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A lovely walk through Morrab Gardens to the sea and back through Penlee Park to the studio showed us that spring was well and truly here. Not just in the sky but down here on the Earth, in the earth, in the trees and in the bushes, in the budding flowers and the already falling petals of the magnolia trees. Bumble bees! There were bumble bees buzzing around the flowers that have already bloomed. In the bushes a robin, bright red breast and its feathers fluffed up by a still chilly breeze. Hopping, but each hop was like a jump, a huge distance covered. How do they do it? Their spindly legs are so thin, they are so small and delicate, a true wonder of nature. As a kid I lived in the countryside and my family kept a lot of animals. We had a goat (Billy), four geese, a dozen ducks and lots of hens. We had a cat (Blackie) and a dog (Butch), a rabbit, a budgie and a goldfish. Some of their names I can’t remember. I do remember one of the geese was called Arthur and he was pretty vicious. Once I was actually attacked by him in a pecking and wing beating frenzy, I escaped but as a child it was traumatic. It didn’t put me off being an animal lover though. I had lots of books about British birds as well as African animals. Olivia was very impressed with me today when we spotted an unusual bird in a tree near the path in the park. A beautiful whistling song, small like a sparrow but with a very sharp beak, a yellowy orange underbelly and grey blue wings with a Zorro like flash across its eye. “I think it’s a nuthatch” I said. A few hours later Olivia was showing me a nuthatch on the computer screen. Ornithologists of the world unite.

At the supermarket by the sea a lovely Rover 2200 sailed into the car park. I say sailed because my Dad used to have a similar model and I remember it seemed to float and softly bounce along the road. We were admiring it, its odd spare wheel mounted on the boot, its unnamable colour and inside its front room cozyness. It was a P reg. That means it was from between March and December 1975 or January and February 1976. Whenever I see a car like this, I look at the reg, figure out the year and think about what records were out when this car was new. If you scroll down there’s a selective list, you can figure out the bands yourself. I had quite a good time that year despite what was coming to wipe out the past. We weren’t the only ones admiring the car, there was a man leaning against his own car and guess what I didn’t notice what make it was because nowadays it really doesn’t matter. We got talking (from a distance). He had an Irish accent and he told me he, too, used to have a Rover 2000, in fact he had two. He also said that they were the same model and close in age with the same body, but one of them was bigger inside. It’s like guitar effects pedals, if you bought a Big Muff when they first came out it might not have the same components as another pedal that was supposed to be the same, that’s just how it was at the Electro-Harmonix factory. Now the specs for everything are so mass-produced that they are exactly the same. Watch out humans lest you become your neighbour.

I had a sesh with Matt in Brooklyn today, he was telling me about being in Brooklyn at this awful time, but as I said yesterday, I don’t have to talk about it all the time, it’s already everywhere. We were talking about Psychedelic music and I couldn’t believe when he mentioned The 23rd Turnoff. That’s twice in a week that name has come up, so go listen to their classic single Michael Angelo, the world wants you to. Dare came in a little later today but we got to work on Space Summit. It was electric guitar day and I played some arpeggios through one of my Vox AC30s with my 1965 Rick 12-string, then I doubled it and then doubled it again using my old seventies Strat. After that I played multiple EBow tracks that Dare will comp together. I spoke to Ed, our drummer, today, he’s in Bristol and playing the drums to the backing tracks, doing a great job. I really didn’t expect that we would be this far advanced with this album, they’re starting to form a queue with Nightjar, the new MOAT album Poison Stream, Salim’s album A Nuclear Winter Feels Warm and Space Summit not far behind. We just have to sort the world out first.

Music today, well last night getting ready to sleep I put on a CD of Jeff Beck’s beautiful and passionate guitar album Emotion And Commotion as expressed in the title. The man has such control, finesse, whilst also having virtuoso skills should he choose to use them. His tone lives as much in his fingers as it does in his amps and his guitar. I’ve listened to this album a lot. I also played his follow up album Loud Hailer (2016), which I’m not so sure about. I have this habit of playing an album twice in a row if I’m not sure if like it which I might not do with an album I really like. Weird.

