Today I walked past the fairground up on the Princess May recreation ground opposite Dare’s house. After years and years of coming to Penzance, having the archive here and working on lots of different albums here, it was only today that I saw the sign that told me that the rec had a name, it’s the first time I’ve noticed it, maybe I don’t look up enough? I always thought of myself as being observant and the sign had obviously been there for a very long time so I immediately thought, “What else haven’t I noticed?”. And then I thought perhaps the problem with humans is that so many of us are just oblivious. And then I thought but there’s so many people who believe things that might not be true and that’s just not helpful. And then I thought perhaps it’s better to be oblivious and not observant because the truth seems so amorphous and one’s certain truth isn’t another’s, you know like gods and the moon landing or morality itself.

We are victims of our upbringings, our influences, what has been injected into us or banged into us, it’s hard to shake it off. I had a theory the other day, what if parents or the government weren’t allowed to show their children anything at all, if education was learned from natural instinct to do the right thing. There’d still be school and education, the teaching of what would be considered known or presumed facts (yeah, I know I, haven’t really thought this through). Would this mean people would not want to know things if they weren’t forced to be educated? In some parts of the world education is not a given, it all comes from the parents. Do humans really have to be told what is wrong, to know it’s wrong? Without guidance would we be marauding bands of killers? Is it just Mummy saying don’t do that dear, it’s wrong, that stops us from turning into murderers? Or would we all just know without any influence that it was right to love, have empathy, and help and support each other? Can society work without a hierarchy? Must there be rich and poor, those that employ workers and those that work for employers or is it just a tradition? Who would build the roads without labourers, who would cure disease without doctors? Are we doomed to a system that mostly doesn’t work for most people whilst working pretty well for a small minority – that’s all of us in the western world (although a lot of us don’t seem to know it). It might work for happy country folk too, people who live on beautiful islands and live off the land. But what about the ones in between, the people in Nigeria and Bangladesh and Somalia, how can this world ever work for them?

The fairground today was dead. I walked past it at 2.30PM, one and a half hours before it was due to open. There were a couple of workers fixing things, one man had a tangle of wires sprouting out of the bottom of the cab of a big transport truck. Another looked busy although I couldn’t see that he was actually doing anything (that’s a skill in itself). I could see the back of the ghost train, a skull stencilled onto the metal sheet at the back of the ride. I could also see what was supposed to be a scary figure, black-draped with a plastic mask, the costume probably held on with a broom handle and although I couldn’t see them I imagined that the bobbing horses on the carousel with their glazed dead stare might be more discomforting.

In the town, the streets are still full of tourists and it’s warmed up a bit so they have a chance to rescue their holiday from the storms. I picked up my pasty earlier than usual from the bakers, they are always shocked to see me early. The other day in the greengrocers one of the men that work there, said to me, “You’re late today”. I said, “You notice when I’m here?”. He said, “Like clockwork”. I said, ‘You like The Boomtown Rats?’ (just kidding). I’d been getting there at 3PM every day because the bakers closed at 3PM and I went to the greengrocers next. I didn’t realise I actually had a routine, but I suppose the blog, the French, the music, it’s all a routine. I need to change my routine – don’t we all. We need to do something different, that’s why the tourists are here escaping the routine. It’s why Ronaldo left Real Madrid, even famous millionaires, people that can do anything they want, need to break the routine. Maybe they should try breaking the routine of being rich and slum it for a while, they might like it.

Today I was in the studio all day working on two projects, Ahad and Jerome. Ironically Dare started trying to find the sound of a fairground, a calliope, a barrel organ, something joyous, circus-like. After that, I sang lead vocals on my project with Jerome Froese, perhaps that in itself (singing) is not very Tangerine Dream-like but it’s what we both bring that makes it interesting. I wrote a third verse and it came out well. After that, we started working on guitars on another Ahad song and that took us through till dinner time and here we are.

Music today comes from a record that arrived the day before yesterday by German singer and actress Sibylle Baier. Colour Green was recorded at home on a reel to reel tape recorder with just voice and guitar, between 1970 and 1973 (although the last track has more instrumentation). She appeared in director Wim Wenders’ film Alice In The Cities in 1974 but ended up not following a career in the arts, moved to America, got married and concentrated on bringing up her family. It’s a lovely album of softly sung self-written folky songs, with understated guitars. You’d never believe that English wasn’t her first language but then again I have Olivia. The songs were compiled onto a CD by her son Robbie and that disc found its way to Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis who in turn passed it on to Orange Twin Records, who released it on vinyl in 2006. In 2008 she appeared in another Wim Wenders film, Palermo’s Shooting, and wrote two more songs, one of which was released in the same year and used in the film.

How can you follow an album like this, easy, let’s listen to Nick Drake’s Mum. This is also recorded at home by her husband and Nick Drake’s father Rodney. It has Molly Drake writing the songs, singing and playing piano. Molly Drake, like her son Nick, was born in Rangoon, Burma, in 1915 and the songs reflect a person’s musical taste from that era, “heavy-hearted” as Wikipedia calls it, I call it ‘yearning’.

