Olivia told me I looked like Aladdin today but I just can’t find my lamp! In actual fact, I was wearing a waistcoat without shirt or T-shirt (but not the bulging pants) because it was another hot day here in AC-free Porto. Not that I mind – yet. Air conditioning is probably okay for sub-tropical climates but surely we don’t need it in northern Portugal, do we? I guess we’ll see as we get deeper into the summer. No thunderstorm tonight to relieve the thick air but Olivia said a bat nearly flew in through the window which I would really like to happen so it could eat all the mosquitos. Last night I got up in the middle of the night, woken up somehow by that high-pitched squeaky buzzing which if I hear it means the hunt is on, the light is on and the wait is on till I spot the evil predator and do my best to assassinate it. In this case, it already had my number and when I closed in on it, lingering on the curtain, BANG! – Blood on the curtain from its last feast. I really can’t do with mosquitos and they like my blood, my dream purchase when my next record knocks Beyoncé off the top spot will be a mosquito net with machine gun turrets at each corner manned by mercenaries who I will pay handsomely to keep the mosquitos at bay.

Although today was a sport and sesh day, an unexpected ritual from the religious ones down below drew our attention. They were in their backyard all dressed up with fires and smoke and chanting and singing. There was face paint and following some kind of religious manual as to what happened next in the ritual (see the pic). Olivia did some research, and it seems they were doing this. It was an interesting backdrop to England beating Croatia 1-0 at Wembley and the seshes with Brian in Indiana and Space Summit Jed in Minneapolis – where they have AC!!

I also spoke with Salim in Texas today where the record we made together is making good progress, more on that as all the mixes are done and the artwork is finished. Salim told me that in Texas they just jump from one air-conditioned building to another but I’ve seen their mosquitos, they’re worse than zombies. That’s the real reason they never leave their cars or their buildings. We’re hoping to get down there to Dallas at the beginning of next year but we have to sort the archive out before we go. We have another meeting about it on Tuesday, will keep you posted on that too.

I didn’t manage to keep my promise to myself about getting out of the house for a few moments today but it was a jam-packed day from football to Brian, to Jed to Salim to dinner to more football to French to blog. Now writing this it’s already late and I have an early morning tomorrow because I’m going to swim earlier than usual but only because I’d like to get back to watch the Scotland – Czech Republic game (Spain – Sweden later). I was watching some of the football fans today and I thought I’m not that kind of fan. I do go YEAH!!! when my team scores but the singing and the chanting isn’t for me. It’s interesting how we celebrate differently. I can be quietly excited and I certainly don’t want to do that dance where the fans swing their arms up and down and scream and shout. There are different kinds of passion, there’s intensely inward passion and intensely outward passion, I suppose it’s like some people want to be out amongst people and others prefer solitude. Then there’s this passion for your team that makes you boo other teams – I don’t have that, I would never boo the opposition because if there was no opposition there would be no game. We should be applauding them for showing up and challenging our team to be good.

Music today was an extension of what Eric Clapton was doing before and after Cream so I started with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (1966) with John McVie on bass and Hughie Flint on drums. I was wondering what happened to Hughie Flint when you think of Clapton and McVie’s massive success and John Mayall’s 60 odd years on the road, he’s 87 by the way. Well, Hughie formed McGuiness Flint with Tom McGuiness from Manfred Mann and they had a couple of hits. A stint in the nostalgic Blues Band with Paul Jones and some guest appearances here and there but his last job was a porter at a Cambridge college. Strange how the fates make one man rich and the other not so much, but then they do give them the opportunity to have their happiness equally. I also listened to Eric Clapton’s first solo album (1970), an odd fair of blues and other songs, one of which I particularly liked, Easy Now, and also Let It Rain which sounds more like a George Harrison song but was actually written by Clapton and Bonnie Bramlett.

Music Of The Daze

Thanks to all who have already started sending pictures of themselves (and their pets) with the Record Store Day release of Noctorum’s Sparks Lane. It seems it got to stores across the US and in Australia at least. If you missed out you will be able to order a copy from Schoolkids Records from Monday. That’s the fourth Record Store Day in a row that we released a vinyl version of what was originally only released on CD. Spirit Level (1992), Hanging Out In Heaven (2000), Nightjar (2008), and now Sparks Lane (2003). I believe there are also limited copies of the previous records at Schoolkids, except Spirit Level. We didn’t make as many of that title and it sold out. I hope you didn’t have to queue so long and that you also picked up some other interesting records today too. My contacts in England have picked up at least three titles for me – Uriah Heep‘s The Magician’s Birthday (1972), The Groundhogs‘ Who Will Save The World? (1972) and Tom Petty‘s Angel Dream. Records, records, records! I just saw there was a 6 LP version of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass (1970) coming soon but it’s like £175, who can afford that kind of money for one title? I’m definitely coming back as a music-loving plumber in the next life.

