2011’s
been a pretty good year for us, looking back we seem
to have squeezed an awful lot in --- and that’s
just the stuff fit to print. Hart Crane remembered much
forgetfulness, I just forget everything I meant to remember
(it’s the amnesia of existence, life’s gift
to us all), but anyway, there’s another record
in the can (comes out in May 2012), we met Jasper Salmon,
did a load of good gigs, my throat got better and there
was a new Tom Waits album (good omen for 2012: there’s
a new Leonard Cohen one coming –“Old Ideas”).
We’ve
been mopping up the year in style, did four shows in
West Wales at the start of the month, all damn good,
we should’ve just carried on going --- we did
the Parrot in Camarthen, the Cooper’s in Aberystwyth,
the Tabernacle in Machynlleth and then a return to the
Hafod in Devil’s Bridge: here’s a big thank-you
to Jasper and Mavis for making it happen, much respect
and a big hug to Andy Gatherar, soundman magnifique,
who not only manned the sound-desk throughout but played
a lovely set each night before we went on, and a big,
wet smacker to Paul Wellington, an old friend of ours
from a million years ago (he’d trekked across
Europe with us one dark November/December in the mid-80s
when we were opening for A-Ha …!) who travelled
down from oop north and spent the final two days helping
us roll up cables, hump gear and drink Guinness.
After the Hafod
show guitars, mandolins, snare-drums and fiddles appeared
from all over the county and there was a singalong till
3am --- I recollect “Bring It On Home To Me”,
“I Shall Be Released”, “Helpless”,
“Urban Spaceman” and “It’s All
Over Now” --- I recall much red wine, I swear
I’ll never forget Jed’s pneumatic-drill
of a strumming arm…At a wholly different end of
the experiential scale we spent a magical afternoon
in a local church listening to a harpist and dulcimer-player/singer
performing winter-songs and old hymns like Rosetti’s
beautiful “In The Bleak Mid-Winter”, sang
in Welsh; we stepped out into the churchyard afterwards,
our souls refreshed, only Dave’s tatty, lustful
and threadbare old thing still besmirched with
sin …When the adventure was over and we had to
travel home the heavens wept, torrentially, all the
way back to London…
The
landscape of New Cross, London SE14 may leave a lot
to be desired in comparison with Devil’s Bridge,
Cardiganshire, but there are still beauties to be beheld
for those in-the-know, and one such was Alison Blackhall’s
harp-playing (another is that harsh-grained photo of
me aged 20 or something taken chiaroscuro one summer
afternoon in the window of 18A Shardeloes Road, just
up the road!) when she and I did a four-song set at
the Amersham on Dec. 19th (it’s the pub whose
Take Courage sign emblazoned across the front
fortified us so much in those early years in London
living in a damp, rat-infested shithole and as homesick
as hell). Alison is a lovely lady and a superb musician
and we intend to do some more stuff together in the
New Year (there are a couple of clips up on YouTube,
including a version of Shipwrecks,
a song hailing back to the very first Songdog album).
I’ll just
mention the passing of two men who mattered (and how
hard is that, ever?) --- Vaclav Havel and Christopher
Hitchens. They’ll
be missed.
OK, that’s
it. On. Somehow on. Have a good one and let’s
make a date for next year.
Ta-ra.
November
2011
At long, long last
we’ve finished the album -- our sixth! -- fourteen
more messages-in-a-bottle to saturate your imaginations
in the coming days (it’ll be out next year and
it’ll be called “Last Orders at Harry’s
Bar”), fourteen more toe-tappers on the joys and
terrors of the human condition! Here’s how it
looks like shaping up (and it’s the first one
we’ve done without any keyboards whatsoever):
1) A Thousand Roads to
Hell - This is a song I wrote over Xmas last
year, and on the morning of New Year’s Day we
did a little video of me strumming the tune in St David’s
Wood --- it’s on YouTube
somewhere. Jasper Salmon’s on violin and Jimmy
Forres plays a lovely guitar solo.
2) A Million Times
- Just me on this one, I used the Martin in an open-G
tuning. This was the very first track we recorded for
the record, we did it at Nick’s place on Wednesday
May 18th this year.
3) Those Straight-to-Video
Kind of Days - I wrote the lyric in Wales over
Christmas (most of the songs for this record were written
in November and December last year) but the melody I’d
had for decades, from the days when we were living in
a gloomy little flat in New Cross just after moving
to London. (The melody of Montparnasse off
A Wretched Sinner’s Song dates from the
same period). Another Jasper track. Dave’s on
drums and castanets. This track was meant to fade but
I rather like the way it just peters out, so we may
just leave it like that. Inspired by a Banksy postcard
I noticed on a stall on the Portobello Road.
4) Last Orders at Harry’s
Bar - Ah, one of my favourites! A song about
the dead grip of the past, about missed opportunity
and been-forgotness. Pod and Jimmy Forres share guitar
duties and it sounds like one beautiful part. All the
characters in these songs are hunkered down in --- or
headed for sooner or later --- Harry’s Bar, we
all are ….. “Where did it all go?
--- I mean, everything? The journey never ends, it’s
just the travellers do …..”. You can hear
this one on our Soundcloud
page.
5) St Lucy’s Day
- Alison Blackhall plays a lovely harp on this track,
it’s a hot pick with all who’ve heard the
record so far. (St Lucy’s the patron saint of
the blind, a light-bringer; her feast day’s December
13th, it’s a mid-winter thing. They martyred her,
of course, as they do all the best people in the end).
(This one can be heard on Soundcloud
too).
6) Bumpy Roads
- Here’s me looking on the bright side, in a funny
key (Jasper had to re-tune his fiddle for this one),
it’s about all those little consolations that
hold a life together (it’s not a long
tune, obviously) --- I love the harmonica on this. On
June 9th we spent an awful, awful day at a
studio in Bromley, putting down most of the drum tracks
--- we were short of time, there were technical problems,
blazing rows, etc. I remember doing the guitar part
to this in a murderous mood: all roads lead
to Harry’s Bar, but sometimes you have to go via
fucking Bromley!!!