When I was looking at albums that were released in 1975 I saw that those old crazy intellectuals Henry Cow had released In Praise Of Learning in that year. It features Dagmar Krause on vocals (back in Germany) as the band merged with another band, Slapp Happy, to make this album. Essentially they were formed out of Cambridge University (of course they were) by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, adding Chris Cutler on drums, John Greaves on bass and later Lindsay Cooper on bassoon and oboe. Others came and left and returned. This is challenging music, challenged the listener, but more purposely challenged the composers and the players. There were songs and there were improvisations, there were lyrics and there were instrumentals, there were complex time signatures and there were no time signatures. The lines crossed on this album are beyond most of our imaginations which contributes to making this avant-garde music such a beautiful noise.

Robert Wyatt’s Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard was released in the same year as In Praise Of Learning and the two Virgin acts toured together. Robert Wyatt is one of my favourite artists, I have all of his records and if I don’t, I want to know why? Wyatt was in the influential Soft Machine, leaving to form Matching Mole (a play on machine molle, soft machine in French). Soon afterwards an accident, falling from a 4th floor window at a party in London saw him paralyzed from the waist down. Before this album and after the accident he released the amazing Rock Bottom and although he has now officially retired from music he leaves behind a catalogue of wonderful treasures for the world to discover.

This proverbial saying is attributed to, and almost certainly coined by, Lord Byron, in the satirical poem Don Juan, 1823: ‘Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!

Truth is stranger than fiction because we don’t meet it as often. In 1897 Mark Twain included an adage comparing truth and fiction in “Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World” as mentioned previously: Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Today’s song from my catalogue is Forget The Radio from Hanging Out In Heaven, where Robert Wyatt gets a mention.

 

Forget The Radio

Switch on your amplifier
And put a record on
Lay back on your pillow
And hear your favourite song
Feel the music breathe
Sing the melody
Read the sleeve notes through
What the musicians do
And when you’ve found the groove
Or if the lyrics soothe
Concentrate and listen really close

Forget the radio
Send the DJ home
You’re better on your own
Forget the radio

All my favourite records
I never see or hear
And here’s the plague of zombies
For power and career
Andy Partridge, Robert Wyatt
You hear it you buy it
The tail seems to wag the dog
The music’s thick, lost in the fog
Without analysis
This is all we wish
Image kills the qualities below

Forget the radio
Send the DJ home
You’re better on your own
Forget the radio

(Willson Piper)
Hanging Out in Heaven (2000)

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A selection of albums released in 1975. Put the band to the title:

Horses, Blood On The Tracks, Play Don’t Worry, Sunday’s Child, High Voltage, Physical Graffiti, Rock ’n’ Roll, Fly By Night, On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, Desperate Straights, Young Americans, Welcome To My Nightmare, Katy Lied, The Rotters Club, Sweet Deceiver, Toys In The Attic, Fish Rising, The Snow Goose, Straight Shooter, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, Warrior On The Edge Of Time, Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy, Venus And Mars, In Praise Of Learning, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, One Of These Nights, Initiation, Tonight’s The Night, The Basement Tapes, One Size Fits All, HQ, Free Hand, Sabotage, Futurama, Atlantic Crossing, Deluxe, Nightingales And Bombers, Born To Run, Picture Music, Timewind, Blues For Allah, Minstrel in The Gallery, Fighting, Wish You Were Here, Crisis? What Crisis?, Another Green World, Bandolier, In Trance, Extra Texture, Caress Of Steel, Bongo Fury, …By Numbers. Ommadawn, Siren, Shaved Fish, Against The Grain, Commoner’s Crown, All Around My Hat, Godbluff, Mal-Practice, Nighthawks At The Diner, Radio-Activity, Fish Out Of Water, Zuma, Schoolboys In Disgrace, Teaser, Numbers, A Night At The Opera, Discreet Music, Helen Of Troy, The Hissing Of the Summer Lawns, Landed, Mustard, Nomadness, Pour Down Like Silver, Strung Up, T.N.T, Evening Star, Tails Of Illusion, Pampered Menial.

In Edward G. Robinson’s final film Soylent Green (1973), a dystopian thriller set in 2022, that also starred Charlton Heston, there’s a memorable scene when Sol Roth, Robinson’s character, seeks assisted suicide as he can no longer bear life living with the fall of civilization. In that process he is placed in a theatre with a large screen and shown scenes of beautiful flowers and forests, flowing rivers and wild animals from an Earth that has long been lost. Why is it called Soylent Green? I’m not telling, you have to see the film. But the scene is a reminder of what was, what matters and how bad things can become. Augurs of the future, warnings and signs are evident everywhere, can this period in our lives make us stop for just one moment and do everything we can to save our amazing world? It really is a Sci-Fi movie out there.

