If you are in Australia and you are reading this, you are probably awake. In dreams it seems you can sometimes see words written in pages of open books but they always seem hard to decipher like the dream doesn’t want to give up its secrets. But as you are awake and entering daylight saving (as I remember not in Queensland) as your spring is on the way and your covid cases are not exploding like they are here in Europe and in America and everywhere else west of Taiwan, then you should tune into Purple Haze at 7.30PM East Coast time on 98.7 or 98.3 FM in Melbourne or stream via www.rppfm.com.au where I will be doing A LOT of talking and hosts Bruce and Steve will be playing A LOT of music with selected tracks from all my lesser-known projects from years gone right up to the present with old favourites and new songs you will not have heard before. Tune in, turn on and drop out – it’s summer.

The show will also be available from noon GMT on Marty’s YouTube channel here:

Sunday is always a big sessioneer and football day, although I’m not sure how many of the sessioneers actually play football. We could actually start a team, Sessioneers United, we could have a special kit with a modern look, a guitar and a book and pen as the team logo instead of the name of a sponsor and a logo designed in 1885. Our kit would of course be all black. We could have a nickname, The Darkness, nope too late, there’s a silly band called that already. What about The Wailing Writers? Whenever we move forward with the ball we wail poetically at our opponents, it would be some kind of artistic haka.

Today I had a big talk with Tony (artist) and DC (engineer) about the EP we are working on. That went straight into Wales vs Ireland and then straight into Jed and writing for the next Space Summit album, even though the first one hasn’t been unleashed as yet (two songs on the Purple Haze radio show Monday). Both these seshes were a success with a route forward on the Tony project which I believe will be called Arctic Lake, so from now, that’s how I will refer to it. I wrote two pieces for Jed to take away, one mad, the other less mad, but both with lots of potential.

From there it was straight into England vs Belgium, the No.1 ranked team in the world. Over here in England, we have all learned to hide behind the couch when England are playing an important game against a hot team. We also used to hide behind the couch when we were watching Doctor Who, always when the Daleks appeared and especially with the Cybermen and sometimes we thought that we could only succeed as a football team if we had Daleks and Cybermen on our side. Like a miracle we won 2-1 and didn’t look terrible, I wonder how it is to be Olivia where her national team expects to win, where the fans expect them to win and – they win.

Olivia disappeared into the day taking tons of recycling from the studio to designated places, the skateboard park and Dare’s house, whilst I concentrated on preparing the vegetables for studio dinner tonight and executed Day 129 of French. It’s getting harder, they have this section where a French person talks at you quite fast and then you have to answer a multiple-choice question. I must be learning because I get things right – I also get things wrong but that’s how learning works.

Olivia returned and over dinner, we watched part of the France – Portugal game where I was listening for French chatter and Olivia for Portuguese chatter – it was 0-0, they cancelled each other out, star players against star players, France are the world champions and Portugal the European champions – this is what happens with top teams.

Straight from that with all its connections to our lives and the future and to Doug in Wappingers Falls for the third and final sesh of the day. Only three sessions but they were long and involved and were bookmarked by football games so there wasn’t a lot of time for playing music.

But, music today wanted to be another early Genesis album, their second, Trespass, released this month in 1970. On release, it didn’t chart and sold just 6,000 copies BUT it went to No.1 in Belgium which was appropriately topical after today’s game. It was the first and last album for their third drummer John Mayhew before Phil Collins joined and was also the last album for their guitarist Anthony Phillips before Steve Hackett joined (with Mick Barnard in between). It is another Paul Whitehead cover. As usual, AllMusic got it all wrong and the album is the beginning of their brilliant Gabriel-fronted career until he left after The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in 1975. What a glorious five years of music those albums were.