7) The Kid in the Super-8
Film - I found an old birthday-card sent me
long ago, a bunch of letters and a photograph with a
message on the back …. There are twelve lines
of vocal and then this big, big instrumental
ending (Pod’s well chuffed with it!).
Nick mixed it once and then he did it all over again
‘cos he wanted it even BIGGER, and he
reached across for his bow and bass like John Wayne
reaching for his rifle, i.e. like a man meaning business
…. “ … still, they felt like the best
of times, every blue moon turned golden ….”
.
8) Monster of the Deep
- I wrote this song in the afternoon and then recorded
it the same evening, just the one take; I meant it as
a demo but it sounds great just the way it is, voice
and acoustic guitar.
9) Sex, Death & Country
Music - We did this in G, maybe it should’ve
been D, I don’t know. It’s kind of …jaunty?
Not my favourite track, this, but when I suggested maybe
holding it back as a B-side or something there was uproar,
so it’s in. (Plus, if we’d left it off,
the record would’ve been 13 tracks long, and we’d
have risked alienating the triskaidekaphobics among
the fanbase, am I right?).
10) Sunshine/Moonshine
- Three violin parts on this one, a bodhran and a vaguely
Celtic-sounding chorus.
Like The Kid in the Super-8 Film, this one
originated in a cache of old love-letters I came across
hidden in a pile of Melody Makers. Each verse
starts with a ‘sunshine’ bit and ends with
a ‘moonshine’ part, but in the final verse
I invert them so that, technically, the song has a happy
ending…
11) The Lies I Tell Valerie
- This was the first song I wrote for the project, I
came up with it while we were still recording A
Life Eroding, but it was too late to include it
on that record, though we always knew it’d be
a key song on this new one. Joe Wilkes plays a wonderful
‘cantina’ acoustic guitar part. The drunken
choir bellowing along behind me on the choruses was
formed of Nick, Pod and Dave after a long evening on
the Chateauneuf du Pape at the Hotel Hafod in Devil’s
Bridge: very, very late that night we retreated to the
Yellow Room where all the gear was set up and we did
the BVs ---no-one expected them to make the final mix,
but, er…they did…!
12) Swansong
- This one I started writing in my hotel-room in Japan
when we played there in September last year and we’ve
done it live a few times recently. Because it’s
about a singer we intended putting a doo-wop combo under
me on the choruses but time ran out, money got tight,
etc. Still, I like this track a lot.
13) Something For The
Woman With Everything - “A werewolf’s
claw, the Medusa’s gaze, and a flame from the
bush on Mount Sinai” or “A mushroom cloud
and a unicorn too”. And I’m greatly enjoying
that nice major-seventh chord it ends on.
14) Red Orchids
- This one’s barely three minutes long; at Devil’s
Bridge Jasper came back the day after he’d finished
his parts to add some violin to this one, and then a
while later to Nick’s place in south London to
add some more; Dave spent half a day in the Yellow Room
splashing cymbals. At the end of the song the guy’s
off to raise a glass to Bacchus in the company of a
barmaid who’s seen and heard it all --- I’m
guessing he’ll find her in the backroom at Harry’s
Bar.
So there you are, then: one fine
morning sometime next year the record will be sent out
into the great big cruel world with a packed-lunch and
a Travelcard to face the critical praetorian guard.
Three cheers for David! Massed boos for Goliath!
We
revisited the Hotel Hafod again in early October for
a show with Mabon (it turned out that their guitarist
and I attended the same grammar school and were in the
same year, though we didn’t remember each other!)
--- I had a cold and a ragged throat but the gig went
well, and, afterwards, we drank red wine out under the
stars to the distant boom of the waterfalls (I think
it’s what they mean by ‘stealing a beautiful
moment’). We’re back there again in early
December, along with three other shows in the environs
of Mid-Wales and the details will be up on the website
and on Facebook and all the other usual places by now,
so please go check. Otherwise, most of October was spent
mixing the album (Nick fingered the faders, we peeked
over his shoulder a lot) and I’ve been writing
more songs in readiness for whatever may follow Last
Orders at Harry’s Bar (in that connection,
while I think of it, thanks to Maggy Burrowes for duetting
with me on the Beauty & The Beast demo).
All that’s spoiled what otherwise would’ve
been a very nice autumn for me is this throat problem
that I’ve had for well over two months --- prayer,
Strepsils, and antibiotics have all proved useless,
so I’m finally off to see a specialist next week
(you don’t think it’s fucking throat-cancer,
do you? Or maybe nodes or something …?). We had
a nice meal in the West End with JJ (he’s making
a video of A Life Eroding) and Michelle from
One Little Indian, another with Kia (we dined in a restaurant
opposite the Harold Pinter Theatre where Thandie Newton’s
currently appearing in Death & The Maiden
and I lived in constant hope Thandie’d pop out
on a fag-break, that we’d lock eyes across Panton
Street, that she’d burst into the restaurant and
fling herself down in my lap, but alas, the hope proved
forlorn).
On the afternoon of Hallowe’en
we did a photo-session with Cathy Dupuy in the catacombs
at West Norwood cemetery and there should be a picture
from it somewhere hereabouts. What else have I enjoyed
since last we spoke? --- In October I bought the DVD
of Martin Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison,
Living in the Material World, lapped that right
up, (hell, I even bought the photo-book!) and then,
a fortnight later, there was Bad As Me, the
outstanding new Tom Waits record. And I started on a
diet and I’ve lost a little weight. And then there’s
the second volume of Beckett’s letters just out,
1941-1956 ---- look, I’m concentrating on all
the good things here, obviously, I could just
as easily regale you with a litany of despair,
but I won’t, I mustn’t. Or maybe I will
next time, but…What else?
No,
here’s something sad I do need to mention, the
news of Jackie Leven’s death.
