Gideon Coe Airplay for McCookerybook and Rotifer Last Night

Listen again here:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vymm

Little Egret, and Remembering Nick 'Dubulah' Page

So Dubulah has passed away, and a whole load of memories of working with him, laughing, arguing, eating, planning, drinking, all flooded back last night. I scrabbled through cassettes to find music we'd worked on together, and marvelled at just how many musicians he has worked with in his life, from so many different cultures. I remember him telling off the Ethiopian players on stage at the Edinburgh Festival and how it didn't seem to matter- everyone just took it in their stride. And I remember the first time I marvelled at hearing Transglobal Underground with the Bulgarian Choir samples, and Temple of Sound at Womad, and Dub Colossus at Netil House or somewhere else east... Passing Clouds perhaps? With Winston Blissett on bass, and a horn section, and Mykaell Riley singing. And then Transglobal at Under the Bridge, a glorious reunion where you could still see the schoolkid in everyone on stage. I remembered the Simonics, a five-piece band that consisted solely of Simons and Nicks, who recorded at Elephant Studios in Wapping with engineers named Simon and Nick. I remembered Bumble and the Beez, with Simon Walker on violin and Mykaell Riley singing his heart out. And the Red River Mountain Boys!

Nick would come running with his guitar if you had something musical to do, and a sandwich and cup of tea (or beer) to offer in exchange. You learned to record and keep the first take, because he was so brilliant he'd go off into the stratosphere with his playing after that. He listened to the music in the song and played to it- that's very rare in a musician. 

So many of us bought and sold Nick's guitars too. My original Gretsch Chet Atkins Tennessean was his. He had borrowed some money from me, and was trying to sell it to pay me back. I was furious. "Never sell a guitar to pay back a debt!", I told him. But he carried on- so I had the guitar off him, and I've still got it. That was the guitar I played in Helen and the Horns, and it came everywhere with me. Once, he showed me a fabulous guitar he had with gold machine heads. He had just discovered that they had tiny fold-out string winders hidden in them, and the two of us sat and gurgled with delight like two silly guitar nerd babies.

Oh, and we recorded Leaving' You Baby together, too. Somehow, he'd persuaded Robin Scott (of 'M' fame) to let us record for free in his studio in Wivelsfield in Sussex. We went down there by train, and when we got there I realised we both thought each other knew how to program a drum machine. "I'm not touching that thing", said Nick, and that was my first experience of drum programming, the weirdness of which we kept on the proper version of the song. We recorded that at Alaska studios in Waterloo with Paul Gadd, Gary Glitter's son, who was the nicest person in the world and who had  husky dog that sat with us all day. There, Nick told me off for saying I couldn't sing in the mornings (so of course, now I never say that, and can do it perfectly well) because we only had a day. We discovered the delights of the Bell sampler, pushed the faders to the max when the engineer was out making a cup of tea, and had an absolute blast. We phoned Mykaell and he happened to be passing by later that day- he came in, threw a swathe of the most brilliant harmonica playing across the track, smiled and went off again. Same with Simon Walker, who set up, played the maddest thing you could possibly get out of a violin, and serenely floated out into the cool south London air. It was an amazing day. Nick persuaded a friend to release it on his label, Pure Trash, and it even got played on the BBC's folk radio programme on a Sunday morning- and at a nightclub in Spain where King Kurt were playing, apparently. The photo session for the cover was slightly disastrous. Nick dressed up as a Greek god with a toga and ivy in his hair and we sat in a huge truck so my friend Kim could take photos- but the sun hit the screen and most of what we got was reflections. I ended up doing a drawing.

I suppose all this is saying that Nick was a whirlwind of anarchy and can-do that completely blew a hole through bullshit and artifice. You could have quite forthright conversations and then everything would be forgiven. He called me 'Cooks' as a nickname and accepted my tomboyness. When he moved to Spain, I missed him being around but I knew he'd found love, and that was amazing.

