A lovely walk through Morrab Gardens to the sea and back through Penlee Park to the studio showed us that spring was well and truly here. Not just in the sky but down here on the Earth, in the earth, in the trees and in the bushes, in the budding flowers and the already falling petals of the magnolia trees. Bumble bees! There were bumble bees buzzing around the flowers that have already bloomed. In the bushes a robin, bright red breast and its feathers fluffed up by a still chilly breeze. Hopping, but each hop was like a jump, a huge distance covered. How do they do it? Their spindly legs are so thin, they are so small and delicate, a true wonder of nature. As a kid I lived in the countryside and my family kept a lot of animals. We had a goat (Billy), four geese, a dozen ducks and lots of hens. We had a cat (Blackie) and a dog (Butch), a rabbit, a budgie and a goldfish. Some of their names I can’t remember. I do remember one of the geese was called Arthur and he was pretty vicious. Once I was actually attacked by him in a pecking and wing beating frenzy, I escaped but as a child it was traumatic. It didn’t put me off being an animal lover though. I had lots of books about British birds as well as African animals. Olivia was very impressed with me today when we spotted an unusual bird in a tree near the path in the park. A beautiful whistling song, small like a sparrow but with a very sharp beak, a yellowy orange underbelly and grey blue wings with a Zorro like flash across its eye. “I think it’s a nuthatch” I said. A few hours later Olivia was showing me a nuthatch on the computer screen. Ornithologists of the world unite.
At the supermarket by the sea a lovely Rover 2200 sailed into the car park. I say sailed because my Dad used to have a similar model and I remember it seemed to float and softly bounce along the road. We were admiring it, its odd spare wheel mounted on the boot, its unnamable colour and inside its front room cozyness. It was a P reg. That means it was from between March and December 1975 or January and February 1976. Whenever I see a car like this, I look at the reg, figure out the year and think about what records were out when this car was new. If you scroll down there’s a selective list, you can figure out the bands yourself. I had quite a good time that year despite what was coming to wipe out the past. We weren’t the only ones admiring the car, there was a man leaning against his own car and guess what I didn’t notice what make it was because nowadays it really doesn’t matter. We got talking (from a distance). He had an Irish accent and he told me he, too, used to have a Rover 2000, in fact he had two. He also said that they were the same model and close in age with the same body, but one of them was bigger inside. It’s like guitar effects pedals, if you bought a Big Muff when they first came out it might not have the same components as another pedal that was supposed to be the same, that’s just how it was at the Electro-Harmonix factory. Now the specs for everything are so mass-produced that they are exactly the same. Watch out humans lest you become your neighbour.
I had a sesh with Matt in Brooklyn today, he was telling me about being in Brooklyn at this awful time, but as I said yesterday, I don’t have to talk about it all the time, it’s already everywhere. We were talking about Psychedelic music and I couldn’t believe when he mentioned The 23rd Turnoff. That’s twice in a week that name has come up, so go listen to their classic single Michael Angelo, the world wants you to. Dare came in a little later today but we got to work on Space Summit. It was electric guitar day and I played some arpeggios through one of my Vox AC30s with my 1965 Rick 12-string, then I doubled it and then doubled it again using my old seventies Strat. After that I played multiple EBow tracks that Dare will comp together. I spoke to Ed, our drummer, today, he’s in Bristol and playing the drums to the backing tracks, doing a great job. I really didn’t expect that we would be this far advanced with this album, they’re starting to form a queue with Nightjar, the new MOAT album Poison Stream, Salim’s album A Nuclear Winter Feels Warm and Space Summit not far behind. We just have to sort the world out first.
Music today, well last night getting ready to sleep I put on a CD of Jeff Beck’s beautiful and passionate guitar album Emotion And Commotion as expressed in the title. The man has such control, finesse, whilst also having virtuoso skills should he choose to use them. His tone lives as much in his fingers as it does in his amps and his guitar. I’ve listened to this album a lot. I also played his follow up album Loud Hailer (2016), which I’m not so sure about. I have this habit of playing an album twice in a row if I’m not sure if like it which I might not do with an album I really like. Weird.
When I was looking at albums that were released in 1975 I saw that those old crazy intellectuals Henry Cow had released In Praise Of Learning in that year. It features Dagmar Krause on vocals (back in Germany) as the band merged with another band, Slapp Happy, to make this album. Essentially they were formed out of Cambridge University (of course they were) by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, adding Chris Cutler on drums, John Greaves on bass and later Lindsay Cooper on bassoon and oboe. Others came and left and returned. This is challenging music, challenged the listener, but more purposely challenged the composers and the players. There were songs and there were improvisations, there were lyrics and there were instrumentals, there were complex time signatures and there were no time signatures. The lines crossed on this album are beyond most of our imaginations which contributes to making this avant-garde music such a beautiful noise.
Robert Wyatt’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard was released in the same year as In Praise Of Learning and the two Virgin acts toured together. Robert Wyatt is one of my favourite artists, I have all of his records and if I don’t, I want to know why? Wyatt was in the influential Soft Machine, leaving to form Matching Mole (a play on machine molle, soft machine in French). Soon afterwards an accident, falling from a 4th floor window at a party in London saw him paralyzed from the waist down. Before this album and after the accident he released the amazing Rock Bottom and although he has now officially retired from music he leaves behind a catalogue of wonderful treasures for the world to discover.
This proverbial saying is attributed to, and almost certainly coined by, Lord Byron, in the satirical poem Don Juan, 1823: ‘Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!
Truth is stranger than fiction because we don’t meet it as often. In 1897 Mark Twain included an adage comparing truth and fiction in “Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World” as mentioned previously: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
Today’s song from my catalogue is Forget The Radio from Hanging Out In Heaven, where Robert Wyatt gets a mention.
Forget The Radio
Switch on your amplifier
And put a record on
Lay back on your pillow
And hear your favourite song
Feel the music breathe
Sing the melody
Read the sleeve notes through
What the musicians do
And when you’ve found the groove
Or if the lyrics soothe
Concentrate and listen really close
Forget the radio
Send the DJ home
You’re better on your own
Forget the radio
All my favourite records
I never see or hear
And here’s the plague of zombies
For power and career
Andy Partridge, Robert Wyatt
You hear it you buy it
The tail seems to wag the dog
The music’s thick, lost in the fog
Without analysis
This is all we wish
Image kills the qualities below
Forget the radio
Send the DJ home
You’re better on your own
Forget the radio
(Willson Piper)
Hanging Out in Heaven (2000)
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