A long weekend, tired now and sitting on the couch watching flashes of sheet lightning light up the sky in the distance. It was hot today, 31/88, and I was trying to position myself in line with the fan. There’s no air conditioning or heating in our place and our front room gets quite hot in the summer, that’s what the blinds are for, to keep the heat out. At 1 AM all the windows in the house are still wide open and the slice of moon like a white piece of honeydew melon has slipped off its plate in the sky and disappeared behind a mauve cloud. All the creatures are asleep, the humans and the birds and anything that moves by night is also silent, I don’t see a mosquito or a moth, just Sunday stillness.

Today Olivia decided to spray Ariel’s bed palette blue in keeping with her aesthetics and the ambience around the wheel arches, Ariel needs a tasteful interior. In the week, she’ll be back from the beauty salon with brushed, rust-free hair, a working radio and heater and a wing mirror that doesn’t move inwards in the wind of the motorway. Her heartbeat will be checked, her limbs and her lungs and hopefully she will have the strength to take us on a journey through Europe, more on that in the coming days.

Today was busy and slow, a strange combination but it’s Sunday and Sunday always hobbles along on unsteady feet, almost stumbling but somehow it always claws its way to its conclusion. It puts everything on hold by doing nothing, it’s a benign obstruction, an invisible blockage, a story you want to end. Instead of a day of rest, it has become a day of waiting, or impatience, of anxiety towards the toothless, fear of that which is no threat.

Seshes today with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney, Johnathon in California and Space Summit Jed in Minneapolis. In the afternoon, I spoke with Arno in France who we will be seeing soon as we will be driving north from Spain after next Saturday’s Anekdoten show. I played bass on one of Arno’s records, the band was Sweet Gum Tree and the song was Bird Of Passage, featuring Isobel Campbell (see below). I also did shows as the bass player in France and England.

Music today has been The Strawbs – From the Witchwood (1971) with its lineup of Dave Cousins on lead vocals and guitars and Tony Hooper on vocals and acoustic guitars and both of them on various other stringed instruments. At this point, the keyboard player was Rick Wakeman recording this album in February/March only weeks before appearing on Bowie’s Hunky Dory recorded in June/August and before becoming a full-time member of Yes recording Fragile from August-September, not a bad year and that wasn’t all of it, the obscure Piano Vibrations was released in the same year when Wakeman was working as a session musician (see article). At this point, John Ford was on bass and Richard Hudson was on drums, they would both leave in 1973 to form Hudson Ford, who remembers Pick Up The Pieces? One presumes they had to be called Hudson Ford despite F coming before H because Ford Hudson sounded like a make of car, having said that Hudson was also a make of car under that name till 1957 (fascinating facts).

Music Of The Daze