Last wedding post, honest - all about the music played over the whole day (and cracking vids of some of them). If you were there and wondered what the deuce that awful racket was while you were trying to have a conversation, now you can find out!
I began thinking about what music to have at the wedding on pretty much the same day I proposed, way back in January 2008, and didn't completely nail down the playing order until 48 hours before the wedding itself. During this time it went through all sorts of changes - the above notes are just a glimpse, as I tried to compress a wishlist of songs totalling 22 hours into less than half that time. This was made all the harder by regularly hearing new music that just had to be in there, the latest example being Daniel Johnston's session recording of Go for Marc Riley that I heard the week of the wedding and spent an evening hurtling around the internet trying to find an MP3 of that particular version (and then, when not finding one, ripping it myself using iRecordMusic). It became a regular occurrence in our flat for me to suddenly yelp out "this'd be great for the evening!", scamper around iTunes to find it then figure out how to crowbar it into a playlist already 4 hours too long, running tracks and orders past my better half.
In the end I think we did okay. Obviously, it's not just a list of stuff I like - there's a chronic lack of Torche and Melt Banana on there - but music the Missus loves as much and also won't repel our guests. Well, the penultimate track might have lyrically, but that was at the end of the night anyway. Ironically, after all the time and thought put into choosing and ordering the songs, the first hour or so were completely missed as everybody was outside for photos and I hadn't arranged for the outdoor speaker to be brought out, being somewhat dizzy, which was mildly annoying as we'd picked some of our very favourites for that first hour and Loudon Wainwright's Passion Play is just perfect for a wedding. A cursory glance over the afternoon list shows a fair few tracks plucked from the Tighten Up! Trojan Reggae Classics (1968 - 1974) compilation, which I'd always thought would help keep the atmosphere relaxed and breezy, and from Alton Ellis, king of rocksteady/lover's rock, whose music I'd never heard until late 2008 when Mark Lamarr highlighted his work, particularly the swoonsome Willow Tree. You can get his excellent Be True To Yourself Anthology at iTunes (bizarrely subtitled 'The Godfather of Lover's Book') for £11, which at 56 tracks is pretty sweet.
Similarly, the evening playlist ended a few songs early because we were getting far too tired, only a few people were left and it seemed best to go out on Thank You For The Music - and oh, by Jove, it was, the seven remaining people in a circle bellowing along to the chorus. Having never DJ'd or anything close before, I wasn't sure quite when people would start dancing - turned out to be later than I expected, which I think was down to an expectation that Missus & me would start the dancing as is customary, when as far as we were concerned we didn't think we'd be dancing at all that night, especially with my gammy leg. Obviously, as the photos show, we eventually did get up and move our feet (or, in my case, upper body), but we were just too bally shy to do so earlier. I partly wish I'd made a few changes to the playlist over the course of the evening, replacing the comparatively harsh Pump Up The Volume/What Time Is Love double bill with something a bit more poppy , but the day was going so quickly and there were so many people to talk to, I didn't want to lose even a few minutes hunched over the iBook moving tracks about.
Still, it's a good bunch of songs, two playlists we'll always keep on iTunes or whatever the future equivalent is. Even though I hardly noticed a lot of the music on the day, such was the overload of it all, it must've sunk in somewhere because playing any of it takes me right back to the Book Trust or Marlins Wynd, some to the point of choking up a tad (Bjork's Unison, I'm looking at you, even though you went unheard on the day! (and if you like that song, do watch the live version below, it's a stunner)) or grinning like a bastard. Now, two months on, if I could just stop hearing music and thinking "ooh, that'd be great for the evening"...
(See below for the full tracklisting and some ace videos to go with it)
Sick of hearing about the wedding yet? Of course you are. It was two months ago! Well, I've almost run out of mileage, with just one more post to come on the soundtrack, after which you can rest easy. Anyways, this is just to let you know that a Best Of, Greatest Hits, Creme de la Menthe of the wedding photos (both from guests and pro) is now up online for youse to enjoy. If you were there, look for your gurning face and marvel at how young you were back then. If you weren't, stare at them for so long that you become convinced you were there.
