Sweet and Sour

The sweet is that the new CD will be delivered to me next week. It's out on Martin's Barbaraville Label, which is managed by Voiceprint www.voiceprint.co.uk and it's called Take One. It is very simple and very raw- the tracks were recorded as first takes (hence the title) and have no overdubs etc etc. So there are mistakes, and it's recorded in my morning voice (lots of singers don't sing till the evening) but I am still mighty proud; sometimes I feel that I hide underneath arrangements and overdubs.
It's the same as going to a party sans make-up!
It features a few songs I wrote for the Ramble-My-Rose Song Circle (Katy Carr, Nadya Ostroff and Rowen Bridler) and so it has a special place in my heart.
The sour? I am still really sick, and I can't go to see one of my most favourite singers in the Universe, Janet Kay, who is singing literally just down the road! But I have a tough teaching day tomorrow at the University of the East and I will have to get there at 8 a.m. to prepare. I went there yesterday to try to do stuff but I ended up coming home and leaving my keys behind to boot, and Offsprog 2 had to come out of school to lend me hers so I could get into the house. Meep.

Cover Design by the ever-brilliant Emerald Moseley, see www.goldtop.org for more of her work.

Helen and the Horns are 55

We are number 55 in the Myspace Jazz Chart. I didn't even know there was such a thing!
www.myspace.com/helenandthehorns
Here's the chart page for the extra-nerdy
http://www.myspace.com/music/charts/united-kingdom/jazz#/united-kingdom/jazz/artists/overall/3

From Peter Chrisp's Photo Archive

The Prodigal Embroidery

Etchings and Bantams

First day of student contact today, which I hope will be short and sweet as I don't want to poison the lot of 'em with my virus cocktail. Some time last week I bought an old mohair coat and took it to the dry cleaner's. I can't remember where or when but it's quite nice and reminds me of one I had many years ago which I wore until it was threadbare.
One of the print technicians at the Art College in Brighton has been in touch. Charlie was the etching technician and I remember trying to make paper in his office in a food blender I had been given as a 21st birthday present by McMum and McDad (I asked for a motor scooter but I think that was a bit greedy)*. I was quite upset at being given such a domestic gift when what I really wanted was some sort of door to freedom and adventure, so I wasn't upset when Charlie melted it with turpentine as he was trying to clean it. Apparently, the soggy dissolved paper ended up on the ceiling.
Best place for it!
Some time I will scan my etchings and put them on the art website. Me and my pal Mandy both had etchings exhibited in the Royal Academy. Hers was a beautiful etching of trees through a window and was commended; mine was an odd collage. I had photo-sensitised the zinc plate, and projected an image of Andy Warhol on to it, which had slipped and made an interesting accident. I drew my tap shoes under it, some old deck shoes I'd painted white with emulsion and written 'a' and 'b' on the toes of to mimic a Warhol print (these shoes caused great mirth at the Dawn Jordan School of Tap, which I attended regularly). Anyway, somebody bought my Warhol print which delighted me. I just wasn't ever able to follow up these arty things. These days, I would be put down as 'unfocused'. Actually, I probably still am in many ways.
*Martin bought me a BSA Bantam, bless him. It lives in Scotland and is the star of a little film. I will ask him for the Youtube URL and post it here. It's an ex-GPO chap and is absolutely beautiful.

Bill Oldie Gets Up and Sits Down

Oh yes Zoot (comments below) I remember the Belvedere! Shabby, damp and pondering its very existence every day.
I think I've written about this before but if you were very (un)lucky, you could witness a Sinatra-a-like in a beige suit and Grecian 1000 hair, singing lounge songs to his own reflection in the back mirror-tiles, accompanied by Bill Oldie on pianner.
Bill was about 150 years old and wore a brown suit that had probably seen better days even when he bought it. Although he was almost completely bald, a thick and lustrous tuft of grey hair poked out of the top of his shirt, as though it was making a bid for freedom before Bill pegged out. He was painfully tall, and painfully thin.
'Yer Shepherd's Pie's ready!' the woman behind the counter would shout, and pop a piping hot dish on top of the piano.
'Bill wants to get up! He's getting up! Help! Help!'
Several pubfolk rushed over to help him as he slowly, slowly rose from behind the piano, peering brightly from behind his spectacles and desperately grabbing on to the piano-lid, the back of his bentwood chair, anything, to gain a bit of leverage. This was clearly an Event.
Sitting with our half-a-lagers, we marvelled at the Sunday lunchtime excitement.
'It's OK! It's OK! He's sitting down again. You all right, Bill? It's OK! He's alright!'
Wow. Sunday lunchtime on the Brighton seafront.
We won't see days like that again!

