‘The Layers’ blog

Buried beneath myriad strata, warmed by the living fires that swirl inside the Earth’s core, two floors below Microsoft customer service and one above the realm of the Morlocks, a brown-coated minion scurried, clipboard in hand, along rows of dread machinery as it whirred and clicked incomprehensibly. Here, in a vast subterranean complex sunk at the centre of a triangle of ley lines and just off the Northampton bypass, lies the machinery that regulates the universe, washes and conditions the fabric of time and space and drives the cogs of fate itself. The minion paused, distracted for a second by a flashing light. He paused to read the dial beneath it, reset a counter to zero and wrote on his clipboard: “Layers drummer. Drama levels risen above threshold.”

Somewhere in the darkness, a valve closed with an ominous click…

At least that’s how we imagined things were panning out when we clapped eyes on Rupert setting up his drums with a skin pallor that suggested he’d not had time to get out of makeup after auditioning as an extra in ‘The Walking Dead.’

Earlier that very week a carrier pigeon had been faxed to Layers HQ bearing a coded microdot reminding us to occasionally check our e-mail. Fortuitously, a message had just arrived with the opportunity to fill in for a band that had pulled out at the last minute granting us the chance to play our first gig in Sweden. This was quite exciting until we realised that it said Swindon. Undeterred, we packed our trunks (we were on our way to the swimming pool) and made plans to wow the crowd of The Rolleston with our unique blend of rock and fluffed chords.

Unfortunately, Roo’s copy of “Middle Class Revolutionary’s Quarterly” had contained a scratch n’ catch guide to the most noxious pathogens of 2012 and his energy levels were on a par with a dazed sloth that had spent three weeks on the Karen Carpenter diet plan.

Fortunately, here at Layers HQ, we’re no strangers to a little bit of percussionist-based drama - in fact, this barely tipped the scales. So, ably supported by Ells Ponting and Shadowlight, we did our best to rock the world of a small but appreciative crowd.

There have been less error-strewn performances in the history of music, admittedly, but Roo rose to the occasion and gradually heads started to nod and some mobile phone footage was taken and a crowd was wowed. We finished with a couple of semi-acoustic numbers, including a version of Surf Trip that allowed Roo to lurch out from behind his newly-racked kit and cough along in harmony.

Many of the qualified epidemiologists in the audience that evening (you just never know with Swindon, do you?) were exchanging comments to the effect that it was unlikely that setting up, gigging and breaking down would do much for Rupert’s health. As it turned out, when Roo called on Friday to tell us that he wasn’t feeling that chipper using the ‘séance’ setting on his mobile, it looked like a grim prognosis for him and for Saturday’s much anticipated gig at the Vaults.

Not for one second did we doubt the awesome powers of our drummer. Well, we did, actually, but none of the other drummers that we knew were available so we got the wife to slip some Bob Martens in his soup and soon his little tail was wagging again.

To be serious for a second: massive props to Roo for powering through when he was feeling like death. Not only was he drumming for us but he was playing for the opposition too. No, no, not like that. I mean he was playing for Wilf, the awesome support act. He’s just a bit camp occasionally, honest.

Was it a brave performance considering his state of health? Hell no. It was much, much more. If this was drummer related drama it was epic not tragedy. Victory snatched from the slavering jaws of defeat.

Saturday night was one of those nights that we’ll be able to look back on in years to come and smile. With support and banter from a wonderful crowd, with fantastic guest appearances from Rob and Sarah on keyboards, Trevor and Kevin on backing vocals (not to mention most of the crowd), we had a cracking time. Several times during the gig I could hear the audience singing along so lustily that I could make them out over a backline that left my ears ringing on Sunday. There’s something about hearing virtual strangers singing lyrics that you’ve written that’s almost indescribably special.

