This is the first of several releases (I believe) by Gina on Jack White's record label, Third Man Records. It's such a good song and I've been hoping it would be recorded and released for a long time; it's been well worth the wait, and what a cool label to be released on too. It features electronics by Ana da Silva, I contributed BVs in the chorus, and came out over a month ago. I'm a little tardy in posting it, having been overwhelmed by work and a spell of illness. The vinyl is a good strong pumpkin yellow, so posting it on Hallowe'en seems just about perfect.
Sometimes it's worth making a journey somewhere to see an exhibition that is unique. It feels like all the more of a gamble when the gallery website actively repels you when you try to buy tickets in advance, and nobody answers the phone at the gallery. Will you travel all that way and be turned back at the door?
We decided to chance it, and after a quirky train journey during which the conductor interviewed all the passengers informally, and said goodbye to them personally over the tannoy ('don't forget to put the cards away after your game and before you get off the train', and 'is my dad there in his allotment today?'), we disembarked at space-station MK and walked up the wide LA-style boulevard to the gallery. It's a town for cars, quite clearly, but we found our own landing strip and passed some jolly chaps pruning the evergreen shrubs on the way up. It's quite a way, through the quiet shopping centre. The whole place reminded us of the outskirts of a European town- perhaps Barcelona, or Lisbon: there was an overall sense of the centre of things being elsewhere; and I remember reading about Los Angeles: 'There is no there, there'. It was like that.
The gallery was quite busy, and we were hungry after the walk so we sat in the caff for a bit. It was lovely, actually: children, grandparents, ladies lunching and really friendly and relaxed staff. Then we jumped into the exhibition to see what we could see.
The first room was dominated by a huge painting of an Edwardian daddy playing with his daughters. It was absolutely extraordinary. I didn't think daddies played with daughters back then. One of them was climbing a tree. I didn't think girls climbed trees back then either. She also looks rather grumpy, as though she didn't want to be photographed... hang on a minute! That kind of sums up the whole exhibition, and is really why I wanted to see it. Knight noticed things in paint that other partists overlooked. She lived with travellers and documented their lives, especially the women; she painted portraits of people of colour in theatres in New York, especially the women. She defied the edict against women painting nudes and she not only did that, she took a whole bunch of them down to Cornwall and painted them swimming outside. She lived with a circus for a while and painted the performers, and she was also a war artist. Because of the reflections in the glass I wasn't able to photograph one of the best paintings, the silvery fabric from an airship spread across the floor of a repair factory, shimmering and heavily folded, with groups of women sitting together mending it. It is such a beautiful piece of work: you can actually feel the concentration of them working. You are with them there.
And reader, she could paint vehicles!
Stylistically, we saw early paintings where she was experimenting with pointillisme, then brash and colourful portraiture, and then detailed paintings of wartime workers, both male and female. Her palette was often rich and colourful- quite defiant. She was an excellent draughtswoman, with some exquisite etchings that demonstrated her dynamic skills with the weight and power of line.
Most importantly she was endlessly curious, and poetic in her processing of what she experienced, pondering on the travellers having only mud for a carpet yet the sky for a ceiling, for instance.
Over and over again, she painted a section of a city street illuminated by a flash of lightning because there was no other light like it. She visited the painting again and again until she felt she'd captured the moment, with its flustered umbrella people, bicycles, trees, railings and buildings all illuminated by the harsh flash.
Knight was a woman who quite obviously lived life to the full in all its terrible and wonderful glory. A woman after my own heart and an inspiration. It was well worth the journey in order to return home refuelled, and to remember that defiance is the best and only way!
Up in the loft, I have a box of postcards that were part of a constant postcard-exchange before the internet elbowed other forms of communication out of the way. Lots of us had stashes of postcards, bought at galleries, or vintage ones, or bought in bulk from remainder bins at stationers, or even home made. You didn't have to write anything important- a few lines of a passing thought, a funny thing someone said, an invitation. The address was part of it. A cheeky bloke sent one to me addressed to 'Helen McCookerybook, spinster'. John Peel was a postcard-sender, and I've still got a couple of them written in his cramped and tall handwriting that you had to tip up to read.
