Out into those lovely dry streets today, looking for all kinds of bits and pieces before we hit the road for España. Music stand, 9V adaptors which led to the milliamps question, oh dear. Generally, no one asks you about milliamps if you are buying a 9V adaptor, but this is Portugal and the man was very concerned I didn’t buy something with the wrong milliamps. I was communicating with him in Spanish, but another man was there doing some translating, which might actually have been confusing the matter. So, this is just a warning that just when you think there can be no doubt, you can be bamboozled by milliamps.

It’s a little colder, but my hot blood doesn’t seem to notice as much as everybody else. I am obviously an alien who landed on this planet with a different physiology. Wasn’t the twist in The War Of The Worlds that the aliens were eventually stopped by the common cold? It makes sense, those aliens better check before they invade. It happened in South America with conquistadors, diseased with European viruses that they could fight off through generations of exposure, but the Incas were unable to fight off those same viruses. I was thinking today that violence might be a disease, a human condition, inherited, handed down, and untreatable as we continue with the pattern, still looking for a cure.

An unplanned sesh with NJ Brian as a new song appeared and needed attention, haha. Songs have needs, they have brains and ideas, they have ambitions, they are also elusive, they need your attention. So we talked to the song, found out what its issues were, and helped it achieve its goals. It left satisfied, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing from it again when we get to the studio and open the conversation about expectations and we’ll do our best to find its identity.

Sarah put together the acoustic pedal board for the three 12-strings – that is three tuners, one for the legendary Tape Guitar, one for the Seagull, and one for the drop D guitar doubling as a spare with three DI boxes all plugged into two plug boards, compact and easy to set up, unlike my dumb system on the English dates where everything was loose and a time-consuming hassle to set up and put away. OK, it wasn’t coal mining, but there are easier ways to do it.

I watched a lacklustre England draw with North Macedonia (1-1) with an own goal to help them and found myself cheering North Macedonia on for a historic win.

Music today has been The Groundhogs – Who Will Save The World? (1972), I suppose it needs posting regularly.

Music Of The Daze