My band once opened for Doll By Doll at Dingwalls, Jackie
used up all our load-in time doing vocal exercises at
the mic, right up to doors, so we had to go on without
a soundcheck (oddly enough, Marsha Hunt did the very
same thing to us at the very same venue?) and the ensuing
Sounds review deemed us ‘cacaphonous’,
therefore I was mildly peeved for years, until Songdog
did a show with him in Amsterdam a long time afterwards
and he was just lovely, a proper gentleman and a magnificent
performer, I loved everything about him (OK, so maybe
not his shapeless, distressed denim shorts). It ain’t
right that the good ’uns keep dying (it’ll
be Christopher Hitchens before long, I suppose) while
the Evil Shit A-Listers (the X-Factor Fuhrer with the
square chin and the smuggest grin or Tony Blair
--- add the names of your choice here) just seem to
thrive – or at least, get away with it (and even
when they don’t, it can still
feel wrong --- I mean, the manner of Gaddafi’s
death was shameful)… Anyway, RIP Jackie Leven.
I wanted this diary entry to
have a happy ending, so consider this: The Killing
is back (I wanted to shout that from the rooftops in
my opening line but I saved it for last!). I’ll
say it again: The fucking Killing’s
back!!!!!
Godnat
September
2011
Wasn’t
life great once, when you were young and lived life
just for shits and giggles? When for just ten bob and
a green apple (existentially speaking) all the permanence
of the firmament was yours for knowing? Didn’t
you just love the slow advancement of the days?
Life set the bar so high then that ensuing disappointment
was inevitable, I suppose (one of my disappointments
--- and I have a lot --- is that animals can’t
listen to and enjoy my music). Certainty was easy ---
when I was about sixteen I was certain I’d
be married to Esther Ofarim eventually, that it was
only a matter of time and my coming to her notice (sure,
I felt bad about what it would do to Abi, him seeming
such a nice guy and all, but, alas, love takes no prisoners
…). For me, the death of the 60s and all its utopianism
was catastrophic (now here I am, gruel for
blood, tending my little circumscribed flake in the
steaming manure heap of the ochlocracy and telling myself
I should be content)…
Anyhow, I’ve
been rummaging through the goodies and the guilty pleasures
stacked up high in my rag-and-bone-yard-of-the-past,
because I’m writing songs again (Gepetto in his
workshop, crafting his little Pinocchios, eh!) and that’s
my modus operandi, taking shards of memory and twisting
and shifting them into new patterns for new songs, like
in a kaleidoscope; I’ve just finished one called
“You’re So Now, I’m So Never-Was”.
Nick’s in his grotto mixing the fourteen tunes
we recorded in Devil’s Bridge in June, he’s
halfway through and should be finished … oh, soon
(surely?!!) but these new songs are in addition
to all that and intended for whatever project follows
Last Orders At Harry’s Bar
--- demos are being recorded as we speak.
In the meantime
we’ve done a few gigs, all with Jasper Salmon
onboard, fiddler extraordinaire and a major asset to
the ongoing Songdog symphony: first we played the ‘Stute
in Llanhilleth, Karl had particularly wanted to play
here because it’s where Fred, his Dad, grew up,
it was a kind of bringing-it-all-back-home thing for
him, and we had a wonderful evening, playing to (and
being entertained by in our turn) a devoted bunch of
acoustic music devotees (but why isn’t the place
descended on en masse by the musically-literate from
all the neighbouring valleys, as it deserves to be?
Was there rugby on TV or something?). Then
we did another good show at Subterranean Holborn Blues
at the Bowery, our second cracker there this year (and
we risked a tentative version of “Swansong”
off the upcoming record). Then we hiked down to Exeter
for the Acoustica Festival, which should’ve
been splendid but wasn’t: our stage was outdoors
in a yard behind the theatre and it might’ve been
gone wonderfully had it been a balmy summer evening
(for many souls had turned up to see us) but as we took
the stage the heavens opened and it rained and rained
and rained (it was coming through the tarpaulin roof
of the stage and dripping on me at the mic) and so the
crowd had the option of standing there and getting soaked-to-the-medulla
or going indoors to catch Richmond Fontaine in a nice
warm and dry theatre
with a very nice lighting rig (personally, I’d
have stayed out in the rain ---- and a brave few did
indeed just that! ---- but then I’m a freak).
At the end of the fifth song there was an almighty bang,
the stage was plunged into darkness and the show was
over. Note to promoter (people of so many different
levels of talent and ability flock to work in the ‘music
industry’, I suppose it must be the perceived
glamour!!): I rather think we were booked for the
wrong stage, don’t you?). The very next evening
we did thirty minutes at From Dusk Till Dawn up in Archway,
North London, so at least Jasper managed to end on a
good one (a mention in dispatches for Gabriel
Moreno, I enjoyed his set and his whole approach
to his material; I expect to share a bill with him again).
And our next outing is (with Jasper again) at the Hwyl
Hydref in Devil’s Bridge on October
8th (highly recommended not just for obvious musical
reasons but also because autumn in that part of the
world will be breathtaking).
It’s become a bit of a
tradition that I extol some new record in these columns,
and this time it’s Ry Cooder’s
Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down, a fourth masterpiece
in a row from Ryland, after Chavez Ravine,
My Name Is Buddy and I, Flathead.
(Tom Waits also has a new LP out on
Oct 24th and the reviewers are already rating it highly,
but to plug it would be like plugging the sea and the
sky).
That’s it, I’m pretty
drunk now, and despite the ‘in vino veritas’
principle, I’d best call it a night: being a great
animal lover with no time at all for that ‘two
orders of creation’ crap, I’ll leave you
with two quotations I came across:
Samuel Butler:
The true test of the imagination is to name a cat.
Ken Campbell:
If Jesus was as good as everyone said he was, he must’ve
owned a dog.
