A coincidence seeing Don Letts on Saturday because today Olivia got a little “Lost In The Supermarket”, actually, she was lost in the psychedelic mall. We left home in the rush hour for the petrol station, filled up and followed the sat nav to avoid any traffic jams. I sometimes doubt this device and sometimes my mistrust of the machine is right and other times it’s wrong. That relationship between the machine and us has often been exposed as the navigation tells us to turn left into a brick wall. It can exaggerate a traffic jam, or find you a pathway that eases you through the back streets, catapulting you out onto a free bit of road. We made our way through the coils of freeways driving against the traffic which seems odd as we head towards Matosinhos by the sea. You’d think that people that worked in Porto would live in Matosinhos but it seems the traffic is driving the other way – good for us, we’re going to IKEA.

We want candles, IKEA is the cheapest place to buy them and as it’s December, they warm us up and as it’s Christmas, they add to the atmosphere, a win-win situation. Whenever we come here, it’s always full of people, there are always people coming out into the car park wielding giant boxes on uncontrollable trolleys. The genius of IKEA is that it’s cheap enough and good enough, the question is does it last long enough? I think it’s a case of how much you touch what you buy. I had a sofa bed from there that didn’t last long with constant use, turning it from bed to sofa and sofa to bed every day. Today, we had a specific target, got in and got out and immediately returned to Ariel with a big bag full of various candles, large and small. Outside there were lots of policemen, I asked one of them, “Is there something going on?” He said, “No, just being safe”. But it was weird to see so many policemen, in pairs every 20 yards outside IKEA.

We went back into the mall where IKEA lives and Olivia went to buy some baubles for our tree and I went into FNAC for a browse. I realised once I was in there that I didn’t have my glasses so looking at the records or anything else was frustrating as I couldn’t see how much anything cost. I was looking for the Bowie record, Toy, released November 26th. I couldn’t see it (literally) but I might need to look in a proper record store, not a store like this which has a token selection of hip, commercial, and classic. I did pick up and looked at Pink Floyd’s new re-release of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987) which has re-recorded drums, I thought, that’s a reason to hear it, I don’t love the album but I’d probably like it more with Nick Mason redoing the probably awful eighties drums – I just wish that for so many ruined records from the eighties, no, I won’t be making a list. I asked how much it was, 42€, a little pricey I thought for this record.

Some years ago I was watching The Walking Dead and after a few seasons of watching an episode or two over dinner, I realised that the continuous decapitations were turning me off the show – and off my dinner. The same thing happened to me with Game Of Thrones, I just felt it was all too brutal to enjoy. So, on the way out of FNAC, I was looking across at the merchandise, the books, the cameras, the guitars and the gadgets when something caught my eyes in the board game section – The Walking Dead Monopoly! Really?

Music today was Siouxsie and the Banshees‘ tenth album, Superstition (1991). It starred their biggest US hit with Kiss Them For Me which reached No. 23 on the US charts – Siouxsie in the video looking very sophisticated, quite different to the punk days, all grown up. Talvin Singh adds India on the tabla. I really like Kiss Them For Me, a proper song, lots of bells and whistles but a proper song – I can’t say the same for Fear (Of The Unknown), it sounds like ‘then’, sure, but it’s stuck there. Cry, better, leads to Drifter, different. This makes me wish they’d carried on beyond The Rapture for another ten albums of adventuring, but I suppose that’s what The Creatures were. Little Sister continues the exploration and Shadowtime continues the search for another single on the album.

By Silly Thing, it’s all starting to sound a bit too computerised, losing its heart and soul, the big problem of the eras and their demands to sound like the period they are in, sometimes the trend of the now isn’t the best sound for the band and its songs. Got To Get Up follows with snappy drums and anything organic is buried deep underground. The unsurprising sound of drum machine on Silver Waterfalls makes you realise that this is another album where the producer (Stephen Hague) is firmly putting his stamp on the sound. Sure, the band want to try new things but somewhere in Softly lies another fascinating side of Siouxsie hidden away in the production. The Ghost In You snaps itself brightly to the end, leaving all warmth in the coffee machine in the foyer, the only machine with warmth in the building. There are some good songs in here somewhere, unfortunately, it’s 1991 that’s deciding the direction.

