Grown up, mature, responsible drinking.

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!

Green Man Festival 2008

Five years ago I received a call asking me to play at the second Greenman festival. The first had completely passed me by but since nobody was offering me gigs then I readily agreed. The festival was ace. A handful of gentle, bearded folk with lots of kids running around and acts like Alisdair Roberts, Four Tet and The Earlies playing amidst the soft rain, it was small enough to navigate (nobody has ever been lost at a Greenman festival) but just big enough that you could get out of your cake without upsetting anybody. I’ve been every year since and even though it has become much bigger (the first one, in 2003, was attended by 350 people. In 2008 there must have been ten times that number). The mixture of folk, electronica and random esoterica is far more interesting than the usual festival lineups of identikit indie bands and commercial heavyweights.

Jo and Danny, the organisers, had been members of the indie scene in the late eighties before it was seduced by money, cocaine and fame and have used their love of music and their experience in putting on bands (they used to run the Buzz Club in Aldershot) to create an experience completely lacking in cynicism, violence, corporate interference and the usual multi tier backstage pass shenanigans that are the hallmark of most major festivals. They are lovely people too, enthusiastic, generous and, for the time being, completely committed to ensuring the festival remains purely about the artist and their audience.

Over the past five years I’ve seen incredible performances from Bonnie Prince Billy, The Earlies, Dead Meadow, Bert Jansch, Pentangle, Richard James and this year didn’t disappoint. The Cave Singers were the act that I was most looking forward to seeing and they were great. Knee slapping, beard totin’ tunes sung by a guy who sounds like a girl with a guys voice.

The Fuck Buttons were disappointing. I’ve been playing one fuzzy note from a laptop for decades and it took two of them ages to do very little. Kling Klang would have been so much better.

Oh yeah. Music that moves.

I loved the first North Sea Radio Orchestra album and they were better this year than last. Then they were lost in the big tent but somehow managed to overcome that this year. Maybe it’s just that I was standing a little closer to the stage. Spiritualised were ok but relied heavily on the ballads and their performance was a lost opportunity for a crowd who wanted to finish off the night with a display of Astaire footed abandon. Threatmantics, playing early on Friday, were the best I’ve seen them. Lurching between, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine, The Specials and a host of others using a guitar, drumkit and viola, they left me breathless.

I was standing in the courtyard of the Green Man cafe waiting for Mary to finish watching The Peth (who, it must be said, were utter shite and need to sort out their priorities. People don’t but tickets to see a singer who’s fucked his voice up so completely that he could only muster a bellow akin to a stricken yak. It’s alike a guitarist chopping his arm off just before he’s due on) with a beer in my hand when two people walked on the small stage and started playing. Wildbirds and Peacedrums (and what an ace name that is) are a couple of Swedes who make a free soul racket that had me transfixed. At times it was difficult to believe that there were only two of them up there.

I checked out the dance tent on the Sunday night and, as usual, it was Andy Votel playing undanceable psych music to a handful of his mates. For somebody with a supposedly wide ranging taste in musical styles, his sets always sound to me like two bands at the most. I called it a festival and slid back down the muddy hill and to bed.