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Lyndon's
SONGDOG
DIARY
A
lapidary log.....
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dates
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DIARY
2010
April - August 2010
 It’s
been a busy five months --- the album
came out at the end of April, we did a launch show at
Peter
Parker’s Rock n’Roll Club in
Denmark Street. Before that we played Ten Feet Tall
in Cardiff (nice venue but nigh-on nobody came!). Later
on we did another gig at Le Pub in Newport and this
was a good one, though when Corrinne went to collect
our fee at the end of the show, the promoter, so drunk
he was slurring his pauses, tried to hide behind a big
Welsh flag draped across a wall, just stood there, stock-still,
like a giant suit-of-armour covered in a dust-sheet
…We did a few sessions
for Resonance
104.4FM (for Ben
Eshmade's Arctic Circle and Dexter
Bentley’s Hello Goodbye shows - click
links to listen again) and had a wonderful
night at the Chattery in Swansea (the best live music
venue in Wales!), then we did three gigs opening for
Johnny
Dowd --- Norwich, Leicester and London’s
Borderline, all fantastic (you know me, always
so close to ontological collapse, nothingness forever
beckoning behind the veil of things, but this one afternoon,
a strong wind herding the clouds west, as we drove through
the Fens, a Harry Belafonte tune playing, I had one
of those numinous moments ---fleeting but unforgettable.
Ferdinand Bruckner wrote that the only choice we have
 is
bourgeois existence or suicide, but I’d say playing
in a travelling band is the option he overlooked). In
a while we’ll be putting up on the website some
more of the photographs Phoebe Sian Allen took of these
shows …
About a week after the Dowd tour
had finished we did the Borderline again, for Louis
Eliot's Summer Pageant, but this time the
earth failed to move, though Nick and Dave, gazing upon
the lady morris dancers’ décolletage like
Moses did the Promised Land, had a different kind of
special moment all of their own… Sometime later
we played the Windmill in Brixton, the day of the World
Cup final: I enjoyed myself a lot but Greg, the promoter
(a Welshman and a good egg), took the mic and delivered
a pretty passionate ticking-off to the pub’s management
for having turned on ‘the match’ on a screen
at the far end of the room two songs before the end
of our set. I hadn’t even been aware it’d
happened, but I was there cheering Greg on ---- my soul
was forged in the great countercultural battles of the
Sixties, when the music belonged to the longhairs
on  Max
Yasgur’s field while the football was
for the guys in the ‘bombers riding shotgun in
the sky’. For me, 1966 meant Revolver,
Pet Sounds and Blonde
on Blonde, not Bobby Moore (OK, OK, it
was the year of Raquel Welch in that fur bikini in One
Million Years BC too). Now of course,
in this technotopia we flail about in like we would
in a bucketful of shit, everything’s just fucking
entertainment, right?…
Let’s talk about something
else, something nice --- one sunny Friday evening
I did fifty minutes in the black box at the Arctic
Circle’s Folk in a Box
event at Battersea Arts Centre and this was really
something, I mean really something! There I
was, perched on a stool in light dimmer than a late
Beckett playlet, picking songs knee-to-knee with a succession
of visitors ushered one-by-one into the darkness. I
remember looking up from the fretboard somewhere during
the third song and the girl sat opposite me was gazing
back with such incredible intensity, and with
eyes so deep and beautiful I could’ve swum in
them .…The scariest thing I did all year
was getting up to tell a story at David Hepworth’s
True
Stories Told Live event in Islington back
in April -- I say story but it was more a seven-minute
preamble to the song I was doing. I talked about a childhood
friend and how we’d drifted apart when he’d
joined the army at 16 (I feared we’d meet on the
barricades somewhere, someday, me poking my daisy down
the barrel of his rifle). He’d died last year
and it’d apparently been a painful passing, so
it seemed somehow important that I know what I’d
been doing the night he’d gone; when I looked
up the date in my diary I found it was the evening I’d
started writing A Life Eroding (So Much
Sorrow), so that’s the tune I played.
