So after a morning of metaphorically knocking on the door of the industry re an open letter pertaining to Bandstocks, I open the door to fetch the mail (bills) and the fucking thing falls off in my hand.
The whole door!
I’m still happy though, the weather is a wet, cold ogre banging at my window and I have to go out there now but today I feel happy and there is nothing that I would wish for except that everyone else could feel the same.
Here’s
To inhaling crushed bones
through a dried up
white out pen
and riding the backwards racer
in hot June rain
in a matching blue and gold
plastic bag / poncho / raincoat.
It’s a wooden coaster
with a medium hill height mean,
high hill to flat ground ratio
you know I’d sell my shingles
for a thimble dip of snow.
Back then I’d've sold my single
for a fingertip of glow.
And us in navy blue hoodies
and khakis, as was the style that year.
In London,
where the sirens yelp
like a helpless dog
with its paw stepped on,
and the rain comes down in late July
and the record labels call you Why?
and your eyes are slits in bags of fat
and your eyes are piss holes in the snow
I swear,
The riders on the tube
tie razors to their elbows,
The riders on the tube
keep cold coal in their billfolds,
The riders on the tube
will hide cocaine in their shell toes,
and yes yes yes man
they’ll novocaine their hello’s
Till the constables got pit bulls
with their paw bones all stepped on
Till the constables got pit bulls
With crushed bones up their nose holes
And us in fish net hat
and canvas shoes, as was the style that year
The Civil War Bear came through again this week, allowing us to take over a room at the old Music Box rehearsal studios so we can use our Hot Press, stretch our canvases and generally use it as our office. That meant having to shift that bloody heavy thing again. This time our mate Dickie Jim was on hand to help me get it into the van and then into Music Box. It’s far too heavy for two people and we had to drag it a bit the result being that it’s a bit fucked. It still works, amazingly enough, but needs a repair. It doesn’t shut properly and all the connections at the back are loose. And it’s scratched to fuck.
I spent a few hours building tables and heaving the press onto Cait’s old kitchen table, ON MY OWN! I swear that thing is going to involved in my death somehow, I’ve seen it looking at me funny. It was alright actually, the radio was on and I enjoyed the peace and quiet.
i think there may be enough room in there for me to have a wee recording setup in there. That would be sweet as I haven’t done any proper songwriting or recording this year. I have about forty scraps of melody sung into my telephone, all of which would be lost forever were I to lose it (a very real possibility) so I need to start transferring some of these ideas to tape.
I had to set everything up quickly because I had a job to finish for a client in Brighton. I had made an illustration for a wedding using photographs sent to me by the best man and I needed to get it into the post. I was very lucky that the Hot Press still worked because there aren’t too many of those hanging about. I was also in a race against the dying of the light but I raged and I got there in the end, looks pretty good too even though I stretched it over the wooden frame in the dark.
The Los Campesinos! job is still ongoing. This week we had to deal with their American and Japanese record companies and all their territorial quirks. I’ve been asked to do an illustration for another wedding, this time in Australia. I think the theme will be Brian Wilson so I’ll enjoy knocking that one up. I’ve got an illustration in the Times today. I mocked up a cereal packet to advertise a cereal called ‘Credit Crunch’ (Now that’s satire). I think it looks pretty good.
I’ve also started working with a program called ‘Motion 3′ which is mindblowing. I’m going to start making videos for my songs soon, I can’t wait.
We asked our friend, Kirsten, to take some photographs of us while Mary is still pregnant. She is a great photographer as you can see here. We decided to go to Merthyr Mawr a place that Mary and I had tried to find before with little success. I borrowed my friend Ffion’s car and drove west for about forty minutes eventually ending up in the tiny Hamlet of Merthyr Mawr with it’s sleepy, storybook cottages, winding lanes and swaying cornfields. At the end of one of these lanes you reach the part we were looking for, the place where the trees give way to huge sand dunes that eventually, I assume , lead down to the sea. We picked our way down a sunlight spotted path, past the ruins of the mansion house, once the centrepoint of the lost village of Treganlaw and onto the famous dunes where parts of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ were filmed.
It was a beautiful day and we had a great laugh together even though the sandhills were murder on the ankles (and I am pregnant after all). We stayed for a couple of hours before heading back to the car. Kirsten had spotted some cornfields and had always wanted to take pictures in one so we crouched amongst the tall leaves and stems and snapped away until I declared myself tired and hungry and that was that.