Back to the wedding we go, this time to give credit to the quality nosh that got served up for our guests to devour. It had always been our intention to use as much locally-produced food as possible, to try and involve suppliers who we normally buy from at the Farmers Market, even to get some baking done ourselves. Knackering my leg just before the wedding put paid to that one, but we managed to achieve the rest.
First up, the afternoon reception. Now, something that I've often noticed at weddings is that the menus give a ludicrously pretentious description awash with the food fashion buzzwords of the hour for a dish that in reality is no great shakes, the kind of spiel so suitably mocked at 6:50 of Meades' Slow Food. So that was something to be avoided from the start. The options were limited all the further by the fact that the venue we were using, the Scottish Book Trust, didn't have an industrial-sized kitchen as other, insanely-priced venues may. Initially, this looked like a huge problem since it ruled out most caterers unless we wanted to go the way of the cold buffet but in retrospect the restriction turned out to be a blessing, nudging us towards an option we might never have come up with otherwise. After all, if you've not got a kitchen large enough on site to cook hot food for 50-60 people, what do you do? a) Cold buffet, b) find another way to heat the food on site, c) call out for pizza.
We held on to the idea of (c) as a last resort (the back-up plan for the reception was actually to pop up the Royal Mile to Wannaburger and order a massive take-away) but focused on (b). How else to cook food on site? Simple - a barbecue. Once we realised that the whole thing started to fall into place. For one thing, it's pretty difficult to come up with gourmet-guff descriptions of a burger - with a barbecue, you know exactly what you're getting. It also allowed us to serve both vegetarian and carnivorous dishes, though this meant ruling out some good-looking local caterers (we would have loved to involve The Engine Shed in some way). A couple of different caterers had the wherewithal to do such a barbecue and we ended up plumping for Saltire Hospitality. After reading the industrial horrors of grain-fed intensively-reared cow factory farms in The Omnivore's Dilemma it was particularly important to me that we had Scottish beef, grass-fed, preferably organic, which Saltire were able to offer via Simon Howie, Perthshire über-butcher. Presumably because of arrangements between Saltire and Howie we weren't able to use one of my preferred meat suppliers, Well Hung & Tender, but to be fair the meat served up by Simon Howie was very good, if not quite up to the juicy excellence of WH&T. They were also able to supply organic chicken, bean burgers and some really good vegetable skewers, all of which was barbecued on site in the garden outside. Being in Scotland, there was of course a contingency for heavy rain - Saltire had the ability to cook the food elsewhere, then hurtle over to the venue with it all kept in hot containers, but thankfully it didn't come to that. There's nowt quite like seeing (and smelling!) a decent barbecue in action, and the very informality of it was in keeping with the relaxed vibe we'd wanted for the whole day.
For pre-ceremony noms, I'd planned on baking a whole lot of these for people to nibble as they arrived, but my ripped calf prevented me from being able to spend any decent time in the kitchen in the days leading up to the wedding. However, this was the perfect excuse to go ahead with Operation Tunnocks, dazzling our guests with the shiny shiny wrappings of 100 teacakes, plus caramel log and wafer bars to go with them. I've loved Tunnocks teacakes ever since I moved up here in 2002, at times veering on addiction, and knowing they continue to be made in Uddingston (oh, to visit, but they've a year-long waiting list!) helped keep in line with our local nosh aim. I think having the Tunnocks there at the start helped in setting the tone for the day, as did Mum's knitted cake and the sight of the wedding cake...
