I went down to the station today to inquire about leaving Penzance on the 3rd December, the day after lockdown ends. There are no cheaper advance tickets, it’s too late for that, but not knowing if the lockdown would continue we were hesitant to buy in advance, but today they said: “the curve has flattened”. It’s going to cost £70 each to get to London and probably the same or less to fly to Portugal. I don’t think we could ever have imagined that planes could be cheaper than trains. But then I don’t think you could ever imagine that a pint of Guinness could be £5 when a quality second-hand record of a great artist could cost the same. Three pints and you’re getting something really special, five pints and you’re onto rarities or a brand new release. A week’s drinking and you could have your own record collection.

After the station, I walked by the harbour. The last time I walked here the sea was as high as I’d seen it, today the tide was out and the few boats that remained here were tilted on their sides as the water had receded and left them useless, like a swan waddling on land. The serene soft breeze in your hair as your sleek yacht rides the waves in contrast to the clumsy lump stuck in the harbour sand. They are like the swans with the beautiful image of them floating on the surface of the water or Duran Duran videos (haha). Boats have ugly clumsy anchors, swans have ugly clumsy feet, no water, no elegance.

As I walked along the road by the harbourside I noticed all the ropes and chains that moored the missing boats to the shore were still there. It seemed surprising that when they took their boat into hibernation that they didn’t take the mooring rope with them. Perhaps they know their spot and they know where they will be moored in the spring, or is it first come first served and the ropes and chains are public property? I heard once that the happiest day of your life is when you get a boat and the second happiest day of your life is when you sell it.

Sesh today with Matt in Brooklyn, some cool songs coming, Stefan in Germany had to postpone but then I had a chat with journo Fred Mills who’s going to help with a bio. All this promo stuff. Does anybody remember Led Zeppelin? No videos, no singles, no interviews, no promo, hugely successful. I suppose you can’t ever compare how things were and although times have changed I’m not sure how far mystery goes these days. It was ok for Kate Bush and Leonard Cohen, seventies artists and sixties artists that made mystery work, but Kate was pretty visible in the beginning. Michael Stipe made a point of being in the shadows and saying little, it worked for him but again, it was a different time.

If your music fits the zeitgeist then mystery works but if you are outside the happening scene then your mystery is just going to keep you obscure, but then again what’s wrong with that?

Crowdfunding is a relatively new concept that puts the fans in touch with the artist and that’s great if you want it that way. Not everybody does and really you can’t blame them. A lot of people communicate through the music, not as a personality outside the music.

With two weeks to go on our Indiegogo campaign, we hope to get to at least 75% of the goal. The goal was the same as Noctorum but this is a tricky time and perhaps MOAT is less known. But then Indiegogo doesn’t look like it’s going to go bust and run off with the money. Just so you know, my partner in this project, Niko, is a Swedish/German composer and multi-instrumentalist, I write the lyrics and sing all the songs, we both play guitars and bass but Niko also plays piano, vocoder and even piano accordion, he plays pedal steel and comes up with great melodies and if you are following the campaign you might have already heard two of the songs from the album and if you have donated then three are available. From now all three songs will be available to listen to if you have donated, the general public has to wait another ten days.

The best thing about all this is that in just two weeks a digital copy of the new album will be available to everyone who donates, whether they buy a CD, the vinyl, the handwritten lyrics, the mystery box, house concert or even a postcard. It’s exciting to think that it will be available to everyone. As soon as the vinyl and CD are manufactured we will send out the physical copies, that will be January before the street date in mid-February. So please preorder now and help us cover the costs of making this investment work so we can make more records.

Check out the MOAT campaign here

Music today is Curtis Mayfield’s second studio album, Roots, released in 1971. One of the great Soul Funk albums along with his debut and on through his seventies albums, the Super Fly soundtrack and the anti-war concept album Back To The World (Curtis/Live! was also released in 1971 before Roots). His sweet soulful voice, anti-drug, peace and love message was a new black social conscience, a world also inhabited by the boy genius Stevie wonder. Sly Stone might have been in this world, too, if he hadn’t spiralled out of control with his drug use.