Yesterday I had to move our antique couch from the living room, into the van and over to the studio. I took four or five of us to get it in all those years ago but I had to do it on my own. I managed to gouge a couple of deep grooves into the hallway floor and I ended up taking the front door off but, with the help of a neighbour, I managed to get it into the van and it now sits proudly in the old ‘Box. Mary spent a few hours cleaning the windows and the window sills, oh, we’re nesting alright.
In the afternoon we drove over to see our friends Kevin and Beth who ha a baby girl, Nell, just over three weeks ago. She is beautiful and very well behaved, that’s the sort we applied for. keve and beth seem very chilled and Kev and I surveyed the garden and watched a bit of football while the ladies talked about contractions and pushing. The whole thing made us feel much calmer.
Oh yeah, on Saturday we attended a Parentcraft thing at Llandoch Hospital. It was supposed to be six hours long but we left after three. It was full of blokes with hangovers refusing to massage their partners’ backs, presumably because it’s not a manly thing to do. Well fuck that, I love giving Mary a squeeze and I don’t care who’s watching. So we left at lunch and got home just in time to watch Liverpool stuff Everton. Magic.
The new Akira the Don mixtape is out this week and awesome it is too. Mixes, bangers, stompers and samplers, it’s all done with the unmistakable swagger of a man who has to stand on his tip toes to look out the window. I love him, Mary loves him and one day the world will stand and cheer. Until then though, grab it FREE from his website or give him money for a copy that sounds good on something other than your phone. He’s even done a version of ‘Goldrush ‘49, how cool is that?
I guess that, reading the above on the day between Friday and Sunday, it would appear to be obvious, immutable even, that today was a Saturday but having been a freelance musician/illustrator (or whatever it is I do nowadays) for the past eighteen years every day is Saturday, every night is Friday night. That’s not necessarily a good thing. The weeks and months slip beneath one’s feet, blurring and drifting without the weekend anchor to root you to any kind of calender. The body clock is fucked, birthdays are forgotten and whole seasons are missed. Do we have seasons anymore? Yesterday was warm and sunny, I was waiting for Mary after swimming last night and people were out in short sleeves and the tiny skirts and yet there are Christmas Trees in the windows of many of the bars around Cardiff.
Christmas Trees? Wasn’t it August three weeks ago?
The reason today feels different is because we’ve had so much work this week. As well as the whole Bandstocks thing, I’ve had my illustration for the Times, a commissioned illustration to finish and a design/layout job for Los Campesinos that we accepted even though we’ve never done any layout work before and it meant having to put ourselves through intensive crash course lessons in various software we’ve never used. we did it though, finished last night which is why I feel light as a feather this morning. That’s not to say I don’t work hard normally, it’s just that my brain was having to work in a different way. We need as much work as we can at the minute, we’re about to go from being a freewheelin’ couple to being a family on low income. It’s exciting though, I remember trudging to work in Birkenhead,twenty years ago, thinking that my entire life was mapped out in front of me in a dismal grey, formless sludge. I was determined to find the escape hatch and I did, not having to go into that office every day, to work for people and concepts that were alien to me, is the single greatest victory of my life and even if I have to go back, if things don’t work out, then at least I have tasted the air on a weekday morning in February, with nowhere to go, no-one to see, no bells to ring and no buttons to push. Somedays I would alight at Hamilton Square Station and walk in the opposite direction, take the ferry over to Liverpool and wander the streets, looking in windows and dreaming in Squares. Is that what I want from my son? I have no idea what I want for him. To be safe, warm and happy, that’ll do for now.
I worked in the red building (top). A place so dull that this was the only image of it I could find on the web.
