I woke up early today and thought about galloping horses, no reason I can think of except for that annoying advert for the bank where they associate their horrible corporate brand with a beautiful galloping horse. You’ve heard of cultural appropriation, there should be something called beauty appropriation that calls out corporations for selling an image that is as far away from their philosophical reality as can possibly be. It’s incredible to see how they gain trust with images of something beautiful, distracting from their outrageous fees and profits. Hm, the banks, best keep your money in the mattress but don’t forget to blow out the candles when you leave the house.

So today I swam and will swim three days in a row because it will be the last three days you can go to the pool before the lockdown and I hear a mile a day keeps the doctor away. In the pool today there was a Spanish lady and a Frenchman, the usual nice Frenchman, I thought I’m going to ask him a grammar question, so I did, he was most helpful. I wonder if there’s anybody out there who would like to talk to me in French – slowly. The Spanish lady was from Barcelona, we were talking about how the only real way to learn a language properly is to live in the country with the people and the fewer skills those people have in your language the better. That’s the problem with Sweden, most people in the cities at least speak really good English so if you try to speak Swedish as a beginner they just reply in English! It’s unhelpful and frustrating.

Interestingly, it’s the reverse in France, there’s some kind of expectation on you to be able to speak their language well but often when you try, if you’re not good enough at it they don’t or won’t respond in a helpful manner. But it’s not just your terrible French, it’s also their terrible English. Obviously, this is a generalisation but if you compare Sweden to France the gulf in understanding and being helpful is big. I suppose it’s the same in Spain and Italy, a lot of people don’t speak English. Even in Germany, it’s a problem. I went into a bakery in Cologne station and asked if they spoke English, they responded quite coldly so I spoke in my broken German, I knew the word for croissant (croissant) and they were so happy that I tried.

Olivia is so good with languages, she’s a polyglot. Some people just have a propensity for learning languages and it’s a mixture of love for it and study that makes it happen. The grammar is the difficult thing, remembering all those conjugations in different languages, yikes, but you just get it eventually if you put in the work. It’s the same with playing guitar, you just have to keep on doing it and then hope that it suits you. The problem is that you don’t know how good you can be at anything until you go through being bad at it, such is life.

We spoke to Stephen at Schoolkids Records today and the official release date for the new MOAT album Poison Stream will be February 12th 2021. But anyone that supports us on the Indiegogo campaign will get the record as soon as we have it manufactured so we will send it to you without waiting for the February date. We will release another track in the coming weeks, we have 34 days left and we have reached 45% of our goal. Olivia has already sent out a few ‘mystery boxes’ we are working on Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics and we have sent out copies of the first MOAT record (they are running out) as well as a couple of postcards. Doesn’t everybody at least want a postcard from Penzance?

Skype began today with a sesh with Tim in Sydney and ended with a chat with Salim in Dallas. Isn’t it amazing that we can communicate across the world like this? In the good old days you’d have to ride that galloping horse for days – good luck with the Penzance-Dallas, Penzance-Sydney ride.

Music today is from ex Jellyfish members Roger Manning Jr, Eric Dover and Tim Smith in their new project, The Lickerish Quartet. Their first release is Threesome Vol.1, an EP with four vocal tracks on Side 1 and instrumental versions of the same songs on Side 2. It’s classic Pop and the first track, Fadoodle, sounds like a cross between Jellyfish, Sparks, early Roxy (if they were cleaner) and Queen (if they were smaller). The second track, Bluebird’s Blues, is 10cc meets The Beatles via Supertramp except it’s all an American take on these mostly English bands. I guess (American for I suppose) they love The Raspberries and The Beach Boys too, so if you like this kind of modern clean Pop it’s executed with panache and skill. On There Is A Magic Number, a more mainstream sound comes out of them, less connected to that Indie cred influence, it’s almost West Coast – well they are from Los Angeles. I imagine a little too perfect for most Indie fans but beautifully realised anyway, they would have been huge in the early seventies. The last track, Lighthouse Spaceship, continues with the list of previous influences, they love this kind of music and do a wonderful job of it but although their influence list is solid, to my ears it also includes Pilot but to tell you the truth, I never tire of hearing Magic or January.

Songs Of The Daze

The howling wind, the rattling windows and the silencing of the human voice. It just takes the weather to keep people in (or to get them out) but tonight they’re definitely in hiding.