His song Move On Up from his debut might be his best-known song but all his albums are full of soulful classics and once you have investigated his solo career there’s his previous band The Impressions to look into. Curtis died on Boxing Day 1999 at the age of 57 from complications of diabetes. In 1990 he suffered a tragic accident when a lighting rig fell on him at a concert stage in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He was paralysed from the neck down. In 1996 he released the album New World Order which he sang whilst lying on his back. He was a civil rights activist, a lover and a fighter and is sorely missed.

Songs Of The Daze

I had to get out of the studio today because I knew the sea was there. I put on my beautiful Italian coat, long pants, gloves and scarf, looking good, walked outside, I was overdressed, I went with it. On the way down to the sea, we went by the Thai restaurant and ordered a take away to pick up on the way back. Down on the seafront that damned fence is still there, it ruins everything, you can’t take that walk along the prom with the sea, ominous, below you. So we went to one small section of walkway beyond the prom which is so dark that you can almost only hear the sea and not see it except for the white tufts on the waves. The tide was in, we walked on to the stony beach and got as close as we could – it was like treacle tonight, a thick moving sweet sticky liquid. We stood there for a while mesmerised by the incessant waves that have been banging against this shoreline for thousands of years. We stirred it with a giant spoon and poured it over our pre-dinner dessert and ate treacle sponge under the stars.

At this point, I took the Bowie knife from its sheaf and dug it deep into the heart of the sponge. I knew there was something in there, I could hear it crying. I removed the sponge from around the whimpering and there alone was a small biped, a skin of metallic grey, long fingers hiding tearful eyes, a fin, webbed feet and a golden ring on one of its four fingers. Exposed, the creature stopped weeping and slowly raised its eyes from behind its small hand. Its eyes were yellow and blue slits like a snake but sadness was obvious in its demeanour. About 6 inches in height, claws on feet and fingers and wet skin covered in crumbs from the sponge. Suddenly, the creature’s skin began to glow and in a flash of light, sponge and treacle, it was gone leaving behind a small key.

The key was black, matt black and as I went to pick it up it felt like fur. I held it in the palm of my hand, it started to vibrate and suddenly I found myself in a large hall, perhaps a cathedral except everything was green. I looked down at my feet to see there was no floor and above me buzzing sounds like bees. The key was gone and my clothes had changed. I was now in a red silk robe, a patterned edge of triangles and circles. I heard a voice behind me, it was the creature. It sat on a giant bejewelled throne, rubies, amethysts, diamonds and more triangles and circles in lapis lazuli. The voice was small and high-pitched like a cheap guitar. Then came this riddle:

“The treacle in the sea will never be,
The circles and triangles have decreed,
The sponge is invisible for all but one day,
And I just got hungry what can I say”

And then I was back by the sea, in the dark, Olivia by my side, no sign of the key, the treacle sponge or the small creature. I walked to the Maserati and started driving towards Portugal. Olivia sat by me and DJ’d, she played the Blood Winners’ first LP and Blue Rouge before we came to the English channel. In France the countryside flew by outside the car, we drove from Calais to Irun in 7 minutes and as we passed into Spain we noticed that the sky turned a bright turquoise and ravens appeared in the sky in more triangles and circles. I felt peckish and as we whizzed by San Sebastian and Bilbao, we entered into Portugal through Tui at midnight. I knew that I could eat a pastel de nata at any time in Portugal and I pulled over at a garage and filled up with petrol that looked very much like treacle as Olivia ran inside to pay.

One minute passed and we were in Porto, sitting at a café with a pastel de nata each and a Portuguese decaffeinated coffee, on the table was a jar of treacle with a picture of a wave on the label. The waiter came over and asked if we were okay and as I turned to answer him I knocked the jar of treacle off the table. It fell with a crash and broke in half. The waiter ran to the kitchen and came back with a sponge to clean it up, placing the glass in a small bucket. After he had cleared up he came back with another jar, different from the one I broke and I noticed on the label was the same creature I’d encountered on the beach in Penzance. It was holding a Bowie knife and licking its thin white lips.

