Singing, and Hay Fever

Wednesday is music day and I'm singing for Loud Women's Reclaim These Streets track, a version of which I've already recorded. But I have a terrible wheeze cause by Horse Chestnut pollen and it's even sunnier today that it was on Monday when I did the first version. The deadline is Friday and unless it rains, things are going to be the same. Taking antihistamine makes me sing flat- so I'm between the devil and the deep blue sea.

I'm also going to sing a cover song for Kevin Younger's online night, which is a bit more laid back so I'll treat that one as an achievement award, if I make the achievement!

I hope to write some lyrics for Friday's Song Circle song, and maybe even work on Robert Rotifer's next 'starter song', but that one is like a deferred pleasure; I almost don't want to do it, because then it will be done.

The book came out on Monday, which was a surprise. I knew it was imminent but I woke to Twitter tweeting about it. A side benefit has been people that I haven't heard from for a long time getting in touch, and that has been really nice. It's my penultimate academic work. Copies turned up yesterday, and it looks good and it exists: all that work and such a slim volume! I hope to publish the actual interviews themselves one day as a standalone book, because they are so interesting.

At some point, I'll have to gird up my skirts and deep clean the house. The first little pale grey silky moths have started parking on the walls upstairs, a clear sign that there are eggs and grubs buried in my clothing and in the carpets. Huh. How can you be a pop star with moths eating your glamorous garms?

ATISHOO!

The Zebra Crossers

On the journey home, I'm positive that I saw the same couple crossing zebra crossings at least twice, possibly three times, in completely different parts of London. 

Do you think that's what they do all day? Cross roads on the black and white stripes?

The U Turnips

 I've just returned from a 32 mile round trip to Offsprog One's birthday, which was a lovely affair in the garden with a cat who thought we'd come to see him (don't they all?) and of course, a day of sunshine.

Every road, large or small, had roadworks and one of those small portable traffic light systems, just too much for at least one driver in every road, large or small.

The journey in both directions was a complicated tapestry of U-turns by impatient men, regardless of their holding up of cars, buses and lorries going in both directions. Off they roared as soon as they had finished the antisocial manouvre, I'm sure to do exactly the same thing in the next blocked street down the road.

And anyway, why should they wear masks?

Hard to Find a Title for This One

I have always been angered by people who try to stop other people from wearing masks and taking precautions against Covid, but I've always know that there was nothing I could do. Maybe if they knew someone who had died, they might not be so irresponsible? But a lot of these people, journalists and the like, have very wide friendship groups so must have experienced bereavement directly. I think reading Cristina's posts about getting ill, then iller, and then a post from her nephew saying she had passed away, followed by the same with Julia Craik, followed by her husband (you see, it creeps up on people so innocently, and social media lulls us all into a false sense of security) right at the beginning of the pandemic, taught me what a vicious and terrifying thing this virus is. Then my brother's partner's Mum, and the people that I know with Long Covid.

These were the thoughts that passed through my head as I leafed through the Guardian this weekend and read an article about bereavement. Blustering Johnson pretending the vaccine has solved all our problems? Keep it! That's not going to bring people back to life, the people who have been loved so much and who are so much missed. 

Abstract but deeply emotional thoughts, and then I saw the photograph of Sean Mitchell and his partner, with a heartbreaking account by his partner of the ritual of saying goodbye in full PPE: a ritual that must be so familiar to thousands (yes, thousands, Johnson!) of bereaved families.

But this photograph was of Sean, one of my favourite ever students, who I thought had returned to the Caribbean. Funny, talented Sean with a sly way of looking after himself. The guy who taught himself to play guitar in eight weeks so he could play the songs he'd written to comfort his own bereaved friend. Empathetic Sean who felt my anxiety when the external examiners were in, saying 'Don't worry Helen, you ran a normal class and it was great, as always'. Sean who smiled a lot, a real lot: a self-assured, tall young man who wouldn't stand for any racism that came his way, calm and sometimes daydreamy. He was a man who knew himself.

In all honesty, I don't know what to do with this anger. The sense of helplessness as a greedy, dishonest, amoral bunch of people help themselves to the contents of the national coffers and simultaneously try to slash and burn our civil liberties, is almost unbearable. I don't want to hear of any more lovely people being slaughtered by government incompetence. No more! That's enough!

Nature Draws Beautiful Pictures on Gravestones (St Andrews Church, Totteridge)

 

Book Flyer: 25% Discount

 

Socially Distanced Gig in Stockton-on-Tees, End Of May

I hope the trains are running by then! Here we go: a socially distanced gig in Stockton. Whoopee! 

Better brush up the old songs and polish the new ones!

https://www.seetickets.com/event/helen-mccookerybook/ne-volume-music-bar/1814513?fbclid=IwAR0diosYblBUAPKDd1U7_D2pZI9NYGM6jDL-WooXgghGB0upFqMv8-PbGjw

I've spent the whole lockdown year writing new songs- first with Robert Rotifer for our collaboration (more to come!), then with Willie Gibson for our one-off project, and then also solo weekly at our song circle. Now I have to remember the lyrics to the original ones. Some of them I play as 'old pal' songs- they are comforting, but some of them have been on the back burner for a while. The guitar parts seem easier to remember, possibly because they are part of my body in some way.