I fucked up the intro --- nerves, sweaty hands --- and
had to start it again (Mary
Gauthier did the musical spot at the next
event --- I’ll talk about her in a bit ...). I
told the story and sang the song again at the Cardiff
version of True Stories Told Live a
month or so later, found it easier going the second
time around ……
The last weekend in July saw
us playing two sets at the Port
Eliot festival in Cornwall and this was
a pretty fucking amazing weekend --- it’s
a music and literary do, a kind of Latitude-West (that’s
Hugo Williams’s coinage) set
in the grounds of a baronial manor-house (the oldest
continuously-inhabited dwelling in England) occupied
by the Earl of St Germans. Corrinne and Lenny camped
onsite but we nabbed a place in a Travelodge ten minutes’
drive away. We’d drive in each morning, Lyle
Lovett’s Natural Forces
playing in the car, breakfast would be red wine and
lemon-drizzle cake up in the Tea-Rooms. I remember a
posse of 50s-style char-ladies pushing a wagon round
the site dispensing tea and biscuits; I remember too,
the one-minute disco (a van would pull up at a designated
time and place on the site, the back-doors would be
flung open, a disco track blaring from the speakers
within. The crowd would frug ecstatically for exactly
sixty seconds when the doors would slam shut and the
van drive off). We all marvelled at Grayson
Perry at the performers’ cocktail do
looking resplendent in his Bo Peep dress and bonnet.
Our shows went well (particularly the second one on
the rainy Saturday evening, our stuff works better in
the rain). Late on the Saturday night I stood down the
front for Jakob
Dylan, singing along while we waited to
You Can’t Do That with
a woman that knew the words as faultlessly as I did.
What with Jakob being on a major label he had the budget
for a hundred blokes onstage with flashlights, checking
and re-checking and then re-checking everything all
over again and these days I’m the most impatient
dude in the world (the hour’s getting late, time
is precious, don’t people realise we’re
all gonna die in the end? There’s so
much left to do and I don’t have that long left,
for Chrissakes!) so I jumped ship twenty bars  into
the opening song, but it did sound promising,
so I went and bought the album at the Rough Trade stall,
played it through four times in a row on a car journey
to Wales and think it’s a very good record, well
done Jakob. The following day I watched Kathryn
Williams’s set in the Heavenly tent
--- someone called her a national treasure, and that’s
exactly what she is (and she’s a One
Little Indian stablemate). I asked her about the looper
she was using to bank up her vocals, harmonize with
herself, etc., so I bought one when I got back to London
(though God knows when I’ll find the time to play
with it, view the demo in cobblerspace – I meant
online [!!] and so on. Fuck, I’m so busy I won’t
find the time to die …). I caught the
start of Paul Simon’s son’s set and he started
with a cover of a Tom Verlaine song,
so he scores extra points for that, but then I got distracted,
drifted off into the dark, it was that kind of night,
bumped into someone who’d told a story before
me at True Stories Told Live, “Welcome to Notting
Hill-on-sea” he said …..Thanks to Louis
Eliot for inviting us - I really do hope we
can go back next year…..Jack Douglas
(American producer, he did John & Yoko’s
Double Fantasy) contacted
us, said some really nice things about the songs, and
Robert
Wyatt rang Jane at the Spitz (she’s
promoting our show at King’s Place
in late September) praising A Life Eroding,
and we get a lot of nice messages from people all over
the world telling us how much the music means to them;
it helps enormously to hear it and more than offsets
all the ressentiment (in all its various guises)
you have to put up with (ask anyone who’s doing
anything, they’ll tell you). So it’s been
a very memorable year so far, and there’s still
Japan to go (plus, the CMJ Festival in New York have
registered an interest, asking us if we’d be available
to go in mid-October; if that gets firmed up into an
official invitation we’ll be there, believe
me!).
I saw that new Christopher
Nolan film Inception
and I don’t know if it’s good or not (though
I suspect it was bollocks), I came out shell-shocked,
traumatised, so much CGI just overwhelms one’s
cerebral cortex. I liked The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo but that was Swedish, and
I love almost anything Swedish --- it goes without saying
that Wallander is just sublime
(especially the Swedish one, though Ken Branagh’s
good too), easily the best thing on TV since Deadwood.
