About Me
I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V3.6 !
Which is to say, only a true village idiot would try to marry kronk sensibilities with the folk tradition.
Once I could have been a contender, then someone offered me some folk music. I didn't want to try it at first, but they all looked so happy, and I so wanted to belong. And I didn't belong - I played jazz but when they said to me "this is a beautiful chord voicing", I thought - where's the context, you cats? I played world music but got tired of being shouted at in ancient aramaic, and then they said I had to piss on my fingers to help my bendir technique and I didn't want to.
It's always someone else's fault.
I played with singer songwriters but the 'me' count made me twitchy. I played classical but they couldn't accept that I needed five snare drums for the cadenza in Nielsen's 5th. I played improv, but I had to keep inserting my dirty little idioms into their ideologically pure texture-scapes. Still, look at me now - stealing ballads from unsuspecting source singers. Trying out those step dance moves on the stomp box. I'm going to keep taking the ginkgo biloba and one day I might be intelligent....
These are some of the many exciting people I worked with back in the day:
Cicala Mvta, Richard Sanderson, Ashley Wales, Harry Beckett, Abdel Ali Slimani, Robert Dick, Maddy Prior, David Toop, Union Wireless, Jerry Donahue, Ian R Watson, Rhodri Davies, Eddie Prevost, Charles Hayward, Natacha Atlas, Chris Biscoe, Pat Thomas, Bows, Lob, Seth Lakeman, John Edwards, Cheb Nacim, PP Arnold, Zubop and Zubopgambia, John Coxon, Eliza Carthy,Paul Rutherford, Juldeh Camara, Johnny Flynn, Steve Beresford, Terry Edwards, Tony Bevan, U-Cef and the Halal Joint, Orphy Robinson, Tête à Tête Opera (as a composer, aaaaactually), The Very Tiny Little Kids, Lol Coxhill, Blaubauer, Tom Chant, Kakizakai Kaoru, Yazid Fentazi and Warehouse.
A fair few of them never noticed.
Here's some of the nice things people said before the trout ate my arms:
"He's a bit like Keith Moon.....he's all across everything all the time"
Charles Hazlewood, BBC4, July 2008
"Its an album full of thought, variety and surprises. Fair Ellen Of Ratcliffe in particular sounds born of the electro dance age with some truly astonishing percussion work by Pete Flood."
Colin Irwin, reviewing the new Tim Van Eyken album, fROOTS, June 2006
"Pete Flood contributes sudden, dramatic drumrolls whose fascination lies as much in what is missing from, as what is audible in, each peal. This is a Flood specialism witnessed in previous Back In Your Town nights: pinpoint accurate non-repetitiveness and a wilful ability to ruthlessly excise beats whilst remaining very funky indeed a case of being on the .66 if you will."
Eleventh Volume on Back in Your Town, Red Rose Club, 19/8/04
"Flood's percussion is equally as versatile. There's free jazz, Beefheartian clatter, lashings of bells, chimes and rusty metal; even (for a few bars only) there's some old school heavy funk. He propels, comments and decorates throughout with virtuosity but no flash, whipping up quiet polyrhythmic storms behind Watson's mercurial trumpet figures."
Gordon Miles, reviewing the Treecreepers album, BBC Online, Nov 06
"Watching Flood play is a real treat - he has a small drum kit but it is surrounded by a vast array of instruments, toys and household items, all of which can be either banged, shaken, rubbed or, well just plain dropped.....This is no playtime melange though, it's, well thought out and expertly performed, witness to the piercing and eerie use of bowed cymbals also used throughout "Bold Fisherman", along with the ultra subtle tapping of a tar with just fingers in the same song."
John Sharp, Reviewing Van Eyken at Tal-Y-Bont, Bangor, Folking About (http://folkingabout.blogspot.com/), Nov 06
"As for drum set handmade. Also utilization of waste material has done, that says the air does. Contents fully, large satisfaction it was live in the performance which hard is chewiness. Live you have heard, you instructed to the brown cell together. Thank you."
Japanese Blog, name untranslatable, Farmyard Animals Trio - live at chofu Ginz, Tokyo, 20/2/2005
"More gratingly, Pete Flood's ham-fisted tango pastiche for Flora and Leo segues into a solemn and sentimental scene for Rosa, composed by Chadwick. The effect of all of these juxtapositions is to neuter the expressive potential of individual scenes, and to create a rudderless, confused drama."
The Guardian on Family Matters by Tête à Tête an opera written by myself and five other composers, 12/02/04 (and it was a flamenco pastiche you chinless fool).
"Best of all was Pete Floods percussion kit which, looking like some kind of satanic Christmas tree, made the trip worthwhile in itself."
BBC online on Bellowhead, 19/9/05
" oe rg o v. Gwnth dth ."
John Cage, Empty Words, 1975
