Eyelashes

My friend Joan phoned last night: we have a plan to go to Whitstable this winter and cycle along the seafront. She suggested velvet dresses and fake eyelashes, but I was a bit worried in case the wind blew our eyelashes away. Then I thought we could take butterfly nets to catch them in. So if you see two madwomen charging along on bikes chasing eyelashes with nets, that's us.
I've found it's a good plan to opt out of scoring systems. I don't like being 2 out of ten, or 3 out of ten. I like being camel out of elephant, and those who like to score other people are ant out of toad. Let them put that in their pipe and smoke it.

G

Little Bruv can play the trumpet, and McMum's tin teapot. When he lived at home, he used to practice the trumpet and the Golden Retriever used to howl along. He found that she could hit a perfect 'G' and hold it for ages. She looked ever so funny- undulating neck outstretched to the full, eyes closed, and doggy lips pursed to a black O shape, helplessly hooting a doggy sine-wave until Little Bruv showed mercy and stopped.
There's another story about G. Round about 1990 I was asked to write some music for a documentary about Millwall Football Club that was to include recordings of the fans chanting. The producers wanted Lester Square to play guitar, but he didn't want to come to the matches. Anyway, I found an old Curved Air track that mentioned the Isle of Dogs, where Millwall first started up, and I transcribed the drum pattern on to a piece of graph paper, which took ages because I had never done anything like that before. I gave the recorded pattern to Lester and he wrote a sequence of chords in G. Then I went to a funny little sound-effects company in Soho and collected sounds of the river- barge-hooters, trains, and then a lion roaring (the Millwall symbol). And I had a recording of Douglas Hird going 'These Hooligans'. I went to about 6 matches to record the chants.Because of the fan's reputation, the producers came with me the first time but they kept saying 'Have you got that?' and in the end I decided to do it myself, because the safest place in the universe for a woman to be is in a crowd of guys at a match. They are only interested in one thing; I got asked once if I was recording the swearing, but apart from that they totally ignored me.
It was incredible- the chants would start down the other end of the ground and sort of rush through the crowd towards me, gathering pace and sweiiling in volume until they arrived where I was recording at the Coldblow Lane End, where the sound would roll around under the tin roof, with the most brilliant natural reverb, before dying away again. Sometimes, they'd spontaneusly start up right next to where I was standing, and the chant would travel in the opposite direction. Honestly, there is no other place where you could hear a male choir of thousands of voices, all singing in unison like that. What an experience! At the end of each match I'd be totally high on the feelings of the crowd alone.
Anway, what was funny was that coincidentally, every sound that I put on to that soundtrack was in G- the barge hooters, the echoing turnstiles, even Douglas Hird's nasal mantra. Best of all, all the chants themselves were all in G, and I started wondering why this could be- at six matches, thousands of men would start up together all in the same key; then I suddenly remembered how noticeable it was that each man had shaved just before the match- so many raw faces! That's when I realised that mains hum (which as any musician knows is so close to concert G that you can tune an instrument to it) via their electric razors, was the last sound they heard before the match, and it must have stayed in their heads until the game!

Private Eye did a small pisstake of the programme, much to my delight. I had always wanted to be on Top of the Pops and never managed to, and having my music lampooned by Private Eye was definitely the next best thing!

Laughing

Laughter is a relief, isn't it? I spent a huge amount of time laughing like a child last night at Martin's quick wits and ad libs. There was an amazing singing heckler with a hugely strong voice- the sort of singing voice an imaginary Welshman has. Instead of being put off, Martin did a double-act with him every so often. He could teach Sun Tzu a thing or two.
I got up an did some songs in the intermission, one of which was a new one, and duetted with Martin on 'Once I loved a Sailor' which is from the new album he has just recorded. It's a lovely song, and I've never sung with a proper crooner before. Actually, I haven't sung with a man on stage since the Chefs, at least five million years ago. And such fingerpickin'- there's a song he did in tribute to Etta Baker that just has the most fantastic chords and the most fantastic fingerpicking all knitted together like a Fair Isle jumper, complicated but catchy at the same time.
I took a picture of Martin playing but I've posted this one instead. He's talking to the imaginary Welshman after the gig, and I just thought it was a nice photograph.

