Men Dressed as Traffic Cones on the Train to the Darts in Alexandra Palace Yesterday

 

Flaneuse-ing

Restlessness is a permanent affliction of mine; I need to keep moving. Today I went to the East End of London for an aimless wander, taking in Rough Trade East to ask for the latest Hollie Cook album. The chap behind the computer tried to sell me an old one, remixed this year (naughty), presumably thinking it didn't matter. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to award 'idiot' badges to people who try to palm you off with something they think they can use to get rid of you, you pesky awkward customer? In the end, I bought it from Bandcamp when I got home.

 Sometimes I get lost in the area, aided by the fact that Apple Maps gets lost too. The two of us usually manage to find our ways there, though. Lots of shops and cafés were closed; the bagel shops still had their queues, and the charity shops and vintage shops were still doing brisk trades. It's funny how parts of town have totally different identities in the daytime and at night. 

About ten years ago (possibly more) Guy Harries, a colleague at UEL, and me used to run the Songlab at the venue 93 Feet East in Brick Lane. It was monthly on a Monday night, a 'dead' night for pubs and clubs. Mostly we had students and staff from the University playing there; one time, our illustration lecturer Mikey Georgeson (AKA David Devant) did a brilliant set as Mr Fox with Mr Solo (the latter played French Horn). People used to drop in off the street and perform sometimes, often young rappers with a CD with their backing track on it. 

Guy organised the illustration students to come along and draw the musicians playing their songs. It had a gentle buzz about it ,and was always full of people who had come to watch or come to play. I would drive down from Barnet to Tufnell Park to pick Guy up with his PA and take it to Brick Lane, then do the reverse at the end of the evening, and stage manage it while Guy did the sound; we organised regular song writing sessions to help people to write material. The University put us on their website, and a student came all the way from Romania to enrol on the course specifically because of that. But the University wouldn't contribute anything to it, nothing at all. In the end we stopped, which was very sad. We'd made a little mark in the nightlife of the area, a tiny droplet of water under the bridge!

Years before that, I went to see Cleveland Watkiss perform across the road at the Truman Brewery. My friend and colleague at the University of Westminster, Mykaell Riley, had been a producer on a TV show in the very early 1990s. One of Cleveland's first TV appearances was on that show, which was presented by Smiley Culture. I'd been working at The Peckham Settlement with a reggae band, and I took them all along to the show to be in the audience. Cleveland had a wonderful singing voice, and when eventually both me and Mykaell started working at Westminster, I invited Cleveland to come along to do a lecture. We were all fish out of water as lecturers back in the day- musicians who had paid their dues on the road entering an institution that was more used to highly academic people but needed the injection of reality once the government of the day finally recognised the sheer amount of money that British musicians were bringing into the UK. We were simultaneously resented and respected, which is a weird combo. 

You come to really, really appreciate people who support what you're doing, even the little things that they say and do. It's almost as though the sun comes out and picks out refuges for you: an energetic press person, a supportive record label, promoters who care and people who are interested in what you do. These things make the whole process a complete joy.

What a ramble... maybe wandering around the streets has inspired a mind-wander now I'm back home. I'm still half asleep after nodding off after what turned out to be a very long walk, six and a half miles. I didn't know there were so many miles in East London, but there you go.

What's next? More learning of songs for Friday's Crisis gig, then lots of rehearsals next week for the Waiting Room gig in Stoke Newington. A big thank you to everyone who has helped me, both back and the day and more recently. Musicians too- how wonderful to play with such inspiring people.

Woman Lifts Weights at Jeremy Deller Trafalgar Square Event, Summer 2025

 

Thingamajigs

We went to see The Importance of Being Earnest at the Noel Coward Theatre a couple of evenings ago. I hadn't been told by the Offsprogs that it had Stephen Fry in it, because they know I don't like him much (a certain stupid assumption about women's sexuality that he obviously had no business making, because he knows precisely zilch about it). 

However, I swallowed my pride and went along for the ice cream in the interval.

It's a weird version: the play is a parody already, and so making a parody version of it is a high-risk punt. 

The script is so great that it's hard to get it wrong, but it wobbled between camp and smut (G.A.Y. jokes in this day and age?), had some odd direction (too often we were faced with the actors' backs), derivative tropes (the butler who couldn't find the way off stage), and some fabulous clowning from the woman who played Cecily (Jessica Whitehurst, who could really have done the entire play herself). I've just realised that one of the main male leads was played by Olly Alexander, so maybe that's what drove their desire to see it! He was relentlessly fey and enormously energetic, and he too was a great visual comedian.

