TO WHERE I AM NOW

What is it that makes us have favourite colours? Mine isn’t red (although I support Liverpool), perhaps it would be my favourite colour if it was another shade of red? I like blue but only certain types of blue – Mediterranean blue or the colour of the blue on this gate in today’s picture. For some reason I don’t support Everton (Dare’s team) even though they are in blue. I suppose it’s just taste that gives an opinion about colour, or is it? What attracts us to a certain colour and do girls really like pink more than men and is it because of society telling us that girls like pink and men shouldn’t? Ha ha, can you imagine that masculinity and femininity are something to do with colour? I mostly wear black things but guess what? I’m not evil! It’s not actually a particular colour that I like but different shades of different colours, but then I like to see them but not wear them. So there is mood in colour, what is that exactly? How can a colour have a mood? How does a day have a mood? How come a mist is atmospheric? Why does the mood change from day to night? Something is activated in our senses, but have you ever noticed that some cultures don’t seem to adhere to the same ideas about mood? Moroccan’s seem to be mad about mood (and colour), other cultures seem to like having glaring bright lights. The world is weird and wonderful.

I suppose some of us like to live in the dark. I’m always turning lights off, adjusting the mood to dimmer. I find it hard to sit in a bright room and relax. Candlelit dinners never fail to deliver, candlelight, the embers of fires or the full flames in the hearth are simply mesmerizing. The migraine thing has always been an issue for me and consequently I’m always trying to avoid bright lights. Light beams seem to penetrate my brain, the sun, light bulbs, car headlights, torches, concert lights and worst of all LEDs. Christmas trees have been destroyed forever as the old fairy lights have been relegated to the past and the LEDs pierce my eyes. If you’ve been at our live shows recently you may remember that we use naked bulbs for our onstage lights, but they are ST64 bulbs (non LED), it means you can look at them without being blinded!

We stroked one of the Bengal cats again today. It was sitting on a wall and was very meowy and friendly – and beautiful. Feline’s memory still lingers, she was buried near the house. I spoke to Olivia’s Dad today and I was telling him that Olivia and I had buried a blackbird around the same spot. We were sitting in the front room and it just flew straight into the window. Gerd was telling me that the Peter Frampton farewell tour show he had tickets for in Frankfurt may never be rescheduled because Frampton was doing this last tour not simply to retire but because he has some kind of degenerative disease that means he will be unable to play guitar anymore. Life is cruel.

I spoke to Salim in Texas tonight and in Dallas it’s in the nineties – at 11PM at night, humidity is 41% and there’s mosquitoes everywhere. The thing about Penzance is that it’s a moderate climate so our hovering around 60 for the coming week, the sea breeze and the mosquito population invisible at the moment, means that we are temperature and creature comfortable. It’s bad enough being in lockdown and cooped up inside, but then when you are finally allowed to go out and it’s too awful to want to, that’s tricky.

I have a broken tooth, I went past a dentist office today and I was enquiring about fixing it. They told me there’s a five-year waiting list to get on the books for the NHS. (NHS means cheaper.) But then they told me that the work isn’t as good as the private work that they do there. Does that mean that an NHS dentist by definition is not as good as a private one? Do you really get what you pay for in basic dentistry? What happens? Do only bad dentists work for the NHS? Seems a ridiculous idea to me, being a bad dentist is like being a bad air traffic controller, there’s not a lot of room for error. Anyway, £80 for a consultation and then if you need a crown prepare to sell the silver and eat with your hands, if you don’t you’ll have no teeth to chew with anyway so you won’t need any cutlery.

I spoke to Ahad in Istanbul today about the project A squared. How do you type that little ‘2’ above the A? We’ll continue in the studio tomorrow with this project as well as looking at one of the mixes on the Space Summit album. Two seshes tomorrow, Noelle in Montreal and Chris in New Jersey. Another day closer to the shops opening and getting that belt! Oh and by the way, Olivia found the torch, it had been seduced by the attractive red couch as is everyone and everything. I haven’t mentioned it for ages (although the record pics are always taken on there). We are always under its spell – and red isn’t even my favourite colour.

Music today is chosen by Brian Jonestown Massacre guitarist Ricky Maymi. First comes Aztec Camera’s debut album High Land Hard Rain (1983). Whenever anyone sees the year 1983 on a record sleeve it spells danger because at this point technology had blinded musicians and they were doing all kinds of things suggested by the machines rather than their souls. Luckily Roddy Frame, the mainman, was always a good songwriter and that’s what wins here in the battle between the drum sounds and the craft of songwriting. It doesn’t mean that obnoxious sounds don’t exist, it just means you can see through them. He’s pretty jazzy on the guitar, writes good words, but he seems to have gone from being a young man with a big future to making records very sporadically. He’s probably luxuriating in a Scottish glen.