Thanks once again must go to our favourite local venue, The Vaults. Even if we become globally famous (hmmm, ‘when’ we become…?) we’ll keep coming back, we promise. To Trev, who did a brilliant job of the sound despite being quite heavily monstered by the end. To Sarah, Rob, Kev and Trev (again) for joining the list of musicians who’ve been in the band for a little bit. If we all ever get together on stage, it’s going to look like the Mormon Tabernacle choir…

Thanks to the audience for cheerful and voiciferous support. You were as much a part of the gig as were we. And thanks, as ever, to Roo, Caleb and Paul. Just magnificent, chaps. A job well done.

…Christmas/the zombie apocalypse (delete as appropriate) The Layers brought to me:

Well, very little, if we’re honest. Although if you’ve been good, we’ll avoid the mandatory double-tap in the event that you’ve chosen option B. Ho ho ho.

It’s possible that the many Layers fans out there have been calling out: “What have my favourite band been up to? Where are the new songs, gig announcements, the witty banter to which I’ve become accustomed on the website?” Although if you’ve heard that it’s far more likely to be the voices in your head and we’d recommend that you read the labels on your medication more carefully or at least make a mental note to drink gin from smaller receptacles. It’s equally possible that, given the interval since one of us slipped our restraints and made it to a computer to blog, you’ve simply forgotten that we exist. We can take it; indeed, in moments of existential doubt we often forget ourselves.

So what have we been up to since our last update? Well you may ask. It’s been a tough couple (ahem) of months for us in terms of workload, family life and finding ways to slip court-mandated ankle bracelets. We have, however, been working our way with slow determination through some new songs and the light at the end of the creative tunnel that is the oncoming train of recording a second album - hopefully before but possibly heralding the end of the world some time in 2012.

We were also thrilled and delighted to hear from none other than Jennifer Sutton, she of ‘Heart in a Jar’ fame. To our great relief and excitement, Jennifer reported that she approves of the song - we’re delighted not to be getting dragged through the courts again after the misunderstanding over how Neil came to be caught in Scarlett Johanssen’s wardrobe - and we’re hoping to be able to perform it to her in person soon. Jennifer, that it, not Ms Johanssen and if her lawyers are reading this we’re maintaining at least a 1km distance and have barely dipped as much as a hand into Swarfega since.

Hopefully you’ll have noticed that the website has been subjected to a lick of paint, a scraping of barnacles and a quick squirt of whatever it is that they use to clean morgues and adult movie theatres. Yes, it may be a little late in the year for spring cleaning but as our New Year’s Resolution is likely to be ‘Gig more’ it’s in preparation for a fresh onslaught on the sleazy music venues of England and, all gong well, beyond. So if you own, manage or just know of a suitable venue, drop us a line and we’ll have our best shot at lowering surrounding property prices.

More from us soon (well, sooner, hopefully…). In the mean time, stay off drugs. Unless you’re on anti psychotics or need them for your blood pressure or something. In which case, keep taking the pills. Or injections. In fact, do what the hell you like. Try to avoid getting your head stuck in railings.

Layers out.

If that starts the deja vu alarms a-clanging, it’s because it’s a phrase that’s slipped into a blog before. It’s a reference to a song that’s been a long time coming.

Yes, gentle reader, prepare yourself for a jolt that might even shake you from whatever medication they have Layers fans on in the Keith Richards wing of the home for distressed musos: we’re aiming to début ‘Bratislava’ at our upcoming engagement on 10th June. We were planning to give it an airing at the royal wedding next weekend but MI5 got wind of our plans and drafted a sternly-worded warning. Then sent heavily armed men to our houses and stapled said warning to our foreheads. Curse you, Twitterati.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with our past adventures (or who’ve successfully managed to blank memories of anything Layers-related through expensive counselling and painful electroshock therapy) may not know how the song came about. Ignorance can indeed be bliss but into every life a little rain must fall so here for fans, stalkers, insomniacs and the staff of GCHQ combing every byte of the Internet for security threats*, here for your amusement… well, at least a moments’ diversion from work/suicide plans/tiring Internet onanism** is the skinny on Bratislava.

