Charlotte Worthington at Turps Banana

Look at these beautiful paintings on silk. They are even more lovely in real life. 

We went to see them on Saturday, and it was well worth the hot and humid journey to the Aylesbury Estate in Walworth, where Taplow House has now become an art school.

Dog Getting Haircut, Gypsy Hill

From Sunday Drawing Club.

Judging Punk Songs By French Schoolchildren

Up yours, Johnson! We are still European.

I had  lovely email out of the blue from a French secondary school teacher whose class has been writing political punk songs. Would I judge their finalists? Of bloody course!

She sent me the two songs, one of which was anti-racist and the other, feminist. The songs were bristling with anger and bristling with ideas. It was incredibly hard to judge, but in the end I decided to go with the one with the most singable chorus, so I got my guitar out and sang them both. The anti-racist song won by a very narrow margin.

What a heartwarming thing to do, a heartwarming finale to an unusually good week.

With the Girl With The Replaceable Head, And Co.

Weeks don't normally start this well. When I got to The Lexington, Paul Handyside (ex-Hurrah) was soundchecking and Taff's son Rupert was hanging out with his girlfriend unpacking the CDs and albums at the merch stall. When I'd done my soundcheck, Little Bruv showed up in his hat-of-all-hats, and there was Geoff Travis, who I hadn't seen for a long, long time. It was very nice to chat to him before the early-doors start, and also to Delia for a while too. 

Midway through my set someone's phone rang and the audience halved (joke). It actually wasn't a bad crowd at all for a Monday night post-pandemic. There were assorted Geordies in the audience: nice to see Simon McKay out and about, still missing Fenella Fielding but getting into the music.

Paul Handyside was on fine form, channelling Johnny Cash (and even Frank Sinatra in his more showtunes numbers). He was aided by Rob Tickell on slide guitar, who provided deep and atmospheric flavours to the songs. It was a very powerful set.

By the time TGWTRH took to the stage the room was full. With Lindy Morrison on drums and Mick Porter on bass, they animated the room with their melodic and sometimes quite spooky songs. The vocal arrangements are exquisite, possibly because Taff and Sylvia often perform as a duo, and have worked on using their voices to the maximum effect. They have a unique almost film soundtrack sound, which is at the same time really accessible. Sylvia has a strong voice with a sixties vibe, more Sandie Shaw than Dusty Springfield, and Taff wrings some mean licks out of that Fender Jaguar. It's a stroke of genius to immortalise the Bigg Market in Newcastle: that song triggered not only thoughts of Viz Comic but also a memory of me and my friend Kathleen being chased down the street by a bunch of guys straddling a long pulled-apart cardboard tube like a huge wobbly willy. Oh Newcastle, you disgraceful and wonderful city! 

I remember the catchiness of their songs from all those years ago, my first ever out of London gig. They had driven down to Shipley from the north east and I'd driven up after work from Docklands with the instructions about how to get there written on sheet of A4 paper in orange felt pen. Of course, under sodium street-lighting the writing became totally invisible, but somehow I managed to get there just in time, and I drove back after the gig to be tucked up in bed by 2 a.m.

Oh, I enjoyed their set so much! They have a completely other-worldly sound. I recorded a video of one of their songs, but an enthusiastic chap kept moving his head directly into my line of view. I'll take a look and maybe post it later in the week. Towards the end of the set, we spied Stewart Lee down the front. The man has good taste.

As a finale we all joined each other on stage, including Rupert who'd guested on one of the TGWTRH songs, and played Apology Accepted, the Go Betweens favourite. Aww, it was fun!

On to Brighton last night. This was a much smaller venue, the Pipeline, but the sound was still really good. A hippy turned up at sound check time with a woman he was in the process of trying to get off with.' I like this music', he said, 'It's worth paying to get in'. Big Bruv showed up with his partner (two fams in one week!). I played a slightly different set of songs this night just so I don't get stale, and revived Heaven Avenue because of course it is about an LSD trip I took down New Church Road in Hove many years ago, when I was a young silly art student at Brighton Art College.

