london calling (to the far away towns)
To Twickenham, in West London this morning.......yep....for a meeting. Followed by a delicious stop at Tanya's Café, at Twickenham Green, for a very late, and rather unhealthy, breakfast.
This afternoon I went into the city to collect my new keyboards from Turnkey in Charing Cross Road. Now, ordinarily at this time of year, you would expect the centre of London to be a heaving throng of humanity, yet the streets were almost deserted. It is not unusual in the run up to Christmas to have police at major junctions, controlling the traffic and ensuring that the masses of pedestrians cross the roads safely. No need for that today.
On the way back I took a nostalgic stroll down Old Compton Street, in Soho. This area is now very, much, at the centre of 'gay' London. As I don't qualify on those grounds (!), my reason for being there was to briefly jump back in time, as one of my first jobs after leaving college, was to work for the Charisma Record Company, (then in Old Compton Street), just along from the Algerian Coffee Shop (which is still there, incidentally). My boss was Tony Stratton-Smith, a likeable, but very eccentric man.
He died in 1987, when he was only 53.
The soundtrack to today's adventures was provided by ballyhoo the best of echo and the bunnymen.

marketing opportunity
By this afternoon, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus had set up a display, just inside the main door, where they were selling a complete range of George Harrison cds.

c'est juste une histoire
hi to the lord of yatesbury, julian cope; and to joanne and wendy h. who stopped by today.
all can be found at head heritage and a mighty fine place it is too.
xxx

grilled spam
man, i am so glad i set up an individual email address for this diary of delight ;-)
i am being engulfed with spam and i just delete the lot in one swoop.
bish bosh bash.

it's a snip
....news just coming in....
i've been to royal ascot to get my hair cut.
my italian hairdresser says "we don't cut hair, we tailor it".
lawdy lawdy.
the queen mother was not in attendance.

sick building syndrome
and so a drive, in torrential rain, to high wycombe for a meeting. the coffee was disgusting.
high wycombe so typifies towns in the south east of england. it is surrounded by the warmth of the chiltern hills yet the town itself is yet another example of town 'planners' going berserk and allowing a hideous mish-mash of buildings to force themselves between the meek layers of history. pretty georgian and regency properties are dwarfed by sprawling complexes and malls, apparently built at random, with no thought given to their incongruity next to their charming and aching elders. horrid, angular and ill conceived, ugly mini towers of babel.
virtually every town in the south east now has an identikit pattern, and all these malls give refuge to almost exactly the same stores, lined up almost identically. the body shop, debenhams, mcdonalds and burger king, boots and superdrug, burtons and topshop, hmv and virgin. all the same, every town.
maybe we need this, the reassurance of the familiar, but how sad that the last century and this one will be remembered, in architectural terms, for handing down such monstrosities of woe to future generations.
today's soundtrack for the drive to, and back from, high wycombe, was provided by the glorious
mary j blige and her latest album ' no more drama'.
mary j is a goddess.

back on the chain gang
back in the office today.
london doesn't really exist you know. in the real world it is a tumble of small towns and 'villages' that as a whole, make up what is known as london. i work in one of these towns that dawdle along on the west side of the city.
well, at this point you need to know that i really need a new (music) keyboard. my yamaha dx100 and my korg synth are like lovers to me, but they are unreliable now and cause me the pain of a lost love. they just don't make me tingle any more, you know?
so, i'm looking for a new kboard and i figured i would go to the store at lunchtime and buy a copy of
computer music magazine as i figured they will have ads and reviews that would help me in my quest.
to get to the store in question means a walk of about 200 yards from my office door.
well reader! what a task awaited me.
first i smiled and said "no, sorry, i don't have the time to stop" to the guy from 'the samaritans'
"sorry...no" to the fella from 'oxfam'
"no" to the man from 'virgin power'
"uh" to the chap trying to sell "the socialist worker"
i growled at the woman conducting a 'survey' for i know not what.
i didn't make eye contact with the guy selling cheap cds, nor with the man selling moblie phone fascias.
then i went through the whole thing again, in reverse, during the return journey.
now about that keyboard.....

helpless
what do you do, when you read something written twenty minutes ago, by a guy, sitting in a library, in another country, in another continent? nothing. there isn't anything to do, i guess. except worry.

didcot calling
and while we're about it gina snowdoll's eeeeeks it's a blog! is a truly wondrous place.
i can't give higher praise than to say it is the first blog i look at every day.
gina is the bees knees.

i drew a map of canada, said joni,
on the back of a cartoon coaster
jim mckenna lives in vancouver, canada.
not only does he write with style and flair, his site is a work of art in itself.

