Metaforte

This song travels all over the place, and my passport needs to be renewed!

Doorbells

Sometimes you feel that you are standing in front of a large residential building with a plate of doorbells at the entrance.
You ring at each bell in turn hoping for someone to answer but nobody does, so you retreat in disappointment.
This week has been a week where every door bell I've pressed has rung and someone has answered.
This is remarkably rare, so I'm treasuring the experience.

Clean

I've just vacuumed my guitars.

Songing

Little mp4 files are scattered across my laptop screen like letters spread out on a doormat: full of information to work on, and engendering the same feelings of anticipation.
First thing, I got up and finished comping the vocal for The Cutty Wren, which meant visually shifting vocal takes into time on the screen, then listening to see if they were in the right place.
What a challenge: parts of it are very high to sing, and some of the words twisted my tongue into the shape of a helter-skelter.
I went for a walk to clear my head, and the place was busy with mothers with pushchairs, all saying good morning to each other. Dog walkers at 9.30, baby walkers at 10.30! All very good natured; then back home, I rehearsed one of the songs for Sunday.
This afternoon I completed words/melody for one of Robert's songs. In my head I was seeing one of those paintings by Vermeer, all dusty sunlight through windows that you can't see through properly.
I hope he likes it; I recorded a very basic version and sent it to him a few minutes ago.
This gap in the proceedings is called 'waiting for feedback'.
I'm going to have some crisps now.
What a luxury!
Then I'm going to carry on writing the song about hotels for Friday's song circle.

Fruit

Singing has been a challenge for the past few days because of the pollen. Sometimes it's best to just go with the flow, so I went out for a walk to rest my voice and found these beauties growing in a dried up stream bed. The weather has been so dry that a lot of this year's blackberries are very small, although they are sweet. These ones are quite juicy: their roots have obviously found the water down below the soil. I'm not sure why the birds haven't had 'em, but there are such a lot this year it seems there are plenty for everybody. I stopped after a thistle attacked me (entirely unprovoked) and I stepped into the stream bed because it was hidden under the bushes. It was quite deep, but I escaped with the blackberries intact.

Beginning Twice

Allow me to share my frustration. I printed out fourteen pages of an article I've been writing on Oh Bondage! Up Yours, and the printer ran out of paper.
After replenishing the paper, I pressed 'Resume' and printing resumed.
Alas, it started from the last page again, and the ink cartridge ran out halfway through.
I've now got two sets of the last fourteen pages of the article.
Gah.

White Sky Songwriting Saturday

For most of the day the sky has glowered and sulked, promising rain but delivering only a headache.
Ian Button's done a great mix of the song Michel Wallace and me collaborated on, and that was a sunny thing to receive in the inbox this morning.
By the time the rain finally squeezed itself out of the clouds a repeat of Come Dine With Me was on and I'd bought a pie in the market, so I watched that while flaky pastry fluffed about between me and the plate.
I had spent part of the morning singing The Cutty Wren on to the backing track, and managed to embed the vocal into the track really well (it's bloody fast!) but my pitching wasn't delicate enough, so I left it for another day.
About an hour ago I made the template for another song I'm working on, but this time my guitar playing was sounding stiff so I left that for another day too, although I got the singing done on that one.
I don't know if I'm getting fussier, or worse at playing and singing. I do know that I get so deeply into what I'm listening to that firstly I lose track of the time, and secondly, it's absolutely exhausting. Everything is permanently set up in the kitchen at the moment so if the mood strikes I can just switch on and... well, switch on.
We have a 'distanced' day booked in the studio in Brixton next Sunday, I've ordered some clear protective specs and I'm just waiting for Robert to do the next bits of those songs; meanwhile Jude has worked on the next section of the Desperado Housewives song, and it's Kath's turn to add something.
It's so odd, because at the beginning of this year I thought that I'd like to do a lot more collaborations; I'd already been enjoying working with Robert, and was made up that Johny Brown asked me to play on his songs for the concert-that-never-happened-but-will-in-October-I-hope. Then this virus happened, and the collaboration thing has really come into fruition. It hasn't stopped me from writing songs on my own, but it's like a wonderful added extra that has crystallised out into the vacuum left by the cancellation of all the live gigs.
So interesting to work with, all those different voices, styles, chords, ideas.....

Great Aunt Ina And Her Banjo

Great Aunt Ina used to hang out with the sailors apparently, preferring their company to her genteel Glasgow family. Here she is with her banjo.