Music today was Carla Bruni’s self-titled latest album, her fifth. You may remember that she is an Italian supermodel that married the French president Nicholas Sarkozy (they met in November and were married in February). She is trilingual (at least) and gave up modelling after 10 years to concentrate on music. She had released two albums before they met, Quelqu’un m’a dit (Someone Told Me) and No Promises in 2008 she released Comme si de rien n’était (Like Nothing Ever Happened). In 2013 she released Little French Songs and in 2017 French Touch. This latest self-titled album released this year is all in French except for one song in English, one in Spanish and one in Italian. It’s hard to get a measure of it because it’s a mellow girl singer-songwriter singing in French and that old maxim, “She could sing the phone book” might more generally be reserved for Kate Bush or another fantastic singer, but to my English ear, just the fact that she sings in French is intoxicating enough. Add to that me trying to learn French and understand the words and I’m in. I’m not there yet but I’m closer than I was, that’s progress. Soft French easy listening, what’s not to like!

Music Of The Daze

Tonight the sky was the ‘ice sky from the north’, so clear and perfect, a cold wind had unveiled the stars by blowing the clouds away and replacing that low dull ceiling of grey with this epic giant star-studded roof of the universe. The Earth felt like it had been scrubbed clean, that all pollution was gone, the air so fresh it invigorated your lungs, your body rising and stretched as it filled with oxygen. You could see the constellations clearly, Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, there is magic in the air when the cold hits – you can see millions of miles into infinity, like you could reach the distant planets by simply breathing in the purity of the night. It was beautiful.

In the day, we finished Arctic Lake with invisible tweaks and moved onto Atlanta sessioneer Craig’s song that we will work on in this last period before we leave for Portugal, presuming the lockdown ends and we can travel. I was looking at the travel advice and so far there are no restrictions on arriving in Portugal but we still need to get there. When we do get there we will be visiting the Livraria Lello bookstore which is one of the most famous bookstores in the world, allegedly part inspiration for J.K. Rowling. They sell books in many languages but apparently have a good selection of English books, which answers my question about do I need to take books with me? Always a hassle if you’re flying, they’re heavy. Volumes have secrets.

Support our MOAT campaign here

Olivia was excitingly sending out Mystery Boxes today and she will be doing that till the end of the week. We only have 17 days left before the campaign ends. A new song, The Roadmap To My Soul, has already been sent to the first 50% of donators and if you donate now we will update and send the first three tracks from the album to you every Friday. That will include Gone By Noon and Acid Rain, these two songs you can already hear by clicking on them. You can also get signed prints of the cover art through the campaign if a postcard from Penzance doesn’t do it for you. The first MOAT album is running out, get it while you can. Anyone that wanted a T-shirt might have found there was a glitch on the site the first 12 hours they were available, that is now fixed. The one-hour Skype concert was up at $300, it’s back to $200 as it should have been from the start, like the last time we did a campaign. Thanks for the support, the original campaign video is here:

 
Jerome Froese called me from Berlin today and sessioneer Ahad and I skyped to New York. How incredible is that? The humans take it all for granted, this unbelievable technology that allows us to communicate across the world. Every week I speak to Arctic Lake sessioneer Tony in Sydney by Skype. We have clear and interruption-free conversations every time. Amazing. This is why the Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions work so well, you just need a solid internet link and you’re in. Try it, the first preliminary conversation is free and it doesn’t matter what level you are at. At some point you will be hearing the results of the four sessioneers, Jed in Minneapolis (Space Summit), Ahad in Istanbul, Tony in Sydney (Arctic Lake), and Craig in Atlanta. This will show you the potential, all you need is some ideas and some will. Get in touch.

The Songwriting & Guitar Guidance Sessions

Jerome and I had a good talk today about saving the universe, the unreleased Tangerine Dream back catalogue hitting Bandcamp and making our record. He’ll be working on it in Berlin up till Christmas and we will be communicating back and forth as it reveals itself to us. It’s exciting, I’ve never made a record like this before. Dare will be mixing Ahad’s record after I have gone but I will be getting mixes and updates all the time as we strive to finish that record, too. Long may all this continue.

Music today is Rory Gallagher’s RSD release this year, Cleveland Calling, an acoustic set at a radio show where he plays bluesy songs and talks to the host. It just makes you love him even more. I saw him live twice in the seventies, once at Liverpool Stadium in December 1974 and once at Reading Festival in August 1976 (I also remember Camel and Van Der Graaf Generator being on the bill). Rory played electric mostly but always had an acoustic section in the show.