In 2017 the North East’s finest, The Unthanks’ sisters Becky and Rachel, recorded an album of Molly Drake’s songs and poems with the poems read by her daughter and Nick Drake’s sister Gabrielle. The album includes Adrian McNally on piano, Chris Price on bass and guitar and Niopha Keegan on violin and viola with all three also contributing vocals. McNally also manages the band and is the ex-husband of Rachel, they have two sons. Gabrielle Drake was born in Lahore, British India, in 1944 and is now 76 years old, just a year younger than her mother when she died. Gabrielle was in lots of your favourite TV shows in the sixties and seventies including The Avengers, The Champions, and with purple hair and silver suit as Lieutenant Gay Ellis in the 1970 Science Fiction series UFO. She also had a long stage career and was in many films, including There’s A Girl In My Soup with Peter Sellers.

Having been as big a Nick Drake nut as anybody, a nerd-like visit to the family home and Nick Drake’s grave in Tanworth-in-Arden in 2019 made for reflection at the loss of this great talent at the tender age of 26.

Song Of The Daze

The Unthanks – Do You Ever Remember (Molly Drake), 2017

Featuring archive Super 8 film of Molly Drake with her children, Gabrielle and Nick Drake, some of which has never been seen before (except at live performances by The Unthanks). It is thought that it was recorded by a professional film enthusiast friend, probably not by Molly’s husband Rodney (who did record her songs), and it centres around Nick Drake’s christening at 3 years old.

Do You Ever Remember is taken from The Unthanks album Diversions Vol. 4 – The Songs And Poems Of Molly Drake, which can be ordered from www.the-unthanks.com

Super 8 film digitally transferred by Gavin Bush, edited by Paul Fitzgerald, Cally and Adrian McNally.

Today the sea was a mystical billowing sheet of different currents and random waves that seemed to be a stampede, a chaotic rush, it was less an ocean and more an undulating landscape without the dust of hooves. Water was scrambling towards the shore but the waves seemed to be out of order as if the first waves were being overtaken by the second before the first had arrived. It was a free for all, a sea undisciplined by its own nature as if all of history had been disregarded in a race for each selfish wave to reach the shore before the next. It’s as if the planet itself was confused as if it had forgotten what it does. The natural order of things had been interrupted by the loss of ice, pollution and the abscess of plastic on its belly in the Indian ocean and it was starting to lose instinct, think for itself, but like a child, had no experience of what to do.

There was an awakening, there had to be, the ancient idea of rolling waves, a sea full of marine life, dotted fishermen in small communities around the landmasses, it had all changed with the human population explosion. Now, the sea was a garbage dump, it was overfished and poisoned, it was a slow death and the time had come for the sea, the Earth, nature itself, to wake up and fight back. The humans had taken it all too far, they had invented a world that based organic creatures’ worth on the concept of riches. One man was worth more than the other if he had more. So everything became a race to secure the prize but now and inherent in nature itself was the fundamental problem that nature competes too, everything preys on everything else but today was the first day that it had ever been seen in the waves.

To see August cold, windy, rainy, and to see the tourists in the town covered in macs and hats, the whole family, a small child covered in canvas instead of suntan cream. They were trying to make the most of one walk around town in a bunch, a walk that takes 30 minutes from one end to the other with casual browsing and window shopping. Perhaps another 30 minutes in a cafe, an hour, and then you’re done. Too cold to go to the beach, too windy to even sit there wrapped in blankets, the holiday is a washout. It was meant to be an escape from the virus, let’s go to Cornwall, beautiful, somewhat isolated in the southwestern corner of Britain, beaches, coves, cliff walks, low registered infections, perfect. But they failed to take into consideration the inclement weather, the famous mizzle, the sea on both sides of the landmass up to mischief. There was even a thunderstorm, a rare occurrence in these parts, perhaps something to do with a long peninsula, sea on both sides. The deep dark rumbling voice barked in the middle of the night and threw down torrential rain that trapped everyone indoors. It was exciting but it wasn’t a holiday.

On the beach today, the seagulls were scarce, struggling with their balance on the wind, it was hard to imagine where they had all gone because there’s usually so many of them, shrieking, gliding, ruffling their feathers in the shallows to get clean, but not today. On the beach was a large crab upside down, giant claws and eaten from the inside out, the legs missing, someone’s lunch. I turned it over with a stick of seaweed, its rough rusty shell, its armour, had proved useless as something or some things had got to its underbelly. Or perhaps it had died and been eaten after the fact, it reminded me of the days when I would eat a crab at a restaurant, the thought horrifies me now. A barbaric tool of torture delivered to the table on a side plate, clinking as it’s placed on the table. It’s something like a nutcracker that was supposed to split the claw in half and with another sadistic instrument you would scoop out the meat. The seagulls hadn’t figured out how to break the claws and the carcass was left abandoned on the beach, more dignified in death with its giant pincers intact.

