Hello. The following Q&A will tell you all about this blog.
What on earth is Carnoe’s Mummingbirds?
Carnoe’s Mummingbirds is an artist pseudonym for Mark Garner. That’s me. I’m a musician who has been around playing guitar (on and off) since 1991, mostly for the band “Granny Takes a Trip”.
Why Carnoe’s Mummingbirds?
This name has a history going right back to the early days of my band Granny Takes a Trip when I recalled a brief conversation with former bandmate, Sam Pickard. He announced that he’d seen a poster in a pub somewhere with this title and was postulating how it would make a good band name. Sam most probably saw something like the poster below.
I have no idea why this conversation stuck in my memory for years – it just did. When thinking of a pseudonym in for a solo project away from the Granny band in 2000, I chose this. At the time, I had no idea how to spell it (the notion of googling it was still a new one).
Though I had no idea at the time (ignorant as I was of musical history), the real “Carnoe’s Mummingbirds” was in fact “Karno’s Mumming Birds”; a late music-hall cabaret / comedy outfit under the leadership of impresario Fred Karno. Karno was a comedian of slapstick “credited with popularizing the custard-pie-in-the-face gag” who became a celebrated impresario recruiting the likes of Charlie Chaplain, Stan Laurel and Will Hay.
Karno produced a series of short wordless plays (a way of circumventing draconian censorship), which were essentially forerunners of movie silent comedy. These Karno plays were called “Jail Birds”, “Early Birds” and eventually “Mumming Birds”. The word ‘Mumming’ was used in the context of fooling around and clowning. None of this was known to me at the time.
The misspelling of Carnoe and contraction of ‘mumming’ and ‘birds’ at least differentiates me from the original version. The notion of Karno’s Mumming Birds being a “wordless play” happens to chime very nicely with my own musical project in which the music is almost entirely instrumental and lyric free.
What’s this blog about, then?
This blog is a means of sharing something of my creative activity, helping me keep track of what I’ve made and why.
Did you say you’ve been making music since 1991?
Sort of. I helped write and record music throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. After the birth of my daughter in 2006, music took a back step and there was little time for anything to do with guitars. Aside from occasional and brief reacquaintances with my instruments, stumbling across them as I explored the loft, all went quiet with playing and composing any music for over a decade. Making music, it seemed, was now a thing of my past.
So, what happened? You’ve found your guitar again?
Yes! After a house move in 2021, at the august age of 48, I realised I hadn’t quite finished with writing and making music after all. The strings on my old Maui Blue Squier Stratocaster were rusted into place but otherwise it was in good condition. Lucy, as she’s known, was dusted down and pressed into action once again. The result is Carnoe’s Mummingbirds.
Where can I find your music?
You want to? Thanks for your interest! Well, you can pop around to my house and I’ll happily give you a CD. Alternatively, you could do a lot worse than head over to my Bandcamp site –
https://carnoesmummingbirds.bandcamp.com/
Our venerable cottage-industry level music label, New Leaf Recordings, also has a Bandcamp site on which some Granny Takes a Trip recordings, old and new, are expected to be released.
https://newleafrecordings.bandcamp.com/
Finally, there is my old Granny chum Stuart’s Calcutta Bandcamp page, upon which I occasionally make an interfering appearance with a guitar.
Carnoe's Mummingbirds 