The Reading Festival 27 – 29 August 1976

Music Of The Daze

In the studio today finishing the last Arctic Lake song and mixing. Sometimes it takes a little time to find the right sound. Today we were looking for two chords, an Em and a D, we needed ‘sprangs’. It seemed like it had to be the Strat and we tried it through the little Fender Champ amp in the control room but it wasn’t long before we were into the Vox AC30. It’s hard to beat an amp from 1962. But although the chemistry of Strat and Vox can be a potent one, it wasn’t to be, time to try the Nash Tele. It’s a brighter sounding guitar and we needed a sparkly couple of chords, but even on treble pick up it still wasn’t right. When in doubt find a Rickenbacker, it’s a guitar with personality, a unique sound, and the ability to sparkle and be forceful at the same time. It was perfect. This is why I have lots of guitars because sometimes it can take three guitars to find the sound for two simple chords in one isolated part of one song. So next time anybody says to you, “Why do you have so many guitars?”, you know the answer: “Why don’t you eat the same dinner every night?”

Here’s a story: Tonight at midnight I was supposed to speak to sessioneer Chris in Victoria (that’s a state in Australia for anyone who is geographically challenged). He had to postpone but wait till you hear the reason. An alien spaceship had landed on his lawn, no sorry that was my excuse for not sitting my exams as a 16-year-old, that and staying in bed and reading Sounds magazine. No, his reason was that a cockroach had burrowed into his ear! Oh my god, can you imagine? In a later message, he informed me that it was still in there but no longer alive. Am I squeamish or is that the most horrible story?

There have been some nice packages in the mail, one from Noelia in Argentina sending me some Argentine music. We recently sent her a Rhyme T-shirt but get this, we had to have our friend Julie in Houston who sends T-shirts and CDs out for us send it to us first. The reason? If you are sending a T-shirt from the USA to Argentina, it’s cheaper to send it to England first and then send it to Argentina, go figure.

We were sending out more Mystery Boxes today and started on the lyrics for the MOAT Poison Stream campaign. If you are wanting one of these boxes or Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics, now’s the time to order it as Olivia and I hope to be leaving Penzance soon. This also applies to the last few copies of the first MOAT album that we have here. We can certainly be sending postcards from Portugal, pasteis de nata, and pictures of Ronaldo but we won’t have the MOAT debut album in Porto.

Support the MOAT Campaign here

Today would have been Jeff Buckley’s 54th birthday, to think what he might have done if he hadn’t died so young. It’s also Martin Barre’s birthday, the late Gene Clark, and Gordon Lightfoot who is 82 today. I was thinking today about how some countries have Name day (Sweden for example) but I’d never heard of that before I went there. I guess it’s popular in lots of European countries but not here.

We watched Californians In Space today in a rather exciting episode where the crew of the Enterprise were exposed to The Borg. French is hilarious, that is, once you get into the Diamond League you realise the dedication of your fellow thirty people. After one day the person in the top position had twice as many ‘points’ as I did in the week where I came top of the Obsidian League, the league below. And talking about leagues the premiership is back on this weekend with a tricky match for Liverpool against Leicester with lots of injuries to deal with. May the best team win.

Music today came from Erykah Badu, Dallas’ queen of Neo-Soul. I found some of her CDs very cheap on the net and today I listened to her second studio album, Mama’s Gun (2000). (Check out the coincidental beetle vid.) Groovy stuff, influenced by all the legends and keeping one foot in the future. It’s the kind of music my age group isn’t supposed to like but then I hear the influences and the age group, the demographic that does like this music might generally not know the influences. Like younger people might not know The Beatles, younger people also might not know Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Sly Stone, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke on the male side, and Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Martha Reeves, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Nina Simone on the female side. Of course, some do and a lot of younger people have retro tastes but all those girls that I talked to at Graceland who didn’t know who The Beatles were, was an insight. I don’t really think it was the type of music, more that it simply wasn’t the now and there is no exposure to the past unless you actively investigate it yourself.

Song Of The Daze

We set off on an adventure tonight. First, we waited for it to get dark, for it to get a little colder and looked up into the sky to see if rain was coming and then it was time to go. The wind was up outside the Archive door and we stepped out onto the pavement into the night. We walked down Chapel Street past what once was Steckfensters, the recently closed down curios shop, and turned left, down the cobbled hill by the Admiral Benbow pub that leads down to the water in front of the dry dock. The sea flows under the road bridge beyond the harbour and today it was the highest I’d ever seen it as it flowed over the road at the bottom of the hill. It was warmer than it at first seemed but I was glad of my coat on an English November night.