In Causeway Head today (one of the main shopping and walking streets here in Penzance) nearly all of the shops were closed but I did notice the sign (pic) in the fish & chip shop window. I felt some kind of affinity with the plaice. All jokes aside I noticed that people you pass on the street take a suspicious sideways glance at you, wondering if you are infected. It’s really unnerving, but I suppose understandable when we hear about the worst of what’s happening all over the world. It’s hard not to make every day about this terrible situation, but I’m going to try and keep it to a minimum. You hear about it all day, every day anyway.

Today Dare and I were in the studio working some more on Space Summit. Jed has sent us the track, Ed has played the drums and I played Rick bass and 12 string acoustic. We will continue tomorrow and see what Jed has done with the electric guitars, what needs adding, what needs changing, what needs keeping. We certainly have more time than we thought we had to do this and we are making great progress and hope over the coming weeks to be fairly advanced with the project. I talk about it often because we are doing it often but you have no idea what it sounds like. Well I can’t help you with that yet, all I can say is Jed and I co-wrote the songs, my initial idea which Jed turns into a proper song demo. Jed sings and writes great words and after we’ve got the demo performance as good as it can be, Jed sends it from Minneapolis to Ed in Bristol to play drums then it is sent here to Dare in Penzance where Dare does the technical magic, I play guitar and bass on it and we produce it and enhance it where it’s needed and then Dare mixes it with Jed and I adding our thoughts to the final version. You may or may not have heard of this term, but this is making an album ‘remotely’. It shows what you can do. Jed was my first ever sessioneer and this is the fruit of our collaboration. I/we can’t wait to share the results with you in the future.

I also had a session today with Stephen in Washington and a quickie sesh with Tony in Sydney as we try and nail some direction in the drums on the demos for his project. Somewhere in all this we had dinner (Linda McCartney’s vege sausages) and I thought about my poor old Mum who used to freak out every time I went to visit the parents in Aberystwyth (they retired there from Merseyside). I stopped eating meat around 1984, I always felt like my body was struggling with it (digestion), when I stopped it wasn’t long before I really started to feel better, healthier, less like I was made of lead. My Mum was born in 1927 (my Dad in 1921). They came from a different era, vegetarianism was considered an affliction. Whenever I told her I was coming to visit she would say “What are you going to eat?”. I may have told you this before but we always ended up with a nut roast. My point is that Linda hadn’t gone global yet and initially the nut roast was just about the only thing available for me to eat at a small town Welsh supermarket. Anybody that knows me, knows I am a fussy eater (and hate tomatoes). I was so happy when I met Olivia to discover that she does, too. How things have changed for vegetarians, no longer freaks and into my 36th year of no meat and for many many years (I’ve lost count) no fish, no eggs (they always make my stomach queazy) and no milk. BUT I will put honey in herbal tea, I will put some butter on bread if I have to and I will eat cheese (not melted, yuck), but for only one reason, if I didn’t eat cheese, especially on the road – I would starve to death!

Music today continued to come from Germany, but this time back in the seventies, that great era for German inspiration. The Ash Ra Tempel project belonged to Manuel Göttsching with a floating line up that on the first album and on 1973’s Join In included Klaus Schultze on drums (ex Tangerine Dream) and eventual prolific Electronic artist in his own right. In 1972 Ash Ra Tempel released the second album Schwingungen (Vibrations in German) and Starring Rosi in 1973. He also released an album in 1972 called Seven Up with Timothy Leary. Manuel Göttsching has made many more albums since. It’s a world of guitar noodlings, soundscapes, Space Rock, hippie ramblings, ambient records and sequencers mixed with guitars. He has influenced a whole world of fan bands such as Acid Mothers Temple from Japan. It has been music to the ears of Krautrock fans over the ages.

Next I went to Amon Düül ll with one of my favourite albums, Vive La Trance, followed by the one with the classic album cover, the double album, Yeti. What a world they lived in, outside and inside their music. They were a collective of dedicated artists that lived and breathed their music in their lifestyles. It’s a band I never saw live but wish I had. Always exploring, a cross between absolute musical competence and chance, taking adventures where their skills never inhibited their imaginations. Love, love, love. Outside the quiet creeps on and on and on but here the beautiful noise continues forever and ever.