curtain call
well the curtains, or 'drapes' are happily installed in their new home. i have fed and watered them and they seem to have settled in well.
despite the best efforts of google, i can't find a link to a picture so you will have to imagine them. they are by 'dreams 'n' drapes' and the flavour, or design, is called 'tatton'.
* note for the curtain connoisseur - they have a thermal lining
i measured up ok, and the good news is that they came ready to hang. there was, however, trauma to follow:
well, you have to know that i am a drapes virgin. oh, i'm not ashamed to admit it. i have never been involved in a serious window covering scenario before.
so - you get these bits of thread running through the curtain at the top, ok? well i figured that this was to create pleats in the material for a greater aesthetic effect. no problem so far.
but...no-one told me that neither end is secured so as you pull at one end, the threads come zooming through from the other end. so, i had to hunt out a needle and re-thread the stringy thing back through and start over.
anyway, they are hung and looking good, except that i have pulled these threads too tight on one side and i'll have to loosen them a little to match up, but overall not a bad afternoon's work for a novice.
man, did it rain in berkshire this afternoon? yes it did, big time.
today's journey was soundtracked by the magnificent mary j blige and her cd 'share my world'.

it's curtains for the curtains
i put today aside to finish off the mixing, but i've taken it as far as i can go, i think. anything more would just be 'twiddling'.
i'm going to buy some new curtains for the music/computer room. fay and i split up over a year ago now. i wish she had taken these curtains with her. she chose them because she said they would cheer the room up. jeez - it's like looking at a neon rainbow on acid.

pacific view
tara is from california.
she's been teaching me how to make tacos.
maybe i'll put the diet back a few days......

but all the same i hate it, wouldn't you?
i have 'another suitcase in another hall' from evita (madonna version) rolling round and round in my psyche.
i'm playing it over right now to try and exorcise it by overkill.
i adore madonna but this is overload.
get outta my brain.

(bizarre) brief encounter
so with a hip and a hop, i drove to fulham in west london, to 'use up' the last of the 'free' studio time and worked on the live recording of the gig in chelsea (see earlier scribbling). i phoned mike and said, "you know my coupla lines in 'only a fool'?...well i mixed them right to the front, i hope that's ok...." - there was an anguished pause of about two seconds before he realised i was teasing.
the studio guy wanted me to sign this paper that said that they retain the disks. i wouldn't sign it. it seems to me that 'THE MAN' holds all the cards in this game of poker. i had a great lunch. there is a sandwich shop ( it isn't made out of sandwiches, they sell sandwiches) just around the corner and i had a very healthy lunch of sausage sandwiches.
now, the bizarre thing: when i arrived there was this fella and a woman sitting in the reception area looking....errrm....unwell. i thought i kinda recognised him and he looked sorta like a faded rock geezer. anyway, i asked ravi, the studio assistant and she told me who he was. he was the guitarist with a very famous rock band, who were mega big in the late sixties and early seventies. he and his girlfriend had been in studio 'b' all night. they have, i was told, been there for a week now, re-recording cabaret versions of his hard rock stuff from the seventies.
when i asked why they thought he was doing this, ravi shook her head and said 'desperation'. that made me feel sad.

it's all a blur
jeez, i need to take my contact lenses out.

jester 'nother day
after the traditional saturday (late) morning breakfast of bacon rolls, k and i went to collect our friend gary, who is a singer, a writer and a member of the band whi$perkill - but more of him later. then we zoomed up the m25 and the m1.


we arrived at tony and carolyn's and as usual i put the kettle on (i hope they don't mind, it's a sorta tradition now). i love their house. not only is it a wonderfully comfortable home, it has such a great atmosphere. i remember feeling that the first time i was there and that feeling has never gone.
it is also a tradition that many of the artists appearing on these nights 'chill out' at tony and carolyn's house before walking the short distance to the theatre; at about 7.15pm we all mooched our way in and sat with a bunch of our friends, including claire, rosie, roy and lynn.
this was a special evening as it was dedicated to celebrating the rights of children, and the first half of the evening changed my rather cynical view of the 'yoof' of today, as a succession of highly talented young people performed with outstanding confidence. singers, poets, dancers and embryonic bands - it was a genuine joy to share in the enthusiasm of their performances.

the evening was compered, superbly, by the gorgeous jester devilstick peat and after a break the evening continued with the 'grown up' artists.
amongst the highlights were sets by performance poet, steve wallis - he's a good friend of ours (k and i went to stay with steve, and michelle, in wales a couple of weeks ago) his performances are electrifying and have an entrancing, magnetising whoosh to them. then, gary day. gary played three songs: a new one "head (possibly)", a solo version of "somatose" - a song gary performs with his band whi$perkill , and "words".
gary's voice, always powerful, has entered a new dimension following his whi$perkill work.