So this week I’ve been staring at my computer for twelve hours a day, I’ve got a permanent headache and I’m crazier than a shithouse rat but I know things that I didn’t know at the beginning of the week and that’s what it’s all about. I forgot to mention in my last post that I’d seen my friend Adam last week. Adam used to be in a band called Swervedriver who were one of my favourites at the time (’Ravedown’ still sounds amazing) and we are good mates. He’s lived in the States for the last few years and we haven’t seen much of each other but he was in Cardiff to mix his album with Charlie Francis and Mary and I drove over to Roath to hang out for a while and listen to some of the (ace) tracks he was working on. He invited us to the Swervie reform gig at the Scala on Tuesday but, despite us having been in London that day, we didn’t make it. We went back to Cait’s to pick up the last of our stuff and I had a meeting with my manager. We left Cardiff at about six thirty am, got to Cait’s around ten and then I spent three hours packing and loading the van. After tubing it to Farringdon and then Hackney Wick (to view a not very nice flat) we got back to Caits around seven thirty, completely fucked. Cait made us some dinner -she is such a great lady- and then I drove back to Cardiff getting in around eleven. I slept well that night.
Mary had some breastfeeding workshops this week which was good practice for driving to the hospital. Her belly is huge now and she’s uncomfortable but she’s working hard and I’m immensely proud of her. It’s her birthday on Monday and I have no money to take her out of buy her anything nice, that’s not a great feeling. I’ll have to put a ribbon around the cat.
Gareth from Los Campesinos came over on Thursday to go through the DVD booklet that we’re working on. He’s a lovely lad, he was telling us that he’d been watching old Top of The Pops clips on youtube which brought visions of The Regents, Tourists and Pan’s People to my mind but he was talking about Blur and Oasis! Eh? I’m more than twice his age, fuck. He was lamenting the fact that there has been no real credible scene since Britpop which I had always considered a laughable concept. Bad music with no positive or maverick agenda, an establishment scene. But he would have been seven or eight at the time and I was in my mid to late twenties and the whole thing felt very silly. Mind you, I think that Two Tone was a worldwide revolution when in fact it was probably two or three records and some fucking great badges.
A friend of mine is pitching for some monument sculpture thing in the Valleys somewhere and he’s asked me to come up with a six note melody for bells. I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. I said yes though, of course I did. Always say YES!
My friend Miki sent me a couple fo great youtube things this week.
After having received a bunch of investments through Paypal I realise that if I am to make 50k rather than lose it then I’m going to have to add £1 on to every share. This is down to Paypal charges and the charge that the Bandstocks site throws at you when you upload money on your card.
So, please, if you want to invest. Send £11 pounds through Paypal to fingertipsaint.com
Thanks very much and thanks to all those who have already invested and sent me so many letters of support.
So last Thursday I took my new ‘I only drink wine like a grown up’ experiment to the Conway Pub in Pontcanna. With the beautiful Marylou on my arm, I strolled up the rain sodden streets full of confidence in my new found ability to drink responsibly and looking forward to meeting our friends, Jo and Danny, Carl, Ashli, Dickie Jim and Bronwen and The Civil War Bear (who has shaved his beard off! Oh cruel, twisted fate!). I approached the bar, asked for a large glass of red wine and waited to be tarred and feathered. To my amazement, a rather drinkable number was placed in front of me with nary a mocking whisper. I settled in my seat and engaged in my usual erudite meanderings, sounding and looking for all the world like some cerebral academic like Bertrand Russell or Basil Brush; time passed as has become it’s habit (except when Mark Ronson is on and then it just stops and even starts going slightly backwards) and I was snuggled smugly in the snug, snagged on a line of wine and fine conversation. Booting out time is when things started going awry. Instead of going home I decided that I wanted another adult glass of grown up drink and ended up at a friends house drinking wine until it ran out, then beer, then brandy with a spliff chaser. So I ended up, once more on the kitchen floor with little Chickpea telling me what a disgrace I was. And she was right.
It’s a good plan, it just needs refining.
I had a bit of a meltdown at the start of the week, the enormity of what I’m trying to do coupled with the thousand plus miles I’d driven the week before caught up with me and sapped my energy completely. I would write an email, have a bit of a cry and then write another one and so on, soon passed though and by Wednesday I was fighting fit once more. We started swimming again this week which helped enormously. I love swimming and I love our pool which isn’t one of those horrible chlorine efforts, it’s a swish hydroelasticatedclockwork jobbie and you can drink pints of it while swimming without being sick, result! On Wednesday we stepped out of the exit at around ten pm and walked into Paul fucking Daniels!* Eh?
Maybe i should stop drinking so much pool water.