Ah, yes, the cake. Or, the cake. Or, if you like, the cake. We'd considered a whole bunch of possibilities for the wedding cake in the year and months of planning the day, from making one ourselves to a whole lot of muffins to a giant pyramid of Tunnocks teacakes to not having anything at all - after all, the prices for a 'proper' wedding cake were boggling and the results, while sometimes visually impressive, were almost always the same under the icing. Besides, the Missus doesn't much like fruitcake and starting our marriage with a bloody expensive cake that only one of us would like eating really didn't seem like a good start. We were pretty settled on going for the whole-lot-of-muffins route when, at the end of February, we settled down to watch Rachel Allen's excellent Bake programme on BBC1 (er... via Bittorrent, that is). The highlight was her visit to Edinburgh to see Bruntsfield/Gullane's finest German baker, Falko, where he demonstrated how to make a traditional German cake - the tree cake, or baumkuchen. It was fascinating to watch, as it's baked by applying cake batter to a horizontal spit that slowly rotates in front of a wall of flame. Sadly the Falko demo isn't available online, but here's a video of a much smaller one:
Nifty, innit? Apparently, only once a German baker has proven himself to be expert at this can he be described as a konditormeister because of the skill required to do it right. This immediately pressed a whole bunch of buttons for me. One - locally produced, baked up at his Gullane bakery where we've gleefully feasted before, the work of a true artisan rather than a block of bog-standard fruitcake and slabs of industrial icing. Two - the connection back to mainland Europe, particularly Germany, Bavaria, Prussia, felt like a nod back a few generations to the original Nagls, even though I am woefully ignorant about my family tree. Three - the wow factor... because, really, how many people have ever seen a cake like that before? Not many, especially up here in Scotland, and I had no idea it even existed until Rachel Allen showed us the way. That's the thing about wedding cakes, just like much of the whole wedding industry - you're presented with variations of the same thing over and over again, until it's hammered into you that this is how it must be. It's only by turning your back on all that, on wedding fairs and those ghastly magazines, and realising it can be however you want it to be that the wedding planning can actually be enjoyable. So it proved with the cake - my only concerns were how it would taste and what it would cost. A slice bought from the Bruntsfield cafe in March was a delight, a fascinating taste that more than lived up to the appearance, sort of spongey, sort of spicey (cinnamon and nutmeg, at a guess) with a nice citric glaze around the edge that allows it to keep for a surprisingly long time. I then met the konditormeister himself to discuss the cake - and was very pleasantly surprised to find that a full-size metre-long baumkuchen would cost £250. As a figure, that sounds high, but divide between, say, 50 guests and you're looking at £5 a piece - a price certainly worth paying, not to mention cheaper than some wedding cakes we've seen. One of the key moments on the wedding day itself was coming into the venue and seeing the cake for the first time in all its glory, towering above the small fry. The reactions from guests, most of whom had no idea it was going to be there, were worth the price alone - as was the sight of Kal walking through the Royal Mile carrying it triumphantly, a Cake-Bearer Supreme.
DRINK! Here we were able to support the wares of three of our favourites at the Farmers Market. First up, Laprig Apple Juice (no website sadly), buying a range of different single-variety apple juices along with their delicious apple & rhubarb that I love to bits. Secondly, the wonderful Black Isle Brewery, whose ales I've been buying almost weekly for the last few years. I really wanted to introduce our guests to their excellent beers, going for a selection of the Red Kite, Blonde and Heather Honey, and when one of the boxes arrived with a couple of broken bottles the man behind the brewery took the effort to drive over to ours on the night before the wedding and replace it with another box. Chap! Contrast that with Brewdog who had initially offered a discount on orders for the wedding - then, when I actually went to make the order, changed their mind. No great loss, since the Black Isle beers are superior, but disappointing all the same.
Thirdly, necessitating a little adventure up north, the Cairn O Mohr winery. We've been getting their excellent alcohol-free elderflower wine for years from their market stall, and planned on having a good helping of that at the wedding, but were intrigued by their Oak & Elder wedding blend, available only from the winery itself up in Errol. Being car-less, we enlisted the help of my Dad to drive us up there one Saturday, taking ever-thinner roads until we were greeted by a giant wooden head, then another, then another. What a place! You can see more of Missus's photos from it here, but it's really best to see it for yourself if you can (more details here). Not only were we able to sample the wedding blend - it was lovely, certainly better than champagne, and we bought a case accordingly - but also another non-alcoholic rose elderflower wine that was used for the toast alongside the oak & elder. The winery is a fascinating place, out amongst huge fields of berries, giant wooden heads and a good-sized converted barn venue used for gigs that would've been perfectly good for the wedding itself. On top of that, we ordered in water from Highland Spring and - the one deviation from Scottish-sourced stuff - a range of fair-trade wines from Fairhills in South Africa.
