Two Very Clever Ideas

I had two very clever ideas in the middle of the night.
I was too tired to wake properly and write them down.
'I will remember them', I thought.
I didn't.
Later, I had another very clever idea so I woke up and wrote that down.
This morning, I looked.
It wasn't very clever after all.

The Past and the Present

I drove down memory lane yesterday: Martin was producing some tracks by Jill Hepburn in the Cluny studios, so I went over to Hexham in Northumberland, where the family spent Saturday mornings when I was a child (when we weren't watching news reels in the Tatler in the Haymarket in Newcastle).

There was the theatre where I was a rat in The Pied Piper, aged about six; now it's called The Forum, and it's a cinema. 

The Abbey seems smaller: I was one of a series of monks there, clad in a cowl and habit made from a sheet by McMum, along with all the other Girl Guides. We filed through, singing a chant in our hootling teenage voices.

I went to Wylam, and felt sad, sensing the tracks of McDad's life and my childhood echoing there somewhere...

It was cold and rainy, and there weren't many people about. I'd been overtaken on the way there by the Geordie Chapter of the Harley Davidson Appreciation Society, and I sang a mini-song about that in the shadow of the Abbey. I am going to sing a song every Sunday for 31 days (a month of Sundays) as a diary of what I'm doing.
When I got back to Newcastle I thought I should have done my song there instead- it was the Newcastle/Durham Boat Race and the Quayside was packed: an excitable man with a barking voice sang-sung the latest about who was winning, losing, won last year, the year before and the year before that; there were stalls, including a German one blasting out Go West (Village People) sung in German, and selling Bratwurst with about a million different sauces.
I sat on the Millenium Bridge in the chilly sunshine, watching the Kittiwakes bullying each other and reading the Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stephenson (trying to understand marriage passim).
Before me, bridges arc-ed over like Russian nesting dolls: the Swing Bridge, the High Level Bridge and the Tyne Bridge.
It is a very dramatic city.
This morning, it was my turn in the studio: I re-sang Little England and Summer Days and re-did The Song of the Unsung Heroine. I had time to record New Year's Eve and The House on the Hill, so they will go on the album too, in their very simple form.
I like the Cluny Studios and I've enjoyed working there a lot. The engineer, Sean, is great and it's lovely looking out at the Ouse Burn, even when it's sleet you are looking out at! Three cheers for Martin, who has produced it!



I drove home through stripes of different weather, cloud, rain and sun. Rich people's hedges were so dense with spring growth that they looked like slices of green fudge. The Tories had left their roadside posters up, all of them. The A1 was smooth, quick and quiet, so my soundtrack of the blues and Motown helped me home.
And so to bed.

Last Tracks of New Album

It has been a very busy three weeks, what with visiting the students from the University of the East at their work placements, drawing Medea (Persis-Jade is sending me the finished comic to look at: good luck to them in Brazil!), assessing the songs from the students at the University of the West, staring to mark thesis work, various gigs...
Variety is the spice of life, and I am not a bum-on-seat-watch-TV-person (unless it's a really good cop show or the news).
I tried to watch Gareth Malone's sea shanty programme last night  but it was too much Gareth and not enough sea shanty: it felt very lazy, as so much time was given over to what Gareth felt and so little to actual music. If they had researched it properly they could have found some fringe sea shanty music- Admiral's Hard, perhaps.
Or even just given the actual singers more airtime, or gone to the National Sound Archive to give it all a historical perspective.
But no: Gareth wandered in his anorak, pontificating. What a shame!
The choirs programme where he went in to a comprehensive and motivated lots of grumpy shouty teenagers was fabulous, and I suppose I expected a similar amount of energy and charisma.
And here I am, doing an all-about-me blog. I am so hypocritical, I should be a politician!

Shortly, I will be making my way to Newcastle, where I am finishing off the first-take album, just vocal and one guitar, very simple and very scary t do. When I listened to the whole thing, I sounded tired on three songs so I'm going to do those ones again. I hope I don't sound tireder!

Sossie

I went up the stairs at Leicester Square tube station today, and remembered busking there with Rachel Dollymixture; all we earned was half a sausage, from a tramp.