Ricky’s second choice was The Love That Whirls (1982) by Bill Nelson. At this point Nelson had abandoned his role as melodic lead guitarist with fantastic seventies band Be Bop Deluxe and taken to a more experimental direction using those same gadgets that the mainstream were using to spoil mainstream music. He of course made it all arty and interesting as he left guitars completely behind. Us followers remained fans but we did miss his exotic lead solos and his tone. It would be a long time before he picked up an electric guitar again. It was now all drum machines and synthesizers (and his usual colourful lyrics) and I for one kept up with his work all through the eighties, but then it got patchy, not because of lack of interest but because he simply made so many records that it was hard to keep up. Since 1980 he has released more than 130 albums (mostly physical releases) and that’s not including the singles with their extra tracks and the compilations albums. In fact this album came with a free extra album of La Belle Et La Bête (1982), written for a Yorkshire dramatic society’s production of Jean Cocteau’s interpretation of the fairytale. Prolific doesn’t really cover it.

Ricky’s next choice was Peter Godwin’s Dance Emotions, a 6 track EP released in 1982. Godwin was originally a member of Metro, the band he formed with singer-songwriter Duncan Browne with the later addition of Sean Lyons. Standout tracks were America In My Head and Criminal World, the latter recorded by David Bowie on the Let’s Dance album. Godwin’s solo career also gave us some eighties suited up songs, looking very dapper, the most memorable being Images Of Heaven of which an extended dance mix appears on this EP. There’s also an Images Of Heaven EP that’s not dance inspired which I have. Although it seems that this is the route he was taking as he later released the solo album Correspondence with its moderate hit Baby’s In The Mountains in 1982. He then disappeared. There have been sightings, a project called Nuevo in 2010, a co-write with Steve Winwood on the title track of Nine Lives (2008) and a duet with Sasha, Rendezvous (1998, don’t like it), but otherwise he seemed to be missing without explanation, one wonders if he must have found some other inspirational path. The later songs I’ve heard have been under par and out of nowhere there’s a dodgy track called You (2020), that sounds like an old demo. Go figure. But when he’s good he’s great and finding that first Metro album at least is well worth the effort.

Masami Tsuchiya’s Rice Music (1982) sounds very much like the original source of Japan’s (the band) inspiration although Yellow Magic Orchestra is probably more like it. Unsurprisingly it features Mick Karn and Steve Jansen from Japan as well as Percy Jones from Brand X and Bill Nelson. The androgynous Tsuchiya who Japanese music followers might know from the band Ippu-Do, sings, plays guitar, bass (how could you with those two in the room?), synth, drums, koto and yokin, which could be one of many things. The music is a sometimes frantic mixture of the electronic eighties and traditional Japan (the country). A light-hearted note from Wikipedia (they say it’s all true):

“In April 2017, Tsuchiya married his cat ‘Holmes’ in a small ceremony at Fujikyu Highlands resort.”

Song Of The Day is The Width And The Height from In Reflection, written in 1986 I think Bill and I used some of the same Casios.

 

The Width And The Height

Squeezed in decided ground
Squarely the distance goes round and round
Overly shown in a drowned patchy place
The lock on the dreamy door is a waste
Open and down the sheltered steps
You’ll find new places where thoughts are kept

Make sure you’re small, make sure you’re thin
Where the width and the height begin
Fake is a state, tears on a cake
Where the width and the height take shape

Escaped in a train to somewhere green
Where window cleaners clean and cream
Taste this unusual crop that I’ve picked
Find future in things to say
Grow some taste and go away
Love’s in your pocket so don’t kiss the air

Make sure you’re small, make sure you’re thin
Where the width and the height begin
Fake is a state, tears on a cake
Where the width and the height take shape

Make sure you’re small, make sure you’re thin
Where the width and the height begin
Fake is a state, tears on a cake
Where the width and the height take shape

The make-up room it isn’t real
Belts drape chairs, wet clothes reveal
Out from this book there’s a picture you can peel
But felty walls won’t mean the pool is smooth

Squeezed in decided ground
Squarely the distance goes round and round
Overly shown in a drowned patchy place
The lock on the dreamy door is a waste
Open and down the sheltered steps
You’ll find new places where thoughts are kept

Make sure you’re small, make sure you’re thin
Where the width and the height begin
Fake is a state, tears on a cake
Where the width and the height take shape

Make sure you’re small, make sure you’re thin
Where the width and the height begin
Fake…

(Willson-Piper)
In Reflection (1987)