Bacon Really is the centre of the universe!

John Bacon, always delivering the goods!

As I mentioned before, John wasn't able to make it on the night of the vocal recordings so he came to Martins house the week after to drop his lines in. As expected, John read his lines with gusto and delivered a great performance without any need to have people to bounce off. He even began ad-libbing a few lines to add to his part - some funny words and phrases. Martin had also asked John to bring his banjo.

Fueling Banjos - John recording the licks.

John's Shed Logo for his section on the web.

Centre of the universe John Bacon and John Bacon!

In our first three episodes the 'stinger' tunes between the scenes were all made by Martin on his computer. John had offered to record some live banjo licks to add to the mix. John has always been an exceptional banjo player, but he doesn't get the chance to play it in the band as there is no call for it. Some would say there is no call for him to play the fiddle in the band either - but that doesn't seem to stop him!

A mic was set up and John began playing many small riffs and tunes for us in 10 to 20 second long blasts. He also regaled us with stories and facts about his banjo and playing style in-between the tunes, it was a very loud and fascinating hour!
Once he had recorded a few he was happy with we briefed him about what we wanted to do next. We were looking to add more content to our channel, so we felt a 'Johns Shed' skit would be great. We could get his puppet to build or explain anything we wanted and use it as regular content. I had spent a few nights building a replica banjo for his puppet and had brought it to show him. John was thrilled and said that doing a few run throughs of the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith classic 'Dueling Banjos' would be great to use.

In John's Shed Video, all the dialogue for this is made up by John on the spot, we really loved the line "Don't Touch anything!" so it will be staying and used again for future skits. It took John a few goes to nail the song and warm his banjo up, it had been in his roof for over a year and he claimed to be a bit rusty. We didn't notice any problems with his playing as he rattled through it all so quickly! But watch til the end of the video for the outtake! ;)