Music Of The Daze

A day hanging out with our friend Vivien Goldman today as she has a day off in Porto. Starting with her coming over to our place and drinking tea. We then listened to a couple of tracks of her new record Next Is Now (2021), produced by Youth. She was here in Porto for the Porto Pop Festival talking about her latest book Revenge Of The She-Punks. Twenty years ago I lived in her house in Ladbroke Grove in London for about three years before moving to New York when she sold the house. Vivien also moved to New York where she still lives. I shared my flat in New York with Spacehog drummer and friend Jonny Cragg and it was the last place I was the actual renter of a proper home until Olivia and I moved to Portugal in 2020. Jonny accepted me as a roommate because he knew the band I was in, he’d never actually met me – whadda a guy.

Everything is connected. One connection is that Brix Smith also has an album in the works with Youth. My album with Brix, Lost Angeles, is available on Cadiz Music from December 17th. It was recorded sometime after leaving Vivien’s and New York when I spent twenty years wandering the globe unable to settle anywhere because of commitments to the ex-band in Australia and AAE in England. All this led me to Stockholm and Anekdoten (with whom I will be playing first “post”-Covid gigs in April and May 2022 in Sweden, Poland and Canada). My point, everything is connected. Vivian did a book called The Black Chord with a photographer called David Corio where Vivien wrote the text. One of the pictures in that book was a picture of Jamaican mento band The Jolly Boys who’d I’d met whilst on a trip to Jamaica with Jules Shear where I helped out on a recording of a Jolly Boys album in the eighties. In the book, one of the photos was Moses, the Jolly Boys’ banjo player – wearing a Starfish T-shirt.

We took the subway down into town, just three stops and I stopped off at Tubitek Records to buy the 30th Anniversary release of Nirvana’s Nevermind (with a free seven-inch single included). I’m yet to open it and although I always had a copy of Bleach (1989) on vinyl I only ever had Nevermind on CD so it was a nice addition to the archive. Olivia and Vivien checked out some clothes stores and found boots and rings and dresses between them. We walked through the Porto streets, it had rained earlier but it wasn’t cold despite the date. Vivien forgot her umbrella at the vintage shop. The vibe in the city was brimming over with atmosphere, perhaps it was the wet streets, or that strange mood in the rush hour when everyone suddenly appears on the trains and the roads are full of impatient queueing cars. Whatever it was it was nice to walk up and down the hills, the cobbles and narrow streets to the Trindade area where we went to Boa-Bao to eat, trendy baby. The last time we were here, in the summer, there was no roof, today there was – how did they do that? This was our last couple of hours with Vivien. Bye-bye Vivien, great to see you here, come back soon. Home, chat with Salim Nourallah about our continuous cancelled trip to Texas, the record we made and when will we really be there – Omicron might answer that for us.

Music today was Siouxsie and the Banshees‘ album number nine, Peepshow (1988), and I realised that apart from the first track Peek-a-Boo, I didn’t know the album at all. I do know it’s a new guitarist in Jon Klein and the addition of multi-instrumentalist McCarrick. It’s back to Mike Hedges in the producer/engineer chair but this time I had no problem with the sound of the record. I liked it, but I don’t know it, I only had time to play it once. Perhaps someone here can give us a better review than me.

Music Of The Daze

This week we hope to be making more progress with the moving of the records, musical equipment and anything else left in England. It’s hard to get anything done without jumping through a whole lot of hoops – the second moving company in England has said they can’t move everything because they don’t have a customs agent in Portugal. Whatever that means exactly. Why is it so hard to move my own things to the country where I live and am a resident? We hope to get a Portuguese mover to do it but first, there’s paperwork. It takes so long to even find out what you need. Then there’s the difficulty of doing anything on Covid Earth. Now with the new variant, it seems new lockdowns are coming and in some European locations they have already begun. Here’s some cool video footage of the storage with me and Fred and Gerri Ann from Minneapolis who were over helping us. We didn’t manage to get any footage with Aram, Hud and anybody else helping pack in Penzance because we were simply so wrapped up in it all. Thank you to everybody who has contributed in any way to making this happen and let’s hope it does – happen that is.