Once, a friend sent one to my parents' address when I'd gone there for a few days, saying 'Just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you had to run back to your Mum and Dad's'. I went down to breakfast that morning to an 'atmosphere' and couldn't work out why, until I read the card. Postcards weren't private, were they?
Last year, Andy Barding, who runs a record shop on the Isle of Wight, started a postcard club so people could communicate with each other during lockdown. It was a really nice idea. I woke early this morning and thought about it, and about how great would be to communicate by postcard more instead of always using the internet. I used to put on shows, and always got postcards printed with an image on the front and details on the back. I found a cheapish place in Northern Ireland that did a really good job and factored that into the overall costs of everything, because I felt that it was a special thing to do. I put a lot of thought into the picture on the front because of this. They did what the internet does, but in a more personal way. For all that the internet is inclusive, some of that is an illusion: it's also (dare I say it) uncaring. Andy's project was a reminder that people exist in all our many dimensions, for there in the imprint of someone's handwriting was a reminder of flesh and blood, a signifier of touch, that sensation we were all mourning in our atmosphere of infection, illness and fear of death.
One or two people still send the odd postcard, and it's such a relief from the white paper window-envelopes (bank statements, bills, charity pleas and NHS appointments) and the brown paper admonishments (is this another parking fine?). Butter side up or butter side down, whether it's the coloured picture that catches your eye first or the scribbly writing, it's really exciting to receive a postcard. Part of it is the idea that someone has chosen the card, so it's like a little slice of their personality dropping through the letter box on to the door mat. It isn't an announcement to hundreds of people on social media that people acknowledge with a click. It is a personal communication that has involved a slow-world real-world sequence of events. Purchasing the card at a gallery or shop, having chosen to go there; storing the card until the right time to send it to the right person; writing a personal message and finding a postage stamp; a journey to (or past) a post box; and finally, the thought given to the person receiving it. It's all such a bother, isn't it? But what a charming bother.
It takes a big incentive to go out anywhere these days- not my own things, of course, but other bands....
However, this was an irresistible night and despite the travel problems (I think all the tube drivers on the Northern Line must be isolating because there were huge gaps between trains), we managed to get there in good enough time to catch the Lancashire Bombers, a quartet of chaps with a junior drummer who was one of the most musical drummers I've seen for a long time. He really drummed to the songs and more than held his own amongst his elders, who played rapid-fire garage pop with a Northern Soul twist. I was particularly taken by the Burns guitar which scorched its way through the set. There was a tongue-in-cheek approach to the short, sharp songs which gave them quite an edge. I'm glad to have seen them.
Jetstream Pony were headlining and it was such a joy to see them playing again. Their songs are intricate while still sounding really powerful, and they play with a commitment and a belief in their material that takes you along on the musical journey with them. They are one of those bands whose shows are like a puzzle. Why did they put this bit in the song, and how did they think of it? You'll just be drifting off on a harmony between Beth and Shaun, and then a new part of the song kicks in. As well as being really great musicians, there is an extraordinary imagination that goes into the creation and delivery of their songs. I always really love seeing them. They had a borrowed drummer last night who did a really good job, locking in neatly with Kerry's bass lines. I wish I'd bought one of their CDs but because of the train problem the night was cut off a bit short. Next time!
It is always the right thing not to stay at home sitting about and watching TV, even if it's a Strictly Come Dancing night. You can catch up on that another time. While we are between lockdowns, put that mask on and go out. Breathe in the pleasure of live music while you can!
I'm sorry about the crap photos- people were taking much better ones, and also filming- might be worth checking out Youtube.