Also by the shore today the oddest site, a giant yacht parked in the car park, leaning against the land side of the sea wall where the recycling used to be. It was surrounded by a makeshift fence and propped up by wooden struts jammed into the concrete. The rudder, the propeller exposed and that uncomfortable awkwardness when you see a swan waddling on land instead of graceful in the water. The boat was called ‘Dynamite’, who calls their yacht ‘Dynamite’? Who parks their yacht in a car park by a town beach, who owns a yacht? It must have taken a huge truck to get it there, a crane to unload it? It’s more likely that Poseidon lifted it out of the sea and placed it on the land more out of kindness than anger.

The beach was as sparsely populated by humans as it was by seagulls. Two teenagers huddled together against the sea wall, another couple, one carrying a Lidl bag, walked the length of the beach and back again. On the rocks by the shore two people, a man and his child, were scouring the rock pools for interesting specimens while they still could as the sea was advanced in its return. There were no boats on the horizon today, no boats anchored, no fishing boats on their way out of the harbour, the sea wouldn’t allow it. It’s had enough.

Music today has been loosely sea-themed (not really) with the wonderful Fotheringay album (1970), the only one they released in the period. It has a track called The Sea, it seemed an appropriate place to start. Sandy Denny had decided to leave Fairport Convention and form her own band with Trevor Lucas on vocals and guitar, Pat Donaldson on bass, Jerry Donahue on guitar and Gerry Conway on drums. The results were exceptional and it’s one of my favourite albums in the genre of Folk-Rock, especially The Sea…

The Sea

Do I ever wonder? You don’t know.
You’ll never follow, and I’ll never show.
D’you see the water and watch it flow
And float an empty shell,
And you think that I’m hiding from the island.
You’ve a fault in your senses. Can you feel it now?
Time? What is that? I’ve no time to care.
I’ve lived for a long while nearly everywhere.
You will be taken, everyone, you ladies and you gentlemen.
Fall and listen with your ears upon the paving stone.
Is that what you hear? The coming of the sea?
Sea flows under your doors in London town.
And all your defences are all broken down.
You laugh at me on funny days, but mine’s the slight of hand.
Don’t you know I am a joker, a deceiver?
And I’m waiting for the land.

It’s an album that shares a song with Trevor Lucas (The Ballad Of Ned Kelly), Dylan (Too Much Of Nothing) and Gordon Lightfoot (The Way I Feel). Peace In The End is sung by Denny and Lucas together and a co-write, Banks Of The Nile, is traditional and arranged by the pair with four Sandy Denny classics, Nothing More, Winter Winds, The Pond And The Stream and of course The Sea. It’s one of the great Folk-Rock albums, a must-have – order it now. There is also a live in Essen album from 1970 and a Fotheringay 2 released by surviving members finishing the started 2nd album. There’s a box set of everything available called Nothing More.

Fotheringay only made one album as there was pressure for Denny to go solo due to her popularity, which she did, releasing four albums before her untimely death on the 21st April 1978 at the age of 31. Lucas died on the 4th February 1989 at the age of 45.

One of the issues about these album recommendations and the fact that I may choose one album by a band or at the most 4 albums by one band in a night is that a band like Steeleye Span have released 23 studio albums, 11 live albums and 3 box sets, then there’s compilations! So, I chose Now We Are Six, their sixth album released in 1974, it reached No. 13 on the chart. It was also called Now We Are Six because they were usually a five-piece, the title taken from A.A. Milne’s poems for children (Winnie The Pooh author). The band had brought in a permanent drummer in Nigel Pegrum (amongst other instruments) from Gnidrolog. The band was now Maddy Prior on vocals with Tim Hart, Peter Knight, Bob Johnson and Rick Kemp on lots of different instruments and vocals. The album is a mixed bag, with standout tracks but you have to be careful which version of the album you get. The Australian album has a different order and my favourite track Thomas The Rhymer is cut from 6.44 to 3.15. Agggh!!! I didn’t realise at first and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So if you are in Australia, get the English version and write a letter to the boss of Chrysalis records in 1974 and ask him to change the dumb decision he made.

The album has a classic Folk-Rock sound with the aforementioned track and also the UK album opener (Seven Hundred Elves). I say this often, it’s a classic but you have to like it. Not for everyone. There’s also a spoof track or two where they sing two songs pretending to be children under the name ‘St Eleye’ Primary School Junior Choir (the title track and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) and then there’s a cover of To Know Him Is To Love Him (with Bowie on sax), eclecticism is great but on this record, an open-minded person would go with it, others might cry. Mostly though the album is really great and I even like the dubious bits, just not as much as the great bits. Founder member Tim Hart died in 2009 age 61. Original members Gay and Terry Woods left early but Gay returned as lead singer when Maddy Prior took a break. Ashley Hutchings, founding member of Fairport Convention, was also a founding member of Steeleye Span.

