We will be doing a Q&A for all contributors in an effort to reach 75% of our goal on the Indiegogo campaign for MOAT’s Poison Stream. The idea is that as the campaign winds down we rush for the prize and in the scramble we knock over the trophy, spill the wine and laugh and laugh as we celebrate anyway. So Olivia will ask me the questions sent in and we will film it and release it as a secret link (ooooh) to YouTube. At this point, we are at 57% with 9 days to go and we have 6 days left in Penzance. The third song, The Roadmap To My Soul, follows Gone By Noon and Acid Rain and will be available to everybody from December 1st. All contributors will have a digital copy of the whole album on December 6th. Physical copies of the album, vinyl and CD, will be sent out to supporters in January. Street date for the album is February 12th. So if you want your copy, preorder now or get yourself a mysterious Mystery Box, a T-shirt or even a Skype Concert or even a live House Concert where we will come to you and play, wherever you are, eventually! Thanks in advance, I really can’t wait for you to hear this album from beginning to end.

The MOAT – Poison Stream Campaign

For those that don’t actually know what MOAT is, it’s a collaboration with Swedish/German multi-instrumentalist Niko Röhlcke with me singing and writing the words and both of us playing guitar and bass and with Niko on anything with keys. It’s recorded and co-produced with Dare who is the other half of Noctorum, so it’s guaranteed to sound good. It’s the follow up to our first MOAT album that has very limited copies left, so if you want one, order now before we go to Portugal next week (especially if you want it autographed). The Mystery Boxes and other items also really need to be sent from here in Penzance before we go to Portugal because we can’t really carry T-shirts, albums and CDs there on the plane along with the kitchen sink.

We were in the studio today reworking one of the Arctic Lake songs, trying a different vocal approach which we think works well. They say it’s not over till it’s over but sometimes it’s not even over when it’s over – if you follow. We did that first and then moved onto sessioneer Craig’s track where we broke out lots of guitars to try and capture the guitar sound we needed. We will be continuing to work on that track tomorrow and Dare will mix it when I am gone. Our plan is to rent an apartment in Portugal for a year and initially be there for four months before coming back to Penzance in April to work on looming projects, to be announced.

Bad news for football fans today as Argentinian legend Maradona passed away after a heart attack. He was so famous and so highly regarded that his shirt number (No. 10) was retired when he left the club. He was 60 years old. But also this week we lost club legend and Liverpool and England goalkeeper Ray Clemence, who died of cancer aged 72. Liverpool also had a terrible night tonight with a lacklustre Champions League performance in the wake of lots of injuries, losing at home 0-2 to Atalanta after beating them away 0-5. It’s hard to keep up the standard especially when your key players are injured or worn out from the number of matches they have to play at such a high level.

The next Liverpool game is away to Brighton and I was just thinking about the game I went to see in Liverpool last year against Brighton at home. I was in town working on the new Wild Swans album and the studio owner lent me his season ticket as he was away in France. Liverpool won 2-1 but when I came out there were so many people queuing for buses in the longest lines I’ve ever seen, so I decided to walk back into the city where the studio was. I walked there with a Brighton fan and his family, civilised. But this reminded me of the fact that I never learnt to drive (officially) and luckily Olivia does because when we come back to England we mean to drive back. My father was Merseyside’s Road Safety Officer and he would come home with promo for seatbelt campaigns with pictures of attractive young girls with stitches in their faces that were supposed to scare you into wearing your seat belt. I guess it worked – mostly. It wasn’t until January 31st 1983 that seatbelt wearing became mandatory in the UK. I had motorbikes as a teenager and that is another reason that I never found myself taking a driving test and then living in a city plus being in a band that never stopped gigging, plus we eventually had tour managers and transportation to the shows where they would drive or there was a tour bus. BUT, I did drive around as a learner last time I lived in England so if you are having a baby, I could actually drive you to the hospital, although it’s been many years since I sat behind the wheel, you might be better having the baby where you’re safe.

Music today is the classic Groundhogs album Split (1971) which was a Record Store Day double album release with outtakes that record nerds love. The band is Tony McPhee, guitar and vocals, Pete Cruikshank, bass and Ken Pustlenick on drums. They are a blues-inspired power trio but with lots of mad energy and great guitar playing. Mick Jagger asked for them to support the Stones on the 1971 tour and between 1968 and 1976 they made 9 worthy albums. If you haven’t heard Cherry Red from Split, then lucky you to hear it for the first time.