The Chefs

I sent scans of all my old Chefs posters to Peter Lyell, who ran a website dedicated to the band.
You can look at them here http://www.sukeplow.demon.co.uk/chefs/chefs.htm
The Brighton Punk Alldayer seems to be selling out fast- maybe there need to be more shows next year. Offsprog 1 won't be able to come as the afternoon tickets have all gone, and nor will Joby as he cannot get up the stairs.
I'd like to see the Objekts (I'm still in touch with Dawn Sanders and bumped into her in Edinburgh in July), Dick Damage, Nicky and the Dots, Fan Club and yes, Joby and the Hooligans (Ricky the drummer lives on London and has been to a couple of my gigs, I'm still in touch with Joby and I'm sure we could find Steve Beardsley).
I can remember loads of Joby and the Hooligans songs!
A Vandal Ain't No Scandal
Elsinore
Skateboarder, Rollerballer
Mary Bell
Looking Through Gary Glitter's Eyes
Seeboard Gas
Got Myself a Girlfriend (this wasn't the real title, I can remember the lyrics though)
And of course, we did covers of Jonathan Richman's Roller Coaster and How Can I Leave by Dennis Brown, because I loved the bass line and I could play it, and our then drummer, Dub Duncan, was a reggae nut.
Heady times, escaping from the Teds up the back stairs of the Buccaneer (we were wearing plastic sandals and they hated that) (actually, they hated everything: any excuse for a fight!); drinking in the Windsor Tavern with its two little-old-lady owners who had a cage of budgies on the wall, and the deaf people across in the other bar who used to take the mickey out of the punks in sign language and roar with laughter; the fence who came in there drinking regularly and who tried to sell us stolen bananas; the good old Resource Centre with its printing facilities upstairs, Dawn Jordan's School of Tap crunching away next door, populated by ladies from Vokins department store, frighteningly voluptuous in their black nylon leotards, fishnet stockings and winged spectacles on chains draped round their necks and singing The Good Ship Lollipop in little-girly voices!
Brighton back then was a totally and unselfconsciously camp place.
If you were a lady over 40, you had a solidly-sculpted rococo hairdo, sprayed and coloured to the solidity and hue of antique mahogany: your boobs poked threateningly and sharply to left and right under a pastel merino cardigan with pearl buttons, done up to the neck. Your skirt was tweed and knee length, and you wore beige tights. Your shoes were patent-leather and pointy, and your face was hidden under a thick, thick layer of orangeish foundation, just on the point of crumbling: your lips were drawn on in coral, and your teeth were gleaming greyish-yellow, varnished by nicotine and set by gin and tonic.
The evening streets were populated by caricatures of gay men, some of whom would actually hiss at you if you looked nice, but some of whom were completely au fait with punk and who would be loyal and kind at the most desperate times of life. I remember a friend from Art College used to go to London clubs, as he found the Brighton ones so full of stereotypes.
There was a boxing subculture (many of whom, word had it, were drug dealers) and an antique dealers subculture (ditto); old men thwacked little boys on the bus with their walking sticks ('Let that be a lesson to yawh!'). In summer, the streets were full of young French and Italian students in bright-coloured clothes, running and shouting as if they were in a playground, oblivious to the sinister undercurrents that flowed beneath them.
There were sharks everywhere, waiting to gobble you up: and everyone from back then knows who the worst shark was.
I remember wondering where all the children were. Occasionally, you'd hear them shouting from behind a high wall but you would rarely see them. I imagined that the Pied Piper had been through and taken them all away, perhaps freezing them and turning them into dolls in an antique shop window.
There were mad things: the toucan who wolf-whistled when you walked past the pet shop in Gardiner Street; the cork shop; the budgies in so many pubs: the King and Queen in the Old Steine had a gigantic outdoor cage full of them. The damp houses! Someone I knew came in to college one day and told me the front was falling off her house.
There were romantic lives. One young man lived in a house draped with bronze coloured chenille and kept a dovecote with white turtle doves in his back garden. He dressed in green velvet to complement his red-gold hair and showed us a box where a mother Egyptian cat was lying with a litter of tiny elfin brown kittens.
There were nasty lives too. I went to a party once where (pre-punk) a giant swastika was hung from the wall and everyone was dressed in authentic Nazi uniforms, posing coldly with their drinks and one-upping each other. I couldn't wait to get out of there.
Partying could be dangerous. We were all leaping up and down ('dancing') on the upstairs floor of a squat in Bedford Square when someone pointed out that the central support of the house was missing and the floor might simply collapse at any minute.
I worked as a cook, and later, a coat-check girl, in a big nightclub called Sherry's. There were regular handbag fights at closing time, and young itinerant workers used to stand at the counter and sell each other girls. If a girl liked one of them and he didn't want to get off with her, he would sell her to his friend, telling the girl that his friend fancied her and he did not. They seemed to think that I was some kind of not-girl, and they simply did not care what I thought of this at all.
I made extra money when I was sent out glass-collecting. The clientele got extremely drunk, and every time I took a bunch of glasses back to the bar I could find a couple of quid in change on the floor that had fallen from the men's pockets as they fumbled for change to pay for their drinks.
I worked in a shop called Gallery 57 in The Lanes with Alison, Little Claire, Steph, Linda and Andrea, having some of the best times of my life and writing to John Peel surreptitiously when I should have been working. Nigel used to come in regularly, in his cups and always ready to show us the neat little rows of transplanted hair he had paid for out of the royalties of a South-American hit song he had penned. He got narked one day and grabbed me round the neck, bashing my head on the thick layer of brown sheets of wrapping paper on the counter in full view of the customers with the ever-present Twin Guitars of Don and Juan plinking away innocently in the background. The customers carried on serenely looking at the postcard racks and leafing though the posters. This was Brighton, after all.
Ah, memories, memories. I have far too much thinking time at the moment as I am still too knocked out to leave my room. Back to the book (Our Kind of Traitor by John Le Carre, which I ended up buying because my library card got stolen and I simply didn't have the energy to go through the process of getting another one on Friday, alhtough I did make a donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee http://www.dec.org.uk/ as I said I would).

