Next Gig, Bristol Next Sunday

Last night was spent tour managing- booking trains, hotels and so on, and wondering how much of it I can manage by car.
The next gig is in Bristol, one of a series of Pop! Not Hate gigs arranged by Tim Rippington, who has put his heart and soul into organising these. Hats off to him, because it has to all fit around his life and there's a whole week of music in Bristol, then the Pop! Not Hate gig in London at the Lexington on May 26th.
I will be in Bristol on Sunday afternoon https://www.reverbnation.com/show/24237225?utm_campaign=HTML5_ShowSchedule_Widget_Details&utm_content=show_details_link&utm_medium=widget which is a free gig although you'll be able to support the event by buying badges and t-shirts (that originally came out as t-shorts, which is quite a good abbreviation for a summer outfit!)
Meanwhile the album has been mastered and needs the next things to be done- sleeve design and so on.
Looking at the last album now, I can see how empty and blank I felt at the time. All the drawings in the lyrics book look like skeletons waiting to be brought to life. I don't feel like that about the music: the music was a rescue package for a shipwrecked person, as well as a call out for compassion for other human beings. I wish I could write better protest songs. I will be singing this one next Sunday, for sure.

Club Integral Last Night

It was such a balmy evening that it was impossible to stay at home, so I headed down to Iklectik in Waterloo bursting with curiosity. I never knew Simon King, the guitarist who passed away last year, but has heard great things about his band, the Kenny Process Team. After great sets by The Happy Couple and Howie Reeves, the audience became visibly excited as the band (with Rhodri Marsden playing Simon's parts) plugged in and got started.
What exciting music! It sounds as though surf guitar music has been snipped up and put back together again in a different order, almost Beefheartish but a bit too slick for that. Two guitars- a Stratocaster and a Jaguar, twanging and zinging, a bass and a jazz kit with a sideways baby drum. Short tracks (hooray!). They had false starts (hooray!). How the hell did they manage to play like this?



Blimey, this has been a musical weekend. And this afternoon a jazz band suddenly started playing in the pub in Shoreditch where I went for lunch!
I have been hoping to go out tonight too, but instead I've stayed in and tour managed the next few weeks, hotels, trains all that lark. Someone had to do it, and that someone is me.

Flaneuse

Wandering around on the South Bank was always going to be a better bet than staying at home and inhaling swathes of pollen from the yellow cough-fields.
It would have been good to have been able to join the Extinction Rebellion protest on Waterloo Bridge but the police were instructed to arrest anyone who walked past them so that wasn't possible today.
I understand that The Trojans are playing at Marble Arch this afternoon! That's going to be a great event.
So I wandered along the the Royal Festival Hall and saw this wonderful brass band playing. It's so tempting to do more Helen and the Horns writing and playing, after seeing these. I'll try to upload a bit tomorrow. Little children were having a field day, running, dancing, lying on their backs with their hands behind their heads watching in fascination. Nobody was dancing though... whyever not?
Then outside, this chap sold me a CD. He was determined not to smile for the photo, but he owed me a smile in exchange. It's hip-hop and says 'Parental Advisory', so I hope I haven't bought anything that's going to be offensive. Probably have.
London has been full of music this afternoon: the drummer on the Embankment footbridge, two fiddle payers outside the tube station, and a roaring choir of school kids singing in unison in the distance on another platform. Today, it feels joyous to live in this city full of music, with its multicultural population defiant, protesting, attending events and simply existing in harmony!

She-Punks, Edinburgh, Friday

Do come and join us! Both Gina and me will be at the Q and A for this one:
https://www.facebook.com/events/549412588901018/

Guitarspotters Anonymous

Early Morning Writing

There're lots of ways of being creative, and often it's a therapeutic act. I can never work out when I'm writing songs how much of it is therapy, and how much of it is communication.

