Martin x

I’m listening to ‘Boats’ by the Aliens. -*WOW*-

Recorded a live session here in Cardiff last week with Alan Thompson. His show, Evening Session, goes out on the BBC weeknights and is a mixture of old and new music, whatever takes his fancy. Him and the producer, Darren, were a pleasure to be with for the four or five hours we were there (it was live). I did a session for Alan about seven years ago, playing songs that I’d never played before and I don’t think I’ve ever played since. He is a very funny man and it’s worth listening to his show. I bust a string on ‘Dead of Winter’, of course I did, I hadn’t taken any spares but Darren drove back to his house to fetch me some, what a star. We also did ‘Bear Lake’, ‘Darwin’s Tree’ and Mary sang ‘Why You Gotta bring Me All This Rain?’.

Earlier we had practised at the house. Baby loves ‘Orpheus Lament’, he jumps around every time we play it. He’s due tomorrow, i don’t think he’s coming out though, everything feels too normal. I think he’s waiting until next thursday, Lennon’s birthday before he squeezes his fat head out. Mary and I went to the studio earlier to put a lock on the door. I had to finish up on my own because Mary was having her haircut. The sight of her waddling down the street in the early afternoon drizzle was incredibly moving, romantic and possibly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Thursday I hooked with my old pal Dickie Jim. Recently dumped he’s going through a rough patch, bless him, but Mary and I are doing all we can to make sure he’s ok. He received a grant to research old Welsh folk manuscripts and, as part of that research, he’s been visiting the house of Bob Evans. Bob is a musician of some renown, an independent scholar and an orator par excellence and is helping Rich out with some lectures on the origins of music, Pythagorean scales etc and explaining how music was revolutionised in the early part of the eighteenth century when equal temperament became widely used. Check the wiki

Anyway, Rich told me about his first visit and I was very keen to tag along for the next. The three hours I spent there were among the most bewilderingly enriching of my life. My head was stuffed when I left, full of chants, ballads, juju, hobby horses, Elizabethan poetry, music of the spheres, African spirits and teeming with tunes, tones and times. I could listen to him for hours (Well, I guess I did), if school had been half this interesting I might have done a bit better.

Bob’s partner in music, Mari Ann was also present. She offered her own points, some of which reflected her Trinidadian background and later they performed three songs, Mari ann singing and Bob playing the Cruith, a handmade medieval instrument which, because it’s played in Pythagorean tuning, six strings, three octaves, omits one hell of a racket, similar to the guitar when you tune it to a droney tuning such as Stephen Stills’ fave DDDDAD (or DADDAD). The real power though came from Mari Ann’s voice which scared the shite out of me when she stared singing. Because it’s based on different scales it sounds completely alien (although occasionally it reminded me of Tim Buckley at his most freeform).

I’ll go again next time Dickie Jim goes, I can’t wait.

My mate David Hall was a semi finalist on Masterchef a couple of years ago thus making him one of the coolest people I’ve ever met (actually I’ve never met him, we’re ‘virtual’ friends, isn’t modern life great?) I remember his Leek Puddings and I’ve been threatening to make them ever since. I followed his recipe

They turned out pretty good. I fucked up the pastry three times so Mary had to come and do it but I DID THE REST. I think they were a bit salty but Mary loved ‘em and that’s good enough for me.
Look, I put hearts on top. I’m ROMANTIC AS FUCK!

I’ve just had a hilarious facebook chat with Adam Walton. We’re probably the funniest people ever. And the most modestest.

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.

X

From 7.00pm tonight Mary and I will be talking and playing on the Evening Show.

It lives here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/eveningshow/

If you miss it, you can hear it for the rest of the week.

It’ll be worth it to hear me fluff the intro for ‘Bear lake’.

Every time x

Crushed Bones by WHY?

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?

Go, go get it..

Akira the Don - A Lonesome Town

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.

Regarde!

This one made me cry, stick with it.

Hello beautiful people.

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.

Love

Martin

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!

And, yes, it is a beautiful, blue sky day.

*true!