It was entertaining: the pace didn't let up for a second. However, I felt that the cast didn't gel particularly well; it was almost as if they had all rehearsed different versions of the play with different people before coming together for this one. Stephen Fry was actually very good, cast well in this play and completely over made-up. Those magenta lips! But again, he was performing on a different planet from the rest of the cast. Odd, but fun anyway.

Yesterday was my birthday. Offsprog Two threw a small family party, and Offsprog One made a blue tit cake (that was the icing; it wasn't actually made of blue tits, I promise). It was nice. I haven't talked so much for ages though it was low-key. They even sang happy birthday! Sometimes we go away (once even to Paris!), but this year I'm celebrating actually being alive. My brother James should have been there too. There was a gap in the festivities.

Today I made a list of the songs I need to learn. I'm doing a gig in a Crisis at Christmas homeless shelter on Friday and they have asked for a couple of cover versions as well as my own stuff. I was flummoxed till I remembered Mr Unswitchable's Lockdown Saturdays, so I chose This Boy and Storm in a Teacup to learn, and I'll do Femme Fatale and a bunch of my own songs. I did one before lockdown in Camden, and one guy sat and listened intently to the lyrics and asked about them afterwards. It was laid back and informal, and I'm looking forward to it.

I also have to learn the Rabbie Burns song Charlie is my Darling for the Country Soul Sessions Burns Night Special, and I'll learn the Gaelic version of Cailin Morun Sa for that too.

And of course: It Wasn't Me, to play with Lester Square at the gig on the 15th of January (below), plus Sixties Guy which I've never played live before, and The Porter Rose at Dawn, which I don't play very much and which Jack Hayter will be playing on.

I solved a logistic problem last night in my normal insomniac musings. I'd been worried about getting everyone on stage in time for their slots. 'What a stage-management mess', I thought. Then it hit me: we should all be there on stage anyway, do our slot, then get off. Then for the main bit of the gig, all anyone needs to do is go back to where they started and everything will be set up for them. AHA!

Never underestimate a 'sleepless night'!

Here's the ticket link, and a new poster with Gina Birch's name on it now, for I'm delighted to confirm that she will be playing a couple of songs too:

https://wegottickets.com/f/14034

Mrs Father Christmas on Stilts with Present Intercepts Child on Scooter

 

Why Are We Waiting?

Watching an item on TV about spontaneous choirs on trains triggered a memory of waiting on the quayside in North Shields for a ferry to Scandinavia- probably Esbjerg, when there used to be a ferry service between Newcastle and Denmark. 

I must have been about six, and we were on our way to Norway for a holiday. McDad and Bruv both had red hair, so the idea was that we went somewhere where their skin would not burn.

Embarkment must have been delayed, because the whole crowd of passengers waiting to get on to the ferry erupted into a version of 'Why Are We Waiting' and kept singing it until we were allowed to board.

I was astonished. I had never heard so many people singing at once before, not even in church. It was all done in good spirits, I'd say in quite a Geordie way if there is such a thing: good-natured exasperation. I'm not sure if it was that that got us on to the ship, but we did eventually manage to board and we had a lovely holiday in Oslo and Bergen!

Ten to Two

 

Turner and Constable at Tate Britain

I understand that I should upload pictures to make more people read this, but none of the photos that I took do justice to the paintings, so here are some inadequate words instead!

I love Turner's work. One of the blurbs next to a painting said that he painted the pollution that was visible all the time in London, which is why his paintings are so hazy and swirly. I have often thought you can almost feel the atmosphere in his work; he makes weather conditions into dramatic feelings rather than Constable's rather poncy little puffy clouds. I'd never seen Turner's religious paintings before. There was a bit too much melodrama in them, and he was a bit silly: he painted lots of imaginary Italian scenes before actually going there. Or maybe that's poignant; possibly he couldn't afford to travel!

What was lovely was the little sketch books that both of them painted in. That's where their respective skills were really evident. Overlapping two pages sometimes, the passion for capturing reality was vibrant and infectious. I wanted to get a little sketchbook and paint in it there and then.