The unfamiliar territory that I walk through is academic writing, and it's only now that I am realising just how important it has been to have an imaginary reader. Because Dave Laing supervised my thesis and edited my book, in my mind's eye he has always been there as a person to communicate to, and to understand what the hell I'm going on about. He was such a good writer; he could mix jokes and heavy duty philosophy with statistics, all contextualised in a world that could be imagined perfectly easily, and all delivered in steady academic prose.
Oh dear, I do miss him so. He was like an older brainy cousin who you could turn to for advice.

There's a pile of books and articles here on the table and I'm revisiting the Poly Styrene Oh Bondage! article. It feels really good to be writing this and yes, I'm procrastinating; but today I have to put in a couple of hours because the visit to New York to talk about it is really going to happen, so it has to be conjured into existence and completion.
I nearly went to see Ut playing last night but I have still got terrible hay fever, and in a week's time I'm going to be singing in Bristol. I have to do this today, at least a couple of hours, then listen to the mastered album again to make sure it's OK.

Outside, the birds are singing their hearts out, blended with the occasional siren as ambulances deliver the spring heart attacks to Barnet Hospital.
Sorry to be so dark: three funerals of significant people this year, and a fairly dramatic personal health scare a month ago, make the signs of spring all the more heartfelt.

Leicester Musician Gig With BOHJ Etc.

The Wurlitzer at The Troxy

Happy birthday Karina, what a great call! The sound of theatre organist Phil Kelsall playing a 180-degree monster, carolling, trilling, grunting and making the most joyously extraordinary music you could possibly hear on a Tuesday evening in the company of silver tops from East London, and a small band of renegades with The Knowledge!
http://www.troxy-wurlitzer.org

Joby and the Hooligans' Very First Gig

Pinched from DJ Gremlins' Facebook page, I think this may have been the very first Joby and the Hooligans gig, the very first time I played bass on stage.
This was Joby Jackson, Steve Beardsley, Nick Dwyer and me. We borrowed Punktuation's drummer, who was 14 at the time, and I borrowed a bass guitar from Bella Donna, Poison Girls' bass player, that had belonged to The Buzzcocks. She was Mancunian, and they were friends.
We had written a set in three days, mostly using tabloid newspaper stories, in order to shame The Molesters who had bottled out of the gig. I was told I could play bass in the band, because I was in the room at the time.
Much to our astonishment, we got asked to play another gig after this one. And another... and another.... und so weiter!

Interview by Rona

https://www.advertizer.co.uk/insight/helen-mccookerybook-interview/

'F' is for 'f-hole'; how could I have forgotten?

Coda

The rumblings of a few postings earlier this week are because a shop assistant in a local shop said that the Mayor of London should be taken out and shot, within earshot (ha) of one of my daughters.
I have complained about this to their head office and received a reply, but the reply wasn't sincere enough to make me ever go there again. The shop? Rymans.
People seem to have turned themselves inside out to show what is inside them, and what is inside some people at the moment is very dark and grim.
It's not new. I've even been told that I shouldn't be entitled to a Housing Association flat in London because I come from Newcastle. This sort of hatred is so disturbing because it seems to run through people's veins, bypassing their brains. At the moment, it's torturing me constantly.

Design

The Fight for Survival

We were sitting on Primrose Hill in the cold sunshine on Saturday afternoon, looking at the panorama of London spread out in front of us.
Cranes, cranes, cranes, and tall shiny silver buildings aggressively poking their fingers and thumbs at the sky, seeing how high they could go to pierce the atmosphere with their sharp capitalist harshness.
Hunkered down amongst them was St Paul's, a beautiful and spiritual building, and completely hidden away behind the invasion of glittering stalagmites was Southwark Cathedral, dwarfed by the monstrous and ferocious Shard which has been thrown up so close by.

Southwark Cathedral is where Chaucer's fictitious pilgrims started their journey in The Canterbury Tales, and it's where the Crisis carol service happens every year, and countless other community and worship activities happen. It was built for music and voices to sound good in, and for people to find peace in their hearts.

It's unbearable to even think about what has happened to Notre Dame Cathedral; all of that delicate architecture eaten by flames yesterday.

Are the bad people going to win?

John Howard