These photographs were taken by Antoine, the brother of Nico's companion Philippe. Antoine had a secret photographic technique that made everyone, regardless of size or gender, look like a pop star. It was taken in Nico's flat (she wasn't around- I would have been scared to meet her at that point, I think). It was the first time I'd ever been served those wafer-thin slices of raw meat. I carefully rolled them up and hid them under my knife and fork.
It's only fairly recently that I have stopped making home made wall calendars. I started this in my bedsit in Willesden when I was 23 and the calendars were so huge, I just ripped them off the wall and threw them away when they were finished with. They morphed from gig calendars to mummy calendars and back again. I found these today- one from The Chefs days and on from Helen and the Horns days. The latter has a John Peel session scheduled.
This afternoon, I bit the bullet and went to see the film The Velvet Underground at the ICA, because it's going to disappear, just like Summer of Soul. It has been made by Greedy-Apple-Corporation-Sells-You-Music-And-Things-To-Play-It-On, and I'm not a customer of theirs; it will whoosh on to their streaming service next week, and that will be the end of it. I was so desperate to see it, and I reckoned I could sit there in the dark by myself, and just absorb it even though I still feel crap.
The ICA is robot land, isn't it? Even the toilet is made for robots. On the way out when I went to the loo, the toilet decided that I'd finished my business and flushed anyway. I hadn't finished, but the toilet was very self-assured in its design and now I'm wondering if it was gaslighting me. It was scary.
Back to the film. As far as I'm concerned, The Velvet Underground began it all: the early version of the band, when they were swirling around in both meanness and beauty, was just fabulous. At several points in the film, my hair stood on end. Jonathan Richman, a mad uber-fan of theirs, describes trying to identify what the instruments were playing at a live performance, and discovering that quite often there were sounds happening that came from nobody's instrument at all: they were just there in the atmosphere.
Yes, they were the sound of meanness, but they were also the sound of mystery, and lyrically they turned over the stone and showed us all the bad things that had been hiding underneath it. What a relief to see and hear that honesty!
The little details: John Cale and his mentor tuning their instruments to the hum of the fridge: I know that thing! Dubulah and Simon Walker used to do that, and I always thought at Millwall matches the chants started in unison in 'G' because the fans had shaved before the match and kept that pitch, entering through their jaw bones, in their heads. Cale has really good recall, and at times the film was his; but really, it was pretty even-handed with only Sterling Morrison's story being absent, although his wife was there to tell parts of it.
We heard the Primitives' song Do The Ostrich and what appeared to be an almost country-style early version of Waiting For My Man which was talked over (sacrilege!). We heard about Lou Reed parting company with Pickwick Records where he was a staff writer because he wanted to write miserable songs that told it like it was.
Mo Tucker was really funny, saying how much they all hated hippies when they went to California, and how useless a flower is when someone's pointing a gun at you.
And there was Nico of the beautiful voice, and Andy Warhol exploiting everyone's vulnerability. It was a really absorbing and interesting movie. Then something in real life went wrong, and all we could hear was the audio, and then nothing. The cinema sorted it out and it started again, but by then I had a humdinger of a headache and came home.
On the way back I realised that I'd left Summer of Soul early, too. Maybe I don't like getting to the end of films because I don't like things ending. There has been too much 'ending' in the last eighteen months, and I've had enough of it.
Back to work tomorrow, up really early. I think I am going to go to bed now even though it's just after 6 p.m.
Anyway- here's a Velvet Underground song I recorded (for the third time!) because I love the song so much. Of course Nico does it a thousand times better, but it's just such a gorgeous song. The Mexican zine Pintalo De Negro asked a bunch of musicians to record their favourite Velvet Underground song to go on to a cassette they're releasing imminently with a new issue, and I did it for them, with Ian Button and Robert Rotifer on backing vocals. The film is by Damian Cosmas.