May/June
2011
Songwriting/music-making
can be: A) a road to knowledge and freedom or: B) a
hopeless attempt to distract oneself from the void at
the centre of all experience --- which? Both?…Well,
whichever it may be, we’ve been doing a lot of
it lately. In May we finished the Martin
Rossiter mini-tour with dates in Manchester
and Glasgow (bumped into someone at the Deaf School
I hadn’t seen in twenty-four years --- Cheers
for the stuff you emailed Pod about the Songdog records,
Paul!). And then my wizened Muse loomed up at me in
a nightmare and decreed that it was time to start another
album (“Last Orders at Harry’s Bar”),
so we started with a few acoustic guitar/vocals things
at Nick Kacal’s place in New Cross (including
a demo of a song I’d written that same day, “Monster
of the Deep” -- I might put it on the record just
as it came out on that one take…Another of the
tunes we ended up doing was one I wrote when I was 23;
I didn’t know what to do with it then, but now
it swings! ), then we did one really, reallly
intense day’s work at a studio in Bromley,
getting the main drum-tracks down, nine tracks in six
hours.
Mid-June we decamped
to the Hotel Hafod in Devil’s Bridge, Aberystwyth
to do the bulk of the recording (we’d discovered
the place when I did a gig there with Jason
McNiff back in February). Martin, the proprietor,
generously gave us the use of a big room on the first
floor for a week, where Nick installed a portable rig
--- all those madly expensive mics and pre-amps he specialises
in. This time round we were joined by the very wonderful
Jasper Salmon (he was mixing the sound
at the gig we did in February, and I heard him play
afterwards), a brilliant violinist who ended
up playing on about eight of the tracks --- I hope Jasper
will play some shows with us in time to come, I really
can’t recommend his fiddle-playing highly enough.
We had a great week (even though Nick and I fight a
lot, we always do…), exhausting but fruitful,
and the place grew to feel so much like home none of
us wanted to leave. On the final evening we went into
Aberystwyth to see Jasper’s outfit Whiskey
Before Breakfast play a gig and Nicholas joined
them for a set; another night we had supper up in Jasper
and Mavis’s caravan where I heard King
Crimson’s “Cadence & Cascade”
for the first time in decades (man, that took
me back!! I’d thought only I loved that
song!). Undoubtedly, that week in Devil’s Bridge
was the most fun I’ve ever had making a record.
We listened back to the stuff the other night and it’s
sounding very promising, so, with any luck, it’ll
be mixed and finished by mid-August after Alison’s
put a bit of harp on. And here I need to thank Mr Phil
Pavling who sent a cheque in response to my tweet for
more funds: this guy’s a genuine patron
of the arts, ladies and gentlemen, a kind of 21st century
Lorenzo Medici, he doesn’t just praise
the bands he likes, he gives them money!!!....There
was to have been a duet included on the record --- “Beauty
& The Beast” --- but it didn’t get done
this time, so I’ll sort it out for the next one
(before too long I intend making a completely acoustic
record, and I hope Jasper’ll play on that too)…Songdog
trivia bit: this’ll be the first of our records
to feature no keyboards at all.
By way of consolation for having
to leave the beauties of mid-Wales Bob Meyer
kindly invited us onto his radio show to do four songs
(Bob’s
Folk Show on Radio
Wey) and we had a lovely evening. You must
check out Bob’s show, he plays some amazing blues
and folk stuff, all music he’s chosen himself
and not the things the pluggers try and get him to play:
you’ll often hear some brilliant stuff by people
you’ve never heard of, so listen in, every Tuesday
evening, 9pm.
There’s not much good comedy
on TV at the moment, but there was the Glasto
coverage. I chuckled like a Toby jug at Bono’s
shenanigans, the tax-avoiding bastard (I asked myself:
“This music? Cui bono? Certainly not the taxman!”),
I hooted like an ocean-liner at these two BBC-types’
attempts to get Paul Simon to admit that his appearance
on the Pyramid stage had been like the most amazing
experience of his life (this is Paul Simon
you’re talking to, you fuckwits!) and I guffawed
myself sick at Coldsore’s antics (when
Chris and the boys finally answered my prayers and fucked
off we were treated to the Webb Sisters backstage in
a tent performing a sublime version of “If It
Be Your Will”. There’s really no justice
in the world, is there?).
Like everybody else, I was sorry
to hear Peter Falk and Clarence Clemons were gone, but
the passing that really brought a sob to my throat was
that of James Arness, Marshall Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke,
he was a towering figure throughout my cowboy period,
right up there with Cheyenne Bodie, Clint McCullough,
Paladin and Rowdy Yates …I felt so, so sad for
a while…but then I cheered up no end when I remembered
Margaret Thatcher will soon be gone.
Talking
of “Cadence & Cascade” and being transported
back into another life, I recently came across a pile
of old love-letters sent to me a long, long time ago,
I’d hidden them in a pile of old copies of Rolling
Stone magazine, and as I dipped into them again
all the pain and distress I’d felt when she left
me came flooding back across the decades! After all
those years!…
I know you’ll all already
have bought Gillian Welch’s “The
Harrow & The Harvest”, but isn’t it
magnificent?
I hope we’ll play some
gigs again soon, just have to get this pesky album mixed
first …But for now I shall pour another glass,
lay me down in peace and take my rest.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
May
2011
I’ve been
fine-tuning the songs that’ll form the next album
and I’ve got way more than I really need but
we’ll record them all anyway. The record will
definitely be called “Last Orders at Harry’s
Bar” (Harry’s being the bar at the end of
the road, last stop before annihilation, Armageddon
or wherever, the songs will be performed by Harry’s
house-band --- “so hot they make lullabies sound
like calls-to-arms” --- and the stories the songs
tell those of the bar’s patrons). I hope we’ll
start it maybe next week here in London, though the
plan is to do a lot of it with a mobile rig in ----
no, I’d best say nothing till all the details
have been worked out. No string-quartets this time,
but a lot of fiddle (courtesy of Mr Jasper Salmon).