I hope his many friends manage to gather and celebrate him soon. He crossed paths with so many of us, and I have to say there are a million things I learned from him. He was the first person who played Brecht and Weill to me. He couldn't help being an educator as well as a friend.

I had to go on a long walk today to calm the shock of hearing that he has gone so suddenly. On the way back, this beautiful little bird was pottering around gracefully at the brook. It was very shy, but I did manage to take this photograph. I know we all have different memories of Nick, and these are some of mine, shared with cyberspace, and it's been quite a therapeutic exercise to write them down as it turns out

 

Big Takeover Top Ten

Here's Fatberg being appreciated in all its gory. I meant glory:

http://bigtakeover.com/top-ten/JenDanMay112021

Searching

I can't find my camera anywhere. I thought of looking in the Junk folder of my email account. Seriously.

Not An A&R Person

A thought has just occurred to me. I consistently take an instant dislike to particular songs upon their release which go on to be massive hits.

Perhaps I have a future as a negative A&R person where I listen to the repertoire and choose songs that I think are utterly crap. That way, I detect hit records (or tracks rather) 100% accurately, just by not liking them.

Anyone want to give me a job doing that?

Looking Forward To Tomorrow

 I'm so looking forward to tomorrow. Wednesdays are music days and I have songs to write.

I haven't been sleeping.  A friend is in an induced coma. 

I feel as though I need to think about them to keep them going. Isn't that silly? I can't help it. There's that sort of love for people that isn't romantic at all, but is to do with looking forward to seeing a person, even if you haven't seen them for ages. They are part of your peoplescape, and part of lots of other people's lives too. You've been through things with them, and have a shared past and you hope a shared future too.

It's not the sort of thing you can write a song about, but writing songs about other things will be good therapy.

Meanwhile, I am sending all the positive vibes I possibly can, both in waking hours and in sleeping hours.

Tories

I will never, ever vote for the Conservative party for a very simple reason: I had first hand experience of their heartlessness when I was little more than a child.

I was brought up in a Northumbrian village. No theatre, no cinema, no museums, no galleries: just people. Villages are a combination of working class, middle class and upper class people, though the latter are on an altogether different astral plane. Within these class divisions, there are class divisions. There is always someone to look down on and sneer at, or to look up at and envy.

For some reason as well as associating with children from the council estate, I used to get invited to some of the large houses on the periphery of the village and beyond, to play with children who seemed to live quite isolated existence in families who could best be defined as 'upper middle class'. The houses had grounds, often. I was invited to Pony Club Dances and once even sweated in a sauna in someone's gigantic garden. The mummies were stand-offish and wore suits and pearls, unlike the mams that some of my friends had, who were altogether more approachable.

All was well: life flowed with a peculiar rhythm: school work, play, Brownies, tomboydom with my best friend Linda over the road; the invitations to the big houses carried on.

Then it became known that my parents voted Labour.

Instantly the invitations from the posh mummies dried up. I never went to another Pony Club Dance. Friendships were left in limbo, almost like a sentence half started and not finished. I didn't get to play in those Wendy Houses with the 'only child' any more: those little girls played with children of their own class now. A door had been slammed in my face because of the political beliefs of my parents.

This preparedness to punish a child for the beliefs of their parents has quite naturally stuck with me for my whole life. In fact later on , one of the teachers at school used to berate me in class for my 'half baked left wing views'. There is more to that story, but to tell that would reverse-ferret on what I've just written.

Thus I was taught by example what being a Tory means. It means casual cruelty, especially when you think you can get away with it. It means covering up nastiness with a veneer of respectability. It means intolerance. It means bullying. 

I accept that we live in a Tory country where it appears most people don't like people from 'other' cultures, and venerate putting personal interests and furthering of personal wealth-gathering above anything else. I also accept that I will never be able to understand this mindset. Congratulations to the Tories for passing on their nasty values to the electorate. 

'Well done you!' in the words of Martin Newell. 

