Osprey

Here in Ross-shire, it is quietly beautiful, with tourists whooshing past in cars but not clogging up the arteries.
I have been up North Souter and looked at South Souter (they are giant's slippers!) crossed the Firth on a tiny ferry to Cromarty and sat on the harbour steps, next to local children jumping into the sea, a man washing lobster pots and some optimistic fishermen, and peered through the window of a closed antique shop at a giant moose's head.
I have eaten fish and chips from a shop run by a man who wears blue latex gloves because he's allergic to fish, and seen a tree whose bare upper branches were studded with huge black crows, about 50 of them, looking like a ripe crop ready to be harvested.
I have been to beautiful Dornoch beach with its miles of buttery sand, bearing the imprint of trainers, dogs and recent rainfall at the entrance, before it sweeps away cleanly into the distance and meets the deep blue hues of the evening sky.
I have sat on silly blue plastic chairs from Lidls, and seen an osprey wobbling down the Cromarty Firth, silently laughing at the bird watchers laden with binocular and camera gear, brand new green waterproof clothing and worry-free faces who had crammed themselves into the bird observation hut on the other side of the Firth desperately trying to see him.

The Saturday Post

What a lovely morning! And it was lovely at five too, when I woke up.
Try as I might, I couldn't get back to sleep: I am contemplating the seven hour drive to Edinburgh with Offsprogs One and Two, and then on tomorrow to Inverness.
These very few days will be the sum total of my summer holiday this year and I intend to savour them with all my might (for I am the mighty savourer) although it is extremely doubtful that I will return home with any sort of tan.
I bought a pair of Timberland boots to drive up in, from the British Heart Foundation shop; they are marginally less knackered than the pink ones I inherited from Offsprog Two.
By the way- and this blog now becomes a fashion tipster!- those dowdy shoe manufacturers Clarks have come up with the most brilliant shoes ever- desert boots for all the decades since the Sixties- floral ones, Union Jack ones (brilliant), tweed ones (even brillianter), absolutely amazing. I saw them in Oxford Street when I went to get more embroidery thread to finish the embroidered bra, which is now finished and hanging from a door knob looking sinister.
I hope you like my Daisies song, tucked away at the bottom of my Myspace player. It is very rough'n'ready as I only had ten minutes to record it in. I wrote it to cheer people up who are contemplating daisies, whoever and wherever they might be!

Not

Not having the internet has given me a stiff neck.

It's back (all I had to do was unplug the router and plug it back in again) but still moody.
I've still got a stiff neck though. Should I call Talk Talk and ask them to sort that out too?

Talk Talk is Silent Silent

It may be Cheap Cheap but the bloody thing has been crashed for two days AGAIN in our locality. I just hope it doesn't take seven hours of phone calls to set it up again like it did the last time! Here I am in the library, trying to work.
On a better note, I hit upon the idea of searching my computer for the lost tracks, and I found nearly all of them and shoved them back into iTunes!
I am not going to moan about technology because there are lots of good things about it, and verily, guitars and pianos are technology too.
The best way to deal with it when it's annoying is to surf a calm stratosphere of patience and admire the green grass (seriously! Isn't it beautiful?).
Everything man invents seems to be white, grey or black and hard and shiny. Give me the niff and visual delights of nature, and I'm happy.
There are no keys to press, although it can have deadlines if you're a gardener.
Anyway, enough cod philosophy. I'm off for a bowl of cereal.

Solution?

I've still got the original Garageband versions of some of them, but not 3 Maple Men... I will have to back everything up tomorrow.
It's too much information! I became greedy, and filled up my iPod with lots of stuff for those long car journeys, and my clumsiness has edited it out of my life for me!
In future, I'll just teach my cats to sing my songs and press their noses to play them!

I Weep

Oh, I weep! I seem to have accidentally deleted all my playlists in iTunes, and also lost 11 new tracks I'd recorded to be the heart of my next album! I got a little message on my computer that I was importing files and stopped it, and then found that all the playlists had gone! I've lost three days of music too- I won't know what that was until I try to find something and discover that it's gone.
I wonder if i hook up my iPod that some of those tracks will transfer back? I don't think any of my new songs were on there.
Oh weep weep! Hw could this have happened?