[Beatles-bore-bit: I’m thinking of this
as our “Let It Be” --- but only in the sense
of there not being too much overdubbing!].
A
few months back Jason
McNiff invited me to join him for two gigs
in West Wales, we did it as a kind of songwriter’s
roundtable, a song of his, then one of mine, and so
on, and we’ve done it twice more back in London,
most recently as part of the Camden Crawl at the end
of April. Apart from Pod, Jason and myself being mistaken
for the Bay City Rollers by a gang of women in a bar
in Blackwood (the Rollers were playing the ‘Stute
that very evening, apparently), we had a great
time. The first show was at a beautiful old hotel (the
Hafod)
by Devil’s Bridge in Cardiganshire (it’s
where we first met Jasper), we stayed overnight afterwards,
had this big old place all to ourselves, all very redolent
of “The Shining” (the following evening
we played a cellar bar in Cardigan itself). Our host
for the two shows was Harry Rogers, a lifelong socialist
of the old school and a poet -- back in the late 70s
he’d had his own “Harry’s Bar”
in Greenwich, and managed a few new-wave bands, we must’ve
rubbed shoulders with him in the Albany in Deptford
many a time back in the day, stalking the same hunting-grounds
as we all did (we rehearsed nearby. Kate Bush was there,
preparing for that one tour she did, we’d bump
into her in the kitchen, brewing up for her band; Squeeze
and Dire Straits were bashing it out in adjacent rooms
too. In another studio we used, we once witnessed Queen
and Public Image’s roadies team up to kick the
shit out of a gang of skins causing some bother on the
pavement outside --- isn’t the past so unpredictable!
Ah, such were the times! The invisible barrier between
me and the world didn’t seem quite so insurmountable
then). Anyway,
after the Cardigan show we sat in Harry’s kitchen
till dawn, talking politics and London circa 1978-80,
laughing like Smash martians. (Talking of politics ---
that photograph of Obama’s war cabinet watching
Bin Laden’s execution unfold ---- wasn’t
there such a blast of sulphur coming from those
fuckers? I mean, they kill people too ---- lots
of them! --- but only to keep the world safe for neo-liberal
economics --- or for priapic capitalism, as it’s
also known --- so there’s obviously no moral equivalence
whatsoever. Jason told me he finds ‘straight’
people scary, and I say they run the world and so a
deluge of stupidity will overwhelm the earth in the
end). Back in London we
did a few songs at Joe
Wilkes’s birthday bash and he tried
to join us for “3:30am” but couldn’t
find a lead that worked: there may be a photo hereabouts.
Last week we opened for the splendid
Mr Martin
Rossiter at the Bloomsbury Theatre and
we’ll be doing it again this weekend in Manchester
(Deaf Institute, 13th) and Glasgow (King Tuts, 14th):
for your money you get ninety minutes’ worth of
Martin and his lovely songs ---- oh, and about half-an-hour
of us, of course! It’s bound to be the
best thing happening in those cities on those respective
evenings and a sanctuary from the vexations of the hour,
so do come if you’re able.
I was bereft when “The
Killing” finished, I was beyond lovesick,
but I have to admit Caroline Proust of “Spiral”
helped me over the worst of it …Music-wise, apart
from Josh Pearson’s superb new album I haven’t
bought anything in a while, and all I have to say is
that there’s an awful lot of light entertainment
out there masquerading as something more…
I hope that by the next time
I write we’ll have got to grips with this new
record. We’re a whole grand below the budget I
really want and I tweeted to invite contributions from
any potential benefactors, but, alas, to no avail so
far. Come on, cough up, you’d swear there was
a recession on!
I need something cute to sign
off with --- ah, this might do! --- remember, folks,
all the greatest truths are intuitive ones (and are
strictly resistant to statistical analysis) …OK,
it’s not that cute, but it’s true …Or
this from Philip Larkin: If you’re not two-thirds
of the way there it’s not worth starting.
Boom boom.
Postscript: As I said in my last
diary we've been involved in a video collaboration with
Prof JJ Aucouturier and his class of media students
at Temple University, Tokyo - they decided to make a
video for 'A Life Eroding (So Much Sorrow)', as a crowdsourced
augment reality project. Shortly after, when they had
only just uploaded the first call for participation,
the terrible earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. We kept
in touch with JJ and his students, getting updates on
how they were, but pretty much thought the project would
be abandoned, given they were struggling to keep normal
life going and had bigger worries on their minds than
a video. Some had even left Japan, so we were amazed
and moved when JJ emailed to say that the class was
regrouping, on or offline depending on where they were,
and wanted to finish the video. The students felt they
obviously couldn't ignore what had just happened but
neither did they want to feel as if they were exploiting
it, so they decided that the best way was to refer to
the events in a statement on their site 8songs.info
and let the video be what it would be, depending on
what people submitted. They've all put a lot of effort
into this project over the past few months, in spite
of the events, so please go and have a look at the work-in-progress
if you haven't already, maybe even upload something
yourself, and look out for the final video....
.
