August arrived in Porto hidden in a thick mist that brought with it the sound of constant dripping from the drain pipes as constant light drizzle fell from the sky. It’s moody, mosquito weather and there’s nothing worse than a moody mosquito. I killed one on the side of the bathtub tonight, they get everywhere, ok, no more talk about mosquitos. I would never kill a bee, I would always trap it in a glass as it bumped against the lounge window, slide in a coaster and carry it into the garden to let it free. I’d do the same for a spider but wasps, I can’t go near them. I definitely have some level of spheksophobia. I’m not sure where it comes from because of all the stinging insects, it’s only the common British stripy wasp. The ones that love coke tins and outdoor cafe tables and rubbish bins in parks. I have no problem with bees at all or even hornets, just wasps. It gives me the shivers just writing this down. Maybe it’s the stripes, or how they fly, or the multiple stings or the split body and how they hang in the air, how they walk on the window and how they land, aggh, I have to stop, I’m going to have to go lie down.

Sunday is always a big sesh day and today I was with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney. The EP will be coming in the not too distant future. It’s limited to 200 copies, aquamarine vinyl, four tracks, Tony’s songs, me singing and playing lead guitar, one instrumental. Olivia has a list of pre-orders for it as it’s so limited, so contact her at olivia@martywillson-piper.com if you want to be notified for first dibs when it becomes available. Progress with Paul and Mike in New Orleans as they build their demos into a body of work and progress with Brian in Indiana as the songs originally recorded by him at home are having real drums added and are getting a proper outsourced mix. Last but not least, Jed and I were contemplating the latest demo versions for another album as we release our second single and title track from Space Summit’s Life This Way.

Also very limited to 500 blue copies but available for pre-order now for release in February with the CD released on September 10th. Full digital download with all pre-orders.

PRE-ORDER SPACE SUMMIT’S DEBUT ALBUM HERE

I was wondering yesterday if I should continue with the blog. I like to write, to describe the day but not every day is full of stories. But then that is an inspiration in itself as just being alive is a magical thing, but in a world of such split opinion which I really do not wish to provoke here as there’s definitely somebody else doing that right now, guaranteed. I’d rather concentrate on the literary, the musical, the arts, film, and observation as well as creativity and the pleasure of creating something from nothing which I try to do every night. Learning, teaching, reading, listening, watching, collecting, writing, composing, collaborating with others, swimming (but not for a while) haha, is that a creative arts project? I suppose looking after your health is an important creative project too.

So young people don’t use Facebook and I suppose I wouldn’t either as I don’t follow anybody. It’s a place where some people have asked me to post the blog. I would just write the blog on the website but it seems a daily reminder is necessary. I’m not sure that many people go to websites either, the archive isn’t the site, it’s the place, the music isn’t the posts, it’s the records and the performances, and the writings might come across better on paper, or maybe not? When I think about publishing writings I think I could release the sleeve notes as a book, short stories that have appeared in the blog or the blog itself could be available as different volumes of The Virus Diaries as I started as the virus was beginning to hit and I’ve written every day for 18 months and the pandemic is still with us. Settling down to write independently of the internet is also an option. There are so few hours in the day when there’s so much to achieve, so with two weeks of non-swimming coming up I’m hoping to get my head around that other monster learning curve, the studio. And as well as keeping up with the French I have to start with Portuguese. Olivia is racing ahead in leaps and bounds and starts another intense three weeks course tomorrow, four days a week – she’s going polyglotting.

Music today had loads of false starts, I tried Tracy Chapman, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and went contemporary with Arlo Parks and Natalie Bergman from Wild Belle but ultimately found myself listening to Black Sabbath (haha). I listened to Sabotage (1975) and 13 (2013). Earlier in the day, Tony was telling me about Tones And I. Her song has 2,298,897,024 plays on Spotify. Perhaps I’m in the wrong business.

Music Of The Daze

The window is open on a cool night after a muggy day. I hear a loud siren followed by a quieter one, which is the police car and which is the ambulance? Which is the fire engine? Who designs which siren for which service? Who decides? What tragedy is unfolding out there on the streets? Anonymous pain and drama. The open window is a giant welcome sign for the ravaging female mosquito, looking for blood so she can lay her eggs. Anything could fly in, it’s so open wide, an owl, a bat, a biplane, a superhero, an essence, an aroma, a voice, a cat could climb along the windowsill, the possibilities for that open window are endless. And that just reminded me of Europe Endless from the Kraftwerk album Trans-Europe Express (1977). “Parks, Hotels and Palaces, Europe Endless. Promenades and Avenues, Europe Endless. Real Life and Postcard Views, Europe Endless. Elegance and Decadence, Europe Endless.”