Sometimes when the rain comes in tandem with the wind, the shapes they make together become lively flying water darts that somehow seem to rain horizontally instead of vertically, pricking the skin of your face. But that’s just a confirmation of the wind’s power as it changes the rain’s direction and rushes the endless clouds across the sky. Sometimes it will take a vehicle, especially a tall truck, and tip it over onto the road and yet it has no physical body, just its invisible strength. In wilder regions, it devastates whole cities, islands, countries. What must ancient civilisations have thought of the wind? They could feel it but they couldn’t see it. Bad weather was an omen of anger – still today the humans go to the supernatural to take solace in things they can’t explain. I hope there is an afterlife so we can all get together and laugh at the living, perhaps only in death can we be one, amusing ourselves with our ignorance. “The answer my friend is Blowing In The Wind”.

Sunday is usually sessions and football day but only the one sesh with Tony happened in Australia because the clock changing confusion made me miss Doug in the US. I still can’t figure out what time it is in America even now. I’m not quite sure why it’s so confusing, it’s pretty simple really but there’s something in the air, something that’s throwing everything off. Between lockdowns, pandemics, wars, and politics, the Earth is uneasy. The worst thing about it is the stubborn refusal of the humans to compromise to find a path together, it all seems so unnecessary and all so frightening.

I have to be up in the morning for an early session with Tim in Sydney, our clocks have gone back, theirs have gone forwards so they are 11 hours ahead (see, I’m starting to understand). Although the Ethiopian calendar has 13 months and is currently 7 years behind the Gregorian calendar because they still use the calendar that the Roman Catholic Church amended in 525AD – confusing for sessions. Take these as examples of how confusing it might have been: William III of England arrived at Brixham in England on 5 November (Julian calendar), after he had set sail from the Netherlands on 11 November (Gregorian calendar) 1688. At the times of their deaths, Cervantes and Shakespeare were living (or dying) in different countries. Spain had already changed to the Gregorian calendar whilst England was still using the Julian calendar so although Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day in April 23rd 1616, aged 68 and 52 respectively, Cervantes died 10 days earlier. Confused? Go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_calendar

French today had me flying out of the Pearl League where I finished 6th and into the Obsidian League, just one league from the top (for football fans, I’m in the Championship, Olivia is in the Premier League). Like Fulham, West Brom, Sheffield United and Burnley, it’s one thing being in the Premier League, it’s another thing staying there. You have to perform and the French is getting harder. To carry on with these ridiculous football analogies, France won the World Cup twice in recent years and are still the holders, so I’m hanging with them. In the pool the other day there was a local French man (a man from France that lives in Cornwall). I’ve spoken to him before and he has that classic French accent, I wonder how we sound to them, that is presuming we have a decent knowledge of the language and can converse. If I had my life again I would study languages in a more disciplined manner, it’s getting a bit late to conquer all the languages that I wish I spoke better. But they say it’s never too late and five months into French every day I’m feeling pretty good about it – je comprend.

Music today had me listen to the new Hawkwind album Carnivorous (2020) which has been released under the name Hawkwind Light Orchestra. It’s a double album and I read somewhere that it was supposed to be a Dave Brock solo record but by the time other band members had got involved it had come out under a version of the Hawkwind moniker. What’s it like? If you like Hawkwind you’ll like it but it is exactly how its described, Hawkwind Light. I thought it was something to do with the type of songs but it becomes more Hawkwind in the instrumentation as the record develops. I haven’t quite got the measure of it yet, I’ll be listening more, it’s just great to see bands like this continuously releasing records.

Song Of The Daze

Never gets old.

So it’s a sad day today for lots of different reasons. We lost Nobby Stiles, World Cup winner from 1966, we lost Sean Connery, the original James Bond (amongst many other roles) and we also found out that we have a month-long lockdown (at least) which includes a ban on travel so we will not be able to leave for Portugal until December 3rd. It also means that the swimming pool is closing, putting an end to my swimming regimen. Everybody suffers, only schools, food shops and pro football will be staying open as we struggle to find a way through this crisis. For us, as we try to escape the pandemic and Brexit we can only hope that Portugal doesn’t have a lockdown that starts as the one in England ends.

What can anybody do but try and be safe and sit it out? I’ll be working on music as much as possible, writing and doing sessions with anyone that would like to get involved. I’ll be studying French and trying to think of an exercise that equals the swimming, not running and not going into the freezing sea – so possibly moving records around the archive, that should keep me fit.

I don’t need to make a list of the stresses we are all facing and I feel lucky being where I am with all problems we all face so I’m just going to continue writing, continue playing, continue being in the studio, continue studying French, continue loving the archive, my wife, my children (and grandchild) and my friends. I’m going to write some crazy stories, I’m going to try and observe some interesting things, I’m going to write some songs and I’m going to stay positive about the future despite the distractions. So, perhaps tomorrow will be a surrealistic journey through an imaginary past or an exploration into a fascinating character from history but here goes with what happened today.