January/February 2011
Belated
New Year greetings, then…It
seems a long time since I last wrote, must’ve
been well before Christmas (Christmas 2010 will be forever
evoked for me by C.W. Stoneking’s sublime Jungle
Blues; and getting up in the middle of the night
to do a live phone interview with a US radio show, Acoustic
Roundtable), I spent most of December finishing
off the songs we’ll record for the next Songdog
record (and I’m still ‘finishing’,
18 songs done but one or two more still to be coaxed
up from the murkiest depths, I think). The New Year
started well, first thing January 1st we went up to
St David’s Wood and I did the version ofA
Thousand Roads To Hellthat’s
up on YouTube (I’ve always loved playing in the
woods): a week or so later we spent a lovely afternoon
with Marianne Hyatt and Gavin
Martin, strumming a few tunes on their show
on Reel
Rebels Radio, Talking
Up Yer Country Musical Revolutions. I had
as much fun as my heart could bear in those few hours
but then we got ‘lost’ on our way home and
the Devil made me swear and kick the dashboard…Some
days later we played a set at a Lantern Society
showcase at the Betsey
Trotwood (I really can’t recommend
the Lantern scene highly enough, it’s run by Ben
Folke Thomas and Jack Day
and the gigs usually take place at the Betsey every
other Thursday: it’s the nearest you’ll
get now to how the vibe might’ve been in the Greenwich
Village folk clubs circa 1961. I’m telling you,
if you like acoustic music it can get pretty exciting
in that little room), we had a fantastic gig
--- and Jack Day and Jason
McNiff and the Magic Numbers
were on too …Then came a lull, an interlude, time
out spent living, boring stuff --- but then
it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Borough
and we’re putting in a second appearance on Dexter
Bentley’s Hello Goodbye show on Resonance
104.4FM, had a great time (I knew
Dexter reminded me of someone and it’s just come
to me: Wayne Coyne!), met some nice people and then
it’s over before you know it and you’re
back on a train or in Waitrose or somewhere…
I was in Wales for a couple of
days, attended a funeral, met an old friend --- we talked
about market idolatry and Truth having no syllables
and wasn’t sheet-music way more rewarding before
TAB when you really had to work at it to extract
just a few notes you could recognise from the record,
the kids just get it all on a plate these days and so
forth…
But a quick wiggle of the music-fairy’s
wand and a cascade of multicoloured stars and it’s
early February and we’re in a studio up near Turnpike
Lane with the splendid Mr. Les Mommsen
on the faders and we get 17 songs done in two days of
tracking, with Nick Kacal on bass and
Joe Wilkes joining us on guitar for
3:30am (Small Talk). I don’t
know exactly what we’ll do with the tracks once
they’re mixed --- we may give some to One Little
Indian as free bonus downloads or something, or print
up a limited number of CDs people can get by e-mailing
us, we don’t know yet. (Among some of the old
songs we re-did were Shipwrecks,
Blind Picasso, Childhood
Skies --- always loved the latter, tried
it twice back in the day and never felt we’d nailed
it but now we most definitely have). It’ll soon
be time to start demo-ing the new songs in preparation
for the next LP (I need a fiddler for about half the
tunes, but I want to rehearse the material in advance
with said violinist, not just get them in to overdub
parts once the tracks are down: if you’re a proper
Scarlet Rivera and prepared to work intensively and
cheap, CALL ME!!). I said
to Les that should we end up doing the stuff with him
would he promise to make the record sound old and distressed,
like Jungle Fever and he said did I mean fucked-up and
I said yes, and he replied sure, I love fucked-up, so
I’ll take that as a promise…
The next evening we stayed up
all night to do a Skype conference-call with JJ and
some of his students at the Temple University in Tokyo,
they’re working on a video to one of our songs:
if you Tweet you can find out more about it --- search
#8songs or follow me on @_Songdog;
there’ll be a website coming soon explaining the
project (it’s for the song A Life
Eroding (So Much Sorrow)) and asking for
participation from anyone interested, they need bits
of footage of anything redolent of loss or sadness,
etc., whether it be shot on your phone or looks like
a David Lean outtake, you get my drift?....
So
it’s late on a wine-sodden Sunday evening, and
what’s next? Lemme think…OK, we’re
playing two gigs this week, at the Easycome
(Old Nuns Head, 15 Nunhead Green, SE15 3QQ) on Feb.
16th and then Thur 17 Feb at Acoustic Suicide
(The Gladstone, 64 Lant St, SE1 1QN) and they’ll
be two different sets should you fancy attending both
evenings, you noble, intrepid, deep-souled artoholoic,
you…Alison Blackhall (she played
the harp on Gene Autry’s Ghost
on our last album) asked if I’d like to sing a
few of my songs to her harp arrangements, and yes, I’d
love to, so we must see the idea through to fruition,
Alison, OK?…From Feb 24th I’m doing some
gigs in Wales with Jason McNiff –
it’s a songwriter’s roundtable thing, so
he’ll do a song, then I’ll do one and so
on and details will be up on Facebook anon. Then Songdog
are playing at the Bowery in New Oxford
Street on March 9th --- it’s a Subterranean
Holborn Blues promotion and it’s also
my birthday so y’all can come and make a fuss
of me if you wanna (if you’re thinking of bringing
me a gift, I’m really into red wine and checked
cowboy-shirts; or there’s that new novel that’s
composed entirely of questions, you know the one I mean.
Or hell, just bring yourselves!…) ---
and Marianne Hyatt’s Country Dirt’s
on too, and so is Rosie Sleightholme,
so all that should clinch it for any right-thinking
little metropolitan hipster, am I right?
Have
you been following that Danish thriller on BBC4, The
Killing? I’m hooked on it, and it’s
not only because I’m infatuated with
the actress playing Lund (any of our Scandinavian fans
able to introduce me to the lady, though?), it’s
a very classy piece of work. And I’m
expecting big things too from the new Coen brothers
film, True Grit, Jeff Bridges
will be magnificent as Rooster Cogburn, I know he will
(and anyway, I love westerns, I grew up loving them
and I always will, even the crap ones. Remember The
Gold of the Seven Saints? Clint Walker
(you know, Cheyenne Bodie!)? Er, Roger Moore …(no,
forget Moonraker! He’s
into animal rights, so let’s hear it for Rog!)?
Graham and I saw it at the Capitol the year it came
out; just gazing on the fucking poster thrilled
me to smithereens … I should’ve lived in
the Wild West in those times, I’d have been in
the Wild Bunch, I’d have died gloriously, slumped
across the trigger of the Gatling gun or I should’ve
been killed at the Alamo. I should’ve lived in
Cinemascope! Two Rode Together,
aww man, that’s just fucking poetry,
can’t you hear it? The Comancheros!!!!