Back in the Halcyon days of 2008 when the economy was still teetering on the edge like the bus in ‘The Italian Job’, diesel was less expensive than black-market human blood and Japan had a flourishing nuclear industry, The Layers set out to tour Europe in an RV that was slightly too long to fit into Lichtenstein in one go. Following a heavy lifting incident in Vienna (helping a nice elderly gentleman with some building supplies for a basement conversion) Roo hurt his back. This may be putting a gloss on it - this was no middle-aged tweak; bits of prolapsed vertebral disc were visible from space and we were left with no choice but to get Roo back to the loving arms of the NHS before some Tory dickhead dismantled it and sold it to Tesco. A trawl of the Internet revealed that the only real choice of flight required a trip to Bratislava at some speed and so, with all the grace and restraint of a blind demolition derby driver on a three day PCP bender, we headed off to Slovakia. Roo’s pain, physical and emotional, was all too palpable and the drive back to Vienna that evening was a more sober affair and in that reflective quiet, the germ of a song was born.

We were incredibly lucky on that trip to be surrounded by such amazing people. Not just the other guys in the band but the other musicians and CouchSurfers that we met - three years on and I’m still in touch with people that I met in that time and I count some of them as good friends.

That’s what Bratislava is about; bonds of friendship that reach across the world; being able to laugh with friends in dark times; trust and love and brotherhood. As a song it’s taken us a long time to do justice to and I think that the version that we play in June will be the third or fourth version and several iterations into that. Version 3.12 or something. We think that we have got it right, though and we hope that it’s worth the wait because it’s dedicated to some very special people - to Rupert for his courage, to Caleb and Paul for making hard times easy to bear, to Duke for getting us out of a jam and to all of the amazing people that we were privileged to play with and to in Europe. So here’s what we’ll be singing:

It’s a long, strange road filled with signs that I don’t recognise.
We bear such a heavy load hiding pain beneath a mask of smiles.
The road slides away below as the satellite counts off the miles -
it’s almost time to say goodbye

But what we’ve made will not break easily,
what we can’t say out loud is in our hearts.
What we’ve made is glimpsed in between
the spaces in the laughter.

Making room, there’s always space for one more at our table -
someone to keep time; to bear this heavy load of laughter shared.
You’re not alone at home: we’re reaching out across the miles to you -
it’s almost time to say hello again
hello again

Because what we’ve made…

So there you have it. If you get along to the gig, we hope that you’ll take that opportunity to raise a glass with us to all of the people that have made for some really memorable moments for The Layers.

Layers out.

*…which reminds me: factions alpha and gamma - the operation begins at midnight on Thursday, explosives and disguises in the third locker from the end, targets in code B in the small ads of ‘Bondage Knitwear Monthly’. Arise my people, death to the infidel etc…

**All three, if you work in IT.

With apologies to friends who’ve read this - I thought it worth mentioning on the band blog as we’ve been working on this as a band and, all being well, we’ll be giving it a Layers début at a gig soon.

If you’re famous, fascinating or just fucking charismatic, you may be able to get away with telling the story of how you came to write the song. Once or twice. Most of the time your listening public would just as soon listen to the songs and if they want to know your life story they’ll buy your autobiography.

So I offer this in writing now so that if you give a damn, you can read it and I can spare you a minute’s rambling at a forthcoming gig.

In the sepia-tinted, stove-pipe-millinered days of my youth I had a friend whose girlfriend had fallen asleep at the wheel of a car and tragically crashed and died. He’d wandered by as I was presenting a radio show, seen me through the window and popped in. This wasn’t unusual as it was the habit of ‘Ranting’ Joe and mine to pick up a bottle of bourbon en route the studio and use it to render the coffee from next door’s cafe drinkable enough to keep us awake through our graveyard shift. Friends who knew this would often drop in to share a coffee and an off-colour story.