Song Of The Daze

I was noticing how green the grass was at the beginning of this autumn. It looks so healthy and fresh. It doesn’t seem to go brown and die like the leaves on the trees, why is that? I suppose it stops growing or at least stops growing so fast but it doesn’t die. It seems that it’s just water that it needs, constant watering, and it certainly gets that down here in the southwest of England. In countries where I have lived, countries that have lots of sun or lots of snow, mainly Australia and Sweden, the grass doesn’t stay so lush, but then we don’t have those two climate extremes of bitter cold and snow or constant sunshine. Our beaches can’t compete and those magical fairytale winters in Sweden are hard to beat – I wonder how it will be in Porto at Christmas.

Time is now running short and we have two days in the studio coming up to finish working on guitars with sessioneer Craig and looking at some more sessioneer Tony Arctic Lake, and then Dare is going away for a few days. When he gets back he will be in super mix mode including working on the new album from sessioneer Ahad. Then there’s the mastering and then we’re done with outstanding projects, apart from our own. We will be back to work on more projects next year but for now, Olivia and I will be fuelling our experience by living in another country with another language and another culture. Sessioneer Jed and I are already working on Space Summit 2 before Space Summit 1 has hit the world. What will 2021 bring? Certainly the new MOAT album Poison Stream and then there’s Record Store Day.

I think that to do something like moving to a new country, whether it be by choice or by circumstances is always going to be something good. Breaking out of the familiar has to be good for you. One wonders if we might move to Istanbul in 2023 or Paris 2026. We are trying to spruce up our language skills and Olivia will be a confirmed polyglot into the future as if she isn’t already. Break the mould but learn from it, see the world.

I’ve never been to Africa or India, I’ve never been to Russia, I’ve never been to Inverness or even Loch Ness. I would love to go to Morocco and buy all kinds of Moroccan lamps and decorated artifacts. To see the pyramids would be amazing or the Great Wall of China. Of course, these are tourist attractions but still, I’d love to see them – the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa – I’ve never been to Florence. But it’s not just the tourist attractions, it’s the people, the atmosphere, the traditions, the languages, the way people express themselves. It’s a crazy world with so many tragedies and so many wonders, terrible and amazing – we are so privileged with our guitars and our songs and a real chance to experience incredible things.

The first time I ever got on a plane was from London to Sydney, via Kuala Lumpur (April 1980). I remember getting off the plane for the stopover and when I walked down the steps I thought I must be feeling the heat from the engine and then I realised that no, this was the climate. I’d never experienced anything like it. But the journey that was so long didn’t seem so long because it was simply exciting to be flying across the world (I was two weeks away from being 22). As time went by I began to fly regularly and in 1985 into 1986 I flew from Stockholm where I was now living to Sydney for one day to make the Tantalized video. I left January 1st and was back in Stockholm on January 3rd, luckily the video was pretty good and at the age of 28, it seems you can do anything, even something as crazy as this. And remember in Stockholm it was winter and in Sydney it was summer, it was like spending a day on Mars after being in your front room.

Music today comes from Free and their classic album Fire And Water (1970). I’m a fan of any record that has Paul Kossoff playing guitar, the most minimalist guitarist I ever heard, every note meant something, feel, tone, finesse, vibrato like no one else, control, brilliant. Then there’s Andy Fraser’s unique bass playing, original, characterful, different. Simon Kirke’s warm punchy drumming and of course Paul Rodgers’ soulful vocals. Warm, sad, wonderful. Rodgers and Kirke were 20, Kossoff was 19, Fraser was 17 and this was their third album.

Song Of The Daze

So today with the news that the lockdown will go from lockdown to tier system we will be leaving Penzance next week and flying to Porto on the 3rd December, tickets booked and just in time for Olivia’s birthday on December 5th. We have a place to stay for a week and are hoping to secure an apartment within that first week, we have some leads. So the challenge is going to be getting there, Penzance to London by train and London to Porto by plane. Plus of course London Paddington to Heathrow and on the other end, Porto airport to the place where we are staying. We will be trying to avoid contact with the humans all the way. The flight looks pretty empty at this point and hopefully, it will stay that way. Anyway, how exciting.

