably restful day, despite fitting a lot in, primarily due to looking after my mum’s pets, as I wrote yesterday. I had a particularly unusual moment as I sang through a few of my songs from my show, when I realised the song I was running through - Shit Happens - was actually written a hundred yards down the road at our old house on the same street; it was weird to think one of my signature songs was written in the same postcode. I can still picture quite working on it in my bedroom all those years ago. We only lived here for a short while before my mum briefly moved to Norfolk to open a B&B and I moved into my first flat and went to drama school. Musically speaking, this period coincided with the tail end my band being a four-piece and our then lead guitarist leaving dramatically and the three of us deciding to carry on as a three-piece without him, so it was a crucial time in our development; it was also a key momen...

I’m still torn over whether to put songs into my Edinburgh show or not. I’ve been working through some bits and pieces today, which included singing a couple of the songs I’d potentially earmarked for inclusion, and I can’t quite settle on what would be best; the columns titled ‘for’ and ‘against’ are equally stacked. A good reason to use music is it would flesh out the show considerably and give it more weight and depth - and possibly a way to give the end of the show a natural lift - but my main concern is my more serious songs could slow down the comedy and affect the pace of it. It’s a quandary. The sticking point is how far I want to delve into more emotional content; the material I’ve already written strays into territory I’ve not explored in stand-up before - and feels better for it - and while I’ve definitely got a few songs that could strengthen my point, I know how simplistic the approach to genre and brochure listing can be in Edinburgh; this was the problem Glyn and I...

This morning, for the first time in a good few years really, I got my acoustic out and sang a few of my old songs - and get this: it felt great. It’s mad that I’ve not done it for so long, when music was what defined me for so many years; there was a time when all I wanted to be was a songwriter and musician, recording with my band or on my own, yet somewhere down the line, my priorities changed and I moved on to different things. I’d still sing and play - the various actor / muso gigs I did made sure of that - but the actively creating musician inside me was obscured, which is a huge shame really. I’m not sure what it was that made me do it today, though a combination of the music I listened to while getting ready and the fact that Mark Morriss played at Mostly Comedy last week (thus inadvertently reminding me of what I used to do) saw me extricate my jumbo acoustic from its dusty lair* and run through my old repertoire. It was not without pain - the tips of the fingers o...

Over the past week or two, I’ve been on a bit of a Sheryl Crow kick, largely thanks to rediscovering her cover of one of my most-liked Bob Dylan songs. She has one of my favourite female voices, yet despite this, I only own one CD and that’s just a single (her '97 release ‘Hard to Make a Stand’); on that basis, you can only imagine how much of her back catalogue I’d own if I hated her (it would fall into minus-figures). Dylan, conversely, takes up more of my collection than anyone else, save The Beatles and Paul McCartney’s solo work. He’s one of those artists who, when you get him, you really get him - and once I’d tuned into his style as a student, I'd time and again be blown away by his lyrics; he’ll have more jaw-dropping imagery in one track than other people fit in a whole career. These days, I mostly listen to music in the morning when getting ready, and more often than not, this will consist of a suggested YouTube playlist when I’m in the bath, r...