On this particular evening, as I was flying solo and a little busier with the sliders, there was a lull in conversation where my visitor picked up the sleeve to the record I was playing and started reading the lyrics which were, as luck would have it, about losing someone dear.

I thought that this might trigger some sort of collapse but instead, in a calm and mildly amused voice, he started telling me how he’d been in town that day and impulse-bought a tee shirt that he thought she’d love, only realising when he got it home and laid it on the bed to fold and wrap that he was never going to get to give it to her. Then he drained his coffee (about 30% by vol), gave me a sad smile, got up and went.

There’s funny on-air stories and there’s that. If only someone had been listening it might have made great radio. Those particular radio waves are now 21 light years or so out into space.

An experience like that (plus a litre of coffee tending in increasingly large ratios to Canadian Club) will keep you awake at night and in the small hours of the morning that followed I had one of those cathartic lyric-writing moments that were sometimes the only thing, in those days, that would finally summon Morpheus.

The song’s called ‘Magic Lantern Show’ and we’ve been reworking it with The Layers. It became something that I found myself returning to, in the years that followed, when someone died; my Tralfamadorian ’so it goes’. I wrote this post on my own blog originally because it just occurred to me that it was almost exactly eighteen years since a dear friend of mine had passed and I found myself playing and singing in the living room - this song just rushed back to me.

So I won’t bore you with the intro if you come to hear the song played but for all of my lost friends and because of when this thought hit me, especially for Jez: here are the lyrics to Magic Lantern Show:

Forgotten dreams… lost poetry,
pinwheel through the corner of my mind
as I sit, adrift in contemplation.
Unspoken words to lost love:
A magic lantern show
in desolation

Raging at blind Fortune
for snatching future seconds
but lost and impotent without you here.
Unstoppable, unmerciful -
time’s river thunders on.
Awake, to drown in loneliness and fear.

Not the purest of their priests
not the wisest of their teachers
could ever hope to bring you back to me
but not the darkest thief of night time
could steal the love we shared
could steal away our past from memory.

Greetings, gentle fans, followers and insomnia-crazed, compulsive web-surfeers. May your troubled souls find rest amongst the placid, directionless burbling of another Layers blog entry.

It may seem as if things have been a little quiet in the yawning corridors of Layers HQ. We’d hate you to think that leather chairs are going unswivelled, cats unstroked and evil schemes unhatched, so here’s a little update, a teaspoon of sauces yet to fully simmer, a swift, clumsy grope of the shape of things to come.

The winter months have been a difficult time for us all: snow, an assortment of viruses, the need to maintain our secret identities by occasionally making some positive contribution to our various employers’’ endeavours have all taken their toll upon our creative output. However, new songs have been taking shape and, just as the bulbs beneath the soil are conserving their energies for an all-out assault on spring, we too are ready for action.

We’re heading back to the studio first of all, to record ‘Wasted’, one of our favourites of the new songs. If we make it in time that will be offered up to the gang at Geek Pop – looking to be bigger and better than ever this year and well worth keeping in touch with.

Then there are some new songs and new-ish songs to be worked into a new live set and so we’re planning to get back on the gigging treadmill and get those rock and roll buns back into steely shape.

In the meantime, Rupert’s been busily teaching himself video editing – it’s moved on a little since his last experience; for one thing you don’t need to keep turning a handle to watch the films once your farthing’s in the machine. But we have high hopes that some sort of audio-visual shenanigans will be yours to enjoy at some point during the year.

Speaking of the year, this will be five years of The Layers in September. An event worthy of celebration, we feel. Keep your eyes on the site for news on that front but in the meantime, any suggestions that don’t seem likely to get us arrested are welcome.

Layers out.