Like many exhibitions at both London Tates, there was too much here. A bit of focus and editing would have made the exhibition altogether better. There were some gorgeous Constables here, and some intriguing juxtapositions (a painting of a canal with a horse, then another, larger one done several years later of the same place with the same horse, only now populated with men working alongside the water). Both artists are excellent at painting water, Constable still pools and millponds, Turner brilliant at crashing, terrifying seas. But one became tired of Constable's works very quickly: the paintings looked almost paint-by-numbers and they quite possibly were, rushing through commissions. Some of Turner's paintings were not his best, and one of the religious ones had the most silly twee little white rabbit that I've ever seen in a so-called serious painting. 

But I'm quite definitely a Turnerite. It's the industrial ones that I like, all that drama. He's almost like a precursor of the Futurists with his dynamism and ability to turn ugly industrial seascapes into parodies of religious epiphanies. Very clever. I'm going to go back again and soak up some magic from the large canvases that both of them had the luxury of creating. I might like Constable better too, second time around, and see beyond what seems to be superficial sentimentality. He was definitely a record-keeper and he sure could paint a cornfield!

It seems churlish to criticise two such wonderful painters, but it's more that I'm processing what I felt. Now it's time for me to do some drawing.

Christmas Queen

For all you Christmas Queens out there!

Seasons Greetings!

 

Street Artist and Customer, Leicester Square

 

Stereolab at Electric, Brixton

I'm up far too early, so what better thing to do than to reflect on Stereolab's Brixton gig on Sunday?

Their tracks (and also Laetitia's solo music) have been really standing out this year when I'd been listening to Riley and Coe's BBC6 show in the evenings, and when this date was added after the Royal Festival Hall sold out, it seemed like serendipity to buy a Christmas ticket or two.

We'd been spending most of the day listening to their music, yet I'm not enough of a fanwoman to be able to say 'this track, that track'. All I can do is think about the music which was of course, mesmerising. The songs have been arranged with flair and fun, with analogue beeps peeking out from guitar thrashes, exquisitely rehearsed stops and starts, thrilling key changes, and the commanding presence of Laetitia Sadier swapping instruments as though she was merely changing thoughts in her head. A bass trombone stood on a stand, and you could have knocked me down with a feather when it was she who actually lifted it to her lips and played the trombone lines. I watched the other musicians to see who was enjoying which songs (that's a musician's hobby). At one point, the guitarist was having such a lovely time he nearly wrenched his head off his neck, nodding, nodding. And how brilliant to have real drums in music that is sometimes so motorik! The set was a mixture of short, sharp songs with catchy choruses and longer pieces with rock-outs. I liked the short ones best: concentrated, focused thoughts in neat packages, but there was something here for everyone; different sections of the audience were cheering for different songs, which is hardly surprising given they are such a prolific band.

At times, I was almost driven to tears. Look what musicians do: they rehearse, they make songs, they process the human condition, they bring people together. They are not killing people with their machinery. They make mistakes, both technical and in thought. They are not perfect. But they reflect humanity and are born to do so, whether or not music is innate to their DNA. All that assembly of sound, words, nuance, and the layering of a human voice on top of it all, or integrated into a conversation with it all. It never ceases to fill me with awe and sometimes fills me with so much emotion that it spills beyond my body into something that can only be described as beyond human. What could be better than that?

Fairy with Crystal Ball at Street Party

 

Twinkling January Gig!

 Make plans now for Afterchristmas to avoid January misery!

https://wegottickets.com/f/14034

Stylish Street Person Causes a Stir

 

Man With Bull, Rothesay Agricultural Show

 

Showtunes from the Shadows in the Outsiders Music Top Ten

 

Gideon Coe Plays Cailin Morun Sa

 

It's Toadstool Time

Big luv to Wormhole World for including my weird track on their Christmas Compilation!

https://wormholeworld.bandcamp.com/track/its-toadstool-time 

Man Doing Press-Ups In The Fresh Air On Regents Canal Towpath

 

Man Banging Little Bass Drum And Singing

 

Going to Comic Con

 

Playing an Open Mic on Friday, High Street Kensington: cancelled

Sorry for short notice- I have had to cancel this gig!

Reporter on Cold Day, with Passing Dog

 

Mental Recalibration

Well, the last 18 months have been quite shocking. I always find it harder to see terrible things happening to people that I know and love that I do to experience them myself.