Last day of October, the swim, mile 27 and the staff confused as to whether the centre will be open (it won’t). It was muddy underfoot out of the grove, it was windy and spits of rain fell from the sky. I ran into Julian walking his dog (Julian appears in the lyric of In A Field Full Of Sheep from Noctorum’s album The Afterlife). He’s a West Ham supporter and we laughed about the game against Liverpool as true civilised adversaries should.

I got to the studio, pastied up, but I put it down to cool as I grabbed the hoover and tried to sort out the live room and put all the amps back in their positions so we could continue with the Arctic Lake project today and finish off the Ahad guitars on Wednesday.

So it was Arctic Lake day today, I sang the song on Thursday and Olivia did the backing vocals and today was guitars, lots of Rickenbacker 12 string and Strat, rhythms, leads, arpeggios and taking Tony’s song to another level. When I began with the sessioneers project I had no idea that I was going to be able to help get Jed, Ahad, Tony and others, who have not yet made albums with Dare and me, to another level so successfully. Most people who have been in a band that anybody has heard of looks for name bands to work with but I thought it might be more interesting to work with people that had ideas that nobody out there in the public has heard. So watch out next year for Space Summit, the as yet unnamed Ahad project and Arctic Lake, all will be finished by the end of the year although Arctic Lake is only four songs so far that will be finished but Tony wants to add to them to have an album. I hope other sessioneers are going to be able to get to this stage and anybody else who hasn’t yet been in touch. It’s really exciting for me.

Thanks to everyone who is contributing to the MOAT Poison Stream campaign in these difficult times. We are going to release another song in November as soon as we decide which one makes the most sense.

It’s Halloween tonight but it doesn’t seem like the ghouls are as scary as reality. The festive joy has been dampened not just by the weather, the wind and the rain, but the current state of affairs. We have to try and stay hopeful, we have to start living a different way, perhaps now is a time to discover new things that we didn’t have time for before. Creativity, writing, writing songs, singing, playing the guitar, teaching others, reading, watching films, listening to records, drawing, learning another language – I can only make a list of things that interest me but everybody out there has their own list, might be time to start ticking it off.

Music today is the vinyl reissue of The Stones’ Goats Head Soup (1973) and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I have completely changed my mind about the opening track Dancing With Mr D. which I never really liked but now I do and I think it’s because of Charlie and I think it’s because when I first heard this album I didn’t know so much about drums and drummers and feel. I only discovered these things as I got older, made albums and figured out how important the drums were. The vocals are great too as they are on the next track, 100 Years Ago, Jagger is so good, you just have to like him. Not everybody sees it. Mick Taylor seems to be poking out of the track too and despite liking Black And Blue a lot it was a big loss when he left.

The album reached No.1 in the US and Top 5 in the UK in 1973 and this Giles Martin remix hit the No.1 spot in the UK in September 2020. (The album was originally produced by Jimmy Miller.) Coming Down Again has Keith on vocals and I hardly noticed. It’s followed by an inspired classic Stones’ Rocker, Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker). Great guitars and horns. Richards’ presence is felt everywhere in the overall sound of the band, the chords and the tones, the feels and the vibe. Then comes Angie, what a classic, the chords, the vocals (Jagger shines), the video and the song itself. Great piano parts as well, that with the string sounds makes it sound so mature.

Side 2 opens with Silver Train with its harp and slide, but whether you like the song or not, it’s the sound of the band that is the thing. For a group that is so influenced they certainly sound very much like themselves. Hide Your Love is a barroom Blues, a place where they like to be musically but it’s good time music and not as interesting if you’re looking for a great song more than a good time. Winter has that perfect mid-tempo Stones thang, sounds like Bill Wyman on bass and benefits greatly from it (he only plays on 3 tracks on the album). Charlie on drums, Jagger on rhythm and Mick Taylor on lead – and no Keith. It could be a Van Morrison song, has strings and Nicky Hopkin on piano, great Taylor guitar tone at the end.

Two more tracks, Can You Hear The Music and Star Star, end the album. The first is a fine song despite it being buried at the back end of the album. A better song for me than Hide Your Love (I would have swapped them around). Great Keith wah-wah. Star Star has them revisiting their musical roots and adding indecent swear words in the chorus and continuing to scare the establishment to death.