I didn’t really pay it the attention it deserved
but I liked what I saw of the newest take on Sherlock
Holmes: no-one will ever better Jeremy
Brett, but the guy with the funny name made a very commendable
stab at it. Another film I saw months ago but that still
haunts me is The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly,
directed by Julian Schnabel, it’s
harrowing and poetic …Records-wise, there are
the new ones by Jakob Dylan and Kathryn
Williams but the best record of the year by
a hundred miles (I’m not including us, what d’you
take me for, a bighead?) is absolutely, definitely
Mary
Gauthier’s The Foundling.
Man, is  this
a good record! It’s about her having been adopted
and then one day locating her birth mother and making
the call, it’s a subject I relate to and I so
wish I could’ve written some of these songs, they’re
just so beautiful and heartbreaking. All her albums
have been brilliant but this one really is the best
ever and reveals her to be as magnificent a songwriter
as Lucinda Williams. I’m telling
you, the track “March 11 1962” will just
annihilate you …. I spent five days in
Wales alone recently and I played this masterpiece over
and over and over and over …Wouldn’t it
be great if records like this got to number 1 and all
the crap that actually does just faded away, didn’t
even get made?
Randy Newman’s
done it and so has Loudon Wainwright
and now I think I’m tempted to do it too --- re-record
say a dozen or fourteen of our best songs purely acoustically,
‘soundhole-and-the-knee’-style. I played
“An Old Man’s Love”
that way to a friend recently and he suggested it (a
little gang of us headed for Llanhilleth Working Men’s
Club, intending to book a slot at their open-mic night,
do a few tunes in memory of Fred, but we’d been
misinformed as to the date. Still, we spent a sunny
hour on a bridge over the Ebbw, laughing/crying over
so much of the stuff that’d come and gone, so
much water under the bridge, as it were ….). So,
it might really happen if I can fit it in, it’d
only take a couple of days, wouldn’t it?
I’ve probably forgotten a whole bunch of stuff
I wanted to say or need to tell you but I’ve been
typing for hours, there’s red wine swilling round
my very atoms, I’d best go. So bye for now and
try not to get lost in the data-smog.
DO COME TO THE KING’S
PLACE GIG: BOOK YOUR TICKET TODAY! I’LL BE SINGING
TRUE STORIES OF MY ADVENTURES IN THE GREAT HUMAN DESERT,
RELATED WITH ALL THE HURT AND PAIN OF DISENCHANTED INSIGHT!
Aw, fuck, I’m drunk! Look,
just come, will you? ……..
April 2010
When I began this diary I meant
to be dedicated, assiduous (but then the chance of failure
stalks every human venture, especially mine) in its
upkeep, and look at me! --- I haven't posted in months!
…. Ah, but I've been busy …. We've been at Terminal
rehearsing the songs from the upcoming album in readiness
for our show at Peter Parker's Rock n 'Roll
Club at 4 Denmark Street on April 22nd
(it's a funky little oubliette beneath Regent Sound
--- now a guitar shop but once the studio where the
Stones recorded their first couple of LPs). We're on
about 8:45pm and we'll do all the tunes
on "A Life Eroding" (released April 26th
but I think there'll be copies on sale at the gig),
though not necessarily in the order they come on the
record (I haven't decided yet). There'll be no room
for a harp and a string-quartet up there (we'll go to
those lengths later in the year) but Jerome who did
the string-arrangements will adapt the parts for a keyboard
for Gregor Riddell of the Solstice Quartet to play (I
think we can squeeze in John Hoare and his trumpet).
Hannah
Peel's on before us and she's great, so
turn up early. Bear in mind the fact that we don't remember
whole days, we remember moments, and this
will be a moment!