Yet terrible things have happened to me, too. I have been wondering why I have not really written any songs despite having literally hundreds of ideas (how am I going to crack open that parcel of words and music?), but looking at it from the outside, it's not surprising.

I know the creativity is still there: I've been writing songs with a group of people with complex physical disabilities, and songs for a purpose always appear just when I need them. I press the start button, and we move on incrementally from there.

Last night, a line for a song appeared and I realised that I'll start writing again soon. I've been putting a lot of energy into other people's projects (which is a privilege and a lovely thing to do) but it's time to look inwards again, even if what's there might be uncomfortable to unfold.

Strangely, I think the thing that has prompted the idea of starting to write again has been reading a book that I don't like. It is full of poetry and beautiful concepts used in a completely facetious way. 

It's almost as though my songs need to be written as a protest against the misuse of words that don't tap into any sort of meaning.

I am still grieving for my brother: my annoying, funny and intelligent ally. We were literally co-diarists of each others lives and co-defendants in a non-existent court case of deceit and abuse. I'm so glad we spent so much time together at the end of his life, talking about songs and making sure he left a musical imprint of being here. He had so much to say; his songs are packed with words and humour saved up from a lifetime of suppressing his wish to be a musician and earning a living to support his family.

I care so much about humans, and this has been brought to the forefront after what happened to James. We need to see through the fog of hatred that has landed on us all. Life is so short, too short to spend any time stoking fury at people who we think don't match our idea of what a human being should be like. If this is what we feel maybe it is ourselves we should be looking at. These feelings come from fear and discomfort with change. Even though the hatred is mainly targeted at other people and communities, I can still feel it in the air, poisoning the atmosphere for everyone. Unfettered anger belongs to toddlers, not adult humans; we are supposed to grow out of it. 

Being kind is not a weakness, it's the most difficult and powerful strength of all.

The Internet has taken on the role of and Old Testament God, with all the associated scariness, punishment and drama; the new religion's priests are psychotherapists, who manipulate people's inner feelings and dash away from the consequences of their actions before the temples collapse. 

Heavy, dude! That's enough thinking for the day. 

Woman Busking in the High Street

 

Podcast About The Chefs, Radio 3 Madrid

Thank you to Diego for sending this link, via Ian Ballard at Damaged Goods:

https://www.rtve.es/play/audios/el-sotano/discos-historia-chefs-20-11-25/16824690/

Photo by Claire Barratt

Poet for Hire

 

Man Collects Leaves with Giant Grabber

 

Last Life Drawing Class

It was a therapeutic thing to take part in each week, and last night we had the opportunity to draw the model for a long pose of almost two hours. I drew big- which meant a lot of re-drawing to work on the proportions. I didn't finish the drawing, but I don't think anyone did. The model was the best one ever- they managed to stay completely still, and most importantly, not sag under the physical pressure of keeping themselves in one position for such a long time. There were a few short breaks, but by some miracle they managed to get straight back into the same pose with very little change.

Singing Louder and Listening

Over the past week it feels as though my feet have scarcely touched the ground. It has been a long time since I forgot to eat, or indeed didn't have time. This has been such an occasion.

One Tuesday, there was a rehearsal for Gina's choir in the basement of Third Man Records. Hats off to everyone, they had put the work in learning the parts. They are all excellent singers and there was no time wasted: we spent around two and a half hours running through both of the songs and working out the minimum of backing track that could be used to anchor the vocals. By the end of the rehearsal, we were singing as one, which is exactly what a choir should do: listening to the vocal blend at the same time as creating it. It was all the more of an achievement because without exception the members of the choir have their own solo projects as writers and performers, and kept their egos in their pockets to make the whole thing work.

On Wednesday we met at the Union Chapel, where the house sound engineer had prepared microphones for each of us, and he sorted the backing tracks so they sounded good over the PA. I had to leave for a while because Devendra Banhart uses incense and I found that like bonfire smoke, my lungs cannot cope with it. I went and stood out the back with the catering staff who were phoning their families- and eventually, lighting up their fags, so I went back in again.

It was a house full to bursting, and the audience responded really well to Gina's music. She is an accomplished front-woman full of wit and charm, and soon they were eating out of her hand. We stood in order behind the big velvet curtain and slipped into place on the stage after being introduced. It went past in a whirl. I could hear it all working (phew!), and we marched off singing 'Keep to the left..'