I wouldn’t have had to be John Wayne or Clint,
I’d have settled for Jack Elam! Fuck, I’d
have settled for Chill Wills! …. And
the Sons of the Pioneers (buffalo
dung on their boots, prairie-dust in their throats)
were not just up there with the other Immortals (the
Inkspots, the Jordanaires,
etc.) but had a special throne-room all of their own
in Vocal Group Valhalla, testament to their imperishable
greatness …But, no, stop dreaming, Morgans, you
live in these times, godammit! --- this piss-and-wind
age of bureaucrats and Thought Nazis …Maybe I
did something really awful in some other life …?
2011’s
been a pretty good year for us, looking back we seem
to have squeezed an awful lot in --- and that’s
just the stuff fit to print. Hart Crane remembered much
forgetfulness, I just forget everything I meant to remember
(it’s the amnesia of existence, life’s gift
to us all), but anyway, there’s another record
in the can (comes out in May 2012), we met Jasper Salmon,
did a load of good gigs, my throat got better and there
was a new Tom Waits album (good omen for 2012: there’s
a new Leonard Cohen one coming –“Old Ideas”).
We’ve
been mopping up the year in style, did four shows in
West Wales at the start of the month, all damn good,
we should’ve just carried on going --- we did
the Parrot in Camarthen, the Cooper’s in Aberystwyth,
the Tabernacle in Machynlleth and then a return to the
Hafod in Devil’s Bridge: here’s a big thank-you
to Jasper and Mavis for making it happen, much respect
and a big hug to Andy Gatherar, soundman magnifique,
who not only manned the sound-desk throughout but played
a lovely set each night before we went on, and a big,
wet smacker to Paul Wellington, an old friend of ours
from a million years ago (he’d trekked across
Europe with us one dark November/December in the mid-80s
when we were opening for A-Ha …!) who travelled
down from oop north and spent the final two days helping
us roll up cables, hump gear and drink Guinness. 
The
landscape of New Cross, London SE14 may leave a lot
to be desired in comparison with Devil’s Bridge,
Cardiganshire, but there are still beauties to be beheld
for those in-the-know, and one such was Alison Blackhall’s
harp-playing (another is that harsh-grained photo of
me aged 20 or something taken chiaroscuro one summer
afternoon in the window of 18A Shardeloes Road, just
up the road!) when she and I did a four-song set at
the Amersham on Dec. 19th (it’s the pub whose
Take Courage sign emblazoned across the front
fortified us so much in those early years in London
living in a damp, rat-infested shithole and as homesick
as hell). Alison is a lovely lady and a superb musician
and we intend to do some more stuff together in the
New Year (there are a couple of clips up on YouTube,
including a version of 
They’ll
be missed. 
We
revisited the Hotel Hafod again in early October for
a show with Mabon (it turned out that their guitarist
and I attended the same grammar school and were in the
same year, though we didn’t remember each other!)
--- I had a cold and a ragged throat but the gig went
well, and, afterwards, we drank red wine out under the
stars to the distant boom of the waterfalls (I think
it’s what they mean by ‘stealing a beautiful
moment’). We’re back there again in early
December, along with three other shows in the environs
of Mid-Wales and the details will be up on the website
and on Facebook and all the other usual places by now,
so please go check. Otherwise, most of October was spent
mixing the album (Nick fingered the faders, we peeked
over his shoulder a lot) and I’ve been writing
more songs in readiness for whatever may follow Last
Orders at Harry’s Bar (in that connection,
while I think of it, thanks to Maggy Burrowes for duetting
with me on the Beauty & The Beast demo).
All that’s spoiled what otherwise would’ve
been a very nice autumn for me is this throat problem
that I’ve had for well over two months --- prayer,
Strepsils, and antibiotics have all proved useless,
so I’m finally off to see a specialist next week
(you don’t think it’s fucking throat-cancer,
do you? Or maybe nodes or something …?). We had
a nice meal in the West End with JJ (he’s making
a video of A Life Eroding) and Michelle from
One Little Indian, another with Kia (we dined in a restaurant
opposite the Harold Pinter Theatre where Thandie Newton’s
currently appearing in Death & The Maiden
and I lived in constant hope Thandie’d pop out
on a fag-break, that we’d lock eyes across Panton
Street, that she’d burst into the restaurant and
fling herself down in my lap, but alas, the hope proved
forlorn). 
No,
here’s something sad I do need to mention, the
news of Jackie Leven’s death.
My band once opened for Doll By Doll at Dingwalls, Jackie
used up all our load-in time doing vocal exercises at
the mic, right up to doors, so we had to go on without
a soundcheck (oddly enough, Marsha Hunt did the very
same thing to us at the very same venue?) and the ensuing
Sounds review deemed us ‘cacaphonous’,
therefore I was mildly peeved for years, until Songdog
did a show with him in Amsterdam a long time afterwards
and he was just lovely, a proper gentleman and a magnificent
performer, I loved everything about him (OK, so maybe
not his shapeless, distressed denim shorts). It ain’t
right that the good ’uns keep dying (it’ll
be Christopher Hitchens before long, I suppose) while
the Evil Shit A-Listers (the X-Factor Fuhrer with the
square chin and the smuggest grin or Tony Blair
--- add the names of your choice here) just seem to
thrive – or at least, get away with it (and even
when they don’t, it can still
feel wrong --- I mean, the manner of Gaddafi’s
death was shameful)… Anyway, RIP Jackie Leven.
Wasn’t
life great once, when you were young and lived life
just for shits and giggles? When for just ten bob and
a green apple (existentially speaking) all the permanence
of the firmament was yours for knowing? Didn’t
you just love the slow advancement of the days?
