A Busy Day

This has been a very odd January, even for Januaries in general, which are generally odd.
Cold and wet? Check. No money? Check (£688 for a gas bill: house with huge windows and old radiators. Goodbye February recording budget!) Sickness? Check. Yet still that feeling of a new beginning of a new year and infinite creative possibilities...

Yesterday I met Gina- I think it must be a couple of months since we last saw each other. I have had a mega-teaching load and lots of gigs; she has been collecting and editing material for a Raincoats documentary that will be screened at the NFT on 28th March as part of the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, no less. Over breakfast we talked, talked, talked. I am hoping the Raincoats will donate a track to a compilation called Prams which is to be released by Chuck Warner, who runs a label called Messthetics in the States. I will be writing the sleeve notes and I am trying to help him find the owners of the tracks; he is also trying to race Gina from the Marine Girls to ask for one of their tracks. It's hard to put these things together for copyright and other reasons but Chuck has a lot of energy and dedication. There will be a very rare, unreleased Chefs track too, from our later, darker period.
After that I went to the Dover Bookshop in Covent Garden and had a bit of a browse. When I was an illustrator I practically lived there, and yesterday I bought a great book on 50s packaging (the colours!) and a book of musical illustrations, to inspire the new-found energy for drawing this year.
Next was a trip to Uniwest to hear the songwriters there; it's an oddly unbalanced group of fifteen men and five women. Tensely, they leaned forward into the circle, elbows on knees and grim nervous faces. As we went round the circle and each person had taken their turn, the body language changed and they relaxed, leaned back, crossed their feet at the ankles and let their arms dangle. It was a bit like watching a tightly-furled rosebud very gradually open and bloom, because by the end, they were all relieved and smiling, leaning back and spread out.
I'd love to make an animation of that!
Lastly, I headed down to the Columbia Hotel to meet Rob Ayling from Voiceprint to do some record business.
Today, I am a slumping slug. I walked through the gentle germy rain of someone's sneeze on Oxford Street yesterday and I'm hoping against hope that I don't incubate their virus and come out in a fiendish cold. I have a really exciting cluster of gigs next weekend and don't want to miss anything!