I killed the mosquito. It came flying towards my screen, its second run and this time it flew between my hands, I banged them together in a single clap and it stuck to my palm before falling stunned, half-dead onto the desk, bloodless, I caught it in time. Mosquitos, fleas, wasps, cockroaches, I physically shiver at the thought of them, biting and stinging and flying in your face, awful. But the decline of the insect world will cause us harm. For those of you that remember travelling in your parents’ car in the seventies, can you picture the windscreen and the radiator grill, what happened? The humans are at it again.

No sessions today as per usual on Saturdays but I had 15 songs to listen to from Mike and Paul in New Orleans and that takes some time. I have four sessions tomorrow but on Monday with no swimming, I must get into Logic Pro and start trying to figure out how to record properly, set up reverbs and delays, get sounds on the instruments, write songs, write parts for other people’s songs, riffs, chords, collaborate.

New Covid rules don’t start till tomorrow so Olivia missed the supermarket. The rules here are easing and as more people get vaccinated the rules get more relaxed. I suppose those that fear the vaccination more than Covid have to weigh up what they believe, see what is happening around them and take their chances. I read that some are secretly getting vaccinated so their anti-vax friends and family don’t find out. What a world we live in.

I watched the 100 meters women’s Olympic final today, Jamaica won one, two and three, those girls are fast, Elaine Thompson-Herah beat the Olympic record and ran the second-fastest time ever retaining her title. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who won gold the two Olympics previous to Rio, came second and Shericka Jackson came third but have sympathy for Marie Josée Dominique Ta Lou who keeps on coming fourth.

I did my French sesh earlier today, I have to make a habit of that, so much easier to take it in earlier in the day. I have to start with Portuguese and I have this new app called Hey! Lingo, I suppose they were trying to emulate the success of Duolingo with a similar name. You see those products sometimes in the shops that look like the real thing or have a similar name but are in fact cheapo copies. I can’t actually think of any at this moment but I know they are there.

I have to go to bed, my eyes feel like concrete is setting all around them and my head is getting closer and closer to the keyboard. I have an early sesh with Tony in Sydney and will be in front of the computer the whole day. Olivia is in the bedroom hunting another mosquito that has escaped into the lampshade on the ceiling. She just shouted, “There’s two”. How do they get in there, are they tunnelling, do they have contacts on the inside? Are they born in the bedroom? Because with the window and the door closed they are always in there at bedtime, sharpening the proboscis.

Music today was a large collection of playlist material that seemed to range from Eno to CAN, to Nico, to John Cale, to Julian Cope, to Broadcast, to Television, to Durutti Column, to Stereolab and various other hip indie acts. It all stemmed from my desire to hear Eno’s Another Green World (1975), one of the great arty albums of the seventies.

Music Of The Daze

Olivia got her first shot today (Moderna) and her second will be on August 27th. This means that from September onwards we will be able to travel to the UK without quarantining to sort out, pack and generally organise the In Deep Music Archive. What a task but the whole idea of having this collection as an attraction, a cultural jewel, an historical record, a timeless source of entertainment, an educational resource and a really amazing place to hang out, it all seems so irresistible. It will be the ultimate internet cafe and music centre with music played all day, a small venue and cosy couches. I also imagine a quiet corner somewhere for readers. Album launches can happen here, signings, meet the band, interviews and of course research and enjoy a collection that spans different eras and genres and is growing as each week goes by. Donations and contributions are graciously accepted and apart from funding the move from England to Portugal also to keep up with contemporary releases and old treasures. Thank you to everyone who has contributed already.

Help us move the IN DEEP MUSIC ARCHIVE here

Swim today and I was back to my 100 non-stop freestyle as if the Monday back incident didn’t even happen. How can you go from opening the fridge to I can’t move? Your body is a fragile temple that needs rigorous attention. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I smoked and whenever I see a younger person smoking I feel like imploring them to stop before it’s too late. It’s incredible how the advertisers succeeded in painting smoking as cool, manly, and my favourite, sporty! Does anybody remember smoking goalkeepers? A packet of fags in the goal was completely acceptable in the sixties and seventies, quick drag while your team attacks. But even now ex-Arsenal and Juventus keeper Wojciech Szczęsny smokes as did Man United’s Fabien Barthez. Then there’s the legendary Gianluigi Buffon and whilst we are in Italy, Balotelli smoked and even Bournemouth’s Jack Wilshire was seen with a cigarette.

