While I got the time I might as well keep updating - we're going to the UK on Thursday. I have to say UK which sounds rather pompous to me (as in daytime Radio One DJs of the seventies: 'National radio broadcasting all across the yeoo kay...') because we're going to Scotland. I don't know why I didn't just say Scotland, but then again that would have been a bit lumpy because I would have had to somehow negociate a whole building site load of verbal obstacles, verbal gymnastics we could call them to mix the metaphor into a smooth paste, in order to get to saying that we're also going to England. It's just that the Scots are, quite rightly, more than a bit sensitive about people saying England when they mean Scotland, and I didn't want to give the impression that I haven't made the distinction. I once met a Scottish Nationalist politician - I was sitting next to him at a dinner thrown by the Maire of Pessac (don't ask how I got invited or we'll be here forever). I asked what he did and when he told me I said, 'We'd be in the shit without Scotland,' and he replied 'That's precisely our point.' It'll happen one day, I can hardly wait.
So on Thursday we're taking a ferry, driving up to Norfolk to see our friends, then on Saturday we're flying from Norwich to Edinburgh where I'm making a guest appearance with The Proclaimers on the last two dates of their tour.
Edinburgh Castle on Saturday and Bught Park, Inverness on Sunday.
After that we're coming down to The Crooked Billet in Henley and back up to Norwich to play at The Brickmakers, a great venue which puts me in mind of a club house bar at an early seventies caravan site. We're finishing off at The Horsebridge Arts Centre in Whitstable. Whitstable has been described to me as Islington On Sea. I've heard that Jamie Oliver lives there and so does Suggs from Madness. But they may have moved by now. In the eighties, when I lived in Chatham, I used to drive down to Whitstable and Herne Bay. They were my favourite places. At the top end of Whitstable in a place called Tankerton there was a tea garden frequented by Peter Cushing. He'd be sitting there drinking a cup of tea looking somewhat eerie. I never spoke to him, just marvelled. And shivered. It was complete Hammer House Of Horror.
When we get home we have to get on to some serious rehearsing and preparation for the US tour. That's if I get my visa alright. You'd think having a just expired three year work permit and being married to an American it might be fairly easy but it isn't. Amy called an American Embassy helpline, except it wasn't the American Embassy because they've contracted the work out to a private company. The man on the other end of the phone was Russian.
It was impossible - you have to go through an agency. It's going to cost a small fortune, $3010 dollars in fact, plus a trip to the embassy in Paris. And that involves an overnight stay because you can only have a morning appointment. Call it $3250 and we might even be able to fit a sandwich and a cup of coffee into the budget.

All this and I haven't mentioned the album. It's all finished, ten new originals and one cover version. We're very pleased with it. I don't know where to begin in talking about it. I suppose the weird bit everyone's wondering about so far is why Stiff Records. It's very simple: Amy and I are hopelessly masochistic and suffer from low self-esteem so we deliberately sought out a label that we knew would give us a good kicking and generally fuck us up. Is that the answer people wanted?
The truth is that we like Stiff Records. It isn't owned or operated by the cunts that ran it before. Dave Robinson, Alan Cowderoy and Paul Conroy have got nothing to do with it. Stiff Records is owned by Trevor Horn's company, SPZ and run by Pete Gardiner and his assistant Vicky Ball. I've been dealing with Stiff over the matter of re-releases now for ten years and we get along very well. I was very happy when Pete started to develop the label rather than just keeping it going as a museum piece. So with the new album it was a fairly obvious course of action.
We certainly didn't want to put it out ourselves - I did that with Bungalow Hi and it was a lot of work. It's bad enough booking our own dates, Amy taking care of the US and me doing the UK. We're only doing that because the agents that book smaller venues are all fucking useless.
These kind of agents approach me from time to time almost beating their chests as they tell me they could book us coast to coast from John O' Groats to the Great Wall Of China. I explain it to them every time: if we were The UK Subs or, god forbid, The Lurkers, they could probably do just that, book it on the nostalgia ticket, four piece band, two Marshalls, hire a drum kit, bouf sorted etc... But we not quite like that, we're difficult to categorise. Promoters are cautious because they don't know what we are.
I try not to succumb to the temptation of taking up with another chest beating optimist because what happens is that there's a big silence then they come back with two dates three weeks apart and say things like it's a difficult time or I can't understand it, I've sent out fifty emails. And I tell them I told them so and we face an empty date sheet while they go back to playing the bass in a Jesus & Mary Chain tribute band or some such nonsense.
So that's enough of that except to say that it's like an entertainment agency here some days.