 

Even Though You Are My Friend

In the distance there’s a hill
There’s a house upon the hill
On this side it’s dark
On the other side it’s green
I bite my nails, I touch my face
How long before I reach that place

The sky is pressing down
And it tears me from my sleep
I fall onto the ground
And the gorse rips at my skin
I scratch my eyes and open wide
How long before the other side

Even though you are my friend
This is the end, this is the end
Even though you cannot see
It’s up to you, it’s not up to me

The dizzy spell has gone
The tablet dissolved
The ache has left its mark
A not forgotten scar
I try the door, again it’s locked
And time stands still, on the broken clock

In the hallway where I stand
I see pictures on the wall
They’re all places that I’ve been
And I’ve loved
The back door and the front door are exactly the same
The floors they are the ceiling and the walls the window pane

Even though you are my friend
This is the end, this is the end
Even though you cannot see
It’s up to you, it’s not up to me

(Willson-Piper)
Spirit Level (1992)

What occurred to me on another day of endless blue sky with the dust dancing in the warm rays, is, that after a long rainy winter, for a lot of people the lockdown is the first time that their freedom has been threatened. House arrest? Not quite but, no pub, no socializing, no football, no restaurant, no nightlife, no interaction with friends. Today Dare was stopped by the police as roadblocks have been set up. A policeman politely asked him where he was going. “To the shop” he answered. That’s not very threatening, it’s hardly a police state, simple question, simple answer, be on your way. But as they described in the paper today, driving you car somewhere to run or walk is not essential travel, the beach is not an essential destination. And from tomorrow there will be fines. Can you imagine?

The sea today was metallic and one colour from shore to horizon, no shades or hues, one undulating metallic mass. I left the studio wearing a coat, halfway down to the recycling I was carrying it. Next to the recycling is the skate park. It is cordoned off with police tape. We stood and stared at the sea for a while, it was so beautiful, the waves were lapping against the shore in quick succession, the tide at its peak. Each retreating wave washed backwards across the stones loudly as they rubbed together with the force of the water. Further up the beach, the waves were still hitting the sea wall with gigantic forward thrusts, the spray flying up into the air, small foaming droplets of diamonds. We walked across the road into the pasta and toilet paper free supermarket (how are these things still being bought en masse). We talked to Toni on the checkout, we see her a lot. She broke her front tooth, but can’t go to the dentist to get it fixed. My belt buckle broke so now my trousers have become those trendy hanging below your ass style. Any shop that could fix it or sell me a belt buckle or even a belt is closed. Life’s little luxuries once on our doorsteps, suddenly beyond our grasp.

But look, when’s the last time you got to spend so much time at home? For office workers at least, no commute, no sitting under fluorescent lighting. Why do offices have fluorescent lighting instead of warm lamps? Why wouldn’t a company want its employees to be working in the most comfortable of circumstances. Have everyone enjoy coming to work. Jimi Hendrix posters are very few and far between in insurance offices. It’s generic art at the accountants or the horrible gratuitous modern vomit and pizza scapes behind hotel receptions. Who decides these things, or worse who goes along with it? A sense of aesthetics makes a difference to performance, like Rudolf Steiner schools (the founder of Waldorf) or Montessori (founder, Maria Montessori). Put the kids in a circle instead of rows, have the walls painted mellow colours and what on earth is the point of making kids get up so early, go in later, finish when the parents finish work so you don’t have to worry about paying someone to pick them up. Work the first three hours from home so you can get them there, be in work by midday.

If you want to know the difference between Waldorf and Montessori schools go here.

This epidemic shows us all how the world has to change. Pollution is decreasing so people are not choking to death, filling their lungs with carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Nature recovers (I know, I’ve said this before). And what was all that about austerity? How come the government had to put the country through years of austerity but suddenly now they can pay everyone 80% of their wages for staying at home? Why can’t they pay the fishermen 100% of their wages for three years so the sea can restock instead of fishing the oceans dry? The more money we get, the more money we spend, so give us more money so we can plough it back into useless toys and knick knacks and keep the economy running.

Music today has been rather interesting. I was listening to Matador. Their origins are in Berlin. It started with Einstürzende Neubauten, then Mania D, then Malaria! and then Matador, who incidentally there is very little about on the net (no Wikipedia page in English or German). Their second album Sun from 1989 is something like Electronic, Industrial, Gothic Pop Punk with programmed drums and Metal guitars. They were a three-piece with friends, but the core was Gudrun Gut, Beate Bartel and Manon P. Duursma. Gudrun Gut has made a whole lot of interesting records since: experimental, avant-garde records. After listening to Matador I listened to her 2018 album Moment and then from 2017 Instrumentals For Sirens by Gut and Bartel. I found Gut’s Wildlife CD online cheap so I ordered it. Bartel went on to form Liasons Dangereuse. If you want to hear some weird Electronic remix German avant-garde contemporary Electronic music, listen to Gut’s Vogelmixe – Heimatlieder Aus Deutschland.