Two Magicians (Chorus repeats after every two lines).
She looked out of the window as white as any milk
And he looked in at the window as black as any silk

Hello, hello, hello, hello, you coal blacksmith
You have done me no harm
You never shall have my maidenhead
That I have kept so long
I’d rather die a maid
Ah, but then she said and be buried all in my grave
Than to have such a nasty, husky, dusky, fusky, musky
Coal blacksmith, a maiden, I will die

She became a duck, a duck all on the stream
And he became a water dog and fetched her back again

She became a star, a star all in the night
And he became a thundercloud
And muffled her out of sight

She became a rose, a rose all in the wood
And he became a bumble bee
And kissed her where she stood

She became a nun, a nun all dressed in white
And he became a canting priest
And prayed for her by night

She became a trout, a trout all in the brook
And he became a feathered fly
And caught her with his hook

She became a corpse, a corpse all in the ground
And he became the cold clay and smothered her all around

Pentangle is another classic Folk-Rock band from England featuring Bert Jansch on guitar and vocals, John Renbourn on guitars, Danny Thompson on double bass, Terry Cox on drums and Jacqui McShee on vocals. Between 1968 and 1972 they released 6 albums. My favourite is the last one, Solomon’s Seal (1972). It’s also Jacqui McShee’s favourite but not the deaf critics’. They reformed in 1985 minus John Renbourn and gradually shed members till just McShee and Jansch were left with Gerry Conway from Fotheringay on drums and other assorted musicians till 1995. For the next 15 years, it became Jacqui McShee’s Pentangle with Gerry Conway (they are married) – and assorted musicians.

The album opens with a classic version of traditional songwriter Cyril Tawney’s Sally Free And Easy, originally a sea shanty. Danny Thompson’s double bass and these two great guitarists with Jansch’s voice make an instant classic. Jacqui McShee sings the two traditional songs on Side 1, The Cherry Tree Carol and High Germany with Jansch singing another great track, The Snows. People On The Highway sung by both of them closes Side 1.

Another traditional song, Willy O’Winsbury, opens Side 2, it seems that McShee gets these songs in the band. No Love Is Sorrow is Jansch and McShee singing together again as they do on Jump Bay Jump and the last track, Lady Of Carlisle. This might be the appropriate time to mention the fact that as a Folk-Rock band they are as equally influenced by Jazz and Blues. Jansch and his wife Loren both died of cancer within two months of each other in late 2011, he was 67. John Renbourn died in 2015 aged 70.

Last album today is the Fairport Convention classic, yep, I’ve said it again, Liege And Lief, which was released in December 1969. The band was Sandy Denny on vocals, Ashley Hutchings on bass, Dave Swarbrick on violin, Simon Nicol on acoustic guitar, Richard Thompson on electric guitars and Dave Mattacks on drums. Like Fotheringay it was produced by Joe Boyd and features the perennial Matty Groves. The album has a mostly traditional influence and is considered one of the great influential albums of the era, creating a genre. There’s books about it, it’s hard to nail in a paragraph or two, so I won’t try, just listen to it.

Songs Of The Daze

Fotheringay on Beat Club 1970

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Steeleye Span’s Greatest Hits – All Around My Hat mimed on Top Of The Pops:

 
And Gaudete, which you can tell from this that they don’t need to mime:

Pentangle – Set Of Six live on ITV with 6 songs from Solomon’s Seal, 27th June 1972

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Fairport Convention – Folk Heroes documentary 2017:

 
A note from the makers:

THREE AUDIO TRACKS HAVE BEEN “MUTED” DUE TO COPYRIGHT REASONS. THIS IS NOT AN ERROR. CONTINUE WATCHING AND THE SOUND WILL CONTINUE.

The film tells how five young musicians in North London formed Fairport Convention during 1967’s ‘summer of love’. The band went on to shake English folk music to its roots by fusing it with rock, an approach which outraged some purists but delighted a new and devoted audience.

In the subsequent five decades, Fairport Convention has attracted widespread critical acclaim, won a coveted BBC Lifetime Achievement Award, and Radio 2 listeners voted Fairport’s groundbreaking album Liege & Lief ‘The Most Influential Folk Album of All Time’.

The documentary has been made by London-based independent producer Special Treats Productions. The company’s previous television music documentaries include ‘XTC: This Is Pop’, ‘I’m Not In love: The Story of 10cc’ and the award-winning film ‘UB40: Promises and Lies’.

The film features rare archive interviews and footage as well as newly-filmed interviews with the current Fairport members and, among others, Ashley Hutchings, Richard Thompson, Iain Matthews, Judy Dyble, Joe Boyd, Ralph McTell, Maddy Prior, Bob Harris, Suggs, Rick Wakeman, Steve Winwood, and Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull.

Through these interviews, the film examines Fairport’s first five years in detail, including the tragic motorway crash which killed drummer Martin Lamble. It goes on to explain Fairport’s pivotal role in the evolution of British folkrock; how the band fostered major talents such as Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Dave Swarbrick and spawned other notable bands including Matthews Southern Comfort, Steeleye Span, and Fotheringay.

The story is brought up to date with contemporary material filmed at Fairport’s annual ‘own brand’ music festival held at Cropredy in Oxfordshire. The closing sequence features the band’s 2017 festival performance when virtually all the surviving former members joined the current line-up on stage.

The Producer/Director has been working closely with Fairport for over a year. He says: “Our aim is to explain how important Fairport’s influence has been and continues to be – in other words, why the band matters.

“We have not set out to make a comprehensive, year-by-year history of Fairport; that has been done before. The film concentrates on two periods – the first five years and the band today. The result is a celebration of a very British institution and an assertion of Fairport’s continuing relevance.”