What an amazing thing to do, and also what a responsibility. It's been a long time since I arranged vocals for live; it's all been for recording recently, and for live I'd made some call-and-response sections to make the dynamic more interesting. I thought they worked!

Afterwards, Devendra took a photograph of us all on the stairs. He is a witty chap. Earlier, I'd been out to look for somewhere to relieve myself. 'Is this the toilet?', I asked a person standing in the doorway to his dressing room. 'Sometimes people call me that', he replied.

On Thursday morning, I went to my new freelance job writing songs with people with complex disabilities. It was a good session, and I left them with some homework for the next song, which will be a protest song. 

Then it was time to head off to the BBC studios at Maida Vale to a live BBC3 recording of the BBC Orchestra. This was a wonderful thing to do, to listen after so much doing. It was also a watching experience because the orchestra interact with each other and with the conductor constantly. There was a piece by Tchaikowsky where the violins started to the left of the stage, and the arrangement moved through the violas (left of centre) to the cellos (right of centre), and ended up with the massed basses on the right. It was brilliant. Panning sounds on a small laptop all the time is so insular, to see this happening in real life was incredible both visually and sonically. How wonderful to be an orchestral composer and see this dynamic in action after imagining it in your head! Here it is (at least for a while. Can you hear us clapping?): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002lq0l

Friday was a breathing day, although I did prepare and time the mini-sets for the Louder than Words Festival, where I had been asked to play three 15 minute sets before the interviews with Justin Currie (The Tremeloes), Richard Jobson (The Skids) and Eddie Tudor Pole (Tenpole Tudor)

On Saturday I got the train to Manchester. Delays on the network meant that I completely missed Debsey Wykes of the Dollymixture, who was apparently brilliant, and Claire Grogan of Altered Images, who was also apparently brilliant. I did hear her singing through the doors of the Green Room and her lovely voice has not changed a bit.

Cazz Blase and Shelina Brown were there and we had some great conversations about it all, and about how some men are so threatened by intelligent women. Thankfully, not all of them are, but the ones who are have disproportionately loud voices. There are a lot of exceptions, mercifully: for instance I talked to Dave Barbarossa backstage, who is wonderfully funny and tactful. 

I also have to thank the sound engineer Ash for getting a really great sound. He was calm and collected, and there was a room change (Baz from The Stranglers instead of Eddie) which was made all the easier for the fact that he's already done the other two sets I'd played.

What about the punk panel? Well, it was very lively. Chris Sullivan and Stephen Colegrave have published a book called Punk, the Last Word which they say is a tongue-in-cheek title because there is no last word. It was such a big panel that we almost fell off the podium: Russ Bestley, who designed the Pauline Murray biography, Carol Hodge, who performs Crass songs all around the world with Steve Ignorant, Chris, Marco Pirroni, Ryan Walker (journalist from Louder than War), me, Stephen and Mike Dines from the Punk Scholars Network sat in a semicircle with John Robb convening us all. Or reining us in, where necessary. The discussion became heated at some points but John managed to keep things polite and as unmansplainy as possible with so many strong male viewpoints. I think Carol and me held our own, and there was a very interesting point at the end where there was a debate about the origin of the word 'punk', and the familiar conclusion that it came from the nickname of young men in prison about 100 years ago who sexually serviced the other male prisoners. From the back of the audience, Cazz pointed out that her own first discovery of the word was in fact in Shakespeare, where the word was used to describe a female prostitute. Game, set and match to Cazz for that! 

My own issue came with The Pink Fairies and Hawkwind being held up as examples of early 1970s countercultural music. To me, they were in the same male boat as Led Zeppelin (squeeze my lemon), and that led to a very interesting after-panel discussion with the woman who had proposed the idea. In the end, I said 'You should write about this!' (I didn't say 'This is why I wrote the song 'Thrush'!).

The next day, I played an early set before Richard Jobson's talk, and then went to a talk on a history of graphic design and DIY printing in the punk and post-punk era. It does sound like a very interesting book, but unfortunately the author couldn't resist the urge to be controversial at my expense. After the talk, in the questions part, he mentioned that he didn't like Cold War Steve. I actually love him- that constant snarling and biting, even on days when the quality of collage is not brilliant. It's the biteback that I find really heartening. I brought up how I felt. 'Hermann Goering would agree with you', said the speaker. What a silly swipe! I have seen this guy do something this before, so I let it rest. I could have asked him to wash his mind out with soap and water, but I didn't. Funnily enough, I mentioned it to Offsprog One this morning. 'Is he a graphic designer?', she asked. Ha ha! 

