Wedding Ritual #7: Annie Gardiner

Annie Gardiner

first became known to me as the drummer for the inimitable Venus Bogardus, back in the ancient times when you could find out what people were doing on Myspace. Since then I've borne witness to Annie's involvement in an ever-increasing range of musical projects and more - not least Hysterical Injury (the world's greatest dormant band). A producer as well as a singer and songwriter - not to mention a virtuoso bassist [she can do more with four strings than most guitar sections can do with ten]; every new thing Annie does is a fresh exploration of thought, feeling, sound and soul. And it also just happens she loves a catchy tune... and a laugh.

Here are Annie Gardiner's old, new, borrowed and blue creative works, in her own words:

Something Old

"This song written by KD Lang and Ben Mink has come back to me again and again in the least expected of places. I remember vaguely when it was in the charts when I was little, in the car with my future mother-in-law-never-to-be on a tense journey to Mothercare baby shopping - and in my memory, that urging me to look it up - and finding a live performance of KD Lang singing and its palpable joy and melancholy. What intrigued me was the calling of the 'coooooooooooooooonstant... craaaaaaaaving'. In that calling I felt what I had understood the 'craving' to be, the desire for something yet unknown. I thought about the subject, and found it interesting that desire is something that has only had a glimmer in pop music, we know all about certain gendered desires but not about that one and I heard it deeply. 

"One of the reasons Hysterical Injury had such a big bass sound with the particular effects pedals and amp I used was because it was the only sound I felt represented that feeling in my guts; raw and visceral and something you could get lost in as a world. So I wondered what this song would sound like with that underneath it as its instrumental bed. I recorded it live in my bedroom/studio at the time using a custom-made jag-stang shaped, carbon body bass guitar with a P-bass neck through an electro-harmonix Big Muff bass fuzz pedal and Micro POG by the same company, straight into an Alesis 16 channel Firewire desk/interface and into Logic 9 (which I still have a copy of and use from time to time on my Laptop). For vocals I used a Sontronic Helios microphone straight in, no fancy signal chain, just a bit of reverb in my headphones for atmosphere: the recorded signal was clean. I overdubbed the drumstick pattern after and the harmonies, then mixed. 

"It was really nice that Drunken Werewolf premiered it and I think I even sent it to KD Lang (what I thought was her managing company's email) but I never heard back. I figured if it offended them/her they'd have asked me to take it down. But, it's still there and when I listen to it today, I like it and that is unusual for me! I like it when I am not nauseated by myself and my work."

Something New

"This is a brand new track for my brand new album Bloodletting which I am just putting finishing touches to right now! I wanted to share this because I love its rhythm and its message. It's about time, healing, hurt, pain, relating and reflecting... like all my songs are really - just slightly different orientations each time, because time and space changes us. I had read a story recounted by Clarissa Pinkola Estes about a woman skeleton tangled in fishing line in the sea. She would haunt people until they had untangled every single knot and only then were they free of their pain. I liked this and borrowed the idea, and thought about how it related to me - and, hence the lyrics.

"I wrote this whole album on my 3/4 sized nylon strung Spanish acoustic guitar, while singing into a SM58 sellotaped in place to my desk because I couldn't be bothered to stand to write into a mic stand. I wanted to have my vocal effect sound exactly (or as exact as you can get with bog standard Logic Space Designer) like Hope Sandoval on Mazzy Star's second album So Tonight That I Might See. I LOVE that album. Again, it comes back to me again and again. When it first came out I remember snogging my first proper boyfriend for hours to that album (he was just like Dean on Gilmore Girls - 'best first boyfriend ever'). I wanted to have that reverberated atmosphere. So, I recorded all the demo's this way - SM58 sellotaped to the desk and gain up SUPER high so it caught both guitar and voice. Yes, this is an awful way to record, but i didn't care, this was about feeling an atmosphere to write and it worked. I sat in a chair really close and pinned fabric curtains around my DAW so that it felt enclosed but soft. I perfected the songs there and then, until I felt they became shit - then that was the end of the collection. 

"The result is my most introspective work to date. It's personal but it is not 'dear diary' cos I hate that shit, no art in that for me. As a result it has taken me a long time to work on it, because I'd get sad when working on it. I invited some people that i knew I could trust to work on the instruments and I am very excited to share that once it's released. So far, everyone who has played has made me weep with their ideas and sensitivity. So, it's an acoustic album, personal songs under my real name - to be the next release after laying to bed the beast of Hysterical Injury (although, she's only sleeping I think)"

Something Borrowed

"This song has had a huge effect on me, and although I had known of it a long time, it didn't reach me till 2018. As I get older, it takes longer and a lot more listening to find something that moves me physically, that I become addicted to, obsessed with and know the feeling is always inside it. This song does that to me. Recorded in 1971 by Mary with arrangements by Tony Visconti and played by a whole array of amazing musicians including Danny Thompson on bass. It is utterly breathtaking to me the pureness of the vocal and the changes in the melody, written in verse - there isn't a chorus but the refrain kills me every time. It was written by Liz Thorsen, who is hard to find any info about, which intrigues me even more - she apparently wrote the song and then just disappeared. Mary is a close friend of my family, and a connection for me to my parents' life before I was born. I grew up as a young child in her house in South West Wales which my folks rented from her. Tony is also a friend of the family who had worked with both my mum and dad on separate musical projects and together when he had his Good Earth Studios in '70s London. 

"I learned this song on piano and would sing it every day during the making of Bloodletting. I couldn't quite get the right chords I don't think, but got a close approximation. It's a story about everything; relationship with nature, ourselves, relationships, memory, imagination, universe and you - whoever you are... the lines that makes me choke every time are "Oh show me your simplicity / And I may find you are a part of me / And I am a part of you / And I'm afraid, I'm afraid of your big white roaring ocean / Oh but I want to be invisible". I'm choking up just writing this... again, it hits that place for me. I love it."

Something Blue

This was a band I had with my friend Ben Hallman. It was a spin-off band from a more serious band we had called The SP's, then The Frozen Waves. We made five albums and three singles which we never released apart from the single 'Love on Toast' of which there was only one copy made - we put it on Ebay for a week and it didn't sell. It was a project in total stupidity which I absolutely loved at the time. We had this going for about 3 years, then it just fizzled away. We did do one gig where we played approximations of the songs, and got horrifically drunk on stage... where I found myself pouring the best part of a pint of larger into Ben's mouth as he was lying on the floor between my legs as I was singing and he had one hand on his keyboard, we destroyed everything and fell over. That night we were billed as 'idiot electro bollox duo' and we played with Ben's other band Pavlov and the Dogs, Kites and Flags and Dirty Confetti (which was Millie Phipps band at the time). We had the whole room singing "... I love you so much I can't shit...", which was one of the favourites amongst our friends... I even performed it solo at a friends' wedding as they said it was their all time favourite song! I performed it with the couple in front of all the friends and family... it was hilarious! So here it is, I Love You So Much I Can't Shit. 

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For updates on Bloodletting and all Annie's projects (including her Excellent Birds project which we somehow haven't even mentioned) - check anniegardiner.co.uk - and follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

'Day After Day (original demo)' and 'I Love You So Much I Can't Shit' are both available to download now from the new Wedding Ritual Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-decide basis. Please give generously according to your means, as 100% of funds after fees will go to the artists.

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Wedding Ritual #8 will be conducted by Mary Rouncefield.