Surrealism is following me around today like a lost puppy. The gas engineer phoned while I was out shopping and said I'd left a message that sounded like a Dalek on his messaging service. Juggling my bag, wire basket and a handful of potatoes, I accidentally deleted all the notes on my iPhone during the call in such a way that I can't retrieve them (I don't back them up to anything, and it was a text-delete, not a note-delete, so they are irretrievable). But I was sort of relieved.
I looked in the window of the North London Hospice charity shop on the way back, and there was a harmonium (very good condition, and quite a coincidence because I almost sold my piano yesterday), plus literally scores of white satin wedding dresses festooned about the shop and lined up obediently on hangers, as though waiting for husbands to insert prospective wives into them, waltz out of the shop to the church down the road, and marry them. A veritable production line of marriages, all in a north London suburb. Wow.
Actually, the problem with losing the phone notes is that they partially contained a list of all the things I've got to catch up on after being ill. Will I remember them all? I don't know.
We used to play a game on the train home from school. 'You've dropped your head!', pointing at the floor. Everyone got caught at least once, looking down instinctively before playing the trick on the next fool in a school uniform. I've certainly dropped my head, or the contents, anyway.
It's quite nice.
I think I'll leave it there on the floor and see what else turns up in the surreal world of the High Street.
Grounded by my malaise (pretentious, moi?) I'm cooking and thinking. I had a hankering for leek and potato soup to soothe my throat, and I don't really know how to make it, but calling on Spirit of TV Cookery Show, a pan is bubbling on the stove and it doesn't smell that bad.
I mean, it smells nice.
I have been thinking about how powerless you can feel in life. One of the things that has always boosted my low self esteem is sitting alone and writing a song. A song is a friend that changes position: sometimes it comes from inside you and you're speaking, then it suddenly changes and tells you things itself. You concentrate, in the same way as you concentrate on drawing. There is an intensity in the moment that can't be interrupted, and that reinforces your sense of who you are and what you feel.
A good song writing session will make you feel taller and stronger, thick-skinned and armoured against the world, and glowing with creativity. It doesn't deplete your bank balance and doesn't have to be competitive. It's made of sound waves and words. Air and ideas, that's all.
Now, I am building my expertise as a watcher of daytime cookery shows. 'Amazing recipes!' they exclaim, before whizzing through a choreographed engagement with ingredients, clashing stainless steel implements, and immaculate kitchen surfaces that always involves several ingredients that I haven't got (and don't know how to acquire), and results in far too much food for me and my limited stomach capacity.
I watch the cooks frazzled by their efforts as they wrestle dough, whisk eggs and trim edges with panache. They obviously have squads of brow-moppers, sweat dabbers and want-a-glass-of-water-sirs: handmaidens to assist with their travails. Hey presto! Magnifique!
When I was young and poor, I used to sit and watch these shows while I ate a slice of bread and butter. The exotic recipes made the bread and butter particularly delicious, with the added bonus that I didn't have to do very much washing up at all, unlike the support squads for the TV chefs. Now, I think 'If I only had that one missing ingredient, I would make that magical hey-presto food, but since I don't, it's pasta for dinner again'. I am also still partial to bread and butter, which can be the most satisfying food in the universe when the bread is freshly baked and the butter is cold.
I've picked up a virus (I hope not Corona) probably from being back at work. I'm hallucinating detectives from the wall-to-wall reading as I work down the trashy novels pile, as I sit unable to move due to fatigue, and nursing a throat that feels as though it's trying to swallow a hedgehog.
The plots blur into each other, female and male detectives transitioning into one ultra-detective that solves everything on the last two pages. The simple act of imbibing soluble aspirin is undertaken in faux-policing vocabulary, and the hypernosmia (I could smell the pages of the books from my bed, probably because of a bout of Covid last year) has vanished to be replaced by deafening tinnitus that jangles along as an irritating soundtrack to my woozy worldview.
