Every Sunday I’m up early for a sesh with Tony in Sydney and by midnight on Sunday night I’m shot. There are usually multiple seshes on Sundays and today was no exception with Arktik Lake Tony, John in Brooklyn and Space Summit Jed in Minneapolis – I was also listening to a mix of one of Brian in Indiana’s songs. On Space Summit, you may have read that the vinyl version album isn’t going to be available till August because of the backlog at the pressing plant and it makes you wonder why someone doesn’t open up a new pressing plant. What happened to all the machines from the old pressing plants? Were they just abandoned as CDs, the alleged future, took hold? Are they lying in an abandoned building rusting to death beyond repair? Is the business not profitable enough for someone to start a new vinyl factory? Will we ever know? All I do know is that waiting a year to get your vinyl pressed is ridiculous. Anekdoten Nicklas told me that the pressing plant he uses is fully booked for 2022 and we are only halfway through January. What happened to entrepreneurs recognising opportunities based on demand? In the music biz, the issues are always multi-layered and complicated, there’s never an easy path and as if it isn’t hard enough to be able to even get to the stage where these kinds of problems begin.

Everything is relative to your situation and yesterday walking into town I walked past a homeless guy sitting on a step in a doorway in the busiest street with a whole lot of bags. He was lining up two-cent euro coins in a row, neatly aligned at least twenty of them. It struck me that in the chaos of his life he was trying to put something in order. It also struck me that they weren’t euros, they were cents, twenty coins don’t even add up to half a euro, the only value was in the exercise. I can relate to lining things up, I always want to symmetrically organise the table when I’m in a restaurant, I guess it’s a condition.

The most famous Australian that the Australians (mostly) haven’t heard of, Neil Robertson, won The Masters snooker this afternoon, beating Barry Hawkins 10-4 and picking up a check for £250,000. Liverpool beat Brentford 3-0 but it wasn’t televised, I kept half an eye on the West Ham – Leeds game which they lost 2-3. Everton sacked Benitez after losing to bottom club Norwich. Dare will be freaking out over his team’s performance of late. With that and losing the Ashes so badly and Australia doing it again in the snooker I think it’s time to talk some Australians into the benefits of living amongst England’s lush greenery although it couldn’t keep me there for all the obvious reasons. Perhaps if the Australians could get British citizenship but live in Portugal in a warmer climate they’d be more open to the idea.

Back onto the subject of Space Summit, Jed and I started writing our third album today. The demos for the second album are done nine months before the vinyl for the first album is ready. I suppose being prepared can’t be a bad thing although one might change their mind about the material as it becomes old before you record it. Having said that if you watched Part One of Get Back you may have noticed McCartney playing Another Day, Harrison playing Isn’t It A Pity and Lennon playing Gimme Some Truth. As I have the home studio on the way to working it means that we can write different kinds of songs. Before we would write on acoustics and turn them into electric songs. Today I had my Strat through my Focusrite and Ibanez UE405 effects rack with the chorus, the delay and the compressor on and that meant that different songs were lurking in the long grass or floating like butterflies above the flowers. Which reminds me, did you know that butterflies feed through their feet, have transparent wings and can’t fly when it’s cold?

Music today has been Neil Young and Crazy Horse‘s Barn (2021). On first listen only the penultimate track Welcome Back at 8.27 took my fancy. I’ll give it another go but I’m after a certain something from Neil and the lads and Welcome Back is it. The band sees Nils Lofgren returning to Crazy Horse after the retirement of Frank Sampedro with Ralph Molina on drums and Billy Talbot on bass who have both been there since 1968. I’ll listen again.

Music Of The Daze