My teeth behaved today, especially the one upstart, but then I was respecting it’s space and space is what I have a lot of in my mouth. But there will be no toast till the end of the month, or anything crunchy or chewy. If I can’t eat it with the middle teeth, it ain’t being eaten. Papaya and soggy cereal for breakfast, soft bread and cheese for lunch, rice and veggie nuggets with broccoli and peas for dinner (the broccoli is a little tricky). I also try to avoid liquids with lumps. Haha, that reminds me, at school for school dinners they used to give us custard with some kind of sponge (jam usually, I think) but the custard had lumps in it, and it used to make me retch. I suppose it was custard powder not mixed properly. At some point, I escaped and went home for lunch, even though I probably lived the farthest away in the whole school. Run for the bus for five minutes after noon to be in Thingwall at 12.15, run home for 12.20, open a tin of Heinz Spaghetti Bolognese, make toast, eat till one o’clock and listen to one side of a record, then run back for the bus, back to the Woodchurch Estate and be back in school by 1.30. I always just made it – by the skin of my teeth.

Two seshes today, Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney and John Pasagiannis in Brooklyn, whose songs I played on last year when I was in the US. A sesh with Andreas the mixer and then a long listening session (Olivia joined in) where I listened to all the Arktik Lake songs in an order that Tony had come up with, and then I made my own order which I sent to him for his opinion. Sequencing an album can be a difficult job, and the wrong order can really mess up the flow of an album. You can’t just throw the tracks on anywhere, you have to think about dynamics, keys, moods, themes, quiet and loud, fast and slow. It’s another aspect of making records that isn’t often mentioned, it can take some serious time and brain power.

Olivia and Rohan were both out of the house today, Rohan to the river and Olivia to visit her friend’s kittens. They both came back looking like they had been stranded in the Sahara – it seems like it was a hot day, and I managed to avoid it by having my studio head on and sitting in front of a small fan all day, a leprechaun called Attila.

Music today has been Dave Gilmour’s quite middle-of-the-road but lovely album On An Island (2006). Sweet guitar tones and smooth singing, I needed to hear Dave after listening to Money from Roger Waters’ remake of Dark Side Of The Moon (Dark Side Of The Moon Redux, 2023) and Comfortably Numb from The Lockdown Sessions (2022).

Music Of The Daze