Songbird last night, Kalamazoo tomorrow

Went to Songbird last night; it was Diana's birthday and she had on a Ronettes-type wig and funky little Sixties dress. Everything was running late but it's not surprising given that it's such a relaxed place. Katy Carr (that's her, above) was great- I haven't seen her play live for ages and it was lovely to hear her voice again. She does what I always try to do- sings each song as though it's the first time she has thought those thoughts, and the first time she has expressed them to anybody. She also has a really strong style; every time I see her I isten to different bits of what she does, and last night I was listening to the chords she played- surprisingly jazzy, for a person who is more often classed as a folk artist. She has some new songs as well, one she wrote last week was excellent. I love stuff that's hot off the press!
There were some fantastic kitsch lights all over the place- it was like a magician's cave. Sadly, I had to leave before the steel cello and just as loads of people were arriving to party, It's just that my chariot turns into a punpkin at midnight, and I turn into a frog. Or was it an owl?
I'm really looking forward to tomorrow, the Kalamazoo at the King's Head on Crouch End Hill. Come if you can- Martin Stephenson's playing and he's brilliant, and I'll be playing a couple of songs there too.
New Year's resolutions:
1. Stop apologising on stage. Diana made me cringe by quoting some of the things I said back to me, verbatim. O, the shame!
2. Play some gigs outside the UK- Paris, Berlin, New York, Dublin. San Francisco would be nice. Always wanted to go there!

Censorship

I found a great website yesterday,
www.freemuse.org that is all about music censorship all over the world, and that i think everyone should look at when they find themselves taking music for granted. The best thing is that it's quite up-to-date and it's full of fascinating info. I am particularly interested in the situation in Zimbabwe, which is where the battle for freedom of speech in music is, in spite of the very dangerous situation opposition musicians find themselves in, being fought with a degree of humour on both sides that sums up a sophistication in African people that is often overlooked by people who consider their societies to be more developed. For instance, because of the problem with oppositional lyrics, one band has a song about getting old and past it, which they sing with a spotlight on a portrait of Mugabe!
Take a look if you have time. I won't, for today is Housework day, pursuing dustball tumbleweeds from room to room, holding the vacuum cleaner together as it falls to bits while I use it, wondering where in the house the crumb-manufacturing plant is situated, and looking through the wheelie bin because I think somebody has accidentally thrown away the green Christmas stocking with a padded Santa on it that McMum knitted for me when I was a little girl.
Fact: Little Bruv has a brown knitted teddy called Freddy. Why? Because it was made out of freads.

Poisoned Salmon

When I was a little girl living in Wylam, McMum used to send me and Bruv for a walk round the allotments when we got on her nerves. The allotments were situated on the banks of the River Tyne, one of the most beautiful rivers in England. Every so often we'd come across a huge salmon thrown up on the riverbank with its insides completely eaten away by chemical discharges from the Kimberley-Clark paper tissue factory at Prudhoe. We'd get taken round this factory on school trips, to marvel at the giant toilet rools four times our height. Being a tremendously rich multinational, Kinberley-Clark would simply re-stock the river with salmon, until the next time; this seemed to happen regularly.
I'm not a vegetarian (having been brought up in the very down-to-earth countryside) but there was something very distressing about the mindless poisoning of beautiful free creatures just so humans could have disposable tissues to wipe their bums upon.