How do you follow that, well with either more like it or the complete opposite. I decided on D.A.F. – Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. Gold Und Liebe (1981), their second album for Virgin was part of a trilogy produced by Conny Plank (always at the front of anything innovative in Germany). It was their fourth album overall. They are a kind of Techno Fall. Simple sequencers and drums played by Robert Görl and sung by Gabi Delgado. They are a teutonic and influential Elektro duo that were a huge influence on Techno and Electronic music into the future. As I am writing this I just found out that Gabi Delgado died last week (22nd March), aged 61. I guess the bad news didn’t make Rolling Stone.

I also have a Robert Görl solo album (1984), so I decided to give that spin. He actually sings rather than stating things. It was recorded at Jacob’s Studio in Surrey (I just got a mail from Andy who used to own it). I recorded an album there with All About Eve and incidentally this album has a track on it called Charlie Cat, sung by Annie Lennox (she also sings on Darling Don’t Leave Me). I have two Gabi Delgado 12 inch singles, but my turntable doesn’t play 45, I have to swap it over to my other turntable one day and only play 12 inch singles and those new double albums you get where it’s two or three songs on each side that are 45RPM. I guess the idea is better sound quality but really, two or three songs a side? I’d rather have five songs a side, it interrupts the flow of the album otherwise. It’s okay after 20 minutes, but not after 11. Whilst we are on the subject, does anybody think that CDs were too long? There was the space so they filled it up. Despite them being the same length, a double album is psychologically sound, a CD as long as a double album is brain-numbing.

Suddenly I had a desire for Nina Hagen and thought that NunSexMonkRock (1982) might do the job, it did. At the time Rolling Stone called it “the most unlistenable album ever made”. Ha ha, nice work lads. Chris Spedding plays guitar (he gets around), Allan Schwarzberg plays the drums. You’d need a long time to discuss his session works’ vast scope but to think he played on Tie A Yellow Ribbon AND on this might tell you a lot about him.

In German Electronic music there’s a lot to choose from and it goes way back into the past. In the nineties, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma formed Mouse On Mars and in 1999 they released their 6th album Niun Niggung. Hailed at the time by all the right magazines (I guess Rolling Stone hadn’t noticed it). I always think of it as the album Thom Yorke and crew must have been listening to between the release of OK Computer and Kid A. I’m sure earlier albums like their debut Vulvaland (1994), Iaora Tahiti (1995) and 1997’s Autoditacker also came into the picture. Thom must have been thinking what if we did this with vocals?

And as the night draws to a close and I’ve been hanging around post seventies Germany, I was craving Nico. In 1986 Nico released Camera Obscura. It was credited to Nico + The Faction with James Young on keyboards and Graham Dids on percussion and as with earlier albums it was produced by John Cale. It has that brash crashing sound of percussion that comes as much from the keyboards as it does from a drum. A support for her dark wailing voice (or is it the other way ‘round). One wonders what would have happened next if she hadn’t died two years later in a cycling accident in Ibiza. She was just 49 years old. I saw her live twice in the eighties, both times in Stockholm. They were memorable concerts with her sat like a 1000 year old gatekeeper behind her harmonium or standing stoney faced like a scrawny wicked witch. This album, quite different to its predecessors, is as evocative as anything she did before just with a modern touch. Only she could record My Funny Valentine on an album that sounded like this and make it work.

The song of the day is The Moon Drips from the last album The Afterlife. I feel like I could have written the lyric whilst riding in a horse-driven carriage in the farthest most misty part of Eastern Germany in 1896 (would that be Prussia or Bohemia?) before I was transported by a strange supernatural beam to the desolate border of Texas and Mexico in the same year.