 
Sunday seshes today with Arktik Lake Tony in Sydney, Paul in New Orleans, Brian in Indiana and Abby and Nick in Philadelphia. The great thing about all the sessions is that they are all quite different and whereas one project is close to making a record, another is about the guitar or early stages of writing songs or singing or mixing, arranging or simply listening to ideas. The other thing is talking to people in cities all over the world, it’s incredible that you can even do that. I don’t even understand how television works.

On the subject of technology, isn’t it interesting how easily we get used to it, how we can be driven mad when something isn’t functioning properly – the internet dropping out, a computer fault. Who remembers the pre-digital age? I always wonder what the ‘on the pulse populace of today’ will grow old without and miss from the future, the next generation after them commenting, “Can you imagine that in 2080 people still hadn’t figured out how to…”

I saw a fascinating thing on the subway yesterday, we were in a train carriage reasonably full and there were two people reading books and only one person looking at their phone. I don’t think I’ve seen that in a train carriage for years. On the way to catch the train, the Marquês square was getting deep with fallen leaves. What is it about kicking through the leaves that feels so good? I was wearing my long Italian coat, scarf, hands in pockets, checking my gloves were there, expecting a chilly late night, but by the time I got home at 2 AM in the morning I was ripping my clothes off, I was so hot and desperate to cool down – that’s Porto at 2 AM in late November.

I’m looking forward to the Get Back marathon. I held onto Disney+ after the McCartney/Rubin six-parter – surely, there’s more where that came from? It was so interesting to break the songs down in this way. I’ve had four different people tell me how great Get Back is already as they have dived into it, deep as the leaves. I won’t be able to do that for a few days but I’m so looking forward to it. I saw there was one amazing review and one bad review in the newspapers and I was wondering about the necessity of balance in the modern world – something we don’t seem to have overall. Vivien was talking about it in relation to women in music. I had an interesting thought whilst considering this – were there any bad reviews for the Mona Lisa? Is there a need nowadays for someone to love something and someone else to hate it? For the sake of balance? Or have there always been dissenting voices that were never heard at Rembrandt’s house or da Vinci’s place? “Have you seen that Mona Lisa?” – “It’s bloody awful!” – “Morning Ruud” – “Morning Henk” – “Have you seen that new Hieronymous Bosch The Garden Of Earthly Delights yet?” – “It’s ‘orrible!”

Music today was the Siouxsie and the Banshees covers album that shows how broad their tastes actually were, dispelling the myth that all the punk bands hated the indulgent past. It’s great to see unlikely songs like Roxy Music’s Sea Breezes (1972) in there and Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity‘s This Wheel’s On Fire (1968), Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit (1939), The Doors’ You’re Lost Little Girl (1967), Kraftwerk’s Hall Of Mirrors (1977), Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (1974), and even Trust In Me from The Jungle Book (1967).

Music Of The Daze

Thanks to Ricardo Salazar for the Porto Pop Fest tonight that had us hanging out and listening to my old friend Vivien Goldman talk about her latest book, with Don Letts and Darryl Bullock also speaking. Darryl was talking about the subject of his new book, David Bowie Made Me Gay, about the LGBTQ+ community in music over the last 100 years. Don was talking about his new book To There And Black, growing up in England and entering the music scene in the seventies and beyond and Vivien was talking about her book Revenge Of The She-Punks, the fight for a balance of women artists and women generally holding equal sway in a predominantly patriarchal society. It was fascinating to hear these intellectuals speak on their subjects. After the talks, we were invited to dinner with everybody and got to hang out with some very cool people, Portuguese journalists Isilda and Pedro, musicians John Robb from The Membranes, and spent the evening discussing the universe and fixing all the holes. Organisers working with Ricardo, Fitz, Nancy, Ana, all people making this stimulating evening happen, thank you. Cream on the cake, a DJ set by Don Letts.