Waste has been on my mind a little today. I had to do a lot of driving and so I’ve been having pontification about the Irish bail out thrown at me via the radio. Perhaps it’s my lack of expertise in international finance but I don’t see how lending more money to people who are so far in debt that they can’t pay off the interest is a help. Apparently , we need to restore confidence in the banking system . I’m pretty confident that they can’t possibly get much more greedy and incompetent so if it’s ok, I’ll just keep whatever proportion of my taxation that would be used to help fund that bailout, thanks Dave.

Into the mix has waded footballer, philosopher and part-time kung-fu ponderer Eric Cantona with a suggestion to the good people of his natural and temporarily adopted homelands that we rebel by withdrawing our savings, precipitating a banking crisis. I don’t know if Eric has been checking his statistics – a little research reveals:

“Average household debt in the UK is ~ £8,562 (excluding mortgages). This figure increases to £17,838 if the average is based on the number of households who actually have some form of unsecured loan.” (Nov 2010, Credit Action)

So if we consider savings as negative debt then everyone taking everything that they have from the banks would appear to make them better off. Hmm…

Against this bleak spectre was some wazzock from John Lewis explaining that consumer confidence is still high and that the public (yes, the people with the ever increasing debt) are intending to spend more than ever this Christmas. Well whoopee.

So I know that, presented with a bag of humbug in the weeks leading up to Christmas I’m likely to identify it with a ‘bah’-based prefix but let’s be reasonable here. How much of the stuff that turns up in your Christmas swag bag is needed? It’s not the one-off expenditure that is the problem here, it’s the idea that happiness can be bought. Particularly that it can be ordered on line.

Please, by all means, do some Christmas shopping. If you know that Jeff will really, really like that book, that Christina will wear that scarf every day, that little Polenta really will stick out the saxophone lessons then go for it. A well-intentioned gift, given in love is a wonderful thing. If, on the other hand, you’re trailing round the shops thinking ‘what the hell can I get for Auntie Phyllis?” then don’t. Give her a voucher that tells her you’ll come round and valet her car or clean out her guttering (no, that’s not a euphemism. For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you?) or cook her Sunday lunch or take her to Dignitas (delete as appropriate*)

Don’t buy a whimsical piece of kitsch tat that will gather dust on a shelf for months before finding its way to a car boot sale and bring no more pleasure than the unanaesthetised removal of a nasal polyp. Because believe me, the people spending money on twinkling seasonal adverts with snow and smiling children and dogs in faux fleece reindeer antlers aren’t trying to coax you to the shops for the cardio workout and the joy on your families’ faces. They’re doing it to bolster a system for making a few rich men richer by taking a little money from a lot of people who have little enough as it is. You want to get your kids something for Christmas that will stay with them? Start a college fund. If your kids turn out to be thick as shit they can always spend it on six months’ car insurance and a tank of petrol when they’re seventeen. I imagine that the cost will be roughly the same by about 2020.

And the same argument is being used to bail out another set of bankers. What would happen if we wrote off all of that debt? Well, who has invested in debt? People with enough money to buy financial bonds in large numbers. Debt is a commodity to be bought and sold. Essentially, it’s an immaterial crop of pure evil grown in the dark hearts of bankers. A sort of death cap toadstool of the soul. If we wrote it off the rich would get poorer and the poor… well, they’d have their £17,838 debts written off, presumably.

Approaching the point with all the foresight and alacrity of a summer-torpid wasp failing to escape from a partly open window, the reason that I write this is that we’re thinking about getting a recording and perhaps even a video together for ‘Wasted’, one of our favourite songs of late and it’s never been as pointed or topical as it is now.

There’s so much in the world that needs to change. That change can only be brought about by people. People can only start to change things if they can change themselves and that can start by not forcing yourself further into penury by buying pointless seasonal tat because the man in the magic glowing box in the corner of the living room tell you to.

Christmas can be fab. But you can’t buy it. You can make it. Cook, share, sing, play… love.

33 shopping days until Christmas. Find something better to do with them.

Neil out.

*That’s their motto.