Jumble Sales and Perfume

Wish I hadn't gone out yesterday: at least I can take it easy today. It was interesting having a Man-'flu competition with three guys on the tube. Needless to say, I won. The first cough was the deepest....
I also detected people amongst the crowds with the same virus; we have the same trade mark cough, a deep bray that means business. Not for us the discreet hiccup and sniff!
Anyway that's enough of the self pity for today. I have been blog-browsing, and have realised just what a mess of scraps this one is.
I put this down to the fact that I have lived a life of jumble sales and charity shops, from the sixpenny stacks of scratched vinyl 7" singles tied up with hairy twine that I used to buy the the Wylam Institute jumble sales, through the cornucopia of 1930s spectacles and shoes in the Brighton Oxfam, to the current discarded silks and mohairs of the wealthy London suburbs. Bits and pieces, random and disposable.
I don't have a blog-bar or 'subscribe' because I feel that blogs are about freedom and not commitment, but I have started to do a lot of roaming and browsing and it's fascinating to see what people enthuse about.
One of my favourite blogs is Anne's (frayedattheedge.typepad.co.uk). I am charmed by her graceful life in the borders and the creativity of both her and her partner. I also heard from Vanessa yesterday, whose blog bonkersaboutperfume.blogspot.com is part of a whole perfume community that I knew nothing about. Vanessa is a Monochrome Set fan and had been at the first-ever Helen and the Horns gig at Kingston Polytechnic, where we supported them.
That was the gig where we decided to be just Helen and the Horns; the plan had been to rehearse just the Horns, and then Lester Square would join us on guitar and Mike Slocombe on drums. The Monochrome set offered us a gig and much to our surprise, the audience gave us a fantastic reception just the way we were (and there were only two Horns at that gig, too).
The Monochrome Set did the same with Bananarama, who then went on to outstrip everyone, which of course we applauded (while licking our wounds at the same time).
Ah well. I'm surveying the dust balls and dirty dishes, unable to stir up any energy to do anything about them. Offsprog 2 is listening to somebody whinesome upstairs (Rufus Wainwright, possibly) and I'm unable to counteract with blasts of good cheer as the downstairs CD player is broken. Radio? All too silly apart from Radio 4 which is often unbearable due to the quantity of people who seem to have taken elocution lessons from Stephen Fry. I'm tuning in to the happy chirrupings of next door's baby instead. My next song will be entitled 'Baby Talk'.

