Welcome to Gone By Noon, the first track from the new MOAT album which is now live for all to hear on all your favourite streaming outlets. It’s not a single as such, it’s simply a track we like from the Poison Stream album coming in early 2021. Singles are for hitmakers, tracks are for album makers. It’s interesting that people take different things from music, some people want to dance, others want joy, others want originality, strange changes, then there’s those that want simplicity, sing-along choruses, melody. Then there’s anger, politics, virtuosity, storytelling, poetic lyrics, sadness, sincere love songs, loudness, more bass, deep personal voices, screams and velvet tongues. With MOAT Niko and I give it to you how we see it and we hope you like it.

 
I slept for eleven and a half hours and it would have been longer if I wasn’t in the studio today. Last night when my head finally hit the pillow it was surrendering to desire and the welcome falling down into the deepest parts of the unconscious. It was succumbing to the mystery of sleep, the temporary switching off. What a strange phenomenon, everything we do often we accept as normal however outrageous. If you live till you are sixty you will spend on average 20 years asleep, a third of your short life! It’s another reason that you should make the most of your waking hours because if you take sleep out of the equation you only have 40 years of being awake, experiencing pleasure, getting to know the world, learning, loving. Not everybody reaches that age, Jimi Hendrix only had 18 years awake, that’s just 6,570 days, it’s a number you can imagine.

You used to hear people say you should ‘live life to the fullest’ but you don’t hear that anymore, you hear about survival on one end of the scale and indulgence on the other. I suppose we all experience a bit of both but don’t want to be fixed in either place and if in between these two extremes is mundanity, ennui, the grind, then we need to discover how to enjoy life better without just the occasional coming up for air. That’s what the weekend is for a lot of people and like a starving man, if you put him in a room full of food, he will eat till he’s sick.

Not everyone is unhappy but who isn’t anxious about everything these days, it doesn’t matter on your status or your financial standing, your personality, shy, outgoing, whether you believe in the god or the random universe, no one quite knows what the future holds. I just read that from next week here in England, gatherings of more than 6 people will be illegal but what about pubs? Where will it end? Along with people dying, we have institutions dying, the arts are crippled, so many people can’t go to work but it seems that if we ever get through this, people will be able to work from home permanently and the idea of the office might disappear altogether as your workmates become isolated computer people, people you have never met. Imagine the number of relationships that haven’t happened since March. Also, I’m only speaking from the point of view of the Western mentality, imagine how it must be in India.

Back in my little world of seagulls and guitars, Dare returned from his trip up north to see brother Dave and he was so sad that he missed all the drama, not. We started with me playing bass on the Jerome/ich project so Jerome can get on with adding his magic, helping the songs towards their predestined lives of wax. We then set about adding some guitars and ideas to the previous Ahad track that we had been working on, taking in some of Ahad’s feedback before I added my own feedback to the next track. We are getting close to the end of the guitars before the fairy dust is scattered over the songs and they are baked till they are golden brown. Mmm.

Music today is coming from the fragile sticker on the packaging on Boydy’s birthday present. Yes, I decided to listen to Fragile by Yes. What I noticed was how great my stereo sounds and how great Steve Howe’s guitar is on this album. What I love about Progressive music is that there’s always new things to discover and a proper stereo makes you notice things you may have missed, especially if you weren’t quite listening attentively. It’s not just Howe, Chris Squire’s bass is something else, to think the punks failed to notice how fuzzed up and aggressive it was. I followed this with Close To The Edge and for all the melody and complexity I hear so much aggression in this music. I suppose it’s not simple and not lyrically engaging unless you live in a pyramid house and grow your own vegetables. I suppose Jon Anderson doesn’t sound scary and Rick Wakeman’s capes might cause a stony silence if you walked into the local pub wearing one. But bands that look like footballers have often been less than interesting, that’s why I like footballers that look like they should be in bands the best! Haha.

Listening to Yes and Sex Pistols in the same session somehow makes complete sense to me. Anderson and Rotten both have melodic voices and I might be more scared being Jon Anderson’s teepee than Rotten’s local. What I love about music from the seventies is that it doesn’t matter if it’s Yes or Sex Pistols, they have so many things in common. Guitars with great tones, messages, creativity, sonic warmth, seventies music sounds like its era despite the different genres, like the sixties does or the fifties does and the nineties does. Like fashion, sound follows the day and Punk fashion and Prog fashion feel like the same era. Plus one thing that Prog and Punk have in common – the Rickenbacker bass. I know you can’t believe that I’m trying to put Yes and Sex Pistols in the same bag – but lots of energy in both, mad clothes and the aforementioned points plus when you look at how many albums the Sex Pistols put out, it’s damned indulgent considering there’s only one real one. Then there’s the Mick Tucker (from the Sweet) drum roll in God Save The Queen, haha. The guitar solo in Anarchy In The UK and the Hawkwind drum rolls throughout the album. There’s the bluesy chords and licks, if Steve Jones used his little finger he’d be in Status Quo. Last but not least there’s that great comment from Johnny Rotten that suggested that The Clash sounded like Herman’s Hermits (Stay Free). Johnny was a Prog head you know, just ask Peter Hammill. A sneer doesn’t hide the truth.

Songs Of The Daze