Go with it, go with it, it will pass. Don't worry about all the pending things that you simply can't do. Pick up another novel, prop up your elbows, and peer into the grey type littered on the thick corky yellow pages. There you will find the USA, all laid out in all its poverty, unfairness, danger and corruption, all appearing imminently on our own horizons. I am forewarned about people with dementia being kept alive with heart-drugs just so the chains of care homes can continue to fleece their families; people beaten up having to pay their own medical fees, and then having to sue the perpetrators for the money; the oil industry destroying entire Appalachian mountains and polluting the land, water and air just because making money is more important than anything else. People with guns shooting innocent people and then living with it for the rest of their lives, because they carry guns and that's seen as a sign of freedom.
Corruption too in the UK, taken for granted as something we always will have to live with, perpetrated by people who apparently live in an entirely different astral sphere to normal people.
This swamp! Somehow it chimes with how I feel. More books to go before I get better.....
I have always been a long-sleeved checked shirt sortuva person. In the 1980s I bought lots of my shirts from Flip, but I also bought lots of cheap size small shirts from men's shops. When I got fed up with them I used to cut the sleeves off one shirt and sew them on to another. Hey presto! A new shirt (and a lot of spare sleeves because alas, I was too lazy to sew the discarded sleeves on to the other shirt, although I did sometimes wear that one as a cut-off).
We have our first two ever gigs coming up at the end of November, and it seems sensible to start learning the twelve songs in our repertoire, especially since a lot of them have alien chords to learn, and (even more challengingly) lyrics in the German language. Little and often is the prescription. Chords first, lyrics later. If I can get my body to deal with the music, my head can follow on with the lyrics. I hope.
I had an unexpected conversation with a blues guitarist on Monday morning, which was such a cheering thing to do. Guitar nerds aren't usually on patrol on Monday mornings! He's going to come in and talk to the music students, and they are going to love him. On Thursday, an ex-student who now manages vinyl output for a major label is coming in, and last week I spent 150% of my time scurrying around trying to find a room to teach them all in. Now I think I have, but I won't be able to relax until the lecture is over, when I will deflate with relief like a balloon at a children's party.
On Monday afternoon, I played the songwriting students a selection of political songs, all the way from Billie Holliday through Woody Guthrie, Marvin Gaye, The Specials, X-Ray Spex to Pussy Riot and beyond, finishing with the Tokyo Complaints Choir, who always go down a treat, and shine a light of sunny happiness on drab Monday afternoons. I have to introduce them to Lord Kitchener, Pete Seeger, The Last Poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Charlie Gillet's book The Sound of the City which is possibly out of print. There is so much they haven't heard!
Back in the 1980s, when you rounded the corner on the top deck of a Number 36 bus at Vauxhall, you were rewarded by a glimpse into the milk bottle depot where tight queues of clean milk bottles wobbled on a conveyor, past the industrial-glazed windows on their way back into circulation. For some reason, this was a mysterious and oddly romantic sight. The lines of bottles seemed to be heading on a longer-than-necessary journey, backwards and forwards, through gleaming chrome machinery that was curiously complex. And they were clean: so sparkling clean! The glass positively twinkled under the fluorescent ceiling tubes, the contours of their lips etched out sharply in gleaming light. Oddly, you never saw a human being. It was as though the bottles had found their way there independently and lined up patiently, having made the decision themselves to be recycled. I think this was the most riveting thing of all.
Yesterday I carried on the Children's TV theme with a drawing of Belle and Sebastian, that black and white children's programme from France, and then revisited the Delft tile idea (watch this space) by drawing a Delft punk throwing a bit of a wobbler.
After I left school, I had a temporary job at the RVI hospital in Newcastle as a darkroom technician. I spent my days in a large cupboard with a dim red light. There were smaller two-way cupboards set into the walls. A radiographer would put an exposed X-Ray film into one from the wall outside the darkroom, and bang on the cupboard door when they had closed it. That was your signal to open the internal door, take out the cassette with the film in it, and feed it into the developing machine, which would then spew it out into a room next door to be collected and taken to the radiologist for diagnosis.