 

The Moon Drips

In the night
The moon drips inside
And the light fails in my eyes

I reach you, I taste you

Lie awake
To the cold thrill of your face
And the scars’ tips that you trace

The dawn hides you, the mist binds you

Bleak lands and sombre sands
Black ice that weaves and dies

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – The Afterlife (2019)

The silence in the streets, the vast dome of spring blue above my head, the sun finally shining down on an Earth that seems to be so sparsely populated that it reminds me of the past. I remember in the sixties how the roads had fewer cars. I remember tan-coloured, string-backed driving gloves that had a press stud to close them and an oval designed cut out where you could see the back of your hand. No seatbelts, sturdy metal frames and large leather bench seats, doors that clunked in deep tones when you shut them. Chrome door handles and bumper bars, radiator grills and headlights with so much character they had faces, personalities. The Chevron on the Citroen and all the different bonnet ornaments. The Spirit Of Ecstasy on the Rolls Royce, the chrome plated leaping cat on a Jaguar. At some point they were banned as dangerous and then there were the morons that stole them, ripping them off the bonnets in the night. But the wonderful lines that cars had in those days…

One of my earliest memories was my Dad’s Ford Consul. Like me, my mum never drove (except once, but that’s another story). The car was cream coloured and it had an olive green roof but it disappears out of my memory when we made our first house move. My parents ran a pub called The Commercial in Compstall, it’s part of the borough of Stockport where I was born and I imagine that I lived there from birth till our next house close by outside Marple Bridge off the Glossop road. I have a terrible childhood memory of living there. As I remember the pub was next door to a graveyard and to this day I run past graveyards if I’m alone, all cocky and confident if I’m with someone else as if I’m fighting with my psyche trying to inhibit what I might imagine if I was left to myself. Scary stuff psychologically but not as scary as the nightmare I had as a very young child that I still remember. Wait for it, it’s terrible that a child went through this. All I remember is a moving severed hand on my bed. How awful is that for a kid of, I don’t know, about 4 years old? My only other memories are a vague recollection of a small girl whose name may have been Evelyn, a local playmate perhaps. Then there was my grandmother on my father’s side who I remember as being strict and somehow loveless (the opposite of my mother’s mother). I recall she was called Priscilla, she had what looked like dyed ginger hair and a stiff demeanour, I remember her perfume used to make me feel sick and I was uncomfortable in her presence. I remember that she always wore stockings and when she walked her thighs rubbed together so you could hear her coming.

My point with all this is that those days remind me of the stillness and silence of now. I even think the seagulls are quieter as if all that noise that they make was only because of the presence of humans, revving cars and the digital beeping of the doors on buses and their noisy engines as they pull away. Loud motorbikes and shouting children, skateboarders, buskers and the local silver band. As if to say ‘you make your noise and we make ours’. In my world it’s often quiet outside because I go to bed very late and get up very late. I miss the day and all the hoo-ha. I love the dead of night when I’m awake, alert, creative. I always think about starting something past midnight, a song, or writing. It seems that in recent times Olivia and I think about sleeping between 4-6AM and waking between midday and 2PM, eight hours, perfect, although Olivia needs a little more.

It’s been a strange day for music today, partly continuing with what Paul and I were talking about yesterday. I was at the Record And Tape Exchange in Notting Hill earlier this year and CDs have become so cheap there that I decided to buy a whole lot of things that I wouldn’t normally buy to see if there were any surprises. I mentioned Sunflower Bean the other day, I bought a couple of Squeeze CDs, Hendrix Live At Berkley and a whole lot more but one that I got was a Van Morrison album from 2016 called Keep Me Singing. I like to give records a chance and Paul and I were talking briefly about some of the older Van albums. This one though seemed very samey and middle of the road but then it sounded exactly like Van Morrison sounds. Maybe it’s just modern sounds versus older sounds with this kind of music. It’s as if he had recorded this same album in 1972 it would have been much better. Recording techniques, microphones, the sounds of older instruments, the attitude of engineers and producers and the musicians themselves, the whole digital world that we live in and what it has done to our souls or perhaps the block it has created in our souls. I need to go back and listen to a couple of older albums by him and see if I can pick why I like them more.

I was sad to find out that I have music by a musician who has died of the Corona virus, Manu Dibango. For some reason I only have the CD single here from the Wakafrica album (so I ordered it). It’s the Gabriel song Biko remixed with the second song, the title track. Afro Jazz, unique rhythms, he died in his adopted country of France at the age of 86. Originally from Cameroon he was essentially a sax player that played piano and vibraphone. I lived in London with a sax player from Cameroon called Yeb who I once saw play with the amazing Gil Scott-Heron at the Jazz cafe in Camden, but that’s another story. Dibango was famous for his song Soul Makossa from 1972. This led me to a collection from Nigerian Psychedelic, Soul, Rock, Funk koolistas, Blo. I have a compilation CD called Phases 1972-1982. It’s great at first but they stray into Disco territory later on and this reflects their lack of sales with their earlier and best music as they tried to gain some attention but the first few tracks are really worth the price of entry.