The last two nights there have been wonderful thunderstorms here. Hot days and then the sky would go black on one side as the sun set on the other leaving luminescent red streaks across the fading blue. Then the rumbling and the flashing lights began. It seemed to be coming from the mountains beyond the river but as it got closer the thunder was rattling the windows and lasting for 30 seconds or more. The lightning was both sheet lightning and fork lightning and the forked lightning was spectacular, witches’ fingers across the sky. Electric pointed broken spears reaching out, jagged momentary flashes piercing the darkness and shooting across a vast expanse of the night. Then the small droplets of rain, landing on your cheek as you lean out of the window to watch the spectacle. This followed by a loud downpour drenching the Earth.

It was the second day of the European Championships today that was overshadowed by the collapse of Danish star and attacking midfielder Christian Eriksen. It seemed the quick attention has saved his life although there has been no official announcement of what exactly happened. It seems it could be some kind of congenital heart problem. You could see them trying to revive him on the pitch, it was really terrible. The game against Finland (who won 1-0) was postponed and restarted 90 minutes later, but only after all the players including a stable Eriksen had asked for the game to continue – scary and all the best wishes of football fans around the world who hope for a speedy recovery. The Finnish fans were chanting Christian and the Danes responding with Eriksen – brilliant. In other games, Wales managed to draw 1-1 with Switzerland and Belgium beat Russia 3-0. Barbora Krejčíková beat Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova to win the women’s title at Roland Garros and on Sunday Novak Djokovic plays Stefanos Tsitsipas in the men’s final. The cricket had England’s batting collapse in the second test and although it will be continued tomorrow they are just 36 runs ahead with 9 men down, they have little time left.

It was nice to have a free day today with no seshes or pool or gym but I did manage to get to the bakery and have that moment of the outside world to stand and look at the sky beyond the trees. Portugal in summer seems to be hot in the day and cooler at night. I don’t know how often the thunderstorms occur yet. It must completely freak out the birds and people’s pets. Imagine what it was like hundreds of years ago before science, people must have been really freaking out with all the thunder and lightning. Angry gods and all that!

Music today has been Cream albums, their first, Fresh Cream (1966), and their last, Goodbye Cream (1969), which has studio and live tracks. What a great band, an interesting mix of rock and blues and psychedelia and the sixties. As it happens Spotify then went on to Wheels Of Fire (1968), also live and studio, and in the last few days we’ve been playing this and Disraeli Gears (1967) on rotation. Great if you like this kind of thing.

Music Of The Daze

I wandered out into the street today, the usual line of teenagers walking from the school down the block, I seem to leave for the pool as they leave to go home. As we went out all day yesterday and ate out, I have no recycling and garbage to drop off so I walked slowly, calmly taking a little longer so I could enjoy the ambience of Porto and its people on a summer’s day. The man with the belly wasn’t there nor was the old lady that always says something that I can’t understand when I walk by. The fountain was looking lovely, especially since it had been cleaned and the beer bottle that was in there the day after had also gone which suggested to me that they do maintain it, unlike the fountain in the park in Penzance, stagnant and stopped. One time I asked one of the gardeners if they were going to fix it. “We have the pump,” he said, but obviously not the motivation or a sense of aesthetics – it didn’t seem that money was the issue as is often the case in beautiful repairs.

I pass familiar faces on the way to the pool, not people I know but creatures of habit, the same men outside the little bar, the woman and two men that seem to be on the regular lunch hour, she always seems to be lighting a cigarette when I pass. The men outside the Firestone tyre place, the girl in the corner fruit and veg shop, the Japanese girl on the poster modelling the glasses – she seems to be the only one that recognises me, always staring intensely back, just her and the old lady, who wasn’t there today. I try and take different routes to and from the pool, not that there are many choices. The other day when Filipe, a fellow swimmer, gave me a lift in his car it was rather exciting to drive down an unknown street and arrive at the pool from the other side. I can see the progress of the building that must once have been an old beautiful house that fell into such repair they had to demolish it but then when you have a plot of land in the city and you can replace one abode with 20 apartments the developers start to salivate, aesthetic destruction to line the pockets of people who are already rich. Shouldn’t there be a point where you can stop making money, a point where you have everything you need and more, the yacht, the Picasso, the Ferrari and the next billion can go and be of use instead of growing in a bank into another billion that you couldn’t possibly spend?

Outside the pool, I met the other Filipe, one of the trainers, I was a little early so had time to chat. He told me that Matosinhos isn’t cheaper, those apartments by the sea can be up there in the rent stakes. He also told me that it developed out of disused cannery factories from the fishing industry. So I suppose at one time this was a working-class area with factories and behind them was where the fishery workers lived, not that there’s much of the old Matosinhos left, a few old buildings where we walked and now trendy restaurants here and there, in 20 years, it will be completely gentrified and the Ferrari people will be everywhere.