Life set the bar so high then that ensuing disappointment
was inevitable, I suppose (one of my disappointments
--- and I have a lot --- is that animals can’t
listen to and enjoy my music). Certainty was easy ---
when I was about sixteen I was certain I’d
be married to Esther Ofarim eventually, that it was
only a matter of time and my coming to her notice (sure,
I felt bad about what it would do to Abi, him seeming
such a nice guy and all, but, alas, love takes no prisoners
…). For me, the death of the 60s and all its utopianism
was catastrophic (now here I am, gruel for
blood, tending my little circumscribed flake in the
steaming manure heap of the ochlocracy and telling myself
I should be content)… 
theatre
with a very nice lighting rig (personally, I’d
have stayed out in the rain ---- and a brave few did
indeed just that! ---- but then I’m a freak).
At the end of the fifth song there was an almighty bang,
the stage was plunged into darkness and the show was
over. Note to promoter (people of so many different
levels of talent and ability flock to work in the ‘music
industry’, I suppose it must be the perceived
glamour!!): I rather think we were booked for the
wrong stage, don’t you?). The very next evening
we did thirty minutes at From Dusk Till Dawn up in Archway,
North London, so at least Jasper managed to end on a
good one (a mention in dispatches for Gabriel
Moreno, I enjoyed his set and his whole approach
to his material; I expect to share a bill with him again).
And our next outing is (with Jasper again) at the 
Talking
of “Cadence & Cascade” and being transported
back into another life, I recently came across a pile
of old love-letters sent to me a long, long time ago,
I’d hidden them in a pile of old copies of Rolling
Stone magazine, and as I dipped into them again
all the pain and distress I’d felt when she left
me came flooding back across the decades! After all
those years!…
A
few months back 
Anyway,
after the Cardigan show we sat in Harry’s kitchen
till dawn, talking politics and London circa 1978-80,
laughing like Smash martians. (Talking of politics ---
that photograph of Obama’s war cabinet watching
Bin Laden’s execution unfold ---- wasn’t
there such a blast of sulphur coming from those
fuckers? I mean, they kill people too ---- lots
of them! --- but only to keep the world safe for neo-liberal
economics --- or for priapic capitalism, as it’s
also known --- so there’s obviously no moral equivalence
whatsoever. Jason told me he finds ‘straight’
people scary, and I say they run the world and so a
deluge of stupidity will overwhelm the earth in the
end). Back in London we
did a few songs at 
Belated
New Year greetings, then…It
seems a long time since I last wrote, must’ve
been well before Christmas (Christmas 2010 will be forever
evoked for me by C.W. Stoneking’s sublime Jungle
Blues; and getting up in the middle of the night
to do a live phone interview with a US radio show, Acoustic
Roundtable), I spent most of December finishing
off the songs we’ll record for the next Songdog
record (and I’m still ‘finishing’,
18 songs done but one or two more still to be coaxed
up from the murkiest depths, I think). The New Year
started well, first thing January 1st we went up to
St David’s Wood and I did the version of 
So
it’s late on a wine-sodden Sunday evening, and
what’s next? Lemme think…OK, we’re
playing two gigs this week, at the Easycome
(Old Nuns Head, 15 Nunhead Green, SE15 3QQ) on Feb.
16th and then Thur 17 Feb at Acoustic Suicide
(The Gladstone, 64 Lant St, SE1 1QN) and they’ll
be two different sets should you fancy attending both
evenings, you noble, intrepid, deep-souled artoholoic,
you…Alison Blackhall (she played
the harp on Gene Autry’s Ghost
on our last album) asked if I’d like to sing a
few of my songs to her harp arrangements, and yes, I’d
love to, so we must see the idea through to fruition,
Alison, OK?…From Feb 24th I’m doing some
gigs in Wales with Jason McNiff –
it’s a songwriter’s roundtable thing, so
he’ll do a song, then I’ll do one and so
on and details will be up on Facebook anon. Then Songdog
are playing at the Bowery in New Oxford
Street on March 9th --- it’s a Subterranean
Holborn Blues promotion and it’s also
my birthday so y’all can come and make a fuss
of me if you wanna (if you’re thinking of bringing
me a gift, I’m really into red wine and checked
cowboy-shirts; or there’s that new novel that’s
composed entirely of questions, you know the one I mean.
Or hell, just bring yourselves!…) ---
and Marianne Hyatt’s Country Dirt’s
on too, and so is Rosie Sleightholme,
so all that should clinch it for any right-thinking
little metropolitan hipster, am I right?
Have
you been following that Danish thriller on BBC4, The
Killing? I’m hooked on it, and it’s
not only because I’m infatuated with
the actress playing Lund (any of our Scandinavian fans
able to introduce me to the lady, though?), it’s
a very classy piece of work. And I’m
expecting big things too from the new Coen brothers
film, True Grit, Jeff Bridges
will be magnificent as Rooster Cogburn, I know he will
(and anyway, I love westerns, I grew up loving them
and I always will, even the crap ones. Remember The
Gold of the Seven Saints? Clint Walker
(you know, Cheyenne Bodie!)? Er, Roger Moore …(no,
forget Moonraker! He’s
into animal rights, so let’s hear it for Rog!)?
Graham and I saw it at the Capitol the year it came
out; just gazing on the fucking poster thrilled
me to smithereens … I should’ve lived in
the Wild West in those times, I’d have been in
the Wild Bunch, I’d have died gloriously, slumped
across the trigger of the Gatling gun or I should’ve
been killed at the Alamo. I should’ve lived in
Cinemascope! Two Rode Together,
aww man, that’s just fucking poetry,
can’t you hear it? The Comancheros!!!!
I wouldn’t have had to be John Wayne or Clint,
I’d have settled for Jack Elam! Fuck, I’d
have settled for Chill Wills! …. And
the Sons of the Pioneers (buffalo
dung on their boots, prairie-dust in their throats)
were not just up there with the other Immortals (the
Inkspots, the Jordanaires,
etc.) but had a special throne-room all of their own
in Vocal Group Valhalla, testament to their imperishable
greatness …But, no, stop dreaming, Morgans, you
live in these times, godammit! --- this piss-and-wind
age of bureaucrats and Thought Nazis …Maybe I
did something really awful in some other life …?