DJs and mans in suits

It's my lunch hour, and I've got 20 minutes to write this, finish Sara's birthday song (I nearly have), and make some coffee. I gave a copy of the CD to Tom Robinson at Offline but as far as I know, he hasn't played it yet. As I was getting to sleep last night I played a new version of the counting-the-sheep game, where I invented pseudonyms I could use to write in and request that he play a track: Pip Fellowes, Ann Cartwright, Sandy Parker, Tom Beene, that sort of thing. I have sent one to Bernard Lenoir in Paris and also to Guillermo Pez ('Willy the Fish'), a DJ in Argentina who likes my stuff, but I'll never find out if he plays it!
On another note... I was looking for my comic strip of fox hunters hunting rats in towns (sploshers in the sewers instead of beaters in the undergrowth, rat-au-vin for supper and an urban fox gobbling up the remains by the dustbins at the end, laughing) to send off to see if it could get published, as there's been all sorts of stuff about rising rat populations due to recycling etc etc etc, and I remembered my bid for justice, long ago. I used to regularly illustrate a dastardly publication aimed at financial advisers; every two weeks they'd phone and say, 'We'd like a man in a suit...'. Suddenly the work dried up, and I couldn't understand why. I discovered they were re-using my exisitng drawings, and not paying me, as they should have done. So I called them up, and asked if I could come along and photocopy my drawings for my portfolio. And photocopy them I did, leaving them the photocopies (not good enough to re-use) and packing up my originals and taking them home with me. I didn't do any more work for them, but at least I got my drawings back, in case I ever want to have an exhibition called 'A man in a suit'.
I've just got hold of Alex Ogg's book, 'No More Heroes', all about punk bands. There's a hilarious interview with Joby, as well as the story about Jonathan running himself over in the section on The Chefs, and all the Brighton bands are there as well as loads others; it's a very well-researched book. I looked up the Prefects, and he had their Wolverhampton re-union in there. I was impressed, as I was there!

Even later still...

Well you know what it's like when you have to tidy your room....
Two things- one, this year is 007!!!
Two, I have to mention Arnauld, who is my number one helper in France, and who I feel is going to MAKE the French radio stations play my music, just by sheer willpower! Thank you, Arnauld!

Later that day (well, not much later)

I've already posted about this but I've been emailing a band called 'Never the Bride', because I think they sound a little bit like the Monochrome Set, and I remembered when we borrowed the choir uniforms from Fulham Parish (Lester's bagpipe-playing dad was the Vicar there) ad did that gig at the Venue in Victoria, when I'd been given the violin for Christmas that so upset the 7 cats in our house, and all you can hear on the pirate recording of the show is my rendition of 'Oh Susanna'. Bid sang the Bible. There were loads of us onstage- all of the Monochrome Set, myself and more, we'd had no rehearsal and, naturally, sounded like a slow explosion in a sausage factory. It was such good fun though. Sometimes I think about ambitious wannabe popstars with their business plans tucked under their arms, and feel eternally grateful for the fact that I'm the sort of person that blunders through life in blissful ignorance of anything sensible or normal; for every dangerous and nasty adventure I've had, there's been an episode of surreal and ridiculous brilliance to make up for it!

Bottles of Wine

Well I never- the Indian Takeaway delivery man brought round a bottle of Sherry last night: it's almost embarrassing to be such a regular customer that you get rewarded with a bottle for the New Year, but it's very touching too! And I've just been out to the postbox and stuck another note on it, because I've put a bottle of wine behind the plant pots for the kind postman who rescued my letter.
DJ Sonny, from Thailand, contacted me and said that Suburban Pastoral is in his top CDs of 2006 and I'm over the moon about that! Sometimes it has been so difficult to do everything- from recording, which has nearly all been done in three hour slots in the morning because of working and all that, to the financial thing of doing extra work to pay for it all- of the most boring sort, too. Thank you DJ Sonny!
Also, yesterday, Martin texted me and asked me to do a few songs at his gig at the Hobgoblin next Friday, and also suggested we might do a Zoom album together- what a great idea! Micro technology, spontanaiety, a bit of co-writing- what a project for 2007! I know our singing voices sound good together because I've heard the mixes of the songs of his that I sang on in the autumn.
Meanwhile, a very good friend of mine has a birthday in early Feb and I'm trying to write a song for her- very difficult, as our friendship started in a tough part of both of our lives, and it needs to have particularly good lyrics. Can I do it? Watch this space.

False Man Leaning Forward with Real Stuffed Dog

This man leaning forward at an angle of 40 degrees can be found at the RAF museum in Colidale. I went there yesterday because we might take Song Club there if we can get funding for some more workshops. There are some very sinister planes, but also some charming bi-planes and some great helicopters, which I have always liked. And of course, lots of half-hearted models of people like this. I did a very stupid thing though, this morning. The funding man lives down our road, and I had the application form in an envelope with his name on it, no address, to post through his door. 'I mustn't absent-mindedly post it in the post box by accident', I thought, as I absent-mindedly walked straight past his house and posted it into the post box. So I went home and put a little nore on the post box to the postman: "If you find a letter without an address please post it though my door'. And do you know, he actually did!