As Paul and I were talking about Pilot last night, I jumped a long way from Africa to Scotland and listened to the two Pilot albums that didn’t have the hits. By the last album, Two’s A Crowd, the band was only David Paton on bass and vocals and Ian Bairnson on guitar. After Pilot they both played on the first two Kate Bush albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart and then joined The Alan Parsons Project (Two’s A Crowd was produced at Abbey Road by Parsons). When I listen to these old middle of the road seventies records I try to listen to them in the spirt of the era but in this case you can hear the era being wiped out by Punk Rock on the passing of each easy mellow track. Despite their earlier hits and melodic sensibilities they didn’t have a chance – they looked wrong, too. It’s another example of everything Punk was out to destroy, they succeeded of course. But I always wondered why Punk wanted to destroy Progressive music, music that was also edgy, often experimental and annoying the parents – like Van Der Graaf Generator. I suppose it wasn’t simple and energetic enough, although when I saw Emerson, Lake & Palmer at the Liverpool Empire in the mid-seventies it was as aggressive as anything I’d ever seen with Keith Emerson thrusting a dagger into his Hammond Organ and rolling it around the stage like a lunatic removal man.

I had a preliminary sesh today with Tyler in Portland and have seshes with Stephen in Washington on Friday and Matt in Brooklyn on Saturday as well as six more seshes on Sunday. Inbetween all this Dare and I are in the studio flitting between Noctorum writing sessions and Space Summit fixing and mixing. I’m looking forward to a day of putting records away, listening and filing, my idea of fun.

I hope that everyone out there is taking the opportunity to do the opposite of what the panicky vibe in the world is telling us to do. So, mellow out, listen to music, watch some amazing films, read, learn something, French, cooking, banjo, anything. You might not get another chance to be creative like this when time is stolen back from you. On another positive note think of the Earth’s relief as industry pauses and nature recovers. Dolphins in Venice and thousands of people and animals not being choked to death by pollution. The great dilemma, the work force versus the Earth.

Okay I’m off to file and listen into the night, I’ll try and post the pictures of the records I listen to after Pilot, but hey let’s make it those first two amazing Kate Bush albums that Paton and Bairnson played on and beyond!

Today’s song is the recorded version of the appropriately titled Hopes And Fears from Noctorum’s second album Offer The Light. Olivia and I love playing this one live, we usually finish the set with it and it suits the 12 string acoustic and violin perfectly. Olivia’s final soaring solo every night always seems to leave a sense of satisfaction in the audience as it does in us.

 

HOPES AND FEARS

I stare out of my window at a grey Northern sky
On a Saturday
And the smoke in the distance that clings to the hills
From the factories
And people are gathering in droves in the street
‘Cause it’s market day
And I am in love with a girl who I met
Only yesterday

Summer has gone
Lights are on
The nights have grown long
Then the town’s
Looking down
As the rain hits the ground

Then the newspaper sellers are telling us all
What’s been happening
And women are hiding in shopkeeper’s doorways
And gossiping
And you and I meet in the café across from the hospital
And finding a cure for the lovelorn
Is proving impossible

Life tumbles on
Like this song
And the music plays on
And we kiss
Like a play
With our love on display

And the sirens still call
From the factory walls
As we pray to live in peace
With the future unknown
We slowly walk home
As our hopes and fears increase

With our fate in our hands
As we lay in the sand
Will our love and life survive
But I know this is bliss
You are all that I wish
With our hopes and fears alive

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – Offer The Light (2006)

Walking out into the street today it felt like a Sunday morning, less traffic, fewer people, shops closed, everyone at home. I managed to go and pick up a package from the post office, I haven’t opened it yet but I presume it is the Spirit – Model Shop soundtrack album from 1968 (reissued in 2005). It came from Germany, sent by a very nice Italian guy called Fabrizio who gave me a discount, thanking me for all the music. Nice. So the post office is open, deliveries are still happening. The guy at the package counter today told me ”We don’t want to be here, but we have to be”. Later as it got dark we decided to walk down to the sea, stop off at the supermarket which is across the road and see what they had on the shelves. There was some pasta for the first time in a long time, I guess people can’t fit any more in the cupboards, still no toilet rolls, they seem to be flying out the door like, well I won’t say. We stopped for a few minutes to look at the sea at night. There was moisture in the air, a hazy mist made the lamps in the street glow differently, struggling to be bright. The skate park was still illuminated but empty. Seagulls were awake but somewhere in the distance out at sea, there was that special whooshing sound of the waves washing against the shore, there was only the occasional car on the road, the supermarket car park was empty, everyone waits for the future.