Two seshes today with Matt in Brooklyn and Fred in Minneapolis and Fred and I spent some time trying to make some more progress with the Logic Pro so I can be helping everyone involved with Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions achieve and develop their ideas more easily. Having a studio makes a big difference when it comes to trying out ideas, figuring out arrangements and adding parts to songs. With the pool closed for the next two weeks, I’m going to try to make some progress here so I can get a better understanding of how it all works. Thanks to Fred everyone will benefit from this.

 
Just a reminder that Space Summit now has two singles out, I’m Electric (with video) and the title track from the album Life This Way, available to pre-order now with the CD arriving September 10th and the limited blue vinyl early next year. Pre-orders come with an immediate digital download of the whole album.

 
Muggy today, the man with the belly was out again, or should I say the belly with the man.

But the little Marquês park was sporadically populated. The fountain was exploding and cascading water patterns back into the round trough, the pigeons and the seagulls were mingling, the sky was blue and the sun was turning the flowers into even more dazzling colours. Summer is here. At the bakery, they told me they are closing for three weeks in August and with the pool closed some routines are going to be changing. I’m hoping to read a book! Surely I can read a book as some sessioneers are also on their way to make family and summer trips, that makes more time too. So I’m expecting technical knowledge to grow, mental stimulation to increase and I’ll be trying to get started on a new language app for Portuguese called Hey! Lingo. And then there’s Ariel and her aspirations to see more beyond the city of Porto, hopefully, we can go with her.

Music today, finally the new LUMP album Animal (2021) is available to listen to on Spotify. I guess today is the release date. Anything with Laura Marling is going to be good and this collaboration with Mike Lindsay from Tunng is a whole different direction for her and that’s nice to see artists branching out into other areas.

Music Of The Daze

Getting back in the vegan saddle today and hitting the gym for non-back threatening workouts. It all went well but those Monty Pythonesque gluteus maximus muscles seem to be the problem or is it sciatica? (Sounds like a town on the Croatian coast.) Whatever it is there seems to be little you can do about it without some serious consultation from an expert and then possibly surgery. I seem to be doing everything that I should to cure it but on my right-hand side, the pain persists if I run. My problem the other day was on the left side, totally out of the blue, bending down to get something out of the fridge, it proves that I should never be in the kitchen.

I made guacamole the other day to great success and will be at it again tomorrow. I always loved avocados but had never tried one till I went to Australia in my early twenties. In the late seventies, I worked in a restaurant on The Wirral called the Cottage Loaf. It was in Thurstaston just by the common and was a much-liked restaurant with a staff of mostly Italian waiters and an Italian manager, Leno, with his British wife Barbara. I remember the waiters’ names, Sergio, Giulio or Giuliano (I think), Adriano, and a Spanish waiter named Enrique. I shared a flat with Enrique first and Adriano second (I think) in the same place in Heswall where I believe Ian Astbury is from and where my sis still lives. I was escaping home and eventually The Wirral for London, hitchhiking trips around the continent before taking the flight to Australia, my first time ever on a plane.

But I digress, my point was that I saw avocados being served at the Cottage Loaf but never tasted one. There was this starter called Avocado Prawn, which looked awful – pink, green and sloppy. I don’t know why but I think the avocados were always hard, but how would I know if I never tried one? Maybe I saw a poor ignorant customer struggling to break into it or was it that the customer only ate the prawns, the avocado inedible as it wasn’t adequately ripe? When I finally plucked up the courage to try one in Australia I loved it and nowadays live on avocado lunches and at a sushi restaurant eat multiple avocado maki.

Two seshes today with Ava in Minneapolis and Mike in Chicago (after avocado rolls), budding songwriters getting into the habit. Talking of habits, it’s the last day before the pool closes tomorrow but I’m hoping it will only be closed for two weeks in August, the gym will be closed for a month. It’s probably good to give my body a rest and stimulate my mind instead and do some serious sitting in Portuguese cafés reading, it’s just avoiding the cakes that’s the problem. I need to learn how to read whilst swimming. The other day I was in the pool and one of the swimmers had an underwater MP3 player. I asked him where he got it and I know the shop because it’s the same place I took my broken water bottle to on Monday. It seems the perfect solution for killing two birds with one stone.