We did some very nice shows back
earlier in the year, first for the splendid Spitz people
at the King's Cross Social Club and then one with Jason
McNiff at Milford's, in the Strand. Shortly
afterwards, Jason invited us to collaborate with him
on a version of Townes Van Zandt's "Mr Mudd & Mr Gold"
(Jason sang Mr Gold and I voiced Mr Mudd ….). It's for
a Townes tribute album that'll be released later in
the year, with proceeds to go to charity. We had one
rehearsal, recorded it at Guerillasound the next day
and it came out rather well, so look out for it. ("Another
game, Mister Gold? "Shuffle and deal, Mister Mudd!"
….).
I'm really no fan of telly but
I admit I've been bowled over by BBC4's "Great American
Songbook" series, with some wonderful films on Johnny
Mercer (genius! GENIUS!!), Sinatra (GENIUS!), Nina Simone
(oh-my-God! GENIUS!!), Ella Fitzgerald (GENIUS!) and
Louis Armstrong ("No-one will ever touch Louis Armstrong"
said a pundit; he wasn't lying. GENIUS!). Re Gershwin,
Mercer and all the rest: what the hell happened to the
art of songwriting after those
guys? Well, for one, the power-chord
was invented (hang your head in shame, Jim Marshall
…). A critic on the New York Times apparently wrote
that somewhere in the late 1960s rhythm triumphed over
melody and it's a crying shame. I've served my time
in the moshpit, ("figuratively speaking" he sniffed
fastidiously ….), I've thrilled to the wattage so many
times, but that's not really about music, that's something
else …. The day the music
died actually occurred a lot earlier than I used to
think it had; now there are a million bands but not
all that much music ….. (And
"The buying and selling of music, what they've done
to it, is a disaster on the scale of cutting down the
rainforest": Robert Crumb). The funniest
thing on TV lately (unintentionally so!) was the first
part of BBC4's look at Goldsmiths's college: don't miss
part two.
Charlie
Gillett's death was so sad to hear about:
I first came across him in his Record Mirror
and Let It Rock days and by the time I came
to London he was running Oval Records: he championed
both the band I started out in and, later, Songdog (we
did a session on his radio show back when "Haiku" came
out). He seemed too nice a man to be part of the music
business.
I've been ill for so much of
this year, I've had a two-month cold, various infections,
neuralgia, toothache, I bust my knee (I'm still limping
slightly) and I was back in A & E last weekend with
the kidney-stone-horror blues. Let's make a deal: you
buy my new record in sufficient quantities and I'll
retire to a private sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. There'll
be a big cardboard cut-out of me in HMV's flagstore
window while I'll be muffled up, medicated and walking
the paths Nietzsche strolled as he dreamed up Zarathustra:
come the gloaming I'll retire to my chalet and my leggy
nurse and sob over my vast pile of royalty statements,
sobbing at the waste even in a fortunate life, at the
isolation even in a life rich in intimacy ……
Tomorrow night I'm doing a turn
at David Hepworth's "True
Stories Told Live" event in Islington. It'll have
happened by the time you read this, but I'll tell you
about it next time.
It's not nice, but I have to
finish with this. It's from Jonathan Safran Foer's book
"Eating Animals" (Penguin, £20), it's describing the
treatment of cattle in an abattoir and it really needs
no comment: "Sometimes the steel bolt only dazes the
animal, which either remains conscious or wakes up as
it is being 'processed'. 'Processing' continues with
wrapping a chain round the animal's leg and hoisting
it into the air. Then it is moved to a 'sticker', who
cuts its throat. If the steel bolt hasn't done its work
the animals are blinking and stretching their necks
from side to side, looking around, really frantic. Then
they move on to the 'head skinner' where the skin is
peeled off the head of the animal. Some cattle, not
the majority but a non-negligible minority, find themselves
still conscious at this stage. Then onto the 'leggers',
who cut off the lower portions of the animals' legs.
At this point, as far as the ones that come back to
life go, the cattle just go wild, kicking in every direction."
Till next time.