Inside I hit another 90 today, two minutes overtime. I really need an extra ten minutes for 100 but 100 in the allotted time would be real progress, it feels like I’d have to almost kill myself to make it but when you think about Nadal vs Djokovic, a little effort goes a long way, but then they are 30 years younger and 1000 times richer and have a regimen that is so strict that they have special people who put thermometers in their baths and cups of tea. On leaving the pool I was talking to one of the receptionists, Vera, who’s been away with a back injury from the gym. On the walk home, João, one of the swimmers, fist-bumped me in the street and Mário in the bakery told me they’d run out of our favourite bread (pão da avó). But it seems we have settled in here, we know people and we like it. Today the European Championships started, Italy 3 – Turkey 0. Olivia becomes a football widow from now for a month.

Music today is the whole of Noctorum’s Sparks Lane that is available for this weekend’s Record Store Day. We’ve already seen pix from Australia of it sitting in the racks (Thanks, Orla). I hope you can find it in between the U2 picture discs and the Amy Winehouse remixes.

Album Of The Daze

So today is Portugal Day and when we put our heads out into the street it was quiet but that’s because we live in town and offices and lots of the shops were closed. The ladies of the day were still there despite the lack of traffic. We called an Uber and headed to the beach at Foz (pronounced ‘foh-sh’). It’s the first time we’ve headed to the sea since Christmas Day. In Penzance, we went almost every day but that 15-minute journey or half an hour on the train to Matosinhos makes it just that little bit harder – you can’t just amble down there. We didn’t arrive till around 5 PM which was probably perfect as the families and the kids were already heading home, the people who had been there since the morning would have got their fill and ready to do something else so there were fewer people than at midday. There were still lots of people around though, sitting in beach cafes and bars, lying on the beach in their G-strings, the girls too. Lots of people walking the promenade, bikes and roller skates, skateboards and runners. People with yapping dogs, people with docile dogs, young people, old people, lots of masks, it’s Portugal, people here really try and err on the side of caution and do their best with the pandemic – whatever people say is the truth.

The Uber driver was nice, he asked if we were musicians. Haha, it’s obvious apparently, that glowing neon light flashing above our heads. He asked for our names and proceeded to type our names into his phone to find videos. He told me I had a good voice and thought I sounded like Peter Murphy!!! Haha, what? He was a big fan of The Cult and I told him in the ex-band that we had toured with both Peter Murphy and The Cult. There was a moment there when I wished he’d kept his eye on the road but he managed to avoid crashing into the back of the bus and not swerving into the parked car we passed as he swayed a little to and fro. If I’d have been driving and he’d have said that about Peter Murphy I certainly would have crashed, luckily I don’t drive.

We walked along the promenade and then down onto the path beside the sea, stopping here and there to just sit and stare out at the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. This is not the most beautiful part of Portugal as far as beaches go, although there’s plenty of sand, there’s also plenty of rocks and there’s something of the feeling of a city beach. There are piers and off in the distance, you can see the cranes and industrialisation of Matosinhos. We decided to walk the full stretch from Foz to Matosinhos and ended up walking almost 5 km, passing by the full cafes to the right and the sea and the rocks on the left. We spotted the same birds we see in Penzance, the invisible sandpipers and actually not too many gulls. The sea is still very cold and there were not many people braving it. At one little break in the rocks, a family were screaming joyfully as they paddled and were hit by waves. We passed the Castelo do Queijo (Cheese Castle), an ancient fort from the 6th century. There were cannons and towers added in the 15th century but there didn’t seem to be any way to get in for a closer look but you could see the cannons hanging over the walls. As we got closer to Matosinhos we could see that we were actually hitting another town. Rows and rows of apartment buildings and in the water by the beach lots of surfers, struggling to find decent waves.

We haven’t been to Matosinhos before but it’s a place where a lot of people live, it might be a little cheaper than in the town even though it’s by the sea. It’s somehow modern and rundown at the same time as if in the sixties and seventies they decided to build more modern housing as the ancient city of Porto was beginning to fall into disrepair. We managed to find a Thai restaurant two blocks from the beach and I had the weirdest Pad Thai Tofu even though the owners were a Portuguese man and his Thai wife. She was thrilled when I said khaawp khun khap to her (thank you in Thai). The waiter was cool and from Rio de Janeiro and his wife was from Chorley (a town 20 miles northwest of Manchester). He said that her father was from Liverpool and he didn’t understand anything he said. Talking of Liverpool, on the way back whilst waiting for the metro there was a kid in a Liverpool shirt who was uncertain how to react when I told him where I was from. I think it was possibly a language thing although he seemed to understand when I brought up this year’s performance and TAA’s injury – football talk. On the metro we stared at a mosquito on the window all the way home, it didn’t move. A wonderful day.