Voting

What an odd time politically: looks like we are going to be governed by upper class twits!
The thing I really, really care about is the National Health Service, which I think is the best thing we have in the UK, and which I would passionately defend for ever and ever and ever.
What will happen?

A Working Day

After going and performing the momentous cross activity, it's off to work for the Songwriting assessment at the University of the West. The students this year have been great, really working hard at their music and developing it.
Occasionally, someone will write something so beautiful it makes me cry. One year it was a Russian girl who missed her mum and who wrote a whole suite of beautiful piano songs with Russian lyrics.
Next time I saw her play, two years later, she'd turned herself into a sort of Euro-bimbo and that made me want to cry too!

Another year, there were a combination of ruffty-tuffy producers and Bacharach/David sorts of people. I cried three times with that lot- especially at the producer who had never sung before singing softy songs about the sea. They were simply awesome and if I'd ever wanted to preserve a real-life moment for ever it was when I was listening to those songs.
Some of the guys from the rough London estates can write the most poignant and beautiful stuff once they have permission to do it; I have found this at the University of the East too.
It takes a bit of persuasion sometimes but even if they never do it again in their professional career, I know that it is always a good thing for them to do, because they tell me so.

How can you tell it's the end of the academic year?
Emotional teacher-burblings, that's how.
I have ten thesises to mark, then over fifty pieces of work form the University of the East (that's about 150,000 words) and then 80 songs to listen to after that; I think I can be forgiven for enjoying my students' performances, amongst all that.

This is the Skinny Cat logo I drew for Liz's agency

Pests

A pest-control company on the North Circular has a board by the side of the road advertising it's 'pest of the week'; sometimes, its rats.
Other times, it can be cockroaches, or fleas, or mice.
This week, the board announces its pest of the week as 'politicians'.

Yes they are pests, but the suffragettes fought hard all those years ago so we got the vote; Offsprog 1 is coming up from Brighton and we are going to vote together, as she hasn't voted before. I am proud of her for making the effort to have her voice heard.

Jack of Hearts

This is a bit of a jumper I knitted when I was about 20.
I never wore it, so I snipped this bit off and kept it.

Echo

I can't believe it! Literally two days after I have sung under the Brunel Bridge, Susan Philipsz pips me to the post by being a Turner nominee for singing folk songs under bridges amongst other things.
I am reduced to being an echo of someone else.
And I was disappointed because the ducks weren't there to accompany the song.
I will put the song on Myspace, hidden at the bottom where no-one can see. It's not a very brilliant song, because I made it up just before I clambered out of the boat, once I could see there was nobody fishing there.
You can hear the wind, and imagine how cold it was.
Yes, it was cold.

Desp. Ho's

This afternoon, the Desperado Housewives gathered to plot and plan their next excursion, an unplugged night at the Perseverance on the 18th of May.

We have invented a fictitious neighbourhood which we are going to explore in songs, introducing you to our neighbours, all of whom we disapprove of unstintingly. What are the suburbs for, if not meanness?
All that thinking exhausted us and we sat afterwards like used teabags, barely able to raise a smile or a sarcastic quip.
But it was worth it.
I hope you are coming.
It is a Tuesday night and it will cost £5 and £3, and I will remind you again closer to the time.

A-musing...

Two horrid men from 1970s knitting patterns are vying for power...
Intelligence is brutal, and wisdom is graceful.
Hum.