Art Hate

Somewhat like Madonna (but infinitely less annoyingly), Billy Childish is a re-inventor-of-self. He was in the bands Milkshakes and Thee Headcoats, he was the chief Stuckist, and then he was him for a while. Now he is the conductor of the Art Hate campaign, and he has the extreme moustache to prove it!
He came twice to talk to the songwriting students at the University of the West, most of whom responded to him with a combination of one-upmanship and arse-licking (something I am frequently guilty of myself actually, but not this time). They could not cope with him saying "I am going to show you how to play guitar badly really well", and then going on to do just that.
I had been hoping to go to the private view of this exhibition with my Champagne Friend on Tuesday but was too conked out to make it. After about 14 hours sleep last night I dragged the bones down to Cork Street this avo as I felt I had to see it, and it closes this evening.
After walking through Burlington Arcade, where exceedingly rich people saunter exceedingly slowly (they can, after all, buy as much time as they like with their millions), the Gallery at 28 Cork Street was a welcome relief.
I absolutely loved the big posters which had a real Russian Revolutionary feel combined with a bit of 1950s England circa 10 Rillington Place. My fave was this big horsy that looked far to silly to trample on the faces of the artisticly weak, but maybe that's just my own failed anthropomorphism.
There were also some fascinating teeny little sculptures, all with a direct lineage back to Marcel Duchamp via punk and the army-surplus version of the First World War. This is the version of Britain so much loved by the League of Gentlemen, engendering the sort of horrible curiosity you feel when following up a bad smell.
I bought a vinyl single which I won't be able to play until I've saved up for a jukebox, but the Gallery Assistant told me it was Pretty Vacant sung by Billy and KLF Cauty and blank on the other side, although I'm sure it's not because that's not what it says on the cover. I told him about Paul Jones' easy-listening versions of Pretty Vacant and Sheena is a Punk Rocker, all lush strings'n'things and it turned out that he was a big Manfred Man fan!
There is a book associated with the exhibition, at 35 sheets too expensive for me. But I think some of the artefacts are exhibited in their place in the East End. It's definitely worth going and following up this link to see what it's all about http://www.arthate.com/
Brilliant.
Another member of the Art Hate collective is Jamie Reid, who invented what you could call Blackmail Typescript, which was used to effectively by the Sex Pistols.
He used to come to Brighton a bit years ago, and was once Sophie Richnmond's parner (she used to work with the Sex Pistols a lot at the beginning). Their children were naughty and I came into my room to find they had wedged one of my giant plastic pigeons through the door of the budgie cage, much to the consternation of the budgie, who didn't know whether to laugh or cry ( I think) at the sight of his huge, shining and immobile pigeon visitor.

Bored, Blissfully

There is something blissful about topsy-turvey time.

Warehouse clearance of jewellery? 