A Desperado Housewife

Sheet Music

Martin has made proper sheet music for Heaven Avenue with the guitar picking tablature, the lyrics, melody and chords. It's amazing to see the song in that form.
It's almost like a comic strip with all the coded instructions to proper musicians following one after the other: dots, tails, bars, tie-lines. When it is finished I might put it for sale here, perhaps.

Viv Albertine at Boat Ting

Yesterday was a busy day too. Morning was the song circle with Katy Carr, Rowen Bridler and Nadya Ostroff. We have been meeting every two weeks or so and discussing song writing and other things, then deciding on a theme and each writing a song based on something to do with that theme. We started in February and all stumbled a bit at first: yesterday's meeting was time to consolidate three songs and sing them to the group.
It's amazing what a confidence-booster it's been. We do a blog (www.myspace.com/ramblemyrose) and have ongoing talks about lots of things. It's made me write in a really different way, much more loosely I suppose you could say. And because I am older than the others, and although I was defensive about this at first, the sort of lyrics I write are affected by that, because I feel as though I am writing some sort of musical letter to them each time. And I can also see quite clearly in my head the visual stimuli for the songs and if I lose my emotional connection when I'm singing I take myself there in my head and get back there again. Song writing is always therapeutic, but this is a different sort from before, but still the only way I feel I can express these particular ideas.
That probably seemed like a load of navel-gazing crap! It might make sense to someone reading this, anyway...

So on to Boat Ting last night. I met up with Diana and her French friend Gail and we tubed it down to Temple, where Boat Ting has relocated to a shabbier, darker boat with a different atmosphere entirely. The Sybilline Sisters were in full flow as we arrived and it was very funny to see the guys in the audience being alternately terrified and turned on by her poetry. Then there was a duo who made music so scary the room turned into a small pervy club in the small hours. The boat seemed like a dimly lit dungeon and everyone seemed threatening. The vocalist, jerking and gesticulating, made extraordinary noises that were processed and sent out to the audience alongside odd keyboard sounds. The result was the sound of gasping, dying animals, sometimes in space and sometimes underwater. Unnerving!
The posh Notting Hill crowd arrived and started Organising. They had all arrived on bicycles. The men had bicycle hair and the women had a sheen of perspiration instead of foundation. 'How many people could we sit along here?' they asked the space beside me where Diana'd been sitting, in confident and assertive tones. In my head, I pretended that it was me that was French and they went away and sat somewhere else.
We had come to see Viv Albertine play, and there she suddenly was, tall and serene and wearing the best pair of red and black statement boots I've seen in centuries. She had a floral Fender.
"I'm going to tell you something about myself first', she said, and started telling us about herself in song.
Viv has a very confident and deceptively simple guitar style, and it was intriguing to hear her song writing style because all these years later you can still identify what it was she brought to the Slits. At times, and in [particular when Zoe Street Howe joined her on organ, there was a bit of a Young Marble Giants feel, but Viv's lyrics are much more cynical and her delivery is more engaged and pointed than Alison's. 'I Should Have Been a Boy', she sang (I would have been a bad one, she told us). The set really kicked in when she did a song called 'Summer Fairytale', which was a horror story familiar to many women, wrapped in Sesame-street xylophone and organ SFX. Then Zoe swapped to drums, and Viv sang a song about drugs: 'Needles, needles, broken needles, friendly needles, happy needles', fighting her guitar to get chords out of it, having taken us to an entirely different place in her past to where we started.
She was confident, yet delicate and sharp (!) at the same time, and her lyrics articulate feelings that will strike a chord with a lot of women: in 'Confessions of a Milf' she sang ' I chose being an artist over being a wife, now I'm going to lead a very lonely/lovely life'.
I hadn't known what to expect and so I went to this gig with an open mind. Boat Ting was a great place to see Viv, off the normal singer-songwriter circuit. It's a gig people make their own, and it suited Viv's honesty perfectly.
Here's the muso bit! I was really interested in the way she played guitar and had been wondering how this would work solo. She has got a completely unique style, playing little runs in unison and in harmony with her vocal lines and then splashing colour behind parts of the songs that need to have more power. I really liked the deceptive simplicity of this, and could see how much rehearsal had gone in to getting everything exactly right. I am looking forward to hearing more of her music recorded (I'm off to Myspace now!).
Listening to Viv is like eating something really unusual and delicious- you can savour her songs and take the memory of them away with you to think about later. I will definitely go to see her again.