The extra disc starts with Scarlet featuring Jimmy Page, it’s kinda throwaway, not a patch on anything from Houses Of The Holy released in the same year. All The Rage is throwaway in that Stones’ R’n’R way but sometimes it’s cool and sometimes it’s naff, it’s hard to know what the difference is. This track sounds more like the New York Dolls than The Stones (apart from some of the instrumental bits) but otherwise, it’s some kind of Glam trash. For some reason, Criss Cross is one of those cool ones. It’s hard to determine why the formula works here but not on All The Rage. This track could have easily replaced Hide Your Love on the original album and possibly helped it to be better received.

100 Years Ago Piano Demo is just Jagger and Nicky Hopkins, you can hear The Stones in his piano playing as much as you can hear it in Jagger’s voice. It’s interesting to hear Dancing With Mr D. and Heartbreaker instrumentals but that’s being a fan. I was once given a CD of Jeff Beck noodling in the studio, I could listen to him noodle all day. The Hide Your Love Alternative Mix I thought I could do without but somehow prefer it to the album version.

The last three tracks are 1973 Glyn Johns remixes of Dancing With Mr D., Heartbreaker and Silver Train and I’ll let you A/B them to the original mixes as you A/B the Jimmy Miller mix to the Giles Martin remix. Nerds of the world unite!

Song Of The Daze

If you are sitting in the archive when it rains you don’t actually hear the rain falling but rather the result of it, that is water dripping into the deep grids outside the windows. They are something like 3 feet deep, 3 feet wide and 18inches in width with a grill and a drain at the bottom. The building was built in the 1800s so everything is solid and large, big stones and wide windows, it’s sturdy, that’s how they used to do it. They couldn’t imagine why you would want to build something that wasn’t going to last, the concept of planned obsolescence was a capitalist principle yet to be imagined. When I moved in here the grid outside the archive window was 3 feet deep in gunk and the previous tenant had had a flood, duh. It was a mud and plastic casserole made of seagull shit, sweets wrappers, bottles, weeds and anything the rain could find to sweep in there. I had to dig it all out and at the bottom there was a functional drain that had been blocked for years. Luckily we are on a bit of a slope so flooding would only come from torrential rain but in a music archive you can only lose your record collection to water once, and then it’s ruined forever.

So sitting here in the archive room on the cosy red couch you can hear the water dripping outside the window and flowing away down the hill. When I look out of the window you can see the stone wall of the drain often with silverfish darting about under the drain grill. On top of the grill, lots of legs walking along the footpath into the town. One of the grills that doesn’t sit square in its slot is particularly noisy when heavy feet step onto it but luckily the road beyond the parked cars is not a throughway so people often walk there instead. Sometimes a child comes by and because of their height they look down through one of the windows into the studio control room to see what’s going on usually running away quickly when they see whoever is in there, staring back. Sometimes a seagull looks in and other times we get slugs crawling in through the window and leaving a trail of slime. Other times it’s a small frog and sometimes we find a dead one, dried and flat, lying between the tangle of the electrical cables. The other day we had a massive spider, luckily it’s England and despite scaring anyone with arachnophobia out of the room, you’re not going to die. There was once a regular cat visitor that used to jump in through the window and hang out but he/she has long since gone.

We are close to a couple of pubs so there’s often some rowdy voices, shouting and screaming, the humans making their presence felt with a skin full of alcohol in contrast to the nature and the beauty of the Morrab Gardens. In the alleyway (Parade Passage) that links Parade St to the town, you occasionally see a hedgehog in the summer but from November to March they hibernate trying to find a safe place to remain undisturbed by predators hoping that their spikes deter any feline or other general interest. The other day at the top of the passage I went past a bush full of sparrows all furiously tweeting like it was a sparrow rave. The day before a magpie on a roof with its raspy chatter. Today a seagull was just ahead of me, it saw me, jumped onto the wall, then as I got closer jumped onto the higher level of the wall and then across onto the low roof near the small carpark. It seemed convinced that I was following it but it didn’t fly off to the distance, it just stood on the roof as if to say you can’t get me now. I noticed it was young, remnants of the brown feathers of the summer chicks. To think that if this creature can keep its distance and find food it could be a resident here for another 20 years.

As I sit here now I can hear the wind outside, I have a small bright heater on and it feels very cosy in here as I sit down to write. Earlier I had sessions with Ava in Minneapolis and Craig in Wisconsin and although it was hard to get a feel for the day with Craig who was in his studio but with Ava it was easier to assess, sitting in her fur-lined jacket with Palmer the cat looking for attention and warmth, the autumn trees visible outside the window. My friend Ed who is somewhere upstate New York told me that today he woke up to snow. It’s here, summer has gone, the howling winds of winter are on the way, the ice and the snow, the rain, the low clouds and the chilling winds. We can now officially use the term ‘last summer’.

