Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to the MOAT campaign…and now for some really, really good news. We have found an alternative and cheaper way to ship the vinyl and CD from source (USA) to the EU, UK (soon not part of the EU), Australia, Canada, and the rest of the world. We will be shipping to locations outside the USA with an alternative carrier. This change does not affect the US postal charges for US orders, they will stay with USPS. So that’s really good news except it means that if you want to have the record sent to you at the cheaper rate, you will have to cancel your original order and reorder, it’s up to you. If you don’t want to change we will still send you the vinyl and CD with the cheaper option so the balance of your original order would be a donation. The prices using USPS to ship outside America were so high it was discouraging fans from supporting the campaign. Sorry for the inconvenience but we had to do something, the costs were ridiculous. On a positive note, we have already sent out any orders for the first MOAT album (self-titled, 2013) from here in England (and a postcard!). Schoolkids Records intend to send out vinyl and CD of the new album as soon as they are manufactured and that will be before it is in the shops.

So that’s the technical stuff over, today was busy. I was up with the late lark. The late lark is the musician’s lark, the lark that gets up at a reasonable time. Rising at 10AM is early for me but I did it because I was swimming earlier than usual (11AM) and the reason for that was that Liverpool were playing Everton at 12.30 and I was meeting our friend Eloha at the studio so we could watch the match (she is a fellow Liverpool fan). Dare was watching it at his house (he is an Everton fan). It was a great game and ended 2-2, full of controversy and excitement.

After the game, Dare and I were in the studio (2-2, phew!). Today we were working on Arctic Lake. I was playing guitar, some acoustic and electric rhythm so we tried out the Seagull and the Takamine 12 and the Takamine won. I used my Strat for the electric parts. I played some lead on the Strat and the Rick 6, added some keys and sent the track off to the Sydney-siders, Tony (artist, songwriter, guitarist), DC (engineer and bass player). Hope they like it.

Thanks to everybody for all the positive and helpful ideas and comments after yesterday’s rather serious post. Today might be more factual than medical, more everyday than surreal, more trivial than deep but we can’t be Dostoyevsky 24/7. Although on that point I bought a couple of books at the charity store yesterday, one was both short and deep. Anaïs Nin’s Under A Glass Bell (short stories, 1944). I need that at the moment, short and deep, I have to find a way to get back into regular reading and short stories or a novella seems to be the doorway although I haven’t picked them up yet. A book arrived in the post today, a short Ian McEwan piece, My Purple Scented Novel. Wish me luck in finding a way to reenter into a world that I love to be in but busy full days seem to make it elusive.

I managed to fit in a French lesson today and over dinner, we watched the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery – Season 3. It’s not like a TV series, it’s like a film. The special effects, the explosions, the cinematography. I’m hoping that it’s going to be better than Season 2 script-wise. Something has happened in the script, something corny, obvious, cliched in the storyline, in the characters, in the relationships. I think relationships in space should be banned. Doctor Who’s Series 11 with Jodie Whittaker wasn’t good either, she was great, the scripts weren’t, something has changed. I haven’t watched Series 12 despite watching Doctor Who from the mid-sixties onwards. We also watched an episode of Californians In Space but I guess that’s every Star Trek, better scripts without relationships, and moral human dilemmas should be replaced with weird alien concepts, duh.

Music today came from the relatively obscure Warm Dust. Their third album, released in 1972, is some kind of Progressive Jazz with a little too many vocals by Les Walker in the style of Blood, Sweat & Tears or Chicago, except they’re from Sheffield. Paul Carrack played keys in the band and after Warm Dust broke up, he formed Ace, you all remember How Long (1974) and you also remember that Carrack briefly joined Squeeze and you remember Tempted (1981), he later joined Mike And The Mechanics, you remember Silent Running (1985), I don’t! Over the years he has worked as both lead singer and session keyboardist, made solo albums and is thought of as a talented singer although in Warm Dust he hadn’t discovered he hadn’t yet found himself.

My friend Nicklas Barker encouraged me to buy Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets Double Live At The Roundhouse, I did, it’s great, it’s worth it for the material alone, plus it’s well recorded. The reason I was hesitant was because I saw them live in Germany. Call me shallow but they looked like yachtsmen on holiday, either that or a meeting of the Ferrari Owners Club and when bass played Guy Pratt duckwalked to One Of These Days, the horror of that spectacle made for acute disappointment, plus the drums were too loud. Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet as lead vocalist seemed an odd choice but he pulled it off, brave I thought. So if you want a fun romp through the pre-Dark Side Of The Moon Pink Floyd covering both Syd and post-Syd songs, then this double album is for you. Well done Nick Mason for going along with the idea and taking it on the road.

Song Of The Daze