Paul and Rob turned in another fine set. It was good to see them play again because the songs have become familiar by now. There is one in particular that is so strong that I need to find a recording of it- it's the sort of song that I could never write in a million years; it was fascinating to listen to.

The hippy was becoming ever more drunken and assertive and he was over-delighted by the singalong song that Paul ends his set with. More of the assertive hippy in a few lines time...

TGWTRH were on form again, and this time I could hear them better (I'd been very close to the bass stack at The Lexington and was losing some of the nuances in the singing). The dynamics of the songs came across really beautifully and Lindy's drumming was spot on. About four songs in, the hippy was stamping very hard on the floor with great enthusiasm and ignorance. Lindy stopped. 'Excuse me! these songs have been worked out really carefully, and you're stomping all over them!'. 'I didn't realise anyone could hear me!', protested the hippy unconvincingly. In the end he stomped off into the sunset and left the band to finish their set. We joined together for Apology Accepted at the end like on the night before, and by the end of the song we'd pretty much bonded for life.

We all stayed in the same hotel, and there was something heartwarming about that Geordie and Australian breakfast together. Their tour manager Tony Raven Porter (the man in the hat) was part of the gang too and got them all back to Newcastle in time for the van curfew. I travelled back to London on the train with Lindy and hope to see her again before she jets off to New York. I've got the CDs to listen to so I can relive the gigs at my leisure.

Best week-beginning I've had for years, actually: I wish they were all like this.

Magical Night

Photos for now- off to Brighton for the Brighton gig at The Pipeline. Same line-up.

Pigeons Finish A Plate Of Food In Soho

From Sunday Drawing Club

and the dub version

At The Lexington On Monday

That came around quickly! Taff and Sylvia had invited me to open for them and Paul Handyside at The Lexington tomorrow evening , and at The Pipeline in Brighton on Tuesday.

My first ever solo gig outside London was supporting The Girl With The Replaceable Head in Shipley, Yorkshire. Tomorrow they will be joined by Lindy Morrison from the Go-Betweens on drums.

A Rich And Varied Life

Well, today I'm responding to the copyeditor's queries for the chapter on Oh Bondage! Up Yours that I've contributed to the One Track Minds anthology of significant records, which is coming out in the autumn (I think). I've got three more corrections to do. Everything I do involves panic. The night before last I woke up at five a.m. panicking in case the Tories did well in the local elections, and had to get up and check the results. With this piece of writing, it's 'Have I mentioned....', and of course I have (I've mentioned everything, or tried to).

I have enjoyed academic writing because of the research and the detail, but not the slog. The books took ten years each and an article or chapter takes more than a week, spread out over months. For this particular chapter, I travelled to Liverpool at my own expense to look through Falcon Stuart's X Ray Spex press archive. I write in between lecturing and gigging. There are amazing upsides: part-subsidised travel to other countries to discuss and talk about my research (New York, Porto, Vienna, Aalborg, Oslo, Limerick, Edinburgh), and meeting an international community of music academics and writers. It's great for self-respect too. Like a lot of people I have confidence problems and suffer from imposter syndrome, probably because of harsh parenting and cruel schooling. But there are books on the shelf that I actually wrote myself, and this is something I never imagined doing. The same with making records. At school, I was all set to disappear because I was so quiet and introverted. Thanks to punk's violent yet inspiring lessons my life changed completely, and that feeling still runs through my veins, even all this time afterwards.

Up With The Lark

I woke in a state of high anxiety in case the Tories won lots of seats in the local elections. 

It was 5 a.m. and the birds were chirruping with excitement.

I grabbed my phone. Labour has won Barnet council! After all the cruelty of the past almost 20 years, the local community has made a statement about it. I did wonder: the usually-smug local MP was not at the Polling Station yesterday.

What a pleasant change to the headwind.

Bubbles

Sometimes lately it's seemed as though people have formed protective shields around themselves, occasionally quite aggressively. To burst these bubbles without injuring not just the people themselves, but also those around them, seems like an impossible task.