Music today came from Mike. Over the years Mike has sent me mixtapes and today I picked up a package from him with 28 burned CDs and printed artwork. There were five great compilations from all kinds of classic Folk and Progressive groups and the Group 1850 box set. I’ve mentioned them before, the Dutch Barrett era Pink Floyd. You gotta hear them.

Album & Songs Of The Daze

Venturing out to the sea we took a different route from the town, winding through the secret alleyways and narrow streets trying to imagine we were in a different town altogether, not because there’s anything wrong with this one but because now for eight months it’s been the same town that we arrived in on the 29th of February. After our European dates, we couldn’t imagine we would be stationary for so long. We had tickets to New York on August 14th and we thought we would have the MOAT album out and be touring in the USA. Which reminds me, three weeks in and we are at 43%, so please go to our Indiegogo campaign site to secure your copy of Poison Stream, your Handwritten & Illustrated Lyric, or your Mystery Box. Perhaps a print or the first MOAT record (vinyl and CD in one) of which we have less than 40 left and then it’s gone. But as far as travelling, anybody who reads here knows we are trying to move to Portugal and it’s getting increasingly difficult to see how we can do it with countries going into lockdowns. We haven’t left the town limit since we arrived (Olivia went to Truro once). So fantasising about travelling, we meandered through the back streets trying to imagine that we had travelled to another place. On the way we walked past this brightly coloured gate, a house decorated in spiders and cobwebs for Halloween, a homeless woman devouring a pasty on a park bench and a lot of squawking crows that seem to take on more of an air of mystery in an autumn sky.

We walked through some muddy ground in Penlee Park and past the boat pond hoping to see the swans that are usually there but they were gone. When we reached the sea it was dusk, an earlier dusk than usual as the clocks went back last Sunday (this coming Sunday in the US). The sea was all churned up, it was green-grey, the tide was high, the foam sizzled on top of the waves and the pebbles on the beach rattled like a giant chest of jewels as the waves fell back into the sea. The wind was up but it was welcome as it swept oxygen into our lungs. In the bay, two tankers anchored, an array of lights picking them out as darkness fell. Also one small boat with one small light that was a little too far away to make out properly but it was probably a trawler. Also in the distance was the ominous silhouette of St. Michaels Mount, a castle, a stately home on a rock out in the sea, still occupied by the St Aubyn family who has been there since the 17th century. Open to the public in the summer months, winter swallows it up in mists and stormy seas, short days and sombre low clouds.

There was something about the light tonight, a dull glow as if the air was charged with another power. It was then that I remembered that Halloween is imminent and I could easily imagine childhood books coming to life with witches on broomsticks sailing across the sky and silhouetted against the moon, cackling and acting out their mischief, turning maidens into shrews and blacksmiths into pigs. At the greengrocer’s today just in front of the Brussels sprouts and next to the broccoli and beyond the carrots was a giant pumpkin waiting to be carved into a huge lantern and set on a porch for the weekend. In England in my childhood, we never thought about pumpkins as food, only as a symbol of Halloween and then I went to Australia where I discovered one of Australia’s greatest gastronomical delicacies that is available everywhere you go – pumpkin soup, mmmh.

In the swimming pool today (mile 26), I had the whole double lane to myself up to lap 56 and then with just 15 minutes to go before we had to stop a lady got in the water in my lane. It wasn’t a problem we were a length apart so we didn’t get in each other’s way but there is something really nice about having that lane all to yourself. In the next lane was a young girl, 13 or 14, when I had reached my 64 lengths I sunk down at the end of the pool and got my breath back and cooled down but I could not help but notice this natural swimmer executing the butterfly, effortlessly floating through the water. I was talking to Sam, one of the lifeguards, he told me she swims 32 lengths in 10 minutes, I swim 64 in 45 minutes.

Music today came from Deutsche Grammophon, the legendary classical music label. It arrived in the post today and as I mentioned yesterday I was looking for something to compete with Kev wacking the drums on his mega kit in the next room – this wasn’t it.

The album is called Songs From The Labyrinth (2006) and features Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov. The album is the music by composer and lutenist John Dowland (1563–1626). The album has instrumental, spoken word and songs sung by Gordon Sumner, you may have heard of him.

Trailer Of The Daze

What’s most fascinating is reading the comments of the purists that hate his interpretation. It’s not really about whether you like Sting or not, it’s cultures clash, other worlds cannot relate to each other. Like him or not, it’s surprising to hear these people refer to him as a terrible singer. I wonder how an essay about AC/DC might read written by these people? If they think Sting can’t sing I wonder what they’d make of Nick Cave.