Walking and a Heron

Not for the first time, when I saw this huge prehistoric monster I thought it was a statue standing on the grass by the path. I'd gone for a long walk because I knew I'd be recording this afternoon and I wanted a clear head with no anxiety.
As I rounded the corner, there it was, just standing there. An elderly man walked past it with centimetres to spare, but he was deep in thought beneath his baseball cap and didn't even notice. I managed to get within about a metre and a half, although the bird had it's beady eye fixed on me the whole time to make sure I didn't fling a net over it's head. It was looking for insects and worms- it jabbed the ground really hard with it's beak at one point. The water up here is like thick green soup and I don't think there are any fish or insect larvae for any of the birds to eat. The ducks and geese up at the ponds are probably OK for a while because they get fed oats and bread by visitors (and so does a rather impressive giant rat).
Anyway, eventually I got just too close and it took off slowly, flapping its massive wings and landing not much further away. If I had been a bit smaller it would have eaten me, I'm certain.
I'm just taking a break from editing a song that I've been working on with Michel Wallace. I want to export the tracks to send to Ian Button to mix but I can't remember how to do it, so I've had to write and ask. Ricocheting in between academic writing and writing and recording songs is such a blessing but it involves wearing a lot of hats inside the head, kind of thing. You never stop learning though- I think I may become a better guitarist as a result of lockdown, and I've built a better relationship with Logic and its peccadilloes.
Funny using the kitchen as a studio. I'm on stickiness alert and I have to let as much air into the room as possible. There's no space anywhere else, no room in the back yard for a shed, and the kitchen's got the best acoustics anyway because of the hard surfaces.
This is not a problem the heron has to deal with.

Parcels

mccookerybook · Parcels (demo)

Punky's Cut-Out Wardrobe

In the 1970s there was a comic for girls called Bunty which had a cut-out paper doll on the back every week with clothes that you could fold on to her. Bunty and it's sister comic Judy were both terrific. There wasn't a whiff of boyfriend trouble, make-up or anything like that- the stories were adventure stories for little girls to read, and on one of the front-cover Bunty stories she was a footballer.
I think it was Judy who had The Four Marys, a centrefold story with four girls all called 'Mary' (naturally) and two female baddies who looked remarkably punky. I have always wondered if they inspired Siouxsie's look in some way, because she might just as well have read those stories as anyone else of our generation.
Anyway- this is from the back page of Shingles, the comic that I edited in the late 1970s in Brighton. I got contributions from lots of different people and it sold in the record shop in Brighton, Attrix, although most people just read it in the shop and didn't buy it.
I believe I could call that a 'W. H. Smith hit'.

The Original Chef

Crunching

What's that crunching in the back yard? ('patio garden' in estate-agent-ese)
A blackbird!
Rummaging and thrashing a dried leaf to get at a worm inside it or something; I didn't ask.
But how nice!

Imaginary Bread, Chewing Gum and Ben Wilson

I lay in bed this morning and imagined the smell of baking bread that used to waft along early from the bakers. At the time, I had no idea what a luxury that was, and how much I'd miss it when it was gone.
There are still little moments of joy.
Barnet Council ripped up the paving stones that Ben Wilson painted on shortly after he had finished the wonderful community gallery of folk art that was a feature of our High Street. You can't really photograph the experience of walking along and seeing Ben working on a new miniature painting, surrounded by an excited child or two (he did requests), with so many people stopping to say hello and pass the time of day with him.
It was an odd sort of therapy too: just having a pleasant chap around, changing the ugly chewing gum splotches into works of art that materialised in front of your eyes. What a lost treasure, and a lived experience of the trashing of small cultural interventions by a Tory council that wants to steamroller everything that touches real people in its path, as it strives to be an efficient vehicle for capitalism.
On my perambulations yesterday I discovered a lost cache of his paintings, scuffed and muddied (it was so tempting to wipe them, but then the council might find them and eradicate them).
Look carefully at the detail and the world through their little windows, and remember that these are painted on other people's contempt for their environment, matched only by the council's.
These are works of absolute genius, and indeed the concept is absolute genius.
Here they are.

Bats

Yesterday I drove the circuitous route to Sarf London to visit my Offsprogs.
We sat in the park eating chips and yakking for a couple of hours, watching tiny bats flittering across the early evening sky in search of flying insects.
Busy, busy little things.
One of our company found a photograph of a giant bat in the Philippines on their phone and held it up for them to see, but the Sarf London bats weren't frightened at all.
I bought a little box tree in the vegetable shop on the main street to replace one that black and yellow striped caterpillars ate last year. I am going to guard it with my life to protect it against the little buggers- and also make friends with the lady blackbird who has taken to visiting the back yard and rummaging in the undergrowth.
Driving back, the posh brutes were out in force in their bossy cars. Almost the whole way back there is a 20 MPH speed limit, but they weren't having any of it.
I got tooted at all the way home.
The sound of money is rude and bad mannered.