Another day, another dollar. Serves me right for getting a part time job in a sweatshop, I suppose…

There are days, of course, when we all feel like that. For The Layers, the evidence would be that the last few weeks have been a bit of a slog: you can see the weight of responsibility (Caleb, Paul and Roo) and relentlessly  burning one’s candle at both ends (Neil) taking its toll on the band members. Energy levels are dangerously low and there may well be a small, unconvincingly Scottish gentleman running around somewhere in Rupert’s innards worrying aloud about the state of the dilithium crystals.

They say that every cloud has a silver lining - possibly as a result of serious industrial pollution. In this particular case the reflective precipitate in question has been a relatively fecund period in terms of our song writing. It raises the question about hardship and art. Personally, I’ve often found it difficult to write happy songs - as Fish once remarked, you’ve got better things to be doing than writing songs when you’re happy. Maybe so. There always used to be a cathartic element to the song writing process for me. I’ve heard the theory ventured recently that the same is true of society, that we are more artistically motivated in times of hardship. Perhaps we need a little suffering to wake us up, make us think. Maybe we’re not using our full capacity until we’re threatened somehow.

If that’s the case, then maybe this new ‘age of austerity*’ will trigger an artistic revival. Good grief, perhaps people will even start to remember how to make their own fun? I hope so. I’d like to think that a bit of blitz spirit will be the upshot of some potentially bleak times and that we’ll deal with the bad days by having some great nights: gathered together in one house to save a bit of fuel, singing, laughing, sharing food and songs and good times.

Which reminds me, The Layers are available for acoustic house gigs…

Of course, hard times only last so long. Eventually, discontent leads to revolution. Remember, remember the 5th of November. It’s an expression - there’ll be fireworks -  for a reason.

Sometimes it pays to take stock. I’ve been stealing Oxo cubes from my local supermarket for four years now and I just e-Bayed the lot for sixty quid.

By a strange coincidence, it’s also four years or thereabouts since The Layers started writing songs together which, tonight, is my other prompt for stocktaking.

Tonight was one of those rehearsals that reminds you why you do it. We were all pretty tired when we turned up tonight; all having that <sigh> feeling as we loaded the gear into our cars. I still have burned milk powder in my hair, Paul had to leave promptly to go back to work… it’s nights like this that can really test the resolve of a band members that are doing it purely for friendship and love of music. Sometimes, your resolve is rewarded. Tonight was one of those nights. A couple of warm up numbers and then we prepared ourselves to get down to some work on new songs - often the hardest part of an evening: stops and starts, repetition of tricky sections, misunderstandings.

‘Red Roses’ - a song we’ve toyed with on and off for over a year - finally has structure and sense and we made it all the way through it for the first time tonight.

Better still, an entirely new song: ‘Mercy Kill’ went from a half-idea cooked up at a jam last week in Roo’s illness-enforced absence to more or less a complete song.

Sometimes, through the grind of delayed rehearsals, head-colds, distractions, lack of energy and all of the other things that can dog you through a lean period, you can lose sight of where you’re going. It helps when an evening like tonight makes you think back to where you’ve come from. Thinking back four years to those evenings in the back room of the Ormond’s Head, it took so long for some of the ideas that we bounced around to even start to look like a song.

Tonight, we could see even after a few tentative stabs at ‘Mercy Kill’ how it was going to work out. We’ve come such a long way and grown closer as musicians and friends.

By an odd coincidence (yes, another) today happens to be my birthday. I’ve been showered with best wishes and some really thoughtful gifts. I’m very lucky to have the friends that I do.

By far the best present that I’ve had today, though, is to be able to create a couple of new songs with Caleb, Paul and Roo. There really are some things that money can’t buy.

Now, does anybody want to buy six hundred jars of Bovril?

Neil out.

X

I’ve been asked a couple of times in the last two weeks: “Why are you called The Layers?”  I’ve taken this as an enquiry about the name of the band, rather than confusion about my own identity and entered into a brief account of how you go about picking a name when you start out as a band.