So, on the the final short set where I had to develop a pair of cojones to get past the rows of folded arms, but I think it was OK. They clapped! Then I hared over to Eddie Tenpole to hear his interview, and it was absolutely hilarious. Years ago, he came to audition for one of the mad Music Halls that I did with Lester Square but kind of disappeared after that. On Sunday afternoon he was energetic, terrifying, honest, animated and exhausting. Life has chewed him up, but he has chewed it up back. Can you imagine being asked by Malcolm McLaren to go to Paris and have sex with underage girls while singing? Eddie was still clearly disturbed by this, and of course he said no. His talk was packed with people, presumably because of his hosting of The Crystal Maze. He did wonderful impressions of Edward Fox- and of himself being auditioned. He was like a box of fireworks; at the beginning it had seemed that he'd made the decision to just give yes/no answers, but this was clearly impossible for a man with so much explosive energy. It was a great way to end the festival, even though there was so much I missed. 

I had a great chat with Jill Adam, who organised the whole thing so beautifully, and headed home to think about it all. There has been so much food for thought this seven days: every day a different flavour.

Louder than Words

I'm heading to 'Louder than Words' tomorrow where I'll be taking part in a punk panel with John Rob, Chris Sullivan, Stephen Colegrave and Russ Bestley at 6.15 p.m.

I'll also be playing three 15-minute mini sets on Saturday and Sunday if you're going and would like to hear my songs:

3.45pm Saturday 15th - before Justin Currie

11.45am Sunday 16th - before Richard Jobson

3.45pm Sunday 16th - before Ed Tudor Pole

Backstage at the Union Chapel

This photo is from last night. Gina supported Devendra Banhart at the Union Chapel in London, and a choir of friends and associates sang on two of her songs, Live Forever and Keep to the Left.

I did the vocal arrangements, and after one rehearsal at Third Man in the basement (due to touring and other time restraints), we donned our black garb and joined her on stage.

Thank you choir for making those arrangements sound so good! Thanks also to Gina for inviting me to do it. It's a very different kettle of fish to the job of arranging backing vocals for recordings, which I do for myself, Gina, Robert and various other people.

This is a rushed posting; I'm up early for work but might write more in due course.

Young Fleas4U In the Kitchen with a Box and a Bag

 

McCookerybook Chili Recipe

New Zine Alert!
From Jane Duffus, writer of 'These Things Happen: the Sarah Records story'
'Zine Things Happen' includes my recipe for Black Bean Chili.
(substitute vegan sour cream if required)
What a neat publication it is- I love it, and am honoured to have been invited to share my just-about-only recipe!

Coming Up In Jolly January!

Have you got your tickets yet?

This is going to be a unique event, a one-off night of music in north London's Stoke Newington to brighten up your January!

https://wegottickets.com/f/14034

Last Night at the Prince Albert

 

Rachel Love playing her set- they are such a well-rehearsed band. It's incredibly moving to hear Rachel's song lyrics, all the more so because of the beautifully-arranged music behind them. Good luck in Glasgow!

Below, The Last of the Lovely Days sound checking. They play powerful-sounding pop songs with a lot of punky energy.

Photo by Steve Clements. Thanks to all to came- lovely to see Steve, Jon Chrisp (The Chefs London Manager) and his family, Mark Erickson from Asbo Derek (we Gaelicked at each other, briefly), Charlie Harper from UK Subs and Yuko, Jerry and Alice, and Rachel's lovely sons and their partners. As always, the sound was immaculate. Thanks to everyone who sang along to The Sea. Haven't played that one for a while!

New Collaboration with Willie Gibson

https://williegibson.bandcamp.com/album/cailin-mo-ruin-sa-ailein-duinn

Dog Being Groomed

 

Arranging

After a rehearsal of tomorrow's songs (got to keep those guitar-players callouses going!), I went round to Gina's to finalise the parts for the choir arrangement that's going to happen on two of her songs when she supports Devendra Banhart at the Union Chapel next Wednesday. One one of them, we added her existing vocal parts to the ones I've been working on, and the other I think is complete anyway. She's going to send the parts out to everyone today so they have time to learn them.

