Blood, tears and ... hackbretts

Today I've been re-stringing a hackbrett - which is a sort of hammered dulcimer, but hackbrett, which means "chopping board", is the sort of word you want to use when re-stringing one. "What's involved in re-stringing a hackbrett, then?", I don't hear you saying. Well, mostly it's blood, tears and quite a few curse words. Actually, a lot of curse words. You'll use up those your mother taught before you've got properly started. The ones your friends and siblings gave you will be used up before you're halfway through the job and then you're onto anything you can possibly remember or invent. By the time you've finished the job there'll be a few new words that you've just invented ready and worn in for inclusion in the dictionary. Why does anyone re-string a hackbrett then? The answer is probably insanity. The other answer is that someone paid them to do it. Because no-one actually re-strings a hackbrett - they pay someone else to do it. Anything else is madness. But since this is my own hackbrett I'm talking about and I'm too stupid ( and broke) to pay anyone else to do it, (besides I've yet to find anyone insane enough to take it on) I'm doing it myself. So if you need new swear words, just ask, I've got a few corkers to spare.

How to do ...the love song

Actually the question shouldn't be "How do you write a love song?" We think it should be "Why should I write a love song?" And that's where the trouble starts.


Writing a love song is easy. Writing a good love song is nigh on impossible. The pitfalls are many and some of such consequence that lives can easily be ruined.
Any songwriter worth his, or her salt, has to have one or two of these in their repertoire, but frankly, it's best left as soil untouched.


The main problem about the love song is the subject matter. Not love itself, but the object of it's affections. You can't name them, because one day soon they may not be the love of your life. Even if they really are the love of your life there's absolutely no guarantee that you are going to remain the love of theirs. And there's nothing sadder than singing a love song to an old girlfriend. And there's nothing more dangerous than singing a love song to an old girlfriend when the new girlfriend is around.

You can't use a different name, a pseudonym, because that will almost certainly guarantee that you won't remain the love of their lives. Your love will never be convinced that any reference you make to someone of a different name is innocent. Frankly even specifying a gender in a love song is potentially unwise. Hair colour, eye colour, accent, pitch of voice, sexual preferences or favourite places, movies, songs, books and brand of tea are equally dodgy.


About all you can say in a love song is that you love someone, and you will love them forever. You might also get away with saying that you'll do anything for them (especially if it's impossible), but even here you have to be careful. If you carelessly let slip the contents of your first draft you might just find yourself obliged to compete in a triathlon immediately after having built a castle on Everest, by the hand you just self-amputated. If you're a girl you might just find yourself re-populating the world single handed.



So why should anyone try this daunting task? Honestly, it's a mystery. The best I can come up with is that it could be as an attempt to cure the writers block that invariably comes with the contentment of a new relationship. Once the rose tinted spectacles start to get dirty one inevitably starts to look for something you used to have before the relationship but seemd to have got cleaned out along with the colour faded underwear.


The second best I can come up with is that it could be an attempt to display that one is a sensitive and emotionally grown-up person. Of course it will probably fail to show sensitivity and almost certainly fail to sound grown up. However, it might be worth a try.

It might be the only way you get laid whether it's in a bed or a coffin. Only time will tell.

Notes on an evil instrument .....

It's commonly thought that the violin is the devil's instrument but The Appendix as always knows better.

In fact, the clarinet, invented by the devil in 1706. J C Denner, who was commissioned with the actual manufacture of this beast promptly died. The first serious work for the instrument was composed by Jean Adam Joseph Faber a Belgian (need I say more?), who immediately tried to save himself by giving up musical endeavours and started publishing books. I should add that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his clarinet concerto in September 1791 and promptly contracted typhoid and died two months later. You get the point?

The popularity of the clarinet arose because it lent people the hope that they might be able to have soul and play the blues. This is patently untrue on two counts, first although the clarinet lent hope, it soon took it back and used it for it's own more satanic purposes. Second, just read the small print on your receipt - you'll realise that when you bought your clarinet you handed over your soul along with the credit card.

So if you have a clarinet, here is our advice: Burn it, bury it and forget it.

J S BACH - the old man of rock

J S Bach was a mathematician who took time off from lecturing at the University of Brandenburg to compose and perform a repertoire of comic songs, jigs (which he spelt Gigues - well, he did Maths not English, after all), and reels.

His most popular song, ironically, turned out to be Air on a G string, which was adopted by the Irish as their national anthem until the country went Catholic and stopped mentioning things like G strings.
(Curiously, it is nearly impossible to play Air on a G string on a G string. Mostly because the elastic keeps going out of tune, but also because very few G strings are actually long enough to provide the necessary range.)

Born at an early age, Bach was a musical genius. Sadly, he was a dummy when it came to contraception and ended up with eleven kids. To feed these spurious offspring he did gigs in the evening.
Initially he just did covers of numbers by Gabrielli and Vivaldi, but later he started writing his own songs.
His song St Mathew's Passion was only prevented from reaching number one by Handel's Messiah, but with the instrumental Toccata and Fugue in D minor, he finally hit the top spot.
He followed this success with a string of classic hit albums.
Bach's career almost ended when most of the music he had written for the film Fantasia was replaced by other people's work.
Shattered by this experienced he fell to writing muzak for the Duke of Brandenburg and playing with his organ.

Possibly the most curious fact about Bach is that, in order to avoid paying death duty, he changed his name to C F Bach in 1750. Later he changed his name again. This time to C F Martin.
Finally, he emigrated to America and began making guitars as a hobby.
In his final years he started the band Procol Harem, but disenchanted, and only able to recycle old hits, he soon gave it up.