Luckily, I got vaccinated against this when I was young. Unluckily, I have been sentenced to feeling 'wrong' for my whole life. But do I wish I was one of them? Not bloody likely.

Scared

Doesn't it seem silly to be scared of going to B&Q? There used to be one just down the road but it's been demolished and turned into 'luxury flats'. Nothing downgrades the word 'luxury' more than a plethora of flats being described that way, I find.

Anyway- I discovered that the searing frosts this year have destroyed a mega plant pot in the garden, leaving the poor juniper sagging sadly out of the side of it, with pot-shaped tangles of roots clinging to a pot-shaped soil ball. I looked online as we all do these days, only to find at the checkout that everything was out of stock- the pots, the soil, just everything.

Getting into the car and driving wasn't a problem: it was the shopping. The supermarket's OK because I've done that all through lockdown, but buying anything apart from food felt really weird. The young whippersnappers in orange jerkins evidently felt so too. They didn't want to talk; they didn't want to tell anybody where anything was. They just wanted to be there, ideally checking their phones and guffawing at each other in that late teenage way. I did manage to gently force some information out of them, so now I've got a hanging basket liner. How exciting!

At the checkout, the woman was furious even before I got there. 'How am I supposed to lift that up?', she shouted at the big plant pot. I was rather taken aback. Shopping has definitely changed. I offered to pick it up so she could scan it. 'No!' she barked. 'I JUST DON'T WANT TO BREAK IT!'.

Actually I think she didn't want to lift it up, but was shamed into doing it because I offered. She carried on snarling, aiming terrifying evils at her colleague at another till. 'She shouldn't be there!' she confided, loudly. 'She's not a till worker!'.

I tried to help. 'Maybe you could join a union?', I suggested. A tumble of snarls fell out of her mouth. 'Useless! Useless! I used to be in the GMB and then I left!' 'Thank you', I said. For a second, she made eye contact and smiled. 'Have a good day', she said.

It's definitely not just me who isn't ready to come out of lockdown. The staff at B&Q aren't either.

Next Gig! Socially Distanced, NE Volume Bar in Stockton on Tees, Sunday 23rd May

 Ticket link: https://www.ents24.com/stockton-on-tees-events/ne-volume-music-bar/helen-mccookerybook/6224418

Radio 3 Interview About 'She's At The Controls'

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vfrk

New Video for 'Fatberg' by Ruth Tidmarsh- Just In Time For Bandcamp Friday!

 Available from here: https://helenmccookerybook.bandcamp.com/track/fatberg

Thinking About St Johns

I woke up at the Usual Time this morning, for verily, normal life carries on and I have to (a) vote and (b) do a whole lot of marking today. I do feel happy though, after last night! Part of it was quite simply singing out properly and playing with amplification; I do sing and play at home, of course, but politely out of consideration for the neighbours. These houses have very thin walls. Once, Offprog Two and me sat watching TV with the sound down and we could hear the dialogue from Eastenders coming through the wall.

There's a huge amount of traffic in London. We are all in our cars because we are afraid of travelling on the tube with people who don't wear masks, all squashed up in a viral soup. What should have been a 45 minute journey took more like two hours. The roads have been revised since lockdown and nobody knows where they are, and neither do I. Luckily I'm a short sound checker.

The church is beautiful and the organiser Gareth and sound guy Dave were the only people there when I got there. I tuned up, cleaned up, poured a cup of camomile tea (it was cold in there!), sound checked and waited until just before 8. There was one person in the audience, and the vicar passed through once or twice.

The lights came up, the music flowed and off we went! I imagined people at home sitting on their sofas, though I was in a box of lights with the paintings on the church walls looking sternly on, but it really was good to sing again in a  proper venue. My fingers felt like frozen twigs that I had to snap to form chords (even by the end of the gig they were still cold) but I did a gig in Spitalfields market in temperatures of -10 once, so they just had to obey the instructions to do as they were told. There was no PA system, just monitors; maybe it would have felt like elevated singing in the bath if I hadn't had my guitar in my hands!