January 2010
Belated New Year greetings to
you, my friends --- hey, wasn’t all that snow
just so beautiful (even though I skidded on
ice and crashed my car!)? I was snowed in in Wales all
over Xmas, still made a Christmas Day trek to Cwrt-y-Bella
churchyard --- some years that’s walk’s
magical and this year’s was particularly so (the
church shown in the photograph is long gone). True,
Santa didn’t deliver the leggy Amazons I’d
ordered but there was plenty of red wine and much cruciverbalism,
there was also the brilliant “The Hurt Locker”
on DVD and I made inroads into a new song. 2009 had
ended rather nicely (but for the deaths of a few people
I cared about), a few nice bits of business to attend
to, a photo session in the Tristan Bates Theatre off
Cambridge Circus, then four of us went pall-bearing
on Camber Sands (all in the name of the next album-sleeve.
A guy from the council turned up and asked if we had
the necessary permissions to be there doing that, said
there was a fee due whether it be us, Coldplay or even
Robbie Williams ---- he had half a point there, I’d
charge those guys for dicking about on my beach too
--- and, furthermore, permission would be dependent
upon our producing documentation to show we had a trillion
dollars’ worth of insurance --- ah, don’t
you just love a bureaucrat! … The upshot
was we had to find another beach to tote our coffin
round --- a Welsh one, three days later. We did a so-so
show at the Windmill in Brixton, then a really good
gig in Newport to see the year out (we‘d been
invited to play by our MySpace friends The Flying Spider
Revival) and we got asked back to the Windmill in early
January, this time doing it as a four-piece, and played
a lovely one).
There’s new Songdog album
out on April 26th on One Little Indian, it’s called
“A Life Eroding” and here’s
a bit of a track-by-track commentary: 
1. A Life Eroding (So Much
Sorrow) This was the last song written for the
record, the recording was well advanced when I added
this one, written in the dying months of the first decade
of the new millennium, a decade where nothing much had
happened to be hopeful about. In recent years I seem
to have spent quite a bit of time loading the detritus
of peoples’ lives into bin-bags, - people that
Time had used up and finished with -- and that’s
where the “rooting round that drawer you kept
your secrets in” verse came from. Nick (the producer)
wouldn’t fund me a glass harmonica player but,
accommodating cove that he is, the track ended up with
him and Alison (the harpist) doing the honours on quality
wine-glasses.
2. Obediah’s Waltz
I’d been fiddling with the DNA of the Tom Jones/Alex
Harvey hit, “Delilah”, I had it pinned down
in my lab, recycling its old bits, re-routing the circuitry,
reconfiguring the whats and wherefores in the Cubist
manner. My song’s still about jealousy and murder
but it’s the unfaithful lady’s lover that
gets it, not the Jezebel herself.
 3.
Gene Autry’s Ghost This one’s really
a paean to old vinyl, technology’s finest achievement:
passing time can erode love and life itself may mock
everything you stand for but old vinyl won’t ever
let you down. The first person I ever saw strum a guitar
was Gene Autry, in a film at Saturday-morning pictures
at the Capitol on Hall Street, and watching him caressing/pawing
his woman-shaped plank was just as thrilling as seeing
him socking it to the guys in the black hats.
4. 3:30am (Small Talk)
This was the first song I wrote for the album and it
was only meant to get us started, get us used to the
idea that we really were putting together a new record
again, but it grew stronger as we worked on it --- and
when I heard Jerome Green’s string-arrangement,
that clinched it, I knew we definitely had to include
the track. The guy in the song behaves like a prick,
I suppose, but I was rooting for him anyway because
his nemesis --- “the kind of guy to forgive himself
all the shit he’ll ever do” --- is a type
really going places in this newer, cleaner, braver,
saner world we live in and I hate him for it: it’s
a pity he has to prevail, but that’s how it would
pan out in real life, these modern men at ease with
themselves and at one with the way we live now are fucking
invincible ….
5. 1979 This song looks
back to our first years in London, up from the Welsh
valleys, and Romantics all the way down to the medulla.