We’ve been following the latest Covid rules as we try to figure out how to get to England to pack up the archive and move it to my storage unit at least before we get everything to Portugal. Amber list countries, quarantine and rule changes for different countries on the route from Porto to Penzance make it quite a tricky trip to plan. If we drive all the way it’s the rules of Portugal, Spain, France, and England. Olivia has been trying to figure out the road costs versus the ferry from Santander to Plymouth (£400 one way and 20 hours on the boat!!).

Music today comes from American Blues‘s debut album Is Here (1968) and the second and better album Do Their Thing, released in the same year. The band featured Dusty Hill and Frank Beard pre ZZ Top along with Dusty’s older brother Rocky. Dusty, who played bass with ZZ Top for over 50 years, died this week at his home in Houston at the age of 72. RIP.

Music Of The Daze

The second Space Summit single and title track, Life This Way, is here and also available now on all the relevant streaming sites. See video below. It’s only a few weeks before the CD will be available on September 10th and the limited blue vinyl (only 500 copies) will be available early next year. You can preorder it here and get a full download of the whole album. Thanks to Ryan at Jammerzine for yesterday’s premiere. These songs that we release, we call them singles, but are they really singles? They’re more tasters for the album and consequently, we thought it would be best to release different kinds of songs to show the range of music on the record. Even though we do probably have a sound, it’s not like AC/DC where one track is just about what the whole album will be. But then, here’s an interesting thought: perhaps to AC/DC fans all our tracks sound the same? Maybe when they hear AC/DC songs major fans hear subtleties and differences which simply wash over us. It’s like classical music, if you’re not into it – Mozart, Stravinsky or Dvořák, they might sound the same to you when really they are quite different. I will gamble on the fact that the style gap between Mozart and Stravinsky is substantially different to the songs on AC/DC’s new album.

I didn’t make it to the pool today although that muscle problem had me conscious of where the pain was yesterday but today I was moving around quite freely. So I’ll be back in gym land again tomorrow after another night’s sleep and a final Friday in the pool before they close for August. Although today we took Ariel out and went by the other pool to discover that the two pools are discussing who will be open between them in August. I hope it’s my pool because the other one is a little tricky to get to without a car and as I don’t drive and usually leave to swim before Olivia arises I’ll be spending almost as much time travelling as I will be swimming. After the pool, we decided to go on a short run to check out the beaches on the other side of Gaia which is the town across the river Douro from Porto and really close to where we were.

We wound our way down to the sea through labyrinthine Portuguese streets and when you live in a place like this, in the summer with a light blue campervan, you can’t help but feel you are on holiday. It only starts to feel like something’s up when you find a park across the road from a beautiful long sandy beach on the gorgeous Atlantic Ocean with its crashing waves and sparkling surface and when you walk on the sand there’s hardly anybody there and the ones that are there are certainly not tourists. We walked along the shoreline, Olivia kicked off her shoes and felt the waves and the soft sand between her toes. I collected some small smooth white stones and a shell. A wave got me with my shoes still on but only slightly so I didn’t have that horrible mushy socks, saltwater and sand discomfort.

We sat on a rock and gazed out to sea, transfixed by the waves with the sun slowly sinking towards the horizon. It was quite breezy, too breezy to just lie on the beach without a windbreak but there was some protection by some rocks on the right side, making it more comfortable to just sit and not move for a while. There were lifeguards, flags to swim between and between the road and the sand, some nice bar restaurants, also not full. On one part of this long and large expanse of sand, there were hopeful changing tents, empty, unused with the lack of tourists. On a normal summer’s day in Portugal, I imagine this beach would be packed. Perhaps next year we will get to see how it really is in the place where we live.

Music today was appropriately Cape Verde’s Cesária Évora on my iPod in the van till the battery ran out and now it doesn’t want to charge.

Tonight I was listening to what I thought was the new Steve Howe’s Yes album but it was in fact a mini-LP, From A Page (2019). It’s only four tracks from the 2008/2011 lineup with Benoît David on vocals. Disc Two is live tracks and I think the singer sings just a little bit flat and after hearing I’ve Seen All Good People like this I decided I had to listen to The Yes Album (1971) which was much, much better. Not fair perhaps to listen to an album when the singer has every opportunity to get it right versus live with all the difficult issues to encounter. But having seen the ‘other’ Yes in recent years (and recently disbanded), Jon Anderson sang so beautifully live, I actually couldn’t believe it. I wonder what he thinks when another version of the band breaks away and gets a singer whose main task is to sound like him. Weird. I couldn’t believe the current official Yes singer, Jon Davison is called Jon (XXX-son)!

Music Of The Daze