Today is the day of the nasturtiums and caterpillars from outer space. No one knew they were coming, no one knew that the innocent plants would be devoured so voraciously in such a short period of time. On Wednesday we will get a picture of their work, I only wish I had a picture of that beautiful explosion of leaves and flowers that existed before they came to conquer in small caterpillar-shaped spaceships just so you could see how quickly the devastation came. They arrived out of nowhere and swarmed into the flowerbed – it’s like they knew that the nasturtiums were vulnerable, unable to protect themselves, only their beauty as a defence. But the caterpillars showed no mercy and destruction like this hasn’t been since the last time. Today the caterpillars were even on the windows, were they trying to break in so they could arc their way through the house and ravage the plants in the back garden? The question is will these greedy fat caterpillars turn into moths or butterflies? Will these vicious marauders be of the day or of the night? Stay tuned.

Opposite the house, a large fair has taken route, just in time for the terrible weather, storms, torrential rain (or drizzle) and strong winds that make those scary rides even more death-defying. They opened at the weekend but in the day they don’t open till 5PM? Wouldn’t you want the custom throughout the day? A place for the holidaymakers to take their children during this drab weather. A place to wear them out with carousels, dodgem cars, shooting galleries and candy floss? For American readers, that’s cotton candy and for Australian readers, that’s fairy floss. Other languages see it differently, it’s why languages are so great. It seems that in French it’s called “barbe à papa”, which means daddy’s beard. In Swedish it’s “sockervadd” (sugar wadding / sugar cotton wool), in Spanish and Italian it seems to be…candy floss? In Greek, it’s candy thread. In German “Zuckerwatte”, sugar cotton wool. But what actually is it? Chemical teeth rotter! But the parents have to give in to the kids, otherwise it’s tears. All my tears came when I got to the dentist.

The wind is up again tonight, you can hear it moving objects, discarded cans, and throwing litter up in a twirl. A car alarm just went off and one hopes it’s not going to keep on being triggered. Sometimes the seagulls set the car alarms off, jumping on the roofs. The seagulls seem to like the cars, you often see them sitting comfortably or even just standing on a roof taking it all in. The other odd things about seagulls are that they don’t initially fly away if you approach them, they are more likely to walk away first, then if you persist, they run away, it’s only if you get really close that they use their wings.

There were no sessions today but we did talk to Salim in Texas where it was 91 degrees. I spent most of the day on the archive, trying to create space where there is none. Sessioneer Noel is coming down from Surrey in a couple of weeks with a collection of records of a friend who passed away, he is donating it to the archive, his friend is apparently smiling down from the great record deck in the sky. But I have to get organised so we can incorporate them into the collection down here. I don’t want to get too maudlin today but there are some people who are leaving their collections to the archive when they die for fear of partners being lumbered with them – that’s why we need to secure the archive’s future, it’s not just my collection, it’s other music lovers’ collections too, as well as people who have donated albums and CDs, books and magazines and copies of their own records from their musical projects. We’re trying to figure out a future that preserves it at least till the end of the world.

Languages were encouraging today, you have me in one room learning French and Olivia in the other learning Portuguese. I guess Brexit really knocks the idea of English people learning other languages firmly on the head. I’m having a hard time with patriotism at the moment, I simply can’t see why a people have to favour their own people more than they favour other people when after all we are all just people, humans – ask the aliens what they think, they don’t get it either.

Music today reflects on the loss of Justin Townes Earle at the age of 38. I have just one CD, his first full album, The Good Life (2008). It’s been called Urban Americana, he has one foot in Country, one foot in Blues and his third foot in Folk and that’s the place where I like what he did, songs that didn’t incorporate that basic Country sound, just songs, like Who Am I To Say and Lone Time Hill on his debut. It such a sad story, a life of addiction and leaving behind a 3-year-old daughter (as I write the cause of death hasn’t been announced). He was the son of Steve Earle who has also struggled with addiction (I read that his dad has been married 7 times, twice to the same woman, yikes!). It wasn’t an easy family to grow up in for Justin who was apparently into drugs at age 12. He was middle-named after the legend that is Townes Van Zandt who died with his demons at the age of 52.

I saw Steve Earle live once, he was the guest of Patti Smith and I really liked him. I have his first four albums and a CD collection of odds and ends called Side Tracks. He’s one of those artists that is great but I’m not really into the genre he’s put into. Like Prince, there’s tracks I really like and tracks that I’m not into in the genre. His first album was Guitar Town in 1986 which went straight to No. 1 on the US Country chart (89 on the Billboard chart). It was followed by Exit 0 in 1987, No. 15 on the Country chart (90 on the Billboard chart). He slips between the cracks somewhat. He’s a bit too Country for Rock fans and a bit too Rock for Country fans. He’s what they call Alternative Country, maybe he’s modern rebel Country? It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a large audience, he does.