For some reason, though, it’s got me thinking about names in general, partly as I’ve been noticing the names of some of the friends that Facebook suggests for me and something that used to confuse me a little has become clear.

When I was younger, I used to find it odd that there were ‘old people’ names, like Mabel and Humphrey, that nobody was called any more. I imagined that there was some government agency that pulled up outside your door when you retired, stuck a moustache on your wife, gave you a pair of trousers that came up to your armpits and said: “Congratulations, you’re officially old folk. Your new names are Sidney and Edna and you may now start driving brown cars.”

Of course, all that happens is that names fall out of fashion and often don’t come back unless they’re immortalised by canonisation or biblical significance. My own name, for instance, was briefly in vogue after the moon landing in 1969 but will soon be associated with high waistbands and nonsensical anecdotes (although, in my own case, the latter is already somewhat true).

Where modern inspiration for names comes from is becoming a new mystery -celebrity choices are common, of course, but I wonder where the inspiration to call your kid Chardonnay, Champagne or Zinfandel come from? If it’s following Jack (son of Ernest) Hemmingway’s example of naming children after the wines that were drunk on the nights of their conception then surely there would be a lot more kids around called Kronenbourg and Rohypnol?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for creativity and there are names taken from mythology and other languages that are quite beautiful, but the ones named after foods; Cherry, Cinnamon and so on just strike me as weird. “Hi, I’m Pork Featherstone and these are my kids, Kumquat and Oregano. My wife, Chlamydia, is just parking the car.”

I guess when you’re picking a child’s name, that you want them to be unique and special. Hopefully you give a little thought to them not spending every other day at school having the living crap kicked out of them too.

When you pick a band name, you’ve got a similar issue. You want to be unique (we failed on that front) and you try to tread a fine line between pretentious (Clouds of the Everything) and having a ‘joke’ name (Doc Sausage and the Cheesy Helmets) without picking a name that you can only get away with if you’re a student band (Nematode, Cynthia, Garth Vader). Avoiding those pitfalls, you then have to find a name that doesn’t misrepresent your music - a folk duo called Killspike or a thrash-punk outfit called The Buttercups are just going to confuse the hell out of audiences.

So the general procedure is to throw names in a hat, give each member of the band one or two vetoes and then pull them out until you end up as, in our case, The Layers.

A few years on, though, I’d at least like to think that there was some sense to the selection. It wasn’t what we were thinking about at the time but I think that some of our songs do merit some peeling back of layers. I’d like to think that there’s depth there and something worth digging deeper to find.

Beneath the way that we portray ourselves through media like this, too, there’s a little more going on. The Layers isn’t just a band; we’ve shared ideas and experiences that have changed us and there are depths and layers to our friendships that run far beneath the surface.

So, there may not have been much reason other than chance that we were called The Layers originally but there are plenty of reasons now why it was a pretty good choice.

On the face of it, the lyrics to surf trip couldn’t have been less appropriate than when we sang them at Green Man last week. A song about sun-kissed, carefree days at the beach… well, look a little closer, pilgrim. Surf trip is about surf trips with friends, not about surfing. It’s about being surrounded by people that you love and trust so that even if you fall off a surf board or set out across pointy rocks, you know they’ll catch you if you fall.

So as we trudged through the mud to get our gear to the stage, I was smiling because that is where I want to be, warm days and smiling friends. Laughter and new experiences shared.

Confronted, earlier in the week, with flood warnings for the festival, it would have been easy to be disappointed. The mood at our Thursday night run through was great, though. We’ve come this far and we’re getting used to… I was about to type ‘marching into the unknown’ - I think ‘shambling off, half-arsed, with no plan’ is a little closer to the truth. This was certainly much less daunting than driving towards the channel tunnel in our ubercampenbussen a few years ago.