Running Order and Running Out Of Time

While I'm mixing, I'm also trying out different running orders. It's a good way of seeing if the balance between vocals and instruments work. I have marked up two songs for 'further work' and they are not the ones I'd expected. I need to do a heavy editing job on one of them, or maybe even re-record the vocal depending on external circumstances.

I've just arranged a session at Dave Morgan and Ruth Tidmarsh's studio in St Albans to record the double bass. It's all go... apart from the fact I should be learning the Go-Betweens song Apology's Accepted for Monday and Tuesdays gigs with The Girl with the Replaceable Head and Paul Handyside at the Lexington and The Pipeline in Brighton. I already know I'll be able to play it, but will be unlikely to learn the lyrics by heart before Monday, because I have never been able to remember the lyrics to my own songs, let alone any else's. I'm not sure how stressed to get about this.

The lyrics are here on my desktop winking at me!

Back To The Editing Board

Of course, the day I decided to record Spanish guitar is the day a neighbour booked builders to do their roof. It's Ok actually- the thumping and banging is mild and sparse. It's the pealing and honking men's voices that carry the most, which of course they need to do on site. However, I am my own worst enemy. Halfway through a take, my phone dinged with a text: I'd forgotten to mute it. Stupidly, I checked the phone again during playback when the text rang out loud and clear from the recording! 

I deleted the Spanish guitar in the end, and just whisked a few overdubs into the background. Actually it was more blooming editing that the track needed, and I spent an hour chopping and shifting sections of vocals to the right places. It might sound better. I've no idea. I sank so deeply into listening that there has only been one possible remedy: Bargain Hunt on BBC 1. Such cheerful and pointless babbling! It's a tonic for an overworked brain.

I'm starting to miss recording already. I'm just waiting for the violin part to float down from Scotland, and to organise the double bass session, and then I'll be on the final strait. DIY is difficult- have I just created box of turds? Have I mixed the tracks well? There seems to be no logic (in-joke) to it all; I'll try to copy a vocal template on to another track and it simply doesn't work with that particular configuration of instruments. I have had to go with instinct and what I listen to in tracks when I'm audience rather than producer.

Getting things wrong in the guitar playing has been a remarkably good rehearsal technique. I now have a grip like a strong-man and biceps like a weightlifter. I daren't even think back to 2018 when I broke my funny bone, and my elbow was literally hanging off by a thread. No, don't think about it!

Sickert at Tate Britain

Walter Sickert is one of my favourite painters. It's everything about his work: the colour, the application of paint, the subject matter, the viewpoint. It's an absolute pleasure to see these wonderful artworks together and feast on all of those things at once. He was a frequent attender at music halls, and many of these paintings are inspired by what he saw on these outings, but from a quirky perspective: a forest of oboes and bassoons from an orchestra painted from behind, or a view from under the curved balustrade of the theatre balcony.

He was an unforgiving observer of body size but had the skill to paint weight which is the true measure of an artist. It's so hard to make marks on a surface indicate heaviness and gravity: perhaps the most difficult thing.

There is something almost onomatopoeic about his brush technique; it's often spiky like his name (although his signature isn't). He had an affinity with Dégas, whose work I also really love.

I wasn't so keen on the cityscapes or the soft porn, but you can't have everything. And yes, I know he was a candidate for being Jack the Ripper but on balance that appears to have been disproved, apart from by people with books to sell. Looking at you Charlotte Cornwell. How can anyone possibly know if they are right or wrong so long after the events? He seems to have been in Europe a lot of the time and I think I might look in Venice and Paris to see if the same crimes were being committed there before I made a decision.

Meanwhile, the paintings are lovely and I'm going to go again. I feel that as an illustrator I can learn a lot from him when I am confident enough to loosen up my style.

True Generosity

Authentic generosity is private and isn't spread all over social media like a pizza topping. Something made me think of that this morning, not sure what.

Spring at Trent Park Water Garden