I've been teaching in three different universities since having to cancel my gigs. The Easter break is coming up and I'm going to make sure it is full of music. My professional music work, or the way people do things around simply writing songs and playing them, shines a light on a lot of what I teach, and the breathing space will be revitalising for that aspect of life too.

Back to you my guitar, my dear friend.

Thursday Evening, Survivor's Poetry Event

 

Daffodils in Trent Park

 Daffodils under trees in the sunshine. Crafty little blighters- catching the sun before the trees burst into leaf. And how very beautiful they are!

We Love You NHS, And We Don't Want You To Be Sold To U.S. Asset Strippers

I didn't clap for the NHS because Boris Johnson did. That means the clapping was being used to advertise our national treasure to overseas buyers.

I want the medical workers and carers to receive a 12% pay rise: the catch-up pay rise for inflation, and a pay-rise on top of that to recognise the way that have risked their lives for a whole year to keep the service going and on top of that, care for Covid patients without having proper infection protection. I also want the government to stop squandering our taxes on their chums. That is utterly despicable, rotten to the core, corrupt and contemptuous, especially because out of the other side of their two faces they indulge in such moralising.

The only wealth very poor people in this country have is the collective ownership of the NHS, which will happily treat everyone from a tramp to a Queen (both kinds) without criticism or prejudice. That must not be sold off behind our backs, because we will never be able to recreate it or buy it back again. Oh how I detest this cruel government, and everyone who sails in it!

Imminent!

 

'Tis The Season Of the Moth

They're back! 

How I hate them! 

This is from the forthcoming Miniatures album, brainchild of Barry Lamb by by way of Morgan Fisher, one minute tracks about everything in the universe, by everybody in the universe (almost). 

Available from this label: http://www.rermegacorp.com

Armchair Critics

That's what Cressida Dick is unless she was there, in which case I think her criticism would be skewed in the favour of the women's peaceful vigil, which her (predominantly male) officers disrupted and turned into a violent one, thereby exactly underlining the point of the vigil and any other protests focused on the same issue.

Imminent Book: 'She's at the Controls'

How I miss Dave Laing! He was such a loyal and trustworthy mentor, and I know he would have been a huge support right now. My new book is imminent, a project that has been a labour of love for more than ten years. As with the last book, I have worked really hard on using the best and most relevant parts of the interviews to illustrate many different life trajectories within music production for women producers and engineers. It's not a book that focuses on their techniques, it's a book where they tell their stories of interaction with the music industry, and the ways they got into it all. It's also a book that turns upside down the control systems within the music industry, the really obvious way that women's singing voices are detached from them and turned into commodities, from where they turn into almost self-harming weapons.

On Friday, the cover design turned up in my inbox. I was delighted, because it's very close to the idea that I had but it still fits in with the series artwork. On Friday afternoon, I chanted 'She's at the Controls' into my computer software, photographed the sound wave and sent it off to be included in the final design.

I feel such a sense of responsibility. When you write as a campaigner you want to be true to not only to the people who have agreed to be interviewed, but also true to the future of our gender within the industry.

At certain points, the exact right person has stepped in with energy and support. The woman who transcribed the backlog of interviews: her dad was helping out with some work at my house, and said she was at a  loose end. So early every Friday morning her mum called round and picked up a CD with an interview copied on to it, and by Sunday a transcribed interview was in my inbox. Then there was Sarah Raine (write a book on Northern Soul, which I have to read), who stepped in to edit it; Cassie Fox, who indexed it.

Things move so fast in the music industry that the shape of everything shifts literally as you speak and as you type. I lost count of the times I thought or wrote 'at the time of writing'. It's a snapshot of certain times and attitudes, a contribution to women's history. 

I've also just finished what I think will be my last piece of academic writing, a chapter on Oh Bondage! Up Yours. This is for a book called One Track Minds, a collection of writing on important tracks in different genres of music. It includes a chapter on Donna Summer's I Feel Love written by Simon Reynolds, which I can't wait to read.

Why no more writing? I timed a chapter once from research to publication, and it took 87 hours altogether. How much did I get paid? Nothing, and I never really do. Writing has been a labour of love and a labour of information. You can't eat a reputation, and I have to try to make a living and support myself as retirement looms in the future. I'm one of 'those women', and having worked part time for most of my life, I'm not exactly going to be travelling the world on a cruise liner for the rest of my life (hah!).

[Just watching the morning news before work and the gaslighting of the police behaviour on Saturday night. Cressida Dick was the officer in charge when Menendes was wrongfully shot dead by the police, wasn't she? And let's not forget that it was Boris Johnson who bought water cannon to train on demonstrators when he was Mayor of London.]

Near Russell Square