Ari told me that Madonna used to sit in the front row at all the Slits gigs in New York, and yet has never acknowledged her admiration for them and debt to them. And you can see in the early Madonna videos how much she owes to Viv in particular in terms of style.
I have always found Madonna excruciating, and listening to Viv last night, I thought how much more subtly and intelligently she has 'grown up' in comparison to the awful howling, clumping Madge.
I felt proud of our generation, and I felt even prouder of our regeneration.

Recording with Jude and Kath

I've just spent the afternoon with Jude Cowan and Kath Tait recording some songs, two each, to make a little CD out of for our planned 'Desperado Housewife' gig sometime soon at a venue near you. They are very good company, and although I'm knackered, it was time well spent and I'm looking forward to the gig when it happens!

Will it go on till Saturday 02 August?

Last week there was a live band.... 'She's a Black Magic Woooommmmern......'

Now it's the Michael Jackson medley

Trap

This neck of the suburbs, there have been a series of very late, very noisy 40- and 50-year-old birthday parties.
From these I have discovered that Sister Sledge are
Lost in music
Caught in a trap.

Fruitless Day

Posh chairs in Kensington, graced by millionaires' situpons

How odd that a morning spent buying masses of fruit from the market (cherries, mangoes, melons, bananas and nectarines) should be followed by a fruitless afternoon!
I wandered... there in Covent Garden was the Singing Handyman in his vintage vehicle, apparently with his own documentary film-maker riding at his side. Bubbles poured out of the front of his little truck, and Sinatra-type crooning poured out of his mouth and into a handily placed microphone; sound poured out of speakers attached, and he whisked off before I had time to photograph him (I did a while ago though but I can't remember if I posted it)
I went to Stanfords to buy a map of the UK to encourage me to feel positive about my next song writing project after a member of staff at work with a subtle grudge against academics 'helped' me just a little too slowly to spend my research bursary, so I missed the deadline. Hoots, it's par for the course, and my map will renew my energy!
Then down to the tube again- there was Billy Childish! I see him coming up the escalator in the tube more often than not it seems, and this has led me to wonder if he spends all day Saturday tubing it around the capital, looking mysterious. I saw my old friend Denise Stanley with her dog Ben in Charing Cross Road. She'd just been to buy a Spanish guitar for 50 quid in a shop having a closing down sale. We arranged to have coffee soon as we haven't seen each other in years. Everyone stopped to pat Ben, one of those mixture dogs that everyone loves.
I got to Notting Hill Gate, worn out by the crowds and muggy heat; I waled past shabby shops with towers of square pizza slices the size of carpet tiles, and similarly patterned.
I remembered having some fantastic photos taken by a guy called Antoine in Nico's flat along there somewhere, an airy bohemian basement with large cool yellowish-grey tiles on the floor, a low dark indian table, oriental rugs and lots of French hangers-on preparing plates of parma ham that terrified me (I hid mine in rolls under my knife and fork. Raw meat? Not me!) Nico was away somewhere and it was thrilling to be in her flat being elegantly danced around by a French photographer, peering out nervously through my eyelashes with half a ton of mascara on them.
I was trying to see Haunted Stereo at the Notting Hill Arts Club, a special Rough Trade afternoon gig. It was supposed to start at 4 and a crowd was hovering around the doors. In the end at five past, I gave up and came home, crushed by the volume of people and the mugginess of town. They texted to say they weren't on till 7 anyway. Another day, another day.
Back home, I'm thinking of the man I saw getting off a sardine-crushed tube train, holding aloft a huge tarantula made of black, red and white bendy balloons. Wonder if he managed to get it home without a pop?