Then in 1988 came Copperhead Road, No. 7 on the Country chart (56 on the Billboard chart). The first album by him that I really liked song and singing wise. There was something different about it, I’m not quite sure what. I think it was simply rockier but like Springsteen the traditional songs aren’t that interesting to me, it’s when he breaks out of the genre that I like it. On Johnny Come Lately he has The Pogues and although Earle’s voice is powerful and expressive I’m waiting and waiting for Shane MacGowan’s voice but it never comes (he plays banjo and bodhran instead). He loses me again halfway through the album but the eighties drums pretty much ruin the whole thing. Last but not least on Side 2 there’s a duet with Maria McKee but well, it’s a Christmas song and it ain’t no Fairytale Of New York. If this record was made in the seventies or post-nineties it would be really something whether you like the genre or not.

The Hard Way (Billboard No. 100) released in 1988 suffers the same fate as Copperhead Road with drums that I just can’t ignore, I’d love to remix these albums with a different drummer or at least try and do something about the sound and where they are in the mix and then you’d actually have me liking Country Rock. I suppose I need to investigate his later albums as the people who made drums sound that way in the eighties have since been banished to a distant moon in another galaxy where intergalactic snare drums and toms are the thing.

My favourite album by Steve Earle (so far) is the compilation Sidetracks released in 2002. It’s a mix of songs which Earle explains as coming from different times and recorded for different reasons, he calls them “Stray Tracks”. There’s a crackin’ version of Lowell George’s Willin’. There’s Breed from Nirvana’s Nevermind, The Chambers Brothers’ Time Has Come Today with Sheryl Crow, The Slickers’ Johnny Too Bad (from the Jimmy Cliff soundtrack The Harder They Come) and Dylan’s My Back Pages as well as a varied selection of solo songs. It’s eclectic, avoiding genre categorisation and those horrible drums, it’s the best thing I’ve heard by him – so far.

Song Of The Day is Mama’s Eyes (Justin Townes Earle) from the 2009 album Midnight At The Movies. This video was filmed within the Marathon Motor Works complex in Nashville on February 17th, 2016:

So today, Sunday, always lots of sessions, Tony, Brian, Doug, but also it was Champions League final day. Without going on too much about it as not everyone out there likes football or even sport of any kind, I must tell you what happened. So I watched all the games in the competition and this was going to be the game of games, two brilliant teams with a record of scoring lots of goals, featuring many of the world’s best players. Well, it was ok and the game ended with Bayern Munich beating Paris St Germain with just one goal scored in the whole game. Bayern had beaten Barcelona 8-2, Spurs 7-2, Chelsea 7-1 and lots of teams by large margins over one or two legs. After watching all of the finals last week and even before the pandemic, during the game I went to the loo for one minute, that’s when they scored.

It was an indoor day for me today and I was hoping to carry on with the job of sorting out the archive but the sessions and other distractions had me contributing nothing to the job on hand. I managed to do day 80 of French during the adverts during the pre-game pundits’ analyses and somehow stumbled across the fact that today would have been author Jean Rhys’ 130th birthday and the idea that she might have lived to that age was amusing to me as I’m sure it would have been for her. A fascinating character with an intriguing life story she found acclaim late after a period of more than 20 years of no writing at all. I’ve read a couple of her books (Quartet) but her most famous novel was Wide Sargasso Sea published in 1966 when she was already 76 years old. Her latter-day fame didn’t impress, when questioned about it she responded: “It came too late”.

It’s also birthdays for Paulo Coelho, Stephen Fry, A.S. Byatt, Ken Hensley (Uriah Heep), John Cipollinna and David Freiberg (Quicksilver Messenger Service), Léo Ferré (French composer born in Monaco, I have two albums), Blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Yasser Arafat. You may remember that Arafat was poisoned and it seems that the upcoming MOAT album, Poison Stream, is appropriately titled with music streaming and what it has done for us all both good and bad depending on where you stand on the subject. The poisoning concept, in general, is topical and really quite outrageous as the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny lies in a coma in a Berlin hospital. It reminds me of the Salisbury poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018 here in England as well as the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko also in England in 2006. It seems that if you are a critical Russian, you may be assassinated, it puts into perspective the idea that wearing a mask in a shop might be a suppression of freedom.

We will be releasing a song from the new MOAT album in a couple of weeks but I want to stress it’s not a single, it’s a track. In the olden days before Caesar, we would release a single and hope that the single would chart and create interest in the album and that would mean that people would buy it. You may remember that with the ex-band the first single was She Never Said but it was the second single The Unguarded Moment that got people’s attention and made them interested in the band and the album. But these days we’re not thinking in terms of hits or charts or even significant sales because significant sales means something very different today than what it used to.

Times change, we deal with it, remember telex, record shops in every town, fax, cable, steam trains, the world before Hip Hop. We just carry on. Our goal is to make records we like and hopefully records that anyone that might be reading this will like and we will be very grateful if you purchase it so we can do it again and again and again until we all fall off our collective perch. You remember PledgeMusic and the disaster that they caused with their greed and their incompetence, well the concept is still our only chance of covering the expense of making a record and manufacturing it so we will be doing another campaign with another company as we attempt to cover the investment. The only problem is that with this company if we don’t make our goal then we don’t get the pledges. So we’ll be working hard to try and not only offer the album, the music, but other things as well, house concerts, illustrated lyrics, the heads of luminescent aliens. If you have any ideas about what you would like to see that we can make available, please let us know, email Olivia (olivia@martywillson-piper.com) and we’ll see what we can do. Last but not least remember you can still pick up Noctorum’s 2006 album Offer The Light on CD for $5 plus postage & PayPal fee till the end of the month and yes you can always send cover art here to the archive to be autographed if we don’t see you on tour.