We were in the studio today, it was finish off the mix for Space Summit song No.4. (I’m purposely not telling you any titles). By the time that was all done it was dinner time so no Noctorum today, we’ll get together Thursday for that. But on the subject of projects making progress, Jerome Froese from Loom and Tangerine Dream posted that he had been working on our project today, editing guitars for a new type of Krautrock, ha ha, can’t wait for the results.

Wild Swan’ Paul Simpson and I were talking today about music (imagine that). It all started because he posted a track from a Miles Davis album, Circle In The Round (1979). At the time it was a compilation of unreleased tracks and weirdly has a David Crosby song on there, Guinnevere, from the first CSN album. Somehow this led onto Clifford T. Ward, Pilot, Jigsaw, Jimmy Campbell, Rockin’ Horse, Liverpool Express and Van Morrison. So selections tonight are influenced by Paul. Some of these bands you will know, others you won’t. Jimmy Campbell was a Liverpool luminary who was in The Kirkbys that supported The Beatles and played regularly at The Cavern in the early days. He was also in The 23rd Turnoff, a Psychedelic band that you’ve never heard of, that are essential, their 7 inch single Michael Angelo on Deram is what I’ll be looking for forever, even the compilation CD is pricey. That’s where Spotify comes in handy, I was able to listen to it tonight. He was also in the great Rockin’ Horse with Billy Kinsley. Kinsley was also in The Merseybeats and later Liverpool Express. Lots of Liverpool connections here.

There’s some records out there that have no cred, no rarity value, they’re not weird, commercial hits brought them to the public eye, but their albums are forgotten and are often full of memorable songs. Pilot are remembered just for January and Magic but not for the albums Two’s A Crowd (appropriate today) and Morin Heights. Jigsaw are remembered for one hit, Sky High, but not their albums. They had a lot of hits outside England, Liverpool Express had three No.1 singles in Brazil.

This might be a good time to tell you about Seeing Stars. It was the end of All About Eve, we were in Herefordshire in a rented property jamming. It was me on guitar, Andy Cousin on bass and Mark Price on drums. I’m not sure if I remember this correctly but Phonogram had dropped the band after Touched By Jesus. We then got signed by MCA and made Ultraviolet which is incidentally the album that got me into Anekdoten because Nicklas Barker was a fan, he knew less about The Church. We then got dropped by MCA as the record was released, ha ha, nil points (French accent) for effort. So were we in Herefordshire after that I guess? Hm, not sure, but what I do know is that we had a whole lot of backing tracks and no-one to sing them so I stepped in. They were only ever demos really but by the time we’d finished all the tracks we figured we should put it out as an album. It had a certain spontaneous rough and ready quality to it that we liked and ultimately we really liked the songs we’d written. If we hadn’t put it out it would have been buried forever. I had a contact with Border Records in Sweden and they agreed to release it. I think they made 500 CD’s. They sold out a long time ago. I suppose one day we will release it limited edition on vinyl but if you haven’t heard it Salome was the opening track. Coincidentally the guitar sound (that I love) was my 1966 red broken in half butchered Rickenbacker that has been getting some mentions recently. I hope you like it. I guess over time I’ll post more tracks but you can listen to it on Spotify for now.

Another day of wondering what’s happening in the world. All we can do is carry on and be positive and hope things get better, be kind to each other and take the opportunity just for once to slow down and reflect and try and come out of this as better versions of ourselves. The music helps, that’s what it supposed to do.

 

Salome

(Salome, Salome)

Exquisite inspiration
On a tray that’s decorated
With that smile

Your beautiful creation
Set aloof in revelation
His capricious trial

Anything you like
All that you desire

I want to satisfy you
Salome, Salome

The head of John the Baptist
Is upon Salome’s wish list
Lips sick, dry

Nervously entrancing
And she’s sinfully enhancing
Her delight inside

Anything you like
All that you desire

I want to satisfy you
Salome, Salome

(Willson-Piper/Cousin/Price)
Seeing Stars (1997)