Skip Spence was an example to us - he delivered his album "Oar" at whispering volume, bashful but self-possessed and tunnelvisioned. and haunting. that tiny music was ramshackle in its execution but as arresting as any we'd heard.
There were 2 of us, we had no drummer and existed mainly in small rooms. to us it was important to be as nakedly ourselves as Skip was on "Oar" - to make something that added up to everything we were and that could be anything we imagined it to be.
Little Hands Clapping were named (after a line Skip wrote) at the end of 2003, but by that point we had been working on the project for 18 months.
We began in the middle of 2002 by jamming informally. we could swap ideas for hours and played open-endedly on the riffs we'd been storing up since we were last in bands during school. we met a drummer who was called Jonny who played like an octopus and who could wrap himself around any shape we took. he had an electronic kit and kept it turned down low. we had an elastic dynamic but were still constricted into conventional chords and scales. it was a detailed sound, but amorphous and constantly shifting. there were sharp breaks that cut on cue and extended patterns that bled in colour and form as we allowed them. within the structures we were using.
The 3 of us we gave one performance at an open mic night at the end of 2002. it was modal instrumental music. we were still at university. called ourselves The Clicks. there was a wooden version of Miles Davis' "So What" - the only cover we ever attempted - the music came out with a rock intensity but with plenty of air. there was a gaping hole between the deep thump of the kick drum and more brittle guitar texture.
Almost exactly a year afterwards, we had flung ourselves into london, cut off from the comfort of home and an age away from the quiet of university. sharing a house for the first time and barely acquainted with the east end, winter drew in and work was dull. money was short and staying in seemed like the responsible thing to do.
We holed up and practised. the amps were stacked up in tom's room with a tangle of cables, pedals and equipment lying close by. we accepted the predicament we were in and resolved to make a strength of it: before it had all been "wouldnt it be great if we were a band?" now it was: "we are a band of 2 - lets make this work." while it meant we had to do the work of half a drummer each on top of all the harmonic and melodic work, we found we had more freedom and could operate as one mind, one giant guitar. sometimes it sounded good too.
Improvised ideas were harnessed into regular themes. we began attending the raison d'etre open mic night at the Rhythm Factory in whitechapel/aldgate because the dj (Healer Selecter) was ace and we thought the crowd might be willing to appreciate what we were doing. i was already feeling like i did as a kid playing solitaire. music was dead (or meaningless at the very least) till it got heard and we wanted to find an appropriate arena we could bring it into.
We wrote some tight pieces with designated space for improvisation, but it took a while. we only played about 3 of them, "445468", "Squeakyboots" and "The Goose", versions around 4 minutes each. the first was on bonfire night, 2003.
Live performance was always what we were working towards but to us the process was equally interesting. so why not for everyone else? when i got a job with a permanent contract i bought a cheap microphone, and we began recording through it into tom's minidisc player. we wanted to get a document that showed what we were up to, but that you could understand and even enjoy even if you weren't one of us.
"Or: A Stratford Almanack", we called it - the account of our living in stratford. it was the result of probably about 2 or 3 months of recording sessions, and 2 years playing together. Bob Dylan and The Band's "Basement Tapes" had shown us that private, small-scale music could invite an external listener into the imaginative world the musicians create. mistakes, botches and all - if the warmth between the participants was audible.
But the "Almanack" rarely achieves this because its very uncertain - very much the sound of us learning to do LHC music. you can hear us working out a way of playing that was open enough to be exciting, unstable and unpredictable, but that held the forms together. learning, though. rife with mistakes. there are pieces that are carefully set out, some unscripted joint improvisations and some things jammed around a loose set of structures. the character of the record is of our practising - trying things out, defined by our limitations, creating a mood on the fly and often coming off the rails. with such a basic setup, a little distortion, bass-octave guitar or an acoustic piece with drum accompaniment became experimental.
The recordings were completely raw - our abilities with playing and composition and recording felt so flat and limited that we wanted to make a feature of it. we wanted it to show the reality of what we were. which was taking baby steps and frequently falling over. with the exception of "Squeakyboots", nothing here had been played in front of an audience when recordings were made.
The next phase of LHC was about taking what we were doing (or at least a more intelligable version of it) to the Raison d'Etre open mic session. we worked "445468" and "Goose" into more solid, less risky forms by constant and relentless, repetitive practise and became much better at them. rehearsal recordings of all these are far superior to the "album" ones because we were better technically and had beaten the tunes into shape. we amputated The Goose's middle section and made it into a fresh song - a stretched, expansive piece built around minimalist rhythmic and harmonic variations, called "The Swedish Dream of Salt".
We realised two of the Almanack's most subtle and beguiling songs, the acoustic pieces "Sit-gar" and "Do Not Be Stupid" had memorable themes and could be adapted as duos. they became new songs too, called them "Kings and Queens", and "Ivy".
That made three new songs.