Music today comes from Armageddon and their one and only album released on A&M records in 1974. It was something of a supergroup with Keith Relf from The Yardbirds and the first incarnation of Renaissance on lead vocal. Relf was involved with production on Steamhammer’s final album Speech (1972) and that led to Armageddon being formed. The band was Martin Pugh from Steamhammer on guitars and Louis Cennamo from Steamhammer and Renaissance on bass with Bobby Caldwell from Captain Beyond and Johnny Winter on drums. It was something of a seventies Rock album, pre-Punk and post-sixties, not Progressive and despite critical acclaim, the band failed to support it with a tour and they disappeared rather quickly. Relf returned to England and died soon after, he was electrocuted whilst playing his guitar at home. If the riffing Rock band isn’t for you do at least listen to the jangling arpeggios of Silver Tightrope, the album is worth having for just this track.

After Relf left The Yardbirds he produced the obscure Progressive Folk-Rock band Saturnalia who released one of the first picture discs, Magical Love, in 1973. It’s a must-have for all record collectors of sixties and seventies records in this genre. It’s a little more Rock than Steeleye Span, less traditional. It’s another one of those bands that haven’t realised that the sixties has gone and haven’t quite become acclimatized to the realities of the seventies. They have male and female vocals and lots of potential to succeed but, well, they didn’t. The lineup is Aletta on lead vocals, Adrian Hawkins on lead vocals, Rod Roach on lead guitar, Richard Houghton on bass and keyboards and Tom Compton on drums. Roach and Hawkins had been in Horse (I have their record, I bought it for 10p in a charity store, it goes for £500 in very good to mint condition). If Saturnalia had stayed together there might have been a place for them on the British Folk-Rock scene but it wasn’t to be. There was the coup of having Relf produce them, the amazing picture disc, their flowery name and a style that had a following in the seventies. Perhaps they were a little lacking in the songwriting department but they were getting there and the future might have been rosy. The album came in a clear sleeve with a booklet, hard to find but I have it and a concert ticket, hard to find and I don’t have it. On the picture disc, all members are naked on the torso including Aletta. The pressings are early technology for picture discs so there’s some sound quality issues. Last but not least there’s a doubt as to when it was released, Wikipedia says 1969, Discogs 1973, I’m going with 1973 even though you can hear some Grace Slick sixties style in there.

Relf’s involvement might have been a precursor for his next band, Renaissance, with sister Jane on co-lead vocals, another ex Yardbird, Jim McCarty, on drums, Louis Cennamo on bass and John Hawken on keyboards. Or, if Saturnalia was released in 1969, that’s where he got the idea for the next band. The self-titled debut was released in 1969 and it was a bold Progressive affair. The first track, Kings And Queens, is 11 minutes long, the second, Innocence, 7 minutes long and Side 2 only has 3 tracks. It’s gone a long way from the Yardbirds in a very short period of time. It’s produced by ex Yardbirds bassist Paul Samwell-Smith who famously produced Cat Stevens’ successful records and another band called All About Eve.

They made one more album, Illusion (1971), before falling apart. The album was only released in Germany at the time and didn’t get a UK release till 1976. It’s an odd album which somehow sounds more sixties than the first album, its oddness is why I like it, it sounds like nobody quite knows what they are doing, as if they are waiting for somebody to come in and tell them what to do. That’s pretty much what happened as manager Miles Copeland got involved and began the rearrangement of the band – it’s complicated and they ended up being one of those bands that went on to have success with no original members. The single Northern Lights reaching No. 10 in the UK charts in 1978 – as a concert band, they grew to be very popular.

Songs Of The Daze

A rare video clip of Renaissance performing at the underground Olympia Pop Festival (666 – 6 bands for 6 hours for 6 days) in Paris in early January 1970:

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Renaissance – Kings And Queens – Live, 1970 (Remastered) on Beat Club, 30/05/1970:

Another day in the studio today for my ears but not for my fingers. Dare was editing Ross’s double bass from the other day, doing a rough mix and playing some nylon string guitar on one song whilst recording Olivia and her various violins on another. I left my ears hanging off the studio door whilst continuing with the archive sort out, it’s slow progress but every inch of space needs to be found, even the spiders have had to move out. The archive is like a cause, the preserving of music on vinyl, 78, CD and cassette for posterity. It’s a strange ambition to collect for a future you will not see. One hopes that there will be sufficient funds or investment to realise the worth of this collection when in a hundred years time such formats and even styles of music and cover art will likely be lost. Can you imagine having an original copy of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 on original vinyl from 1785 in mint condition?