Having a gig the next day, I was equally prepared to camp or not to camp. That was the question. The huge swathe of tents crammed together in the mud like a slightly festive refugee camp was enough to make up my mind. I was, however, looking forward to seeing Roo put up his tent. Roo was clad in wellies, shorts and a long waxed jacket - making him look like a really posh flasher. I imagined the imminent construction of his tent was going to resemble a Tourettes-afflicted country gent raping a hang-glider. I was denied this joyful spectacle when it took us so long to find Roo that he’d befriended a couple of families nearby and they’d helped him to set up. Roo and Jen had already charmed their new neighbours sufficiently to drag them along to the gig, so with the prospect of friendly faces in the crowd we squelched off in search of food and a stage to play.

This gig had come courtesy of the wonderful people at Geek Pop - do check them out when you‘ve a chance. We were greeted by the ever-smiling face of Hayley and introduced to the crew of Einstein’s Garden. It was a rather fetching little section of the festival and I imagine than in the sun, it would have been a little grotto of paradise. The other great benefit of the sun would have been that it would have taken a little stress off the Solar Stage, where we were about to play. A solar powered stage in the foothills of the Brecons, in August. Yeah, we know. Surely hydro-electricity would have been the way to go? We could have had a lightshow that would have been visible from space…

We’ve played more competently, we’ve played more fluently but it was still a decent performance, I felt. What mistakes there were seemed to go largely unnoticed by our small but perfectly formed audience and even though the quieter parts of the set were accompanied in a somewhat avant-garde fashion from the next stage along, there seemed to be nodding, foot tapping (well, splashing) and general signs from the onlookers that traditional festival gift for the unappreciated artist - the plastic bottle of piss - would not be winging our way any time soon.

There were some memorable moments: Caleb’s first solo, straining our sustainable power source to its limits, actually made me jump. Not as much, however, as the litre of cold water down Roo’s back in mid song made him leap sideways. What sticks out for me personally, though, was that for most of the gig, we seemed to be ‘in the moment’. It’s so easy, sometimes, to walk on stage, tune up and then disappear into a furious world of concentration and self-consciousness and then before you know it, it’s all over and all that’s there to tell you that you played a gig is a damp shirt and ears ringing from standing too close (within a kilometre) of Caleb’s amp. Last week, though, we seemed to be chatting, communicating and laughing together. I don’t know what the audience made of it but I had a whale of a time. I’m also fairly sure that I saw a whale swim past me one time.

The ‘above and beyond’ awards definitely go to Rob, for trekking out to see us; to Harry, for joining the band for ‘Kiss the Girls’ and most of all to Jen for managing to be president of our fan club, the drummer’s hot groupie and watchful mother simultaneously in a noisy swamp without her smile slipping the once. Kudos to you all.

Big shouts also to Hayley for the gig, to Ellen for organising us, to the technical and hosting crew of the Solar Stage and to the other artists that shared it with us. You’re all fab.

Another burst of kit-lugging, then a pleasant little interlude as we were permitted beyond the velvet rope for artiste’s catering, a hugely welcome, cosy meal in a warm marquee filled with laughter and chat.

Then home and my single sombre note of a wonderful day.

On the way home, being tailed by Rob, we were mere seconds behind an accident. The carriageway blocked by a serious collision, as we waited, more and more police, ambulances and fire trucks turned up. I’m happy to report that nobody was killed: I’ve learned since that a man was hospitalised with an abdominal puncture but no fatalities - although that was what we were gradually beginning to suspect as the wait continued. In an oddly complementary musing, as we waited, Rob and I struck up a conversation with a sergeant in the Welsh Guard, back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was struck by the abrupt and unnecessary tragedies that can snatch us from each others’ lives. Moments like that can leave me feeling transient, ephemeral - I was glad that I was standing with a friend. I felt anchored.

I suppose that pretty much brings me full circle. It was very much a Layers experience. Next year - more festivals, bigger stages and perhaps just a little sun…?

Layers out.