We have just 12 days left on the Indiegogo campaign for the preorders and perks for the new MOAT album Poison Stream and if you are thinking of ordering the prints, the Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics, or the first MOAT album please do it this week so we can send them off before we leave. A postcard we can send from Porto if it sounds more exotic than Penzance, although exotic is really only the place where you aren’t. The vinyl album and the CD will be coming from the US anyway. The Skype concert will be over the net and the In House concert will be in your own home at some point in the future. Everything comes from somewhere but not always the same place. The second most popular perk after the record is the Mystery Box and that is coming from somewhere mysterious and I’m not at liberty to tell you where unless you have the security clearance. We were actually considering a Misery Box to match a dystopian landscape rather like Banksy’s Dismaland, thoughts?

The MOAT – Poison Stream Campaign

Out there in the town, there was only half a moon but it was so bright that it managed to light up a chilly night sky full of moving clouds. A solitary star poked out from the canopy as I looked up – it disappeared briefly before appearing again. Olivia and I took the studio and archive recycling up to Dare’s house. It’s since they moved the bins from the beach and I can’t believe how much plastic and cardboard we collect over two weeks. I’ve read that the oceans have suffered terrible consequences of plastic with massive areas polluted as well as sea creatures contaminated with microplastics and now they are in bottled and tap water so look out humans, you are turning into ‘Plastic Man’.

I had a sesh today with Malcolm in Sydney and he rebooked for the 7th December, by then we will be in Porto. It doesn’t seem real and one hopes the internet works where we are staying but it’s odd to be booking sessions to be had in a place I’ve never been to and in a country that I’ve only been to once for a few hours (a gig in Lisbon decades ago). One thing about Portugal is that it’s the same time zone as England, so that’s one adjustment I won’t have to make.

Tonight Olivia and I went to the Co-op and bought two cinnamon rolls and we thought it was amusing that I put mine in the fridge before I ate it and she heated hers up. But then she is always eating melted (vegan) cheese and I can’t stand melted cheese, especially the smell of it. We need a melted-cheese-eating-pod in the house, kind of like those terrible cigarette smoking booths you see in airports. What must it be like inside an enclosed space like that where everybody is crammed in and smoking? I suppose there are fans that extract the smoke quickly and efficiently but it must stink in there. I remember bars when you could still smoke, I could never stay very long because my eyes would start to get irritated from the clouds of smoke. My Fender Strat is the colour that it is because of the number of gigs I played in enclosed spaces where you could smoke. My poor sad lungs.

Music today comes from The Kinks, inspired by Plastic Man but oddly of all the Kinks records I have, albums, compilations, best-ofs, career retrospectives, CD, vinyl, this track isn’t on any of them. It seems it was a one-off single attempting to have a hit as their career faltered – it didn’t work. The Wikipedia page says it is on The Great Lost Kinks Album, I have that album on CD – it’s not there.

The Golden Hour Of The Kinks was a budget series packed with classic songs. You can’t really go wrong with Days (the opening track), Waterloo Sunset, Autumn Almanac, well, do I really need to list them all?

Song Of The Daze

Underneath, out of sight, hidden below the blankets, something wasn’t moving. As you couldn’t see it, or hear it, detect any motion or smell anything odd you had no idea it wasn’t there – or was there. The house was quiet, Jasmine was at love school, Victor had started his new job in the flower factory and Mr and Mrs McFife were finally having their accents removed in the city. So the house was quiet apart from the anomaly that wasn’t there, or was, no one knew, there was no one there to know either way. Pirate the Maine Coon was prowling, although it’s hard to prowl when you are a giant, everything sees you coming, the mice, the swallows, the fish, the moths and the other cats. If they don’t see you, they hear you clumping down, breaking twigs, dislodging the soil. The loud bang and rattle as you jump down from the old rotten table in the garden onto a corrugated iron-covered well, so much noise, the opposite of what was happening upstairs in the so-called empty house.

Jasmine was about to complete her first term at the school and over the last six weeks, had learnt to be kinder, she now knew how to smile at complete strangers, she had learnt to hug and she had been shown how to keep an open mind. She was still able to suspect skullduggery, doubt the truth and relentlessly ask questions albeit with a less aggressive thrust.

