Two days left to get it right. The landlord is coming to inspect the flat at 9 AM Wednesday morning, at 10 AM we are leaving for the airport and are flying to England. Our friend Biggles is kindly getting us from Gatwick and we’ll be in London for five days before we go to Les Boyds in Bristol where we will rehearse and go on the road with Boydie throughout the UK till March 27th, here are the dates. So we hope you can make it. I am bringing the Seagull and the trusty gaffa guitar, plus sessioneer Noel is lending me a guitar that I will tune down a tone for those pesky songs with the high parts that weren’t so high years ago. Olivia is of course bringing her violin and her cellolin. If you have any requests for songs we’ll see what we can do and we’ll have some time to rehearse them but we can’t do everything, the well is deep. We are trying to have merch despite the fear of customs and we have a great new exclusive T-shirt designed by sessioneer Mike in Chicago but made in the UK, so no fear there.

Olivia left before me today to go and pick up two kool chairs she had bought for 5€ each. I walked down to The Archive with some bags of light things like tea and a porcupine alebrije which I managed to damage despite trying to be careful – every move has a breakage or two. Down there we organised as much as we could while there was still light. We won’t have any electricity or water before we leave. We also won’t have a security gate or an alarm – because they need electricity to happen before they can work on these things. We are hoping that this is all sorted for when we return at the beginning of April. It will be something of a problem if we still have no water and electricity in April because we won’t have the place we are in now to retreat to. But the flat is now almost empty of our things and no longer feels like home anyway.

Luthier Jorge and his partner Telma dropped down today to see the new place and helped us bring down another carload. Jorge, the saint, is taking all my guitars to his safe place while we are away. I will sleep better knowing that they are not sitting in an uninhabited building with no insurance in the centre of town. Having said that I was hoping that the ladies of the night (and day) might be a deterrent as they are always there on the opposite side of a narrow street, they see everything (literally). I can only hope that no one runs off with my 1969 King Crimson – In The Court Of The Crimson King albums, I’m collecting them for a wall of that face.

The Ariel situation is still being worked on and in a perfect world, we would drive back to Portugal. She is fixable if we can find the part and it seems the part does exist and can be found, in Germany, maybe in Portugal, maybe in Greece or the Netherlands but how much does it cost, and if we find it how do we get it to Bristol where Ariel waits in the hospital?

Music today has been Tonto’s Expanding Head Band after a conversation with sessioneer Jeff in Ohio tonight about analogue electronic music. They were a duo, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Their first album Zero Time was released in 1971 and was followed by It’s About Time in 1974. This interesting snippet from Wikipedia:

TONTO is an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra, the first, and still the largest, multitimbral polyphonic analogue synthesizer in the world, designed and constructed over several years by Malcolm Cecil.

Cecil and Margouleff worked on many of the classic Stevie Wonder albums as well as with The Isley Brothers, Steve Hillage, Weather Report, Ravi Shankar and more.

Cecil died in 2021 at age 84.