We awoke to the sound of the kettle, not plugged in in the kitchen but at the front door in the postman’s hands. We ordered a new one as ours is struggling, lid gets stuck, rusty bottom, and this new one boils at your chosen temperature, Olivia wanted this for green tea (apparently it’s to be made at 80°C). Plus having grown up with a kettle it’s weird for me to put a small pan on the stove to boil water or even put it in a microwave, especially if you don’t have a small pan, a stove, or a microwave anymore. Trivia after what is happening in Turkey/Syria right now and the unreported wars as well as the reported ones. It’s incredible that there are newsworthy tragic deaths and not newsworthy tragic deaths. It’s almost like there should be one news dedicated just to where people are dying and the rest of the news is a separate programme. No need to wave your flag for which news you believe is right, wrong, corrupt, biased, sadly different camps won’t ever agree.

Did I go out today? No, I don’t think I did, Olivia was off to get more boxes and I stayed in to sing the third verse of an Arktik Lake track that went astray during the Australian sessions. Everything is easy when you know how to do it and it had to be done. I’ll now send it to Andreas to mix in with the track. This process is one of the wonders of modern technology. Matching up the sounds, the performance, the tones, we’ll see what magic Andreas can spin.

After this, I was on with Fred about the status of his record and Brian about the status of his record. Brian’s record is finished waiting to be mixed which will happen when Andreas is done with the Arktik Lake mixes and had a well-deserved holiday. Fred’s record is a work in progress and in the coming weeks, we will decide on a time period to get it completed. Next, seshes in February that will hopefully lead to plans for more records to be made. If we get this new space I will be able to get the home studio set up and the archive home studio space will be moving in the right direction, still waiting for the mayor’s assistant to respond to the last mail but if we get the new space then we will be in touch again to tell them that we mostly need help getting everything into the country, the transport costs perhaps and certainly customs waivers. Fingers crossed, I don’t really need an archive that is an empty space with all the content in boxes in a storage house in Somerset, stuck due to red tape and lack of finances.

So today we lost Burt Bacharach, he made it to the grand old age of 94 (see the list of songs written here). I would hope that he would be remembered for his collaboration with Hal David as a lyricist, arguably his finest work. David died in 2012 aged 91. But Bacharach must also be remembered for his memorable arrangements. It seems we are accepting of losing someone at this age, maybe one day people will look back and say remember when the average age to die was between 75 and 90 like they used to say about the past centuries when the average to die might have been between 35 and 45.

Music today has been Dionne Warwick Sings the Bacharach & David Songbook, the cover art doesn’t quite live up to the songwriting and the singing. That’s War-Wick by the way, English people, Americans don’t really know about the town of Warwick.

Music Of The Daze