Victor’s new job was far more interesting than his last position counting mistakes in the hospital and he was much happier designing the flowers and shipping them off upstairs to the aroma department to have them match a smell to the colour, the shape and the general ambience that his design suggested, it was rather like finding the right perfume for a woman he surmised, there’s nothing worse than the wrong perfume on the wrong woman like his old grandmother who looked like a walrus and smelled like a crow.

The parents, Bonnie and Albert McFife, would not be back till late. Their accent removal was a tricky process. It was so ingrained and at first they were uncertain if it was the right thing to do as it was a part of their character but nobody understood them anymore because as the last native speakers from their village who were still alive, they’d felt a responsibility to keep the tradition and they’d been so committed to the cause that they had lost the ability to communicate with anybody but each other, even Pirate just looked at them blankly.

The day had seemed unsurprising. The grass painter was going about his job with his different sized brushes, the blower was sitting in his usual place at the end of the street at the beginning of the forest, the roofs were still slanting, the sun was still spinning and the shift sleepers still slept. The siren went off at 4PM and 34 doors in the street opened simultaneously as an orderly queue appeared on the pavement waiting for the transport, and then they were gone, everything happened so quickly these days unless it was having your accent removed.

Upstairs and downstairs in the house, everything looked normal. A window was slightly open in the front room, Victor was told to close it before he left but forgot and on the breeze that gently moved the curtain there was always a chance that something could get inside. It wasn’t a given, some people never lock their doors and nothing ever happens and then there’s others that always do and come home to find that it hadn’t helped. It’s like the days when smoking cigarettes was still being promoted as glamorous – despite the link to cancer, enough cool people didn’t die even though they smoked more than a pack a day. There’s always the invisible threat to deal with and just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There’s also that creeping, sneaky, gradual but steady movement that’s too late to stop by the time it’s arrived.

Jasmine arrived home first, Pirate had come in through the cat flap and was luxuriating on the rug, she’d recently learnt to scratch him under the chin and he cautiously accepted her approaches. It hadn’t always been this way and Pirate thought to himself that the school might actually be working. Victor arrived home next carrying a large bunch of experimental flowers, it was one of the perks of working at the factory although some days the family complained to him that this wasn’t the place to test the wares and when Pirate was missing for a day or two and everybody in the house had a headache it was back to the drawing board for the aroma department. Still, the designs were nice and Mrs McFife wanted to encourage her son in his latest pursuit.

Mrs McFife had taken the day off to get into the city for her and her husband’s appointment. Chaos had ensued. Nobody knew her system, it was the first time she hadn’t been there in living memory and all kinds of forgotten meetings, missed calls, unseen messages, unsolved situations and mishaps were swept under the carpet and blamed on technical failures due to unknown forces and everyone seemed to be happy with that as an explanation, tomorrow was another day.

Mr McFife was his own boss so he didn’t have to explain his absence to anybody accept to the usual body and trust had never been an issue and the pure fact that nobody within the body understood a word he said meant that they wholeheartedly agreed with his and his wife’s decision, in fact they actively encouraged it and were most looking forward to the results.

At 9PM, Mr and Mrs McFife arrived home, Victor and Jasmine were on the small veranda at the back of the house enjoying the glow of the moonlight and watching the marauding night ants demolish their leftovers – their small fangs satiated after a hard day.

Mrs McFife shouted a hello across the room and told everyone, “I’m going straight to bed” and it was then that Victor and Jasmine realised that this was the first time they’d understood anything she’d said in years. She slowly climbed the stairs and as she approached the bedroom door she got the strangest feeling. She opened the door and everything seemed normal until with absolutely no accent she let out a howl that everyone in the house, in the street, in the trees, in the well and in the nerve centre clearly understood.

Music today has been the new remixed John Lennon collection vinyl box set Gimme Some Truth (9th October 2020). It seems titularly appropriate and without analysing John Lennon, I can tell you that the sound of this collection is really something. You can find out all about it at this over the top preorder promo page.

Song Of The Daze

Today was brass day and the final day of recording for sessioneer Ahad’s album. We had Sian in with her trombone and Richard in with his flugelhorn and trumpet. We only had two tracks for them to play on but it’s always a thrill to see musicians arrive in the studio with weird instruments. They don’t only look weird, they sound weird too, what’s a weirder sound than a trombone? The flugelhorn is a softer sound than the trumpet, a little bigger and more “chocolatey” to use Richard’s words. All those valves and metal, the lip skills, the tuning, brass is an unforgiving instrument when it comes to pitch, like the violin, so it’s fascinating seeing these musicians make these odd contraptions come to life.