"Kings and Queens" and "Ivy" were the most complete and satisfying things we'd done because they had tunes, plenty of momentum, and sounded rich, solid and full - unbelievable that they were just two guitars, played in real time and simultaneously. they were our first acoustic duets. perhaps there was something about the sonic properties of 2 acoustic guitars that lifted our playing. we played them live in that form.
Then Raison d'Etre offered us a longer slot on a non-open mic variety show and we played 6 songs as people sipped their beer on a late summer sunday afternoon at The Spitz. we practised hard for a month and the recording shows some of our tightest playing. we did a 3rd version each of "Sitgar" and "Stupid", this time on electric guitars with fx on. "Goose" and "Squeakyboots" were fearsome, and the "Swedish Dream" was aggressive and singleminded.
By this point Tom's minidisc player had died and we were recording directly into my computer. we were able to clean up the recording quality as well as overdub with some cracked software my friend sent me.
The new EP, "Waging War on the Ungodly", was all about us expanding and tightening what we do - perhaps playing live a few times had given us some insight into what we needed to do if we wanted to excite people other than ourselves, and we wanted to do new kinds of music, and we could do broader and more colourful stuff cos of the computer-technology.
It sees the LHC dynamic applied to new areas like songs and noise-abstractions. "City of the Dreadful Knight" was built up around a live rhythm guitar-duo take and has a real liveliness because of it. the percussion of that track was done with the same spirited amateurism we applied to the artwork - and again done live and simultaneous for maximum "tom and dave in a room" feel. tom's electro arrangement for "Kneel South" had the same humour, curiosity and playfulness as his lead part to "Squeakyboots" had.
So theres some semi-improvised guitar duets (though nothing as throwaway as the spontaneous stuff that made up a good third, of the stratford almanack), but theres an ambient noise piece, and a backwards folksong with electronic marching percussion and a layered country-pickin tune. our first vocals too, nervous and fragile. and our last. they give the record some intimacy - actually a little more than i'd like to have done. but i feel we all know tom a little better now, which can only be a good thing. a leap foward in discipline with considered, structured work. and with The Spitz live set on there too (minus the shaky, uncertain reading of 4454).
The record was put together over a period of 5 months or something, whereas the previous one was bashed out impatiently, as soon as anything was anywhere close to ready. we really took our time making sure there were as few mistakes as possible on this one.
It also featured superior presentation. tom's work, really - he had a simple idea and executed it convincingly. the sepia was a nice touch, and the lettering too. Little Hands artwork is always parallel to the music - the first was makeshift and if charming it was because it was naive. the second was an altogether classier affair, with an idea, a mood and executed carefully.
By now everything outside of LHC had changed: by this stage (Waging War was done by about the end of 2004) we weren't quite so desperate to amuse ourselves. we were both shot of our crappy full time jobs and occuppied with things we actually wanted to be doing. i had joined Silvery and Carmen (my girlf) had moved to east london too so my time was divided. tom had his thing going on too.
there was talk of more open mic action, but it didnt happen because we could never commit to a date to rehearse intensively toward.
we were in control of where (and how) our lives were going in a way we hadnt been a year before. when we'd first moved down to london LHC was a conscious, deliberate effort to use the parts of our brain(s) that were going to waste working 9 to 5. by the beginning of 2005, that sense of desperation had gone.
We were working more slowly and more in isolation. we were jamming less because we werent free at the same time, and werent flush with new ideas anyhow.
The She e.p. took 9 months and there's only 4 tracks, and not much trickery. what took so long was the writing: these are the dense and were painstaking to write and learn to play. they return to the largely monochrome clean-guitar palette of the Stratford Almanack, but without the loose sprawling stuff. it fulfills the hyper-surf-jazz promise of the live shows. it features our best solos ever, and our most focussed, tightly-written and fully realised compositions. 3 tracks have a bright, clear and warm a separated production by james, giving the LHC sound its strongest ever impact. i only wish it could have been consistently tight: "See Italy" was done when we still lived together and had practised intensively. you can tell. we had to shelve a better-sounding version of that tune done by james because our playing and empathy had deteriorated since i moved out of toms house. "Chamchas Brow" was a simple(ish) tune with not many rhythmic shifts that we'd licked into shape months earlier. so rattling that one out wasn't a problem either.
The other 2 - great tunes - suffer in parts from not having been lived in for weeks. they have some of that early-period uncertainty: tom's sorted out on "The Forest Gate" but my comping is inconsistent - and stuck-on in parts. theres a feeling that i'm not locked too solidly onto what i'm trying to do, and could flip off at any second. "Droll Stories" doesnt roll between its various sections too smoothly, comes apart at one point. it sounds stiff and tense, and about 10 beats per second faster than we can handle. then something truly special happens - i couldn't tell you what it's called. where before we sounded trapped by the structures, the inflexibility and the suspicion that we're not good enough to carry the piece - within seconds everything is possible. the walls come down, the rhythm becomes infinite and time slows to a crawl. swing, skank, any note next to any other note at any time and in any order, rebounding across the stereo. two chords, and every permutation on them, without a thought.