Sunday Sundries

Whatumagonado today?
It's a rainy summer Sunday, I'm gona walk up the road to the shops and buy something for lunch...
Then spend a while putting half the 1980s mags (remember 'New Sounds. New Styles'?) on eBay.
The others are in the loft- that mag 'Debut' that had a free LP with it. It's the scanning that takes ages, so I'll do it in bits.
I have to decide whether to keep Song Club going. I love doing it but it takes a lot of time to manage it; but the funder, a local charity, really loves it and so do the school children. Hmmm.
I have to write a press release for 'Poetry and Rhyme'; you need to feel on top of the world for such things and I'd rather toppled of my world this week but I'm scraping back up again so it's probably worth a first attempt. I have a nice quote from Julian Lewry who puts on Guilfest to start it off with, so maybe I can bounce up from there.
Encouraging things happen sometimesto pick you up; Rowen Bridler has asked me to play some guitar on some of her tracks (she's a really good songwriter- check out her Myspace), someone wrote from the States telling me how much she likes my tracks and that she downloads them straight away and plays them in her car. And the Boothill Foottappers have a Myspace, which is great: they were around at the same time as Helen and the Horns and they had a proper hit with 'Get Your Feet Out Of My Shoes'. We were all a gang of checky shirts and tomboyism. I used to like the Shillelagh Sisters too and once played washboard with them at The Fridge in Brixton- the old Fridge with the beautiful sparkly blue-white walls and the dreadful sound, even though they had stuffed a sock in Lambeth Council's compulsory noise monitor.
That was where my Champagne Friend took mischievous delight in discovering that our muscle-man designer friend, who went on to become thoroughly famous, was born in the year of the Bore, sorry, Boar. He wasn't boring at all, but he got so cross it only spurred her on and I think it ruined the poor chap's evening!
Helen and the Horns had a residency there and we also played a couple of gay nights too. It was there that we, or rather I, got a thoroughly cruel review from a journalist called Antonella Gambotto who was going out with the Editor of one of the music mags at the time. He liked me, or the band, so she didn't, and she called me 'cow-eyed, no-thighed'.
Later, I met Rita Ray from the Darts and talked to her about it; she told me that reviewers were constantly writing about her body and not her voice, and that you just had to get used to it.
That journalist went on to call Cliff Richard a Nazi in a later article, about Sun City I think. His people took her to court and she had to stop working the the UK for a while. She had not realised that he is Anglo-Indian.
I used to like playing there- it was to Helen and the Horns what the Moonlight Club was to The Chefs- a sort of musical home where you could play a series of gigs and experience a venue differently every time. At the Fridge, we were a regular outing for a whole community of short-life housing artists and musicians and film-makers. Vic Reeves used to turn up from time to time, before he was famous, and various Feminist media friends with exciting plans. It was good.