I’ve been listening to Marvin’s album this week, ‘Devil in the Distance’. I did a few gigs with Marvin when we were both playing with Akira the Don a couple of years ago. It’s a great album, with none of the tiresome cliches and studied machismo that much of Hip Hop is ridden with nowadays. As all good first albums do, it deals with schooldays, parents and the environment that he grew up in (Brixton). It’s funny and it’s ace, just like Marvin. Check it!
Mary and I were on Adam Walton’s BBC radio show last night. Adam has been a constant supporter of my music for longer than either of us care to remember (we’re actually too old to remember much of anything) and we love being on his show. He’s the funniest man we know and has us in stitches for most of the time we’re off air (and sometimes on). He’s also a rather ace writer and photographer as you can see on his blog.
We performed ‘Bear Lake’ and ‘Darwin’s Tree’ and I waffled, rather badly Marylou tells me, about Bandstocks for a bit. Anyway, you can hear the whole thing here. He also plays some ace music, he always does.
Afterwards we had a quick glass of grown up wine in Chapter with our friends Fionna the Lady Adventurer, Tom, Chill and Bethan. Afterwards we stood outside and chatted, the party was split into two camps. The girls talked about babies, responsibility and the universal, lifelong struggle of sisterhood while us blokes enthused about computer games. We’re a simple breed but lovable in a waggy dog kinda way.
This morning the chimney sweep came round and stuck his big brush up me dirty chimney pipe. I don’t see anything funny about that, it was really exciting. Look!
So last week I signed the Bandstocks contract and made the move back to Cardiff. In some ways it is a backwards step but time was running out and it is great to be back in our house with all our shit and our little welsh cat, Chickpea. The move took two trips and I’ve still got to go back and get more stuff. I don’t know how we manage to accumulate so much crap, it’s like she’s made of velcro and I’m made of sticky tape.
It’s been one hell of a year though. In the last twelve months I’ve learned to drive, stopped smoking (except for a couple of wee blips), recorded an album, got pregnant (kind of) started a business, started working for a national newspaper, spent six months living in somebody else’s house, sold art from a market stall and grown a rather splendid fro. No wonder I can’t stop napping.
The bandstocks thing (and you must be tired of hearing about this now) is going to be hard, hard work. I need to do something drastic, such as doing an acoustic tour with a new born baby, if I’m going to spread the word. It would be worth it though, if it came off. No question about that at all.
The house was spotless when we got back which we were very grateful for, not just the fact that all we had to do was unpack and settle back in but for the fact that we put our trust into people we didn’t know that well and that trust proved to be well founded. It means we’ll trust again which makes the world, even if it’s just an infinitesimal degree, a better place.
We drove back to Liverpool over the weekend to see my mum and check out the huge La Machine spider that was already crawling through the city. I had been in London a couple of summers ago and have always regretted not seeing the Sultan’s Elephant and Giant Little Girl that wandered through it’s broad avenues.
Just before Birmingham we encountered the worst weather I’ve ever had to drive through. The traffic on the M5 slowed to about thirty mph and I couldn’t see a fucking thing. It was ace! We met up with my mum at Lime Street and headed off to look for the Spider. We didn’t have to search for long. Church Street was rammed and helicopters buzzed overhead, I squeezed my through the crowds while Mary and my mum watched from further up the street. It looked incredible and was a beautiful golden colour. There was a bloke in front of me with his brolly in everybody’s way even though, as I pointed out to him, it wasn’t raining and he had no hair. I HATE umberellas, when I am king etc
I didn’t see any movement from the spider which was disappointing but a policemen told me that it would be on the move a bit later on so we walked down to the docks and had a ridiculously overpriced drink in one of the bars down there. We chatted and watched the sun disappear behind the old warehouses. I took some pictures, it’s ages since I’ve been out with my camera, I need to get back into the habit.
Later we made our way back up Hanover Street for another look. I tried to remember where Planet X was, the place where we spent most of our days in the late eighties and supported bands like Primal Scream when they came through Liverpool, but everything has changed so much. I narrowed it down to a couple of doorways and shut my eyes and tried to recall the distant senses and foggy sounds of twenty years ago.
Back at the top of Church Street we stood near the place where we thought the spider would end up. There was a large enclosure with huge pipes around which a mass of people waited patiently, we were beyond that, near a cordon of coppers who were stopping people from getting any closer which was frustrating. We waited anyway, and waited, and waited.