I've written before about reading Mills and Boon paperbacks that had been left there by a previous technician: it was just light enough in there to decipher the text. Waiting between films was desperately boring and even Mills and Boon was better than nothing.
Occasionally we'd mix massive plastic tanks of developer and fixer, bending the stinky chemicals with water to the correct concentration. In other parts of the department there were rooms where we'd have to develop and fix the X-Rays manually, which was daunting. X-Rayed teeth (occlusal) were processed this way and I remember seeing tiny grey and white films clipped into chrome frames having in the tank of fixed waiting for diagnosis.
The colonoscopy area was disturbing. Woozy drugged people in hospital gowns were wheeled in and out of the camera rooms, and often their prognosis was not good. One day I saw blood in my stools and was horrified. I went into work the next day and whispered my fears to one of my workmates. 'Ha ha!', she laughed. 'What did you eat last night?'. Lots of tomatoes. Yes, it was par for the course to self-diagnose with dreadful bowel complaints when you worked in that part of the department.
There were workplace romances: one of the surgeons was regarded as particularly desirable, and I had the impression that he was taking his pick from the lovely young radiographers in their starched white uniforms. The radiographers were fun. One fo them couldn't afford to go on holiday so she found a French radio station on her transistor radio and sat sunbathing in her mum and dad's back garden for her two weeks off, pretending that she was in the south of France.
We all had to wear little rectangles of X-Ray film pinned on to the skirt part of our overalls to make sure we weren't getting over-exposed to radiation. The Radiographers had heavy rubber aprons that they put on when they were posing a patient, and we had to stand back from the doors when the machine was in operation, just in case..
One of the radiographers had a father who was a jeweller, and one day he secretly came in and pierced everyone's ears at a reduced rate. There was a heatwave that summer and I remember walking through Marks and Spencers to get the train home (it was the only air conditioned shop in Newcastle), and gingerly touching my tender ears. What a strange sensation it was, metal and skin! I don't think McMum was delighted when I got back home.
The X-Ray department was a world of its own. Apparently a senior radiologist had allowed a vet to bring in an anaesthetised pig one weekend; and I bought a length of tweed from a salesman who turned up in our rest room one day (and later sold it to one of King Kurt's guitarists to have a suit made, because I couldn't find anyone in Newcastle to adapt a tailor-made man's suit so I could have one made for myself). I earned enough money to get my hair cut, but it looked awful. Thankfully, it all grew again.
Such hot weather, baking in the dark in a tiny room deep in the heart of the Royal Victoria Infirmary for a whole young summer. Isn't it funny where life takes you?
I had the strange experience yesterday of being tagged in a Twitter post by a record label that is releasing a version of 24 Hours by The Chefs. Last week sometime, I had inadvertently 'liked' a similar post in passing, thinking at was a radio show but actually it's a reissue label that seems to have got hold of several people's tracks (including one by the Monochrome Set), without them knowing anything about it, and who plan to release them all next year.
Their Twitter followers are really excited, and one admonished me as though I was being churlish for noting that I didn't know anything about it.
Think about this: if you had been in a band that made very little money despite being professional for years, how would you feel if the songs that you had spent months writing, rehearsing, playing and recording were completely detached from you, and people were allowed to repackage and sell them, alongside merchandise that they have created themselves, and pay you nothing, without even asking if that was OK? Somewhere out of sight, a bunch of businessmen have exchanged contracts, shaken hands, had a beer and gone back to their huge houses in Surrey or Islington or wherever (and you can bet your bottom dollar they vote Labour), patting themselves on the back. And the people who will buy the records (known as 'the market' buying 'units') will feel as though they are interacting with the artist by buying another record for their collection.
Quite possibly some of the bands and artists don't mind, and in fact are delighted to be remembered. I am completely aware that I am not famous, and should also probably be feeling incredibly grateful for all the attention. I don't- I just feel as exploited as I always used to until becoming completely independent and DIY, or at least as much that as one possibly can be.