Late ‘70s London was raging with the punk/New
Wave fever, they were the very best of times (we came
up in ’76) I felt like Wordsworth in revolutionary
Paris! (Woah, the way those PA stacks used to start
wobbling when the whole crowd would stomp along to “It’s
So Good It’s Incest” or some other such
‘classic’ at the Two Brewers, the stage
awash with beer and broken glass). “But when you
wake up from a dream there’s no getting back there”
--- it’s passing time again, eroding away all
the best things, it’s the album’s theme.
6. Elaine This song
pretty much came out of the band just jamming, a way
we never usually work: a mash-up of Raymond Chandler
and Morricone and christened with the name of the first
girl I can remember fancying.
7. Shaman A song about
an oracle that’s lost the gift of prophecy --
I was struggling with writer’s block for a while
and the idea came out of that: he hopes love will restore
his gift so he can “keep the gods of oil and silicon
onside”.
8. I Got Drunk And I Wrote
You A Poem I’d had this tune for a long time
but had never found exactly the right arrangement for
it, so we used a string-quartet and finally nailed it.
We modelled the guitar sound on the kind of stuff they’d
play before the film started in the cinema when we were
kids, the type of thing you’d hear murmuring away
from behind the curtain before the Elvis film or Audie
Murphy or Ty Hardin or whoever came on --- at the Capitol
in Hall Street again (long ago demolished, there’s
a law court on the site now).
9. It’s Raining On
The Old Cat’s Grave It’s this guy with
his future caving in addressing an old flame who’s
sleeping off another binge in her grotty bedsit. They’re
both “growing old in a snake-pit” but if
she wakes up before he leaves they’ll still laugh
together till the sun comes up. When I visualize it
I imagine it looking like a Pinter play in black-and-white
on mid-Sixties’ TV. (Remember “The Wednesday
Play”?). And, like a lot of my songs, if you tilt
your head at a particular angle in a certain light you’ll
see it has a ‘happy ending’.
10) An Old Man’s Love
Along with the title track my favourite song on the
album, there’s something about the way the chords
hang together reminds me somehow of songs from the pre-rock
n’ roll era. It’s another tune about falling
in love with a call-girl, a perennial song-topic for
me.
11) The Widow This
was the most difficult one on the record to get right,
it caused us a lot of headaches. A man has a one-night
stand with a woman who’s in town to scatter her
husband’s ashes on the lake: he wakes up, she’s
gone and he wishes she wasn’t: too much disappointment
will erode a life, just like time does, they work as
a double act, the bastards. And still the big blue ball
rolls on through space, going nowhere.
Place your advance orders now,
pop-pickers! If you found “A Wretched Sinner’s
Song” too long and ‘difficult’ (you
did?!! What are you? An idiot?) why
not give this latest effort a go instead, most attractively
scrubbed-up in a pleasing new SingalongaSongdog-stylee
……!
So that was the ‘noughties’,
huh? Started with the Dome and ended in Afghanistan,
with 9/11, Iraq, plagues and tsunamis, Dubya & Blair,
New Labour, celebrity culture, reality TV, the worldwide
financial collapse, Simon Cowell and much, much more
in between, a real global shit sandwich of a decade
--- that squeaking you hear is the wobbly wheel on the
handcart we’re all off to hell in. There’s
surely a new Dark Age coming …… 
Corrinne’s father, Remo,
died last week. He was one of the most charming people
I’d ever met, a gentle man and a fine singer (there’s
a snippet of him singing “Martha” on our
first album “The Way of the World”). He
painted, collected antiques and was a life-long left-winger,
and I salute him and greatly regret his passing, he
was a genuine original. (I’ve just learned, too,
that Gary Price has died: Gary -- he’s Simon Price
the music journalist’s dad -- helped my band a
great deal in his capacity as a producer for BBC Wales
and was a lovely man: hats off to him).
We’re doing a show for
Cool as Folk upstairs at the Ritzy picturehouse in Brixton,
on January 27th --- put you down as a yes, shall I?
My friend Bronwen was telling
me about a group of social theorists and anthropologists
who’re trying to calculate the precise date at
which Western civilisation will reach its nadir: I get
panic attacks if I dwell on it, so I’m off to
lie down, pray for more snow.
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