after the gig, many of the performers and friends returned to the house to celebrate tony's birthday. tony is probably the most miserable man in england, but we love him and wouldn't want him any other way.


a further tradition is that everyone eventually crashes out after several hours of talking, singing and laughing.....only to emerge, blinking, into the following morning's daylight and we all collapse into a local café for a late late breakfast. generally, gary and i compete for the title of "mr creosote", the food intake champ. i think i won today.
later i handed gary over to his partner, vicki, on a slip road off the m25. this was quite exciting, as i felt like i was in an adventure movie, handing over a spy to MI5....but it was the m25 not MI5, and gary is more basildon bond, rather than james bond.

japanese link
hello and thanks to jeremy hedley from antipixel for his kind words (nov 24th). all the way from japan, too!

artistic endeavours
well, a busy weekend on the way. on saturday evening we're going to an arts theatre, that is run by some friends of ours. it's always a cool evening because k and i count several of the performers as friends of ours, and we also know half the audience too! after that we are going to a birthday party for our friend, tony. soooo..... back with a heavy head on sunday.
this blog has been running for a week now and i've had over 200 hits. thanks for being there, seriously.

soap on a rope
one of the most successful shows on british television is eastenders. i've never watched a single episode of it. i was just about to say it seems to be on every day, so i looked up the tv guide and realised that it is on every day. whenever i catch a few minutes of the programme, it seems to feature a lot of people yelling at each other. either that, or they're thumping each other; or doing both at once. it has all the production values of WWF. it is badly shot, badly lit, badly scripted and is incredibly popular.
it must be me, then.

somebody's son
somehow, seeing a photo of hijacker ziad jarrah in the 'real' world, makes the events of september 11th even more chilling.

tip: hold the shift key when you click on a link and it opens it in a new window.

couldn't deliver
i have temporarily removed the comment thing because the company supplying reblogger has lost the plot. i'll find another!

illiterate
i can't read. i mean, i can't read books any more. i'm not sure why this state of affairs has arisen; whether it is a temporary abberation or a permanent change of policy, that my brain is imposing here.
a good friend of mine gave me this book, in the summer. 'the life of thomas more' by peter ackroyd. i want to know the information contained in this book, but i can't read the book. i want to, but i can't. y'see it's nearly 400 pages long. just think of all the things i could be doing while i read all those words. eating, or sleeping maybe. i love knowing about the past and how it has led to the present and will influence the future, but i want to have that information assimilated into my brain. i don't want to have to learn it.
it's the same with movies on the tv, now. i can't watch them. oh, i try , but after about thirty minutes, i'm fidgetting; then i raid the fridge, put the kettle on, stare out the window, anything but watch the thing.

ok, ok....i'll start the book tomorrow.

lazy boy
ah! working from home today! what a delicious concept. in reality it has meant a huge pot of coffee and four (!) slices of toast at 11.00am, and then watching my newly restored cable channels for a while. i have about sixty channels and i think i only ever watch about five. but then we all say that, don't we?

overtime
a sequence of events on the phone:
5.25pm notice cable company have taken loada my channels away
i don't know why.
5.26 phone cable company; go through endless routine of recorded voices telling me my options; choose appropriate option;
5.28 "we know you are holding. all our operatives are busy and you are in a queue"
5.28 > 6.06 listen to 'doobeedoobeedooo' music and repeated message
6.07 lynn comes on line and asks what the problem is.
6.08 > 6.45 lynn (a lovely person by the way) explains that she is an artist who specialises in 'indian art' and had an exhibition at the 'national theatre' last week; but she says being an artist doesn't pay her bills. sadly, the cable company had not thought it may have been a reasonable idea to give her some training so we have a three way conversation with the fella who sits next to her.
6.46 fella says to me via lynn that the problem is my cable phone line. when i explained that i have never had a phone line through the cable company, there is a moment of silence and then lynn explains that they have been charging me for phone line rental for three years on my direct debit.
6.47. they both go away for conference with supervisor.
6.52 they decide i can't have a refund, but that i can have free access to cable until amounts balance.
6.53 i say this is acceptable, because i have lost all sense of reason, having been on phone for nearly ninety minutes.
6.54 fella next to lynn discovers simple fault - computer input error.
6.55 fella says all ok
6.56 all is ok
6.57 i wish lynn good luck with her artistic endeavours and the call ends.
it was a free phone call. i feel a sense of loss at writing off ninety minutes of my life.

balls up
yahoo's football news page features what sounds like a very painful injury problem, for a blackburn player
i wonder if it could have been worded rather more sympathetically?
flitcroft hit by groin blow
yikes!

E, A, and sometimes, G.
today's english newspapers report that status quo have had to postpone their tour because rick parfitt has hurt his arm and can't play his guitar at the moment.
i couldn't help but wonder if this is a 'repetitive strain injury', caused by him playing the same three chords for the last forty years.

do you want fries with that?
late last night i exchanged a flurry of emails with fi, the sherbert queen of a&c. we were discussing the a&c mugs and t-shirts thing


the m3 (told you i was getting obsessed with motorways/traffic) is one of the least awful of england's motorways. i went to winchester for a meeting this morning and if you ignore the hideous towers of basingstoke, the road carves its way through some dreamy countryside. once again the autumnal colours were striking.
well, the meeting finished at about 1.30, so, after an unhealthy lunch at mcdonalds, i decided to visit the cathedral and it was a really good time to go because it was virtually deserted. i have a warm affinity with winchester cathedral as a direct ancestor of mine was canon of the cathedral in the 16th century.
he was an interesting figure in the mid 1500's history of england and particularly in relation to his vision in protecting books and writing of earlier periods.
in his book 'in search of england' michael wood devotes a chapter to my ancestor 'thomas'.


curiously, 'can't buy a thrill' can be played from beginning to end almost exactly in the time it takes to get from here to winchester. or indeed, in the time it takes to get from winchester to here. it's time i played something else now.

turn that heartbeat over again
"we warned the corpse of william wright
not to cuss and drink all night
ticket in hand i saw him laid to rest
but zombie see and zombie do
he's here with me and you"
steely dan lyrics do not conform to 'pop' rules.

this highway runs from paraguay
and i've just come all the way.
man, i am going through such a steely dan phase at the moment.
i just have 'can't buy a thrill' on the cd player all the time.
'can't buy a thrill' was their first album and is an amazingly confident, breezy, urgent album of ten delicious songs with lyrics that transcend poetry.
donald fagen was worried that his voice couldn't cope with some of the vocals and so the joyous decision was made, to bring in
david palmer on several tracks. palmer has a voice hewn from gold. liquid yet note perfect. controlled but never sterile.
listen to the opening verse of 'brooklyn' and bathe in its beauty
"a race of angels
bound with one another
a dish of dollars
laid out for all to see
a tower room at eden rock
his golf at noon for free
brooklyn owes the charmer
under me"
a work of genius.

i drink too much coffee.

the crystal of summer shivered into fragments
yeah, i know! but i read that somewhere and remembered that line today.
a couple of weeks back, when k and i were in north-west wales we noticed that autumn was far more advanced up there. well now we have caught up, in 'the beautiful south', and the trees are waving their warm colours; shades of green, yellow, red, brown.
The majority of hits that this site attracts are from north america and i can just imagine the voices saying "call that a fall!!?? come to new england, buster!" and they would, of course, be absolutely right.

get there quicker on horseback
i have noticed i am becoming a traffic obsessive. when people ask how i am, i reply, "oh fine thanks, it's just the journey, ya know!" since i moved offices in august the m4 motorway has started to dominate my day. it is thirty three miles from my home to my office and yet this journey takes me up to two hours daily. with the same torture on the way home this adds up to (stand back: basic math work approaching) four hours in the car each day to travel 66 miles. grim.
oh no! don't say why don't you use public transport. just don't say it.
meanwhile:
the modern antiquarian
is a wonderful site with a breathtaking guide to prehistoric, neolithic, druid and general ancient sites around the uk. not only that but it is managed and run by julian cope.

homework
awww man, why did i bring that work home? i'm only half way through it and i gotta finish it. double damn.

seemed like a good idea at the time
awwww man, i brought all this work home from the office and now i gotta do it but i don't wanna do it but i gotta do it. damn.

parking tickets and mr creosote
the funny thing was i just found a parking space right away. kings road is odd these days. there is a tangible change as you head from the smart (sloane square) end to the dingier fulham broadway end. there seems to have been no sense of irony that they called this part of chelsea 'world's end'.
inevitably the truck picked up a ticket. apparently we were featured on a capital radio traffic flash (true!)...it said 'avoid the otis road area in chelsea where a lorry is blocking the road'. a lorry! hah! anyway they got a ticket.
when i arrived, the dj was playing stuff over the sound system just for the hell of it. anyway i liked him right away 'cos it was mary j blige, who is a goddess.
the sound check went well but dan wasn't there so stevie sang just to get the levels.
we went to this italian restaurant called (i think) la bersagliera, it was just up the road from the gig. i love the way 'proper' italian restaurants make such a fuss about 'pudding'. they nearly always have a 'dessert trolley' and tonight was no exception. i had this amazing banana trifle mush type of dessert. mmmm it was gorgeous. then i 'helped' others to finish their pudding too. just being helpful, ya know!
i know we shouldn't be 'size-ist' or whatever, but there was this enormous guy sitting at a nearby table. as soon as he went, the mr creosote routines started of course. it had to be done.the funniest moment was when this record company guy suggested the band have cartoon artwork on their cd sleeves. everyone knew he was implying something about a lack of photogenic band members, but dan is a cool looking front man.
record company executives, i learned tonight, come in two flavours. the men look like they are refugees from staus quo and have at least two mobile phones. the women wear leather trousers and lots of make up. call me 'mr stereotyper'.
the band were great. neither they, nor i knew what the point of all this was or is. the record company, ****** * ***** ,have signed them on a weird 'preliminary' deal in which, it seems to this humble boy, that the record company hold all the options.
i couldn't leave the desk for 'got me anyway' but i did do my, now legendary, two lines on 'only a fool would say that'.
actually, the sound was great, which is a tribute to the wonders of modern mixing desks and little to do with me. once you set it up these days, it's just a case of a tweak here and a fiddle there.
strange club, everyone sitting around at tables with a kinda dance floor area at the front, and it was cool that all these execs got up and partied at the front.
the set list: simply heaven; my rainbow day; got me anyway; limmie limmie limmie; break it up; can we still?; what's going on?; only a fool; crisis is over; ladder to the stars; the encore was their diana ross medley thing - i'm still waiting / baby love, which is, in fact so yummy i'm still singing it in my head.

only a fool would say that
so tonight the band are playing this kinda promotional gig for record company people. i am mixing the sound because they want to try and recreate the buzz we got when recording the demos in the studio a couple of months back. just for fun, i'm singing back up vocals on 'got you anyway' and 'only a fool would say that', their wonderfully brassy cover of the steely dan classic (from can't buy a thrill).
i say 'back up vocals' but on 'only a fool would say that', i sing one line twice. that's it. "talking 'bout a world where all is free" is my big moment.
mike just called me. he is nervous.
the gig is in some place with a stoopid name, just off the kings road, in chelsea. the rough end of the kings road, not the sloane square end.
it seems parking will be no problem tonight, but there is nowhere to park for this afternoon's soundcheck. so they have to unload all the gear off the street and then find somewhere to park a huge truck, in chelsea, on a saturday afternoon. ha!
i'm going up for the soundcheck, and then we're going for something to eat, before the gig. i said ''let's go italiano''

here kitty!
just can't think what gift to get for your favourite aunt, this christmas?
worry no more, because a
bonsai kitten
may be the ideal answer.

the who
the who were the very very first band i ever saw. in 1966 they appeared at staines town hall with the yardbirds supporting. i had just turned 11. of course i wasn't allowed to go. my parents were rather strict and i was only 11....but staines town hall was only just up the road and the yardbirds were so loud that several people came out onto the streets to find out where the noise was coming from. my father was, and is, quite a hip fella and so he decided he and i could go and stand outside and listen in. well staines town hall is quite small and the geezer on the door let me stand at the back and peep through the doors and watch the who! they played 'my generation' twice and i remember roger daltrey singing 'why don't you all f*ck off' instead of 'fade away'.

the next time i saw them was at the old 'rainbow theatre' in london in, i think, 1972. 'who's next' had just come out methinks.
well, they were brilliant and the geezer from 'east of eden' was actually there to play the fiddley bit from baba o'riley. the only thing was they were soooo loud. that was before the days when bands had sophisticated gear and measurements of decibels.
i couldn't hear for a week, and my mate steve.....his ears literally bled from the experience. no wonder i'm half deaf these days.
i rated the clash above them, though, in terms of 'the rush of adrenalin' experience, because i suppose being a little older by then i identified rather more strongly with the punk ethos, and i truly must have seen the clash 30 times in the late seventies. probably 25 of those gigs were just the hottest experience in energy and musical terms.....but the who were fantastic, yes. it's just that my eardrums don't agree!!!

i see them as missiles now
my office is about one mile from heathrow airport and is on the top floor of an eight storey block. they loom towards me as they bank over the suburban mist of south west london. no longer the fanciful romance of a weekend in rome or a vacation in the states. i see them as missiles now.