Have you ever tried to buy a loaf of bread and offered to pay with gratitude?
Or a bag of tomatoes and offered to pay with self-importance?
There was a new Central Line tube station being tried out, and I'd ended up there on my way to Stratford. We'd all had to get off and change and people were grumbling. At first I thought I'd mistakenly got a train in the wrong direction, but I hadn't. The station was semi-open to daylight, with distressed pink brick walls that had once belonged to a factory or warehouse of some sort. We drifted towards the other platforms, all on a level: our through train had gone back where it came from, and the other two platforms were terminals; another train would be along soon.
Sure enough, one turned up, driven by an excited trainee with their instructor in the cab beside them. There were other trainees crammed into the confined space, and as he drew the train up to the end of the platform, he bumped into it. I kind of knew that was going to happen, and I burst out laughing, and so did the other trainees, their hands over their mouths so they instructor couldn't see their glee.
I started to explore a bit. There was a tabby cat sitting between the rails on the third line. The end of its tail was missing and I advised it to move, because it would lose more than just its tail if it stayed where it was.
What was the name of this station? High up on the wall were painted four words in old-fashioned capital letters: 'St .... .... Manor' or something like that. The paint had worn off and you couldn't read it properly. The back of the station had obviously been a wine bar at some time, and I walked through to the ticket hall. There, there was a waiting room with chairs with walls of emerald green. They were covered with paintings in gold frames, but in close inspection the 'paintings' were cheap and garish prints.
I started taking photographs and filming. Nobody was going to believe this; the other passengers had disappeared on to a train that had drawn in while I was exploring. On my phone screen Dad appeared, smiling and laughing. At that point, I knew it was a dream because he died more than ten years ago.
What a weird day. On one side of it, so much stress has landed in my life that it's seemingly impossible to be able to move forward. On the other, the stress has resulted in an afternoon of dogged editing (removing the sound 'K' from numerous vocal takes in order to tidy up a song, and re-doing a guitar groove in tiny fragments in order to fit it into the drift from the metronome that gives the song a lovely feel).
I have also put down a demo for a new song, which I forced myself to finish just because of the medicinal effect of making music. The song is about a Little Egret I saw down in Dollis Valley one morning early when no-one was about. It was a chilly and rather hostile morning in the summer: the dog walkers were obviously having a second cup of tea, and the cocaine-buying joggers were probably shuddering under the covers, and giving it a miss for the day.
The treatment worked, but I'm very tired, having been pulled between these two poles, the creative north and the cruel south.
A long time ago, Lester Square told me about an Army musician he knew who had a mental breakdown because he couldn't cope with the schizophrenic act of being a creator and a killer rolled into one person's psyche. I'm not in the Army, obviously, but sometimes I do fail to understand the license granted to those who are allowed to pontificate about one thing, while practicing an entirely different scheme.
I need to get over myself. I have just found out that Pat Fish (the Jazz Butcher) has died. Pat was a total gentleman, and had just completed an album with Dave Morgan and Ruth Tidmarsh. He was in the middle of gigging, due to play in Bristol this week. This is terribly sad news.
The past couple of days have been spent looking for lyrics that I scribbled down somewhere in a fit of inspiration. More lyrics always come along, but it's still awful when you mislay them. Writing songs is just about the closest you can get to taking a snapshot of your soul; self knowledge is so elusive, and like drawing or painting, laying out these things outside your sense of who you are offloads a lot of tension and anxiety. You can see, or hear, exactly who you were on a particular day at a particular time in a particular place, feeling particular feelings.
They were irritating lyrics because they didn't fit properly into the music they landed on, but at the same time they described perfectly a tiny morsel of time and experience that had been so difficult to capture.
I have just found them at the bottom of a pile of books. I had been able to visualise where they were on a page and sure enough there they were, following on from a much more nuts'n'bolts set of instructions about how I am going to mix a track that I have been recording.