We crossed the road by the harbour, now sparsely populated with boats as the winter takes hold. The sea is, of course, high here too and from a distance, the boats look like they are on a level with the cars as if they both occupy the same modes of motion. Further along across and on the edge of the car park that sits aside the harbour, a giant buoy, (pronounced ‘boy’ in England, ‘buey’ in American) a reminder of the old-fashioned markers from the sea, outmoded by some new technology. The buoy stood next to the boats’ winter hibernation area, nylon ropes flapping against the masts in the wind.

We had reached the sea path and ventured into the darkness that led to the shore walk. I had my torch but the batteries were low and it made little effect on the blackness of the path. The occasional minefield of already trampled dog dirt made it a precarious trip but I managed to make it with no damage. You are walking with the train tracks on one side and the sea on the other and tonight the sea was loud, the train tracks quiet. On our journey in the dark, we were passed by a girl jogging, two teenagers, a man on a bike. There’s no feeling of danger here on this dark path – welcome to Penzance.

Suddenly a train appeared but it was so silent that it was hardly noticeable over the roar of the sea, it clicked softly on the tracks, off to Plymouth or London, barely occupied due to the lockdown. We walked by the pathway that led down to the beach the last time we made this trip but this time the sea was right up against the rocks and there was no way you could walk there. There was no sign of seagulls, I still wonder where they go at night.

We came to the ominous silhouette that was the bridge that leads from the footpath over the railway line. The torch was failing but we were soon over and dazzled by the orange light of the street lamps and the headlights of the cars. We made them stop at the crossing, surely cursing as they were now on the road out of Penzance and they could speed away, this was the last hurdle on the dual carriageway. They impatiently accelerated off as the light turned to green and we reached our destination. What excitement to be here again in this space-age place next to the Scilly Isles Heliport.

On the way back, we stopped on the top of the bridge and gazed down at the black sea and into the blackness beyond the breaking waves. We breathed in the air, filling our lungs with oxygen and breathing out as long as possible, exhaling old air from our lungs and then breathing in the new fresh batch. On the path, the torch was even dimmer and although the tide was high we went down as close as we could to the waves and I managed to stand on the wet pebbles and experience the awe-inspiring power of nature.

On the way back another man on a bike, it may have been the same man, it was too dark to tell and a jogging couple with bright lights stuck to their heads. They might have been aliens, it was impossible to tell. What a trip, walking out into the night, taking in the sea in the darkness and wondering how we could ever live anywhere without this benign monster in our lives.

Music of the day is The Doors’ second album, Strange Days (1967). It seems appropriate. It’s a poetic album, with Morrison’s moody vocal and evocative lyrics. The band, sensitive to his vision, are a perfect vehicle, Ray Manzarek’s unique keyboard sounds and Robby Krieger’s sixties guitar with John Densmore’s jazzy drumming arrangements and of course the bass player they didn’t have, but did – if not in Manzarek’s left hand, then in the studio at least on this album, Clear Light’s Douglas Lubahn plays “occasional bass”.

The poetry of Horse Latitudes, the hits, People Are Strange and Love Me Two Times and a lot of thoughtful album tracks, makes this a must-have album. Allegedly sonically inspired by receiving an “early copy” of Sgt Pepper’s, a sonic inspiration as they used a state of the art 8- track recorder and experimented with sounds. I love the last track, the ten minute plus When The Music’s Over. The album was produced by Paul A. Rothchild who produced all their records except LA Woman (regular engineer Bruce Botnick did that one). The album was a big success making it to No.3 in the US charts.

After hearing this I had to hear more, so went back to their debut. This one reached No.2 on the US charts and included the hit Light My Fire with Manzarek’s wonderful keyboard line. Larry Knetchel plays bass on Light My Fire and also Soul Kitchen, written as a tribute to Olivias Soul Food Kitchen on Venice Beach. Break On Through (To The Other Side) opens the album and of course that classic, The End, finishes it, later evocatively recorded by Nico on the album of the same name in 1974.

Music Of The Daze