We also did some backing vocals today and were elated that we had finished the recording process. After that, it was straight on to the next project, sessioneer Craig’s song but Dare has some technical issues with the files so we didn’t get very far with that. We’ll continue on Tuesday morning and hope to have recording and mixing done before Olivia and I leave for Portugal on December 3rd. We have a flight reserved, we have an Airbnb reserved, we are going – we are banking on the lockdown coming to an end. We have to book, we can’t wait to see. It’s so hard to plan.

I’ve been trying to catch up with filing records away, I’d like the archive to be organised when we leave so that Dare and Aram aren’t falling over things, there’s nothing worse than tripping over a Black Sabbath album when you’re on your way to find a Smiths album. I filed away some more of sessioneer Noel’s donation of his late friend Norman’s collection, that’s nearly done. Now the ones that I’ve played have to be put back into the shelves as well as the ones that have arrived over the last few months. Today the 2018 remastered reissue of Lodger arrived, I’ve been trying to catch up with the Bowie rereleases (not all the unreleases since his death but the classics). Lodger was supposed to arrive weeks ago but it didn’t, they cancelled the order and refunded it. I ordered it again and it arrived 24 hours later – result.

We have the lava lamps on tonight in the archive, all 25 of them at once. They help to heat the room and keep us psychedelic. I did an interview here with Judy Lyon from Torched magazine tonight. That’s going to be out soon and we’ll let you know where you can hear it and when it’s going to be broadcast. I suppose everything is on the internet these days, I can’t remember the last time I did an interview that was just in a magazine. I bought a subscription to Mojo magazine, the physical version and they sent me an email saying that I had been randomly chosen to receive a digital subscription too. This is perfect as I won’t be here to get the monthly print version and I’ll be able to get it online – result.

I missed all the football today, although I saw that Spurs beat Man City, Chelsea beat Newcastle, Brighton surprisingly beat Aston Villa and Man U unconvincingly beat West Brom. Tomorrow is the big one if you are a Liverpool fan. If Liverpool win they will go joint top with Spurs and if they lose Leicester will go top. So we need a…result.

Talking of sportiness, I wonder what the swimming pool situation is in Porto? I wonder what life is like there, the people, the atmosphere? What might be most exciting is moving to a place that we’ve never been to. I have only been to Portugal once, one night, one gig, in and out. But listening to what people say about Portugal, what they say about the people and beauty of Porto, I’m confident we are making the right decision. I wonder if I’ll be following FC Porto? They did win the Champions League once under Mourinho in 2004 – he left the next week to manage Chelsea, now he’s back at the top of the premiership with Spurs. Well, we’ll see.

Music today comes from Procol Harum and the last album they made before they broke up before reforming 14 years later for Prodigal Stranger (1991). Something Magic (1977) was ambitious, orchestrated, and completely out of step with the oncoming thrust of Punk. But despite all this, it was something of a classic Progressive album, Side 2 has a narrative similar to The Moody Blues, an epic concept about a worm and a tree. It’s like listening to a macabre children’s story. If you are a progger you’ll love this, if you need to be convinced that Prog is worthy don’t start here.

Drummer BJ Wilson sadly didn’t make it to the reunion as he died (aged 43) in 1990. Long-time organist/bass player Chris Copping was also missing (he originally replaced Matthew Fisher who played on A Whiter Shade Of Pale) but Robin Trower who left Procol Harum long before Something Magic returned. The guitarist on Something Magic was Mick Grabham, Pete Solley played keys but conceptually the album was the brainchild of singer, pianist, composer Gary Brooker, and lyricist Keith Reid. If you’d like to investigate this band I suggest you start at the beginning and work your way through their 9 studio albums and one live album from 1967 – 1991. There are some great moments and I recommend that you find them, A Salty Dog for example is marvellous. I saw them live at The Bottom Line in New York in the nineties (Keith Reid was there), Gary Brooker was so good, his voice was great, don’t forget them because most of the world has.

Song Of The Daze