The fact is that every cloud has a silver lining, and because I couldn't find the lyrics, I started writing another song so I had something to work on. The other song is much easier: it's one of those songs that began as a dream where I was at a concert and heard someone singing it. My friend Amy used to do this too: hearing a song on the radio in her dream and realising it was actually her own. Soon, you learn to sing the song into a recording device as soon as you wake up. Once you've done that, all you need to do is write the rest of it, which comes along pretty quickly.
The two new songs are going to jostle for attention for a while. It doesn't much matter which one wins; lyrically they are interconnected because they are both about nature. One is melancholy, the other is a celebration, two faces of the natural environment.
The largest social media company went offline yesterday, and gave those of us who use it a well-deserved rest. I was half hoping that it had gone for good. This morning I read that businesses depend on it, and in some respects the semi-professional part of the music work that I'm involved in also depends on it. Nonetheless, it was great to have a break from it. The real world suddenly went up a couple of notches in interestingness and excitingness, and I thought just how lucky those people are who have never engaged with it at all.
I'm going to try to take a day a week off from it and see if I can. It's become a habit to check it regularly throughout the day, but it's not an essential service, is it?
Yesterday's theme was children's TV shows of yesteryear, and I had a very pleasant hour or so in the afternoon looking through old TV shows to find suitable stills to draw from. I chose this one to work on, all my resolutions to draw in black and white, and to do more than one drawing during the session, going out of the window as the banter flowed. This was actually a particularly weird episode of Crackerjack: the very reluctant-looking boys had to roll around on the floor until the balloons burst, and the first boy to burst all the balloons won the competition. I noticed that all the Crackerjack competitions involved humiliating the children in some way, and from the expression on these boys' faces, they were aware that they were just about to be mocked on live TV. It almost seems as though they were sent to the show by their school (they are in uniform) as an alternative to being caned. The challenge of drawing the balloons was really enjoyable, but now I'm worried that the boys were scarred for life by the experience. I wonder where they are now?
I'm just about to teach song writing this afternoon. So many wonderful musicians have passed through the courses that I teach on and here is one of them, Jamie McDermott.
I'm going to learn this for the next Mr Unswitchable online covers night. Challenging, eh? It's got so much melody in the backing track that it's going to be fun working out how to do it on a Spanish guitar. I do love this song so much- there was a lot of good urban soul made by young people around that time: Southern Freez and all that. I think this was the best.
With Thatcher, I had to merely turn the sound down. With Johnson, the TV gets turned off completely. It's a complete waste of time listening to a priapic self-promoter whose every word is a lie. I am hoping for an early implosion of the Tory party, but that feels a bit like continuing to believe in the Tooth Fairy when you're an adult. While the Conservative press dominates the way people think, they will remain in power in perpetuity. Living in a Tory suburb, I can see with my own eyes their sense of entitlement and power has not been shaken by anything at all, no matter what has happened. It's almost as if people will still continue to praise them with their last dying gasp. It's called 'Not wanting to be proved wrong', and it's a remarkably resilient and widespread phenomenon.
BTW this is a suburb where the woman volunteer in the local Oxfam shop went into an anti-refugee tirade with one of her customers without any apparent awareness of what she was saying, and where the manager of Rymans (a woman) said to a customer 'That Sadiq Khan ought to be shot'. Head office said they'd deal with her, but she's still there.
All the talk of a this being a gentler era and a sense of community post-Covid stops short at the the borders between Barnet and its more tolerant neighbours.
Definitely not here today, gone tomorrow. From TK Maxx in Stratford: plastic cosmetics bags getting it wrong in a big way.
BTW the nicest, most polite and respectful shop staff on the planet, seriously. The assistant manager Mohamed spent almost an hour on the phone getting a refund as compensation for a damaged package that was never delivered, and when I went back I witnessed another manager being incredibly tactful and kind to a man who was desperate for a job and who needed to bring in a new CV.