The evening at Marlins Wynd was much more hands-free - the venue itself was supplying the food and drink, after we'd checked their buffet menu and been pleased with what we saw. We asked the organiser to make sure plenty of Black Isle beer was available, hopefully leading a few people to try out the delicious Red Kite. All the above does sound like an awful lot of work, but it meant the food and drink was as much a reflection of Missus & me as the readings, the vows, the soundtrack. The cake made a perfect talking point, not to mention really tasty, and it felt good to know that we were supporting Scottish suppliers while at the same time giving our guests some really good scran. After all, although ostensibly the day was for Missus & me, we really wanted to give our guests as good a time as possible, as thanks for a) making the effort to attend and b) for playing their parts in leading us through our lives to that point. As Stacey eloquently put it back in February 2008 in a comment that really helped us identify what we wanted from the big day (cheers mate!):
Well, here's the big secret: it's not really your day. I mean, it's ABOUT the both of you, but it's really a party for everyone else at which you're the center of attention. The way I finally looked at it was that the wedding was our big Thank You to everyone we loved who had gotten us to that point and continue to support us.
I still have people telling me how great the wedding was, how fun, etc. and I still feel like I missed the party of the year because I was so busy running around, taking pictures, and talking to everyone. I don't think I'd change anything, but I've learned that OTHER peoples' weddings are for me to enjoy; my own was the opportunity to give them one hell of a show.
"No matter how down you are you'll eventually rise..."
Every summer, particularly around our annual holiday, I seem to latch onto a particular album or EP that ends up the unofficial musical touchstone for memories of that summer. Previously there's been Boards of Canada's The Campfire Headphase, Mr Scruff's Keep It Unreal (Every time I hear Fish I can practically see the water lapping against the stone jetties at Stromness) and Air France's blissful No Way Down EP from last year, released on Swedish label Sincerely Yours. Skip to this year and this post from Gorilla Vs Bear, highlighting a new release on said label from an artist only known as JJ, describing the music as "summer jams of the dreamily wisftul, blood-spattered variety". Could be good, thinks I, and have a listen to one of the tracks (available for free here, or just click play below).
Lovely! Suitably sold, I popped over to the online store to buy the album whole, 9 tracks at a nicely priced £5.40, and already it's shaping up to be the album that soundtracks the sunnier moments of this summer (though it is facing some serious competition for playtime from the new Engineers and Phoenix albums, both of which are excellent and deserve proper reviews later, while the second album from the Gentleman Losers is currently noodling and brooding around my ears most pleasantly). As with Air France, it catches that blissed-out sun-bleached timeless feeling of a good summer, rather than the hi-energy trance bollocks you get blasting out of cars. Think Grouper on the beach, St. Etienne via Air France with a sprinkling of Paul Simon's Graceland and whale sex noises. If there was the slightest scrap of justice in this vicious universe, From Africa To Malaga would be the summer anthem, rather than fecking Bonkers.
More wedding-related writing? Hell yes, and this isn't even the last of it - I'm milking that day for all it's worth! What the groom wears probably interests very few indeed, but there were some elements in my wedding kit that I wanted to celebrate in my own wee way. Besides, I've never looked as good as I did that day, and having spent so much of my life bemoaning my appearance it's a pleasure to actually feel good about it. So, starting at the top...
The suit jacket and trousers were blue pin-stripe from Jaeger, a shop I'd never been to (the über-cheekboned models scare me) and wouldn't have even set foot in but for the giant SALE! posters in the window and a typically vigorous Glasgow rainstorm. Even at sale price the suits were brow-raisingly costly to someone used to Slaters, but to be fair the quality was a huge step up from what I usually get. I remember trying it on at the shop and being amazed by the comfort, the fit, the lightness of the material. Goodness knows how I'd react to a bespoke suit. Although it was 2008 when I bought the suit, it was a wise move - I never saw anything as good at such a price in all the months that followed. If only I had more reason to wear it post-wedding, work just doesn't seem to warrant such class...
The shirt was bought during my quasi-stag-weekend in Brighton a few months back at Gresham Blake. I'd been searching all over Edinburgh and the Internet for a blue shirt light enough to not be dark navy, dark enough not to be retina-scarring electric blue, but I was only ever able to find one thanks to the aforementioned south coast tailors. Reasonably priced and with excellent service, they even tailored an oversized shirt to my scrawny frame for free and posted it back to me in Edinburgh, thereby solving my fat neck problem and making the wearing of a tie sound quite acceptable rather than a choking misery, soooo...