Pull the other one, TV channel! Those tiny weeny sliver charm necklaces wouldn't take up any space in a warehouse and wouldn't need to be cleared. 

They are from the map-pocket of your dodgy white van: be honest! 

Where did you nick 'em from?

I went out to post a letter: it started raining as I opened the front door and stopped as soon as I got back.

Did I actually post it? 

I can't remember, but I didn't have it when I got home.

I spent part of the day bidding for things I didn't want on eBay and then feeling glad I didn't win them.

I sacked the milkman for delivering the milk at 11.30 after I've gone to work, so passing burglars know the house is empty and the milk is warm and sourish when I get back. I did apologise for sacking him though. 

I think he doesn't like getting up early. He looks like a hippy.

I did a drawing of a vase full of upside-down amputated feet, then a sad person looking at it with a foot missing, and now I don't want to open the book and look at it because it frightens me!

I missed my cats, who used to curl up with me when I didn't feel well.

I opened the chest of drawers that used to belong to McDad. 

It has in it about five clothes brushes, four shoe-horns, three pairs of binoculars, two bow ties and numerous magnifying glasses in little pouches, all smelling of a mixture of mothballs and lavender. I imagined an era when people had time to brush their clothes, ease their feet into their shoes with gentle leverage, stand in front of a mirror and take on the mysterious challenge of the bow tie; and peer at faraway things through binoculars, and nearby things through magnifying glasses. 

How gentle that time must have been!

I grazed on Twiglets and tinned Li-Chis all day then Offsprog 2 and myself had breakfast at about 7.30 p.m.

I spent a long time trying to scrape a piece of baked-on raspberry cake off the cooker. 

When I finally decided to give up and leave it, I saw that I had managed to scrape off no baked-on raspberry cake but quite a lot of cooker instead, and there are scratch marks all over the stainless steel. 

Whoopsy daisy!

I hope the 'flu flies away tomorrow. 

Dings and Dongs

Too flaked out even to read- thanks to Wilky for sending me this, just what I needed.
http://www.m0ar.org/4335

Yard

Inspired by Mike Slocombe's rainy bus window photos on his blog today http://www.urban75.org/blog/london-in-the-rain-seen-from-a-double-decker-bus/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=london-in-the-rain-seen-from-a-double-decker-bus

Chefs Songs

After discovering that my library card had been nicked when Offsprog Two got mugged, I had to abandon my plans to get out a library book.
The silver lining to this was that I have made a decision to learn to play some Chefs songs for the Brighton Punk Alldayer in Brighton on the 17th of October (see www.punkbrighton.co.uk for details if you want to go).
I already play Northbound Train as a Helen and the Horns song on the rare occasions when we play as a band, but I've decided to adapt Records and Tea (probably my favourite Chefs song and a collabaration between Rod Bloor, Carl Evans and myself), Let's Make Up (a collaboration between Tracy Preston and myself) and 24 Hours. They won't sound the same as the full band versions but I will give them my best shot. Phil Byford has asked me to play some of my 'now' songs too.
That weekend is going to be a busy one- the Desperado Housewives are playing in Stoke Newington on the Saturday, and I am doing a Billy Bragg night at the Boogaloo on Monday (one BB song and two of my own). It will be blissful to wallow about in so much music!

Lady Lykez

There's a lot of Hip Hop I don't like but this girl is brilliant
http://www.livevideo.com/video/BFF57FAAF18E4BF28AB212F2EA83CC4A/lady-lykez-tryna-get-to-da-.aspx

Man Flu

Yes, I've got Man Flu.
It's the moaning that goes along with it, you see. I suppose it's logical that this strain of the virus should follow on from Avian Flu and Swine Flu; this particular mutation involves a desire to share the misery verbally.
I feel thoroughly ashamed of my rich western moans because this morning I thought of those poor flooded people in Pakistan, bumped out of the news by the bad behaviour of their cricket team.
They are still struggling, and so are the people of Haiti.
I will go to the library to borrow a trashy crime novel later on and donate the money I would have spent on a new one in the bookshop to the Disasters Emergency Committee instead.