It’s not like us to be out in a club listening to a DJ but this was a special situation with Vivien in town and meeting and talking to a whole lot of cool and interesting people. It also gave us the opportunity to go to a club in Porto, something we haven’t done before. It was called Maus Hábitos, a very cool place and although our entourage included the older faces a lot of younger people were there too, plus the other rooms in the place populated with Porto’s night-lifers.

It was chilly tonight and I ended up wearing a big black coat and a scarf, jeans and a shirt before venturing out for what has turned into a very late night. An early morning and a long day of seshes tomorrow starting at 10 AM (it’s already 4.42 AM) is having me keep this short tonight otherwise Sunday will be a disaster.

Music today was Siouxsie and the Banshees‘ Tinderbox (1986) which was an album I bought when it came out. I immediately like this record more than Hyaena and when I look at the credits I see the band in the production role and Hugh Jones engineering, I guess I just have a problem with Mike Hedges’ take on sound as witnessed on Hyaena. All the sounds I don’t like about Hyaena I do like about Tinderbox. It’s still an eighties record but it isn’t lost in itself. I won’t go through the tracks on this one because it’s simply too late but you might remember the catchy first single Cities In Dust. Remind yourself about this album, enjoy this more mature version of Siouxsie and the Banshees, listen to some very nice guitar parts and wonder about the cover image, the same image used on Deep Purple’s Stormbringer (1974) and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (1970) – how is that even possible? One wonders if they knew? Or cared? This from Wikipedia: The sleeve reproduced a picture of a tornado, taken by Lucille Handberg near the town of Jasper, Minnesota, on 8 July 1927.

Music Of The Daze

A real chill in the air today, people were wrapped up, it’s colder but not cold like I know it. I grew up in the northwest of England, I lived in Stockholm and New York, this is spring in comparison with that. I figured I’d be going for the double T-shirt on the way back. I noticed I was the only one in shorts, haha, people think I’m nuts but cold legs doesn’t mean cold to me, I’m warm inside. Fewer people sitting outside the cafes but this cold snap Portuguese style will change back to warmer, that’s how it is here. In the pool it’s a regulated temperature and swimming non-stop for an hour, 20 minutes you warm up. I got more time today so swam an extra 10 freestyle lengths after the mile and the variations (including the injured moth and kicking furiously with the floats, 84 total). I never really want to get out of the water when I’m in it. Pushing off from the wall, an arrow underwater, coming up for air a third of the way and adjusting to the stroke. Today in the lane next to me there were frogmen, I guess they were trainees. All the gear they need and it all looked so heavy. They were talking a lot and then doing a lot of submerging. Three guys, one was the teacher. I suppose there’s a lot to know. It immediately made me think of The Bends.

The sky was darkening as I left, having swum more, I got out of there later. The sun was gone but somehow it wasn’t colder. I thought maybe I’m so warmed up from swimming the cold isn’t penetrating. The blood is running thick and fast in my veins, boiling like a vat, gurgling like a hot mud pool, glowing like a lava flow, spitting sparks. With no heating in the houses and expensive electricity bills, you’d better have that blood pumping through your veins. Although we’ve discovered that candles take the edge off the room and next trip to IKEA we will by 50. Aesthetically they make the dark nights cosy and the front room inviting.

Seshes this evening, Fred and Space Summit Jed in Minneapolis, Noel in Surrey but tomorrow it’s a sesh-free day and we will be hanging with my old friend Vivien Goldman who’s in town for the Porto Pop Fest. A cultural event with music luminaries talking about pop culture. So hopefully some nice touristing around, showing Vivien a bit of the city. Down to the River Douro, Portuguese cakes and seeing an old friend in such an unlikely place, meant to be.

Music today was Siouxsie and the Banshees‘ The Thorn EP (1984), a new guitarist in John Valentine Carruthers although it’s mainly an orchestral reworking of old songs. Overground was a track from their debut The Scream (1978), Voices (On The Air) and Red Over White B-sides of Hong Kong Garden and Israel and Placebo Effect was from Join Hands (1979). An interesting idea and a leap forward from Hyaena (1984). Progress.

Music Of The Daze