It's going to sound absolutely great. I am delighted that Ruth and Karina are going to be part of it; Miki Beryeni, Rozi Plain, Estella Adeyeri, Jenny Green, and more will also be there. 

I had admin to do today- some PRS registrations. The Gaelic electronica songs are going to be released tomorrow. I also had to cut out the printed download codes and clip them to the lyric books for tomorrow.

Tomorrow at the Prince Albert in Brighton supporting Rachel Love & The Last of the Lovely Days It will be a night of warmth and colour!

Tickets: https://wegottickets.com/event/673409

I'll play some songs from 'Showtunes from the Shadows' and from this now sold-out album. The lyrics/chord/colouring book book I made to go with it + download codes will be only £5 (cash) on the night!

Man Sketching Other Passengers On The Tube

 

Pencil

I came all the way back from life drawing last night with an Indigo coloured pencil crayon sticking up out of my hair. I'd been keeping the colours there for when I needed them. I didn't realise till I saw my shadow on the fence when I walked up from the tube station. Nobody on the train appeared to have noticed.

Monday...

... and I haven't done a posting since Thursday! Blame a visit to the V&A Storehouse, McSis's birthday, continuing revisions to Gina's choir parts (she's back from tour and we are fine-tuning), a long walk, and the beginning of rehearsing songs for Thursday's gig in Brighton.

Oh yes, and a paid-for Covid jab with a very inquisitive health professional. He will have plenty to tell his family at teatime today.

Time to get ready for life drawing...

Playing with Rachel Love/The Last of the Lovely Days in Brighton

A week today in Brighton!
I'm going to play mostly tracks from my 2017 album 'The Sea', and I'll have the lyrics book (a colouring book with the chords and lyrics) with download codes for the songs- just for a change!
Great bands!
https://wegottickets.com/event/673409

Music, Music, Music

Willie G and me are just putting the finishing touches to our collaboration- I believe the lathe cut version of our release is going to turn up today, and the cover is almost complete. It was a real challenge to not only earn the Gaelic, but also to sing in a more gentle, lyrical way. Cailin Morin Sa has very few recorded versions but Ailein Duinn has lots; the general feel of the vocals in those versions is of keening, and I wanted to make a vocal performance that was more gentle and yearning. I hope it's been successful.

Meanwhile, I've been working on a song about Toadstools. We were out looking for Fly Agarics, the spotty ones, and couldn't find any. They are often late, waiting for rain, but we think that the trustees of the common have mown the grass so radically that they've stopped the toadstools from growing.

I remembered doing a track for a friend of Joby's back in the day at Rick Parfitt's studio in Camden, paid for with an accordion that I bought in a charity shop. Curiosity took me to an old computer, and sure enough I found it. I've been putting vocals on it and experimenting with storytelling. It's nearly finished: the experimentation part was a failure and I have to tame the sound before I send it off.

And today? A song writing workshop with people with complex physical disabilities, the second one I've done. 

I have a part-song ready to go and I hope it works!

Man Tends To Shire Horse, Rothesay

 

Man on Fish Stall at Market, with Fish

 

Cover Art

 

Arty Musicky Day

I spent part of the day recording the choral arrangement for Live Forever for Gina's November support concert with Devendra Banhart at the Union Chapel. It's quite close to the recorded arrangement, but with added call-and-response, which I think will look good.

When my voice wore out (I'm singing 8 parts), I did a little bit more of the cover for Willie G's Synthecosse project. I'm not sure which song is going to be the A-side so I can't quite finish it. It was visually unbalanced so I'm working on balancing it up a bit; I flipped it, and it leans to the right. More heft to the left, dear.

Excellent opportunity to laze about and watch Hamza's Hidden Wild Isles on BBC1, and eat pistachio nuts and mince pies. Tomorrow, life drawing (if I get there). Will I be brave enough to do colour like two weeks ago? It depends on the length of the pose. Last week's longest pose was 25 minutes and shortest was 30 seconds; there were many changes in a two and a half hour session and I felt sorry for the model. It may be that I need to go to a class at another place to draw at a slower pace, but that's OK. Monday evenings are intense and therapeutic- and surprisingly physical. Standing up for such a long time, stretching and looking at a huge sheet of paper is not normal behaviour. It's wonderful to be able to work big. My drawings of working people are A4 sized and each one is done in an hour, listening to Riley and Coe's BBC6 show. I've got larger paper at home I could work on and eventually I'll get round to that too, merging the scale of the life drawings with the subject matter of the photo-based ones. A plan!