Is this a way of coping with Nigellousy?

We invented a horrible game. You know how Nigella is always slurping, licking spoons and lipsmackin' to turn the guys on while trying to flog her recipes to the gals? Our game was called 'Nigella's Cleavage' and involved us imagining (not fantasising: that's what the chaps do), all the stuff that's fallen down her chest during her slurpings- chestnuts (ha, ha), stuffing bits, morsels of glace cherry, Christmas cake crumbs, sherry, maple syrup (ugh!). Add a few hairs,some grey fluff (I don't know what it is, but I've been vacuuming loads of it up since Christmas), a cracker toy or two, and some Christmas tree needles and you have a rather disgusting melange between them. Well, she has been rather over-exposed recently, hasn't she?

Skate wings, and Rose's new gloves

It was such fun- we went skating yesterday at the Natural History Museum; the internet told me there were no tickets left but I know the internet is a compulsive liar and I used my wind-up field telephone instead. The ice was wet and slippy (why is that always such a surprise?) and we whizzed about, eventually having to play tag as the rink was so crowded. But I think the word exhilarating was invented for skating's proximity to flying! Ari came, and there were assorted teenagers too. It grew dark while we were there and the trees were lit up with twinkling fairy lights, with a massive pale blue moon behind them. At the end, I couldn't get the left skating boot off my foot and was resigning myself to the fact that for the rest of my life I was going to have to accept the nickname 'Giantblueplasticskatingbootfoot', when a kindly gentleman executed some deft digital moves and whisked it off my foot at lightning speed.
And I've just got back from Barnet High Street, where Rose sells the Big Issue. Look at these beautiful gloves she knitted! I think it took her quite a long time. I had some like this once, and the fingers reminded me of x-rays of fishbones, which of course made me like them even more. Hello to you, Rose, if you Google it and find it- it's always nice to chat to you!

Toad, and sometimes it's right to be paranoid

That was a very pleasantly childlike version of Toad of Toad Hall yesterday. Seeing intelligent people like Matt Lucas being 'offensive' in Little Britain has been annoying; how easy to make oneself lots of money by appealing to an audience who think they are being naughty by laughing at things their kids wind up their teachers with. But he was really good as Mr Toad. The snoring sequence reminded me of the Helen and the Horns tour manager, Rag, who we shared with King Kurt. Rag was Welsh,loud,large and fearless, that is, until we got to Pontypridd and boarded with Mrs Williams, a terrifying Methodist whose guest-house was two 1960s houses knocked together. After our drive of 250 miles she insisted that Rag should move the van to the other side of the road before he could have a cup of tea. She made me and Sally, who was our live sound engineer, sleep in one house, and the guys, including Rag with his monstrous snore, sleep in the other. After the gig, we all did more than our usual share of obnoxious imbibing, and were taken aback to find she'd waited up for us! She sat there in the living room of one house, while we sat in the other (they were joined but still separate, sort of) until we went to bed, just to make sure no rock'n'roll activities happened. When me and Sally went to our room, we made ourselves increasingly paranoid; what if she was outside our room blowing anthrax dust under the door? We started laughing uncontrollably and I decided to lock the door, just in case. So I tiptoed across the bedroom and barked my shin on my guitar case, which was in the middle of the floor. 'OW!', I yelled. 'Aha!', Said a voice from just outside the door,'I think you young ladies have been mixing with too many students! It's time you went to sleep, and I'll see you in the morning!. SHE ACTUALLY HAD BEEN LISTENING OUTSIDE OUR DOOR!!!
Fact: I played Toad in the school play. Deirdre had wanted to play the part, because she wanted to be an actress when she grew up, and I didn't. So she added lots of extra lines to her part, the Judge. It didn't matter though- I had a whale of a time. I made a Toad hat out of McMum's old green hat with two halves of table tennis balls for googly eyes. 'I am Toad, the terror of the highways!'. That's what I think to myself as I drive down the motorway to my gigs! No hip proto-Germanic autobahn thoughts for me, oh no!

2007

Happy New Year to you who read this blog. And, of course, to the millions who don't. They don't know what little irrelevancies they're missing, do they?