Some Medea Drawings: Flow

River Thames

'F*CK OFF !!!!'
Oh yes! the jolly teenage alarm has gone off, it's 10 a.m. teenage dawn, and Offsprog 1 is up for the weekend to celebrate Offsprog 2's birthday.
Yesterday, I got up, looked at the cold grey rain and phoned to cancel our boat trip up the Thames.
As soon as I had, I changed my mind, bellowed at the girls to get them out of bed, rammed a few picnic things into a basket (plus a flask of tepid soup) and off we went to Datchet and a little electric boat, max speed 20 mph, for a chilly and wet pootle upriver.
We were rewarded straight away by the sighting of a kingfisher, iridescent blue on its way down and iridescent bronze on its way back up to its branch, a silver fish drooping from its beak.
There was little traffic on the river, meaning that there were hundreds of birds and very friendly lock-keepers.
A pleasure-boat took great pleasure in the girls; leering teeth glowed in the gloom behind the plastic rain-cover as they swirled round for another look.
We couldn't accelerate away, so we slowed down to a creeping pace to avoid them, and watched the cormorants posing stiffly with their wide wings, herons perched like statues on rotten posts that emerged from the currents, a crowd of swans mexican waving in an odd rhythm as they vied to be first in line for crumbs thrown by an elderly couple, ducks of all colours flying, up-tailing, swimming straight towards us and then darting away again.
We swapped gloves as the cold sodden rope made our hands red and chapped; we snapped French bread into scrumptious sections and ate sinful amounts of chocolate.
One lock-keeper, amused by Offsprog 1's photography project of signs and symbols, went off and found her a laminated poster he'd been removing regularly from fence-posts- doggydating.com.
Nobody was sure if it was a pervy site or one for romantic liasons between pet-owners!
We got as far as the Brunel Bridge at Maidenhead, where I disembarked and yelled a song at the magic brickwork, which yelled it back to me again.
On the way back to Datchet, we inspected the velvety green lawns and topiary of the seriously-rich, whose Agatha-Christie houses back on to the Thames. We passed narrowboats with serious captains, fancy little cruisers with posh chaps at the helm, and a big steel boat that the lock keeper advised us to follow into the lock in case it smashed us to smithereens.
Although it was bloody cold, it was a fantastically relaxing way to spend the day- we were out for five and a half hours, and it's taken me till this morning to feel warm again!

The Kindness of Strangers

A kind Mr Usman Abudu has offered to put thousands of pounds into my bank account! This is my lucky day! Watch this space!

I went to the quilts exhibition again today with Offsprog One.
It is such a good exhibition; I think my favourite is the one made by inmates at Wandsworth prison: each little section depicts a different attitude to incarceration, some positive and some negative, and of course they are all separated by lines of stitching, a poignant reminder that its creators exist in separate cells just like the painstakingly-embroidered sections of material that make up the whole quilt.

When I got back I did some more work on the Medea pictures. They have to be finished by Monday and I'll post the whole 12-page sequence when they are done. I think each page has taken a day, although I have been working of three or four at once sometimes so the ink can dry properly. They have been done of special paper called CS10 which you can't get any more, according to Mr Art Shop Man. If you make a mistake, you can scrape it away even though it is done in pen, and the paper is white again, ready for you to make another mistake.

Was that Dennis Bovell we saw in Digital Village yesterday? We couldn't decide; he was involved for a while with the Daintees, almost producing the track Boat to Bolivia.
I have moaned about the shop assistants there (yes, guys, thats what you are, although you clearly believe you are the Kings of Digital Music Equipment and Far Too Important to talk to mortals who walk in with tedious questions about microphones) and true to form, they were completely uninterested in anything except themselves, indulging in a form of collective onanism that almost warrants a TV documentary to investigate the phenomenon.
I know I am a meanie about things like this; it comes from doing lots of menial jobs in my time, and trying to do them well.
I have cleaned guest houses (horrible things stuffed down the back of the dressing tables), worked in shops (adventures with awkward customers), washed dishes in a French restaurant (garlic butter all up my arms), cleaned old people's homes (lift your feet up while I hoover underneath them), worked in pubs (you get your bum pinched), collected glasses in night clubs (look at the floor next to the bar: you find money), developed x-rays (the chemicals stink), worked in a press office (Tim Lott the journalist and now author asked me on the phone if he could speak to someone intelligent, please!) and various other selected occupations.
I have tried never to be snotty to the public in any of these jobs and it does get on my wick when people are snotty to customers in shops.
 I could be Prince Charles in disguise!
I could be Britney Spears in oldface make-up!
I could be the secret millionaire, thinking about taking them away from their daily routine with a cheque for £25,000!
I could be a genii, offering them anything their hearts desired!
What would they wish for?
'I wish the customers would go away.'