An hour later I could see the giant legs winding up the street followed by a live band that were being transported in individual cranes, high above the crowd. It was just getting dark and the noise of the spider, the crowd and the music was gripping. It was genuinely exciting, it would have been even better if we had been closer.
It stopped within the enclosure and had a kind of water fight with the pipes that were shooting out flames, that bit didn’t look too impressive but then, just as I was getting a bit bored and started wondering how the hell we were going to get through this massive crowd, the security people started yelling at us to move back and the gates came down and the fucking thing started walking through us. It was unbelievable, the noise and the spectacle of this 50ft wooden/mechanical arachnid stalking over our heads followed by a horde of musicians banging away in the sky was thrilling as hardly anything ever is these days.
And then it was gone and everyone just stood there grinning and clapping and why isn’t there more magic in the world? If it doesn’t exist then let’s invent it. This was the least cynical, genuine piece of theatre I’ve seen for a long, long tome and it didn’t cost me a penny. And I think about the times we stumbled around those same streets, out of our heads on acid, imagine if we’d have seen a giant spider, a real one I mean. We’d never have gone home again.
We went up the hill towards the Philarmonic, past Roscoe Street where I once had a flat and had dinner in a fantastic French Restaurant. I’ve given up beer (yeah right, let’s see how long this lasts) and have decided to become a wino so my mum and I drank a bottle of Merlot while Mary gorged on, er, soda water. We put my mum in a cab and drove ourselves back to the house where my mum got the photo boxes out so that Mary could laugh at my baby pictures. Honestly, you’ve never seen a head like it. I drank a bottle of Rioja (I could get used to this) and fell into bed about half two.
The following morning we went for a walk in the Breck. It used to be the grounds of a large mansion but was dug out to build the nearby motorway. It’s now an overgrown spot with rocky outcrops and I spent much of my childhood down here.
My mum had never seen the place which I couldn’t believe. I wanted to climb Granny’s Rock which we used to do whenever we came down. I hadn’t set foot in the place for over twenty five years and it didn’t look any different except maybe it was a bit wilder. I didn’t get to the top of Granny’s Rock, I’m too fat and old and scared but I gave it a go, it’s not even that high. All the old handholds are there and my hands and feet knew where to go after all these years.
I have many dreams about this place, or rather this place is the venue for much of my dreaming. It was also completely deserted. Wallasey feels like a ghost town to me, there are thousands of houses, hundreds of shops but I don’t know where all the people are. I hated living here as a youth and don’t like to spend much time here even now but a trip to the old school was in order and we trudged up to Liscard to see if St Albans was still standing. Walking up one of the roads approaching the school with the water tower in the distance felt really weird, like nothing had happened inbetween.
I was here from 1976-1979, I don’t remember fighting the punk wars but we did have a legendary Jubilee party at which the whole school had the biggest food fight I’ve ever been a part of. We got away with it as well, what were they going to do? Cane us all? Come to think of it, we were punk as fuck.
They’ve had new windows put in and the entrance is a bit different and the playground has completely changed but I guess you should expect that. We also walked past the small fence outside the second hand car lot that I would spend half an hour each day jumping over as a seven year old with too much energy. I lasted three this time. Not minutes, times.
Then it was back home for some serious napping, lunch and telly. We kissed my mum goodbye and hit the motorway. This will be my mum’s first Grandchild and she is VERY EXCITED. We haven’t told her that she is bringing him up yet, we don’t want her going overboard with gratitude.
We stopped off in Stafford to see Boo who is married to Mary’s brother, Muffin (who also happens to be MY HERO!). She had a van full of baby clothes, car seats, blow up swimming things and all kinds of stuff that the baby will need; how ace is that? She had also, with the help of her two wee girls, Hannah Banana and Gracie Goggins (I’m not making this up) made us some lush cornflake and marshmallow cakes. Result.
The subsequent drive home was long and poor Marylou was uncomfortable throughout. Still, we listened to Chet Baker all the way and nothing is ever hard when Chet sings.
RT @suddain: @brokenbottleboy To oppose something that doesn't exist is as meaningless as believing in something that doesn't exist, isn ... 10 mins ago
@suddain @brokenbottleboy Amen to that. 10 mins ago
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