Music today is the last track from Noctorum’s Sparks Lane as the weekend’s Record Store Day approaches. The track Qu’est-ce Que C’est? sounds like some kind of French Hawkwind with a frantic German woman wandering onto the stage to answer the question with Ich weiss nicht! How could you resist those breezy international days before Brexit?

QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST?

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Ich weiß (weiss) nicht
Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Ich weiß nicht

Hurt your feelings

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Warum fragen Sie mich das? Ich weiß nicht.
Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Warum fragst du mich das? Ich weiß nicht.

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

So the first Space Summit single, I’m Electric, is out but it looks like we’re going to have to wait another week before the pre-order is up. The anticipation is high but it means we can groove to I’m Electric for an extra week and the album, Life This Way, will be available next week. As I’ve said in previous posts, with the pre-order of vinyl or CD you will be able to get a digital download of the album. But I’ve discovered that some people would rather wait for the CD or the vinyl, open the physical, off with the shrink wrapping, hold the cover in their hands, sit down on the couch with the lyrics and the credits and tune in that way. Others listen in the car, on the computer or on the phone with headphones. Happily, it works all ways. In the meantime, if you want to hear I’m Electric as a tempter for the album, you can hear it here.

It’s not as if we don’t have anything else being released this week. With RSD Drops (Record Store Day) coming at the weekend (June 12th) we have Noctorum’s Sparks Lane released on vinyl for the very first time. I know, I’ve told you this 11 times this week. There’s just something really exciting these days about getting the music you made released on vinyl, even if it is 18 years later. In a digital world, it seems like an achievement and we are a long way from the halcyon days of mega album sales. I remember when the ex-band’s first single arrived in my hands, She Never Said/In A Heartbeat, I was fulfilled, I only ever dreamed of making a single, I never could have imagined being part of as many records as I have and the fact that some of them earned gold records, spawned hits and had a following was way beyond expectation. But here we are with a large back catalogue and a lot more projects on the way, I’m sorry that I have released or been involved in so many records, it’s hard to keep up. For me, everything David Sylvian does, everything Kate Bush does, everything Robert Wyatt does, I have to buy, although these days those three are either retired or rarely putting records out. There are more contemporary artists whose records I would buy everything of, FKA Twigs but then she’s not exactly prolific either. But I always buy everything Chrissie Hynde, everything Lucinda Williams, although the Chrissie Hynde records have been patchy. Everything PJ Harvey, the list goes on but I gave up drinking so I could buy more records – true!

It was a beautiful hot southern European day today in Porto, a slight breeze but warm, the sky a dazzling blue, you could feel the heat wrapped around your skin. The man with the belly was out again, sitting on the same bench. The walk to the swimming pool has a shady side and a sunny side and today I chose the shady side of the street because it was warm enough there. Plus, I’m a pretty fast walker, I can’t help it, and if I were walking on the sunny side I’d be sweating pretty quickly, I could slow down – or I could walk on the shady side. I managed another 90 laps today and when I leave the water – I’m shot. But it’s because I’m pushing it, swimming against time. I have this number in my head that I try to reach. Perhaps if I had no time limit I might not swim as hard but then I’d probably try and reach another number that requires an effort and in the end, the effort is what pays off, whatever you do.

I had to get back to the house quick sharp today because we had an accountant meeting. Yes, we have to get into the Portuguese system. She was really nice and seemed like the perfect person for us, recommended by someone we had met, Ricardo who saw the TV show and knew the ex-band. We met him in the park a few weeks ago – good tip, thank you, Ricardo. Now I’m just waiting to hear back from the storage house and removers in England and trying to find out the cost of moving everything here. Agggh, I hope it is doable, I hope we can get the building we want, I hope we can get the Archive in a space that makes it accessible and I hope I can reestablish recording here in Porto and entice musicians to come here and work with me – it could be a worse location!

Music today has been the ninth and penultimate track on Noctorum’s Sparks Lane. This one Dare sang and usually the one that sings it writes the words but in this case, I wrote the words and Dare sings it. It’s a bit of an odd title but thinking back, I think it was something I overheard someone say, but I can’t quite remember when, where or what the context was. It’s delightfully slow and dreamy and one of my favourite tracks on the album.

Song Of The Daze

A GIRL IN EVERY GRAVEYARD

There are no headlines in the news today
Just petty wars, far away
All these tragedies wash over me
Paper heroes they don’t interest me

If I could only get outside myself
See the garlands not the chains

Dying flowers on a broken grave
Who could know how much love you gave
A quiet shell, that’s lost the sea
How could consequence let this be
So many colours in a dying leaf
Instead of sadness there’s relief

I think you’ve bruised this heart
I just can’t get it started again
I think you’ve used this heart
And it looks like we’ve parted again