I didn’t get out much today but when I did, John in the Co-op who used to work at the leisure centre told me that the pool was opening in a week. My body has been craving the exercise, the water, the feeling of being stretched. Swimming in a mask might be interesting. Walking up and down to the beach and back to the studio, up to Dare’s house and back to the studio, it’s not enough and if you’re used to swimming laps then the sea isn’t happening, it’s just a freezing playground where you can pretend it’s summer. I remember being on Bondi Beach one New Year, the water was like ready to eat soup, something that the British will never know.

Olivia and I spoke to Stephen tonight at Schoolkids Records in the US and we plotted, we’ll have some news very soon about MOAT and the new album Poison Stream. In the meantime, my solo record Nightjar will be available on Record Store Day Part 2 in September. We still have the second Noctorum album Offer The Light CD offer at $5 plus postage and PayPal fee (email Olivia at olivia@martywillson-piper.com) and we have also released the pre Seeing Stars track Soldier under the name Never Swallow Stars as a downloadable rarities track. Space Summit is looking good for early next year and also today we listened to the track that Jerome Froese has sent us for me to sing which we will be returning to him to add his magic and mix, more on that as it happens.

In the supermarket today I heard Magic by Pilot, it never gets old, I’m singing along in my head. I don’t mind hearing old seventies Pop songs in the supermarket but I have to say that muzak in lifts does bother me. I heard a story that at a certain mall in the USA they were trying to stop kids hanging around and getting up to mischief, nothing worked and then one day some bright spark came up with the idea to pipe Phil Collins music through the speakers and they were never seen again. Haha, it’s probably not quite true but it’s an interesting idea that you can scare people away with music, it works on me. There was a book I read once called Time Of The Hawklords by Moorcock and Butterworth where they fended off their agitators by firing the music of The Carpenters and Elton John at them, silly but amusing. I would imagine that sonics have been experimented with as a weapon or have I just seen too many Sci-Fi films?

Without going over the perplexing issue of why people listen to music on such low-quality devices these days, ok, I’ve said it again, whyyyy? One classic situation that drives us musicians mad is when you are somewhere, say a garage or a shop, and they are piping music through their speaker system in the roof and say it’s The Beatles and coming out of one speaker near the till is the vocals without the band and down by the fridges it’s the band without the vocals. It’s fascinating if you want to deconstruct a Beatles song but a department store might not be the place to do it.

Music today has taken me to the Classical world and a double album of cello concertos, a cello sonata and a piano trio. But before I tell you what it is you are probably wondering what is the difference between a concerto and a sonata? Well, here’s the answer and more:

A concerto is usually a solo instrument (sometimes two or three, but usually one) with orchestral accompaniment. A sonata is usually a solo instrument with piano accompaniment. A symphony is a large work written for a full orchestra.

The tragic story of the cello genius Jacqueline du Pré is well known. At the age of 28, her musical career was over due to Multiple Sclerosis and although she lived 14 more years, she died at the age of 42. Considered one of the all-time greatest cellists she left behind a body of work part of which I listened to tonight.

Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor
London Symphony Orchestra / Sir John Barbirolli

Haydn Cello Concerto in C
English Chamber Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim (her husband)

Beethoven Cello Sonata No. 3 in A – Piano Trio No. 5 in D ‘Ghost’
With Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman

So how do you follow Jacqueline du Pré? The answer was simple, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s Pictures At An Exhibition, the music of Mussorgsky arranged by Keith Emerson and played live at Newcastle City Hall in 1971. It’s incredible to think that an ambitious project like this might be enjoyed by a large enthusiastic crowd of YOUNG PEOPLE. Glam was on the way but at this point, the Pop world was still transitioning from the sixties into the seventies. The Progressive genre was capturing the minds of the bright young things as they grew their hair and listened intently to this complex music played by an unlikely cast of three, including a mad virtuoso keyboard player dressed in leather, looking like a warrior rebel who would dazzle the crowds with his skills whilst thrusting a dagger into the keyboard (Keith Emerson, ex The Nice), a singer, bass player, guitarist with a sweet voice (Greg Lake, ex King Crimson) and a drummer that defied rhythm logic (Carl Palmer, ex Atomic Rooster).

To say they had a vision would be an understatement and this album, their third, had them entertaining Classical music inspired by/taken from Mussorgsky’s ten piano pieces (“painting in sound”) interspersed with their own material, including Greg Lake’s The Sage, redolent of King Crimson from whence he came. So who was Modest Mussorgsky? Well, he was a Russian composer born in Russia in 1839 and died in 1881 at the age of 42, coincidentally at the same age as Jacqueline du Pré but from self-imposed alcoholism. The young open-minded audience loved this music, passionate, skilful, dynamic, but it was to listen or shake your head to, you certainly weren’t dancing to it. Emerson Lake & Palmer were huge. I saw them at the Liverpool Empire in the mid-seventies during their Brain Salad Surgery tour.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, humorist, poet, singer, songwriter and professional Scot Ivor Cutler is something that only eccentrics might wish for. It’s hard to describe but his album Dandruff (1974) released on Virgin Records after an appearance on Robert Wyatt’s classic Rock Bottom led to his Virgin deal. It is, