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27 March 2008
More ravings...   Where The Fuck Have I Been This Time??!!?

We've been recording, I've been relaxing (!!!???), tripping over cardboard boxes, doing gigs, letting it slide, not getting on with it, reading a book, taking a hike, swinging the lead, losing my grip etc...

We stood in for The Raveonettes the other night. We were going to see them anyway but they cancelled which was a bit disappointing because being a fan I was looking forward to it.
I was out in Limoges which is a dump of a town really. I was trying to send a parcel to England and it turned into an all afternoon event because the fan belt broke and I had to stop in at a roadside garage where two youths made a bad job of replacing it for a cash settlement.
I was gone a lot longer than I thought I would, and when I got back Amy and our friends that we were going to the concert with were all on the street looking for me. A daft idea really because hanging about on the street, scanning the horizon and looking anxoius isn't really going to hurry things up, but that's human nature I suppose.
Anyway, it seems that a friend of a friend who works at the venue (the friend of the friend that is, not the friend if you can follow that) knew we were coming, and when The Raveonettes cancelled at the last minute the promoter got straight on to us and asked us to fill in. Amy wasn't sure to start with what the guy was on about because it was all in French.
The concert was a double bill with Vic Chesnutt so it was more like being surprise special guests in a way. We were a bit worried about disappointed Raveonettes fans (and there were a few) but we pointed out that seeing us was like getting a sneak preview of The Raveonettes thirty years from now - as long as they keep at it and get knocked about a bit.
Anyway, we went down pretty well and the upshot of it is that we've got a gig in Angouleme the weekend after next.
Some young Danish people who saw us in Freibourg last year told us we were like The Raveonettes, the only difference being that we were better because we were more original. I don't think this is necessarilly true but we've taken it as a huge compliment, the more so because they were from Denmark, same as The Raveonettes.
I was tempted to turn into an American Showbiz Country Hick / Hack and make an announcement:
'We were really sorry to hear about Ray Vonette.We wish him speedy recovery and later in the set we're gonna be featuring one of his songs...'
But I don't think a French audience would have got it.

I can't think of anything much else that's happened. We keep recording, shifting boxes around. I stopped shaving for a month and developed a beard which is a strange thing that every man should try at least once in his life. It's a slow version of jumping into an unheated swimming pool - you get used to it and for a while it's quite enjoyable. But I'm getting out now, as in shaving it off because I'm bored with it and it feels bizarre. Mickey Gallagher told me after one of his beard episodes that he got rid of it because he couldn't bear to think of the whole world knowing what his pubic hair looked like
 If this beard looked half as good as my pubic hair I'd be a happy man. Now steady on ladies...



Oh yes - I played with The Proclaimers in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was wonderful as ever, the more so being in Scotland. If you haven't got their album, Life With You, buy it now! Not just for Whole Wide World, for the whole thing -I think it's one of the great albums of all time.

  

No sooner had we had Merry Christmas and a happy new year, and all that old bollocks, than South By South West crept up on us again. Has it really only been a year since the last one? Good God! I've lost all track of time.
I don't want to get suckered into that even though I obviously don't exist now for yet another year because I didn't cough up for a flight and a hotel and pop in a thirty five minute set in exchange for thirty seven dollars and a wristband. But I'm sure plenty of other people did and it was the best South By South West ever.
Of course, the end result for most career hounds is that everything stays exactly the same – except that occasionally somebody tells them they caught their set at SXSW and then runs out of conversation. But for the city of Austin it's good business. Everybody who's anybody knows that you're nobody unless you were there this year, so off they all go, and Austin gets a big cheap festival. Someone told me once just how much profit there was in it for the city. I can't remember the amount now and I wouldn't like to quote it in case I'm out by the odd million, but believe me, it's a lot. And all in the name of Fame. Remember my name…?
I regret not sending out Happy SXSW cards. Glastonbury's coming up next - one or the other of these tediously media-blitzo go-getter events is going to replace Christmas eventually. Right now the shops are stocking up for Glastonbury and here I am sitting here in this bucket seat on the back porch wondering where I went wrong.

Perhaps I'll try “A Merry South By South West And A Happy Glastonbury To All Our Customers!"

Goodwill to all men this Glastontide, and all the best in the South By South West! Etc.

And I haven't even begun to talk about our little West Coast tour – thirty hours of air travel and two thousand miles of driving in less than a week for four consecutive dates. We must be more fucking mad than the artistes clamouring to play at SXSW. Except that we're under no illusions, and I don't think we could be accused of working for the man.
On the subject of SXSW (and when did we ever really leave it?), Amy pointed out that we could make a killing as backing musicians  – we just book ourselves into a decent hotel early in the game and then get on to all the solo artists we know that might need a band, let them know that they'll be there and offer our services. Get yourself an all-star backing group - next year Amy and I will be there, me with guitar and bass, Amy with guitar and keyboards, both of us in superb voice, ready to tackle those difficult harmonies, and hot to trot at a mere $100 dollars a pop. Each.
I'm going to be one of those pain in the arse people rushing for show to show with an armful of instruments, ever self-important and always looking beyond you for more interesting possibilities when you try to engage me in conversation. And I think I'll take up a sideline as well, just so that I can watch the poor suckers that engage our services inwardly groan when I announce that I've brought the old mandolin along - ‘thought it might come in handy'…
Understand, I'm not knocking the musos, I sometimes wish I was one. Musicians complain about everything but at least they sometimes get paid. But musicians quite often assume that the star of the show, people like me and Amy, are making loads of money while they're earning a pittance. We've found that by not having any other musicians in our group we can indeed earn a pittance – and sometimes we almost earn enough to live on.
But this lack of musicianly help has meant that our album has taken an extraordinary amount of time because we've been doing everything ourselves. But this has also meant that Amy has learned to play the piano, my bass playing has improved three thousand fold (whatever fold means), we've developed tremendous percussion skills and we can spot a viable sounding loop in the day to day operational noise of any domestic appliance or gadget. Actually that last bit is a slight exaggeration – we've never recorded the salad spin - but I do have an almost cosmic sample culled from a recording of the toilet flushing in my old flat in Brighton.
And I didn't get a musician to flush it – I flushed it myself and operated the sampler with the other hand (which of course I washed afterwards).



I'm hoping to be able to to update the site a lot more regularly than I have in the past couple of years. I've actually got a room to work in now and after something like a year and a half of shifting cardboard boxes around. Occasionally I'd dig in to one of them and pull out some long lost treasure like the Shure Vocal Master sign off one of my old PA columns, leaving the resultant chaos until the boxes needed moving again.
Meanwhile Amy was working in a room filled with my boxes and I was working at a table in the hallway by the front door. The hallway was OK - I was right next to the record player - but it was noisy because of the road outside and if anyone opened the door unexpectedly my papers would blow all over the place and I'd get very cross.
Sometimes the front door wouldn't be properly closed and the air displaced by a passing lorry would blow the door open, and once a mad old lady from down the road tried to come in the house because she desperately wanted to see Amy about something that needn't concern us menfolk. Luckily Amy was away and by the time she came back the affair was long forgotten so we never found out what it was all about. I envisioned something involving bloomers, varicose veins, white flesh and some complicated webbing straps…
But now I'm in the room where we used to throw our clothes. It was like a dump for things we never wear, bedding that has no use - old duvets, difficult pillows, moth-eaten blankets, my collection of fabrics and mismatched curtains... all housed in and around some large drawers which came from the lingerie department of Bonds department store in Norwich when they were refurbishing it and turning it into a branch of John Lewis.
Somehow we've managed to organise ourselves - I built a large cupboard in the room Amy works in with enough space to hang every item of clothing we own with sections: too embarrassing to ever wear, what was I thinking of!!?!, one day I'll be less tubby…, will there ever be an occasion for this? etc. Plus a small section for stuff we do actually wear.
And now I'm in the room at the back, surrounded by aging embossed piss yellow wallpaper with a slight pink tinge, and ghostly patches where crucifixes used to hang. It was an old lady's bedroom. Now it's my centre of operations and here I am surrounded by all my junk, thinking about writing another book.

But I can't really do that until we've finished our album. We've got three tracks actually mixed now and I've retired temporarily to rekindle my sanity having botched a simple tape edit. Yes, that's right - we're working with tape. I'm mixing everything down to a two track Revox, just like the ones at Pathway Studio where a lot of the great early Stiff records were recorded.
Here's a photo of Pathway in its heyday with the great Bazza at the controls. I think the other character is Glen Tilbrooke. You can see the Revox machines on the shelf overhead.