Final Performance night - all the songs were written during SWF week.

On the last day of the the 2009 Festival, we all got together in the cafÈ to play back the last of the week’s songs. Many people had delayed their live performance until this final session, due either to completing a particular song toward the end of the week, or the time taken in developing chord sheets for the house band. So the band had to learn around 20 songs in a 3-hour rehearsal – challenging, certainly, but Jo and Barry were on the case with the chord sheets, so every chart was really easy to read. I think we just about pulled it off (and in a few cases, even had time to write and rehearse some vocal harmonies). Barry’s excellent A&R-ing put the rock/dance-friendly songs towards the end of the final band set, which led to predictable – but wonderful – table-dancing etc as the evening’s beer took its toll on the audience!

SWFers past and present will, no doubt, be tired of hearing me say this, but it’s nonetheless a wonderful thing; a song can be nothing more than a title at 10am, and appear on stage with a full band performance by 9pm the same day. This is testament to the way our songwriters embrace the SWF experience – throwing themselves into the writing process, and forcing themselves to complete a song. It’s this ‘momentum’ of writing, recording and performing that helps many of the SWF songwriters to break (what they perceive to be) writers’ block. Here’s an excerpt from an email I received this morning from one of the 2009 songwriters;

“I would like to thank you so much for the experience of a lifetime. I enjoyed it so much and despite much doubt did in fact write one song a day [...]. All the staff worked incredibly hard but I was astounded by your capacity to absorb the time pressures and stress. It did not show one bit and you were like the proverbial swan paddling on the water.”

Here’s a gallery of performance images from the final day. You can also find some of these images on our Facebook group.

SWF 2009 - Finale song - What's the Big Idea?

SWF's Joe and Richard 'trading licks' with the songwriters.

SWF studio producer Abner performs a song from his homeland of Ecuador, while Joe accompanies on, er, ukelele.

Sunday Times writer (and songwriter) David Sinclair with SWF tutor Richard Parfitt.

Final rehearsals with the house band - a lovely reggae tune called 'Where Do I Go', written two hours earlier!

The first house band song, performed on the Tuesday in the cafÈ.

We’re two gigs in to the week now, and the house band members (Chris, Josh and me) are deep in rehearsal. The band system works like this; a songwriter completes their song (usually the same day), writes a chord sheet (or gets one of the tutors to write it), then brings this notation to our estimable ‘chord tsars’ Jo and Barry for checking. When the chart is complete, the songwriter brings it to the band in the main rehearsal room for a quick run-through. We then add ’secondary hooks’ (intros, additional riffs etc) and, where necessary, backing vocals. Instrumentation varies (I’m still trying to find a way to use my pink Flying V ukelele) but is usually guitars/bass/drums and sometimes keyboard. We usually only have 10-15 minutes to learn and run through each song, so it’s essential that the chord charts are correct – hence all the checking and tutor support earlier in the day.

Not all of our songwriters need to use the band – some play as acoustic-only (or even unaccompanied voice), and others perform to drum-loop backing tracks created earlier in the day with our Garageband/Logic Mac workstations. But whatever the arrangement, the quality of the writing has been excellent – affecting melodies, clear and singable lyrics, and in many cases some particularly strong choruses. We’ve had a good variety of genres – punk, reggae, pop, electro and rock, as well as plenty of folk/acoustic singer-songwriter performances.

The V is ready. But no-one has requested its services just yet.

The purpose of the band is to provide a level playing field so that all the new songs can have the same performance ‘frame’, regardless of the performing experience or instrumental skill of the writer. Previous SWF-ers, or regular visitors to this site and its forum, will know that we try to separate songwriting and performance. It’s a shame that, to many audiences, a poor song performed well can sound better than a great song performed badly, so we try to give each song its best chance to ’survive’ its first day of life!

In other news, we’ll be on the BBC today – radio this morning, and BBC West TV this evening. I imagine these news features will be online via iPlayer for a week or so from the date of the this blog entry.