Sixties Guy!

Watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTXV7MTpSFg

Nun Waiting Outside The Post Office

 

The Lump on the Sofa

That is me! After a second visit to see Do Ho Suh's wonderful artwork at Tate Modern and a solid two and a half hour life drawing session (where the tutor homed in on criticising my work relentlessly for no apparent reason), I hoofed it up to Huntingdon today. Well, sort of hoofed it through the chaos of tube and train delays and folded-up people in crowded carriages. 

George (AKA Willie Gibson) picked me up at Huntingdon station and we spent a solid chunk of time mixing Cailin Morun Sa and making it sound good. His attic room is full of analogue synths and other such accoutrements, but a song is a song is a song and making it sound good still needs careful listening and editing. We were both very happy with what we did, and it fits perfectly as a duo with Ailean Duinn. 

God only knows what sort of foreign accent I have in the Gaelic language; maybe I sound a bit like an equivalent to those packets of Czech biscuits called Crapsy-Pants. I did try, honest: the callout went on social media but no fish nabbed the bait. I got offered Irish Gaelic accent-checkers, but of course that's not the same at all.

I did the first of Gina's choir arrangements on Sunday (third attempt lucky), so it's been an intense few days. 

In fact, I think I deserve a cup of tea.

Sixties Guy: New Video

 

A DIY Political Song In An Hour

Yesterday evening, I ran a song writing workshop for the Antiuniversity at the House of Annetta in East London.

Doing something like this is better if you don't walk in with a ready-made song for people to copy: it's one of those situations where you start the process and only intervene when things get 'stuck'. 

It's amazing how far we got: a chorus, three verses and even harmonies. Too much, perhaps: I lost the plot halfway through and insisted that the harmonies went over a chord in the wrong place. Sorry to the participant who called that out! 

It was a rousing song in the end, that captured the concerns of everyone who participated, I think. We worked very quickly and everyone put a lot of energy into it so the ideas came thick and fast. At the end it became a song that belonged to all of us, that can be taken away and changed and adapted by anyone who was there and used for their own purpose. 

Inadvertent star of the evening was Cat. Cat decided to walk across the table, right across the centre of what the humans were doing. The table consisted of four narrow trestle tables in a square formation with a gap in the middle that was covered by a large white paper tablecloth; of course, when Cat got to that part of the table, it disappeared down the hole in a completely undignified fashion along with a pen or two and all of its self-assurance. Poor Cat.

I almost cancelled the workshop because the remnants of the virus are still punching my body and stuffing my brain, but actually I'm very glad that it went ahead. We wrote a catchy song from absolutely nothing in just an hour, and now everyone who came along knows how to do it themselves. 

That's the way to do it!

Hulling Strawberries, Borough Market

 

Big Life

 

The (Distorting) Mirror

With nothing better to do than become immersed in the entire Saturday newspaper, virus-calibrated cogs of my brain worked like a slide rule to juxtapose articles I'd been reading into strange configurations. 

An article on copyright and artificial intelligence, calling out big tech for stealing absolutely everything from absolutely everyone to 'train' AI, merged with one by a TV writer bemoaning the fact that her now-grown children had left home, and there was now nobody there to 'inspire' her scripts. Nobody there to steal from, she meant. 

It's not an enormous conceptual leap to land squarely in the lap of songwriters, plundering our private lives for our lyrics. Our ex-partners anxiously scan the words of our songs to see if they are there (often they are not: who wants to give them additional publicity?). Sometimes our songs explain things to us that we didn't know: we think we are writing about one thing, and year later we realise we'd been articulating something else entirely. 

Our 'secret' method of communicating in lyrics and music still involves the plundering of episodes that half-belong to other people. One side of a story becomes a story; one person holds up a mirror to the other, but it's a mirror that they made themselves. A bit like A1 reflecting the interests of the tech bros, or rather, the self interests. An avenue of fairground crazy mirrors, it twists the way we'd like to see ourselves into something hideous, which perhaps we are.

Oh, now it has become too complicated. I'm going back to sleep.

New music video coming soon!

 

An Apostrophelipse!

And do you think all those badly-spelled, badly-punctuated 'working class right wing' tweets and postings are created deliberately to make people scornfully share the message, and therefore gain more clicks?