So it should be this quite interesting cross, you know, you've got the fantastic players
of the sort of, from the classical world that are in the Metropolis ensemble and then piece
that has all three of the Grandbox boys in, which is Corey on Banjo, I may use him with
a bit of harmonica.
And also I'm a great fan of this kind of homemade percussion which the Grandbox boys
use.
And this one particular group that I saw at the Swanage Folk Festival had a small boot.
That was probably, it was basically one little broom handle and a baby boot on the bottom
and maybe they had, I don't know, maybe a hundred bottle tops and they were just doing
this to keep time.
And the Grandbox boys had just started.
I don't even think we were called the Grandbox boys yet.
And when I came back to London, it was just like, all right, this could be a good idea.
Okay, so this is, there's 420 Freedom Lager bottle tops.
So 420 Freedom Lager, and that's why it's called the Freedom Boot.
No kind of master plan other than that.
And we were lucky because we were playing a pub and Freedom was a new brewery that started
up and they happily donated 450 bottle tops to the cause.
On here, there's basically five per screw and there is some debate about the best way
to attach the bottle tops to the instrument.
Use, stay in, better.
But there's an alternative camp that likes the nails because there's no threads, so the
bottle tops jingle a little bit more.
But we kind of balanced that out with the, with the gungrew.
So it still has, even without the gungrew, you still have a nice little shake there.
But the, when you're banging it, that's not enough.
This adds to, for banging, but this is great for the, and then you can also spin them.
And the boot is right here, this is the boot.
And in the boot, there's some stuff that we have here, I haven't taken some in a long
time.
This is a little bang, so they have coins in there, give it a little bit of a bang.
So the way that this works, in theory, is the boot gets bolted on to the bottom here,
boot hole, and this gets screwed in.
So this goes on here, like that.
And then around this, these go around the bottom here, and these are called the gungrew.
They're Indian classical dancer belts, there's another pair that I wear on my leg, on one
of my legs.
And so these go around like that.
There is a tradition of these instruments, also in kind of the blues and pop rock world
with a group called Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts, who had a small hit back in the 60s.
And they actually, their percussionist guy used something similar to this instrument,
which they call the Zobstick.
And they actually have a spring in there, so they can really bounce it.
But they also use nails.
And as you know, we found a lot of cultures all over the world use instruments similar.
So I am going to write a piece specifically focusing on the boot to incorporate in the
piece that there'd be these bigger orchestral sections where the whole ensemble is involved,
but also to bring it back down to the group element.
So my piece is going to draw on that, but also on the African American Fife and Drum
tradition, which I was exposed to from listening to Arthur Turner.
Having a whole more kind of unified evening that moves between these, the Adams piece,
the John Adams piece and my piece and the sort of classical pieces.
Because you know, there's so much influence of the kind of folk music that the Grownbox
boys use.
There's a lot of that in my music, there's a lot of that in the John Adams piece.
So it seems to be an exciting idea if we could somehow bring these two worlds together and
show that they are really connected quite deeply.