Necktie from Austin Reed - again, not a shop I'd normally go to but their website suggested a couple of nice bluish ties that got the Lass's approval, choosing one with an intriguing enough pattern to balance out the relative brightness of the shirt and the stripes of the jacket. If only it had come with instructions on how to knot the bounder, but no doubt they reasonably expected an adult male to be fully versed in the way of tie-knotting. If only I'd gone to Eton...
Cufflinks - ah HA! Now these I'm chuffed with, and took every chance to show them off on the day. Initial plan was to get some silver painters-palette cufflinks from the National Gallery... Until they were priced at around £50. For freaking cufflinks?! Scuppered, I went home and had the thought of searching for cufflinks on Dawanda and seeing what cropped up - and amongst the results was the obvious choice, so obvious I should've known from the start. Lego! Yup, blue Lego block cufflinks (keeping things coordinated) from Bitsandbadges at a tenth of the price for the palette cufflinks and far better suited for the day, especially given my childhood love of the little plastic blocks. If only we'd actually brought some lego along, I could've actually built something on my cufflinks. How many grooms can say that? Though the stormtrooper ones were awfully tempting...
And so to the shoes - well, boots, real clodhopper lovelies. I'd been trying to think of some way to reflect Northamptonshire, the place I spent much of childhood, in the day. There's only really two things that come to mind with Northants: footwear and rugby, and since I'm as much use in a scrum as a guinea pig it would have to be the former. Thing is, so many of those old-time shoe manufacturers have deserted the Shire for cheaper, distant lands, most damningly of all being Dr Martens, that it was starting to look as though it was Church's or nothing, and they're not cheap. Yet again, the internet came up trumps - I searched for "british boot" and ended up at the BBC: British Boot Company, selling UK-made boots as they have for over 150 years. Sweet! A little more clicking around revealed that one of the lines they sold, Solovair, were still made in Northants, not far from Wellingborough, and one of their best-looking steel-toed boots was called Highlander, a nice nod for me towards my love of the Highlands. Although highly tempted to wear them as soon as they arrived, I waited until the wedding (apart from breaking them in at home, naturally) and have been using them ever since. The quality is solid and well worth the extra pennies, as is the knowledge it's helped support what little manufacturing remains in the Shire.
And finally there's the most important thing you can wear on your wedding day - the ring. Just as I had the Shire represented by my boots, it was important to us to have elements of Orkney in the wedding day (especially as the Lass was born there). There were a few touches echoing back to the isles - the bride's shawl was knitted from Orkney Angora, while the ceremony began to a clarsach interpretation of Orkney Wedding March with Sunrise by Peter Maxwell Davies, and our wedding rings were forged there (goodness, that sounded dramatic). They're the Tryst rings from Ola Gorie, who very nicely made extra-small rings for Missus and me, what with us having the scrawniest digits in christendom (and even then the ring still fair rattles about on my finger - I'll have to get it puffed up with silicon implants or fat or something). I've never had any kind of jewellery on my fingers before and I'm still trying to get used to it, something I suspect would be easier if it didn't keep sliding around, but it's an exceedingly nice feeling to look at the ring and think of what it symbolises. Besides, the markings on it - oghams, letters from an early medieval alphabet found on stone monuments, those on the ring apparently translating as "eternal love" but probably read "Olaf woz ere" - remind me of Tolkein's One Ring. After all, it is one ring to bind them... can you blame me for going all Gollumy?
(First and third photos by Kate Brandwood, second by Nanette Kaulig)
Yet again I've been guilty of overposting stuff I've found online over at Facebook, no doubt boring friends as they scroll through a news feed groaning under the weight of links, while neglecting this place. Tsk! Well, here's a couple of video treats for you, spotted by Sully, produced by the remarkable Pogo, of Mary Poppins and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the original, mind). Each film has been seamlessly sampled, mashed and edited to create something altogether new. The resulting music is akin to Air France, Avalanches or an overly-chipper Orbital, lyrics shimmied about into gobbledigook, while the videos are downright trippy, all colour and dance that'll leave you giddy in a good way. Wonderful stuff.
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