Every time I do anything like this, I feel thankful because life might have been so very different. I can't articulate exactly what happened because it is private, but there is something so magical in this freedom that absolutely blasts its way through any desire to be a pop star or anything like that (bit too late, anyway). It's being able to stand there and sing what I want, the way I want to sing it, to have learned to play well enough to make music to sing to.

Afterwards, the vicar came out. What a sweet man. He had watched at home he said, because the sound was better there. We chatted about closed churches and mosques, and gigs in churches, and how good Peggy Seeger is. Imagine being an enlightened vicar who not only does vicarly things but also gets to see gigs in his church. Now that's some life.

Thank you to everyone who 'came along'!

Tonight!

Join me at this event tonight at 8 p.m.

Ticket link:

 https://www.citizenticket.co.uk/events/st-john-sessions/helen-mccookerybook-live-and-online-ndash-a-special-live-streamed-performance/

It will be weird: me and the sound crew, and everyone else there in my imagination. I have had a few requests for songs.

Let me know if there's a song you'd like me to play, and I'll get it out from the attic and dust it!

 

Flop!

Last week's mega workload has rendered me a complete energy-exhausted flop today. I have the desktop computer 'jukebox' playing Rufus Wainwright gently in the background, with bits of Terry Callier and Odetta thrown in here and there. I've dug out some lyrics sheets for songs I'd forgotten the lyrics to. I've done some marking, and discovered that another of my students appears to have got a job after doing a work placement. This almost made me cry; life is just so tough for people these days. I feel so proud of her.

The sun is temporarily shining and it's tempting to get out there, but when I went shopping for coffee this morning, I was tricked. It started raining as soon as the front door clicked shut. So I don't believe you, Mr Sunshine: you're a liar, just like almost everyone else. Or at least, the people who tell us that they aren't.

Isaac Hayes. How I love the atmosphere of old recordings; you can almost hear the wood panelling and the scruffy carpets in the music, with the cigarette smoke curling through the dense air of the basement and the empty whisky bottles lying on their sides amongst the worn-out shoes of the musicians.

I should do some more cleaning. The regular moth flypasts in the evenings are becoming bit of a joke, and there are small beetles sneaking around everywhere. The spiders have given up: they are maxed out and their webs are getting tatty through misuse. I washed the kitchen floor this morning, peeling inexplicable tiny blobs of dusty Blu-tack off the linoleum and rinsing dust-clogged yellow cloths in grey soupy water in the sink. Motivation is low for such things, though, especially when the living room is full of tempting guitars and piles of lyrics. 

Actually, my finger-ends are sore after graduating from the Spanish guitar to the Green Goddess. The digital divas are taking a rest until later tonight or even tomorrow morning. I've almost forgotten how to rehearse for a live gig. 

I do remember that you can't stop a song halfway through and put the kettle on at a gig, so I suppose that's a good start.

Tony Hancock in 'The Rebel' from Drawing Club

Drawing Club on Sundays: a kind of dreamy online activity with the imagined whisking sound of pencils of paper. We are far-flung: Edinburgh, Bolton, Kent, London. Conversation chunters along, we hold up our drawings to the little computer camera and show each other what we've done. 

I missed out on watching most of the actual film because I did a screenshot of the beginning with the bowler-hatted men and the deadly uniform workplace, and started drawing that, so the film is on the list to watch properly another time. From earwigging the discussion, it seems there are a lot of awkward truths that unfold in the story: very Hancock. Very awkward Hancock.

What else? Lots of rehearsing with my guitar for Wednesday night's gig, a lovely lunchtime Zoom with my friend Joan about an animation/sound mini-project, watching the forthcoming Fatberg video come into existence (!), cooking a huge pot of green vegetable soup, and making a start on the mountain of marking. And marvelling at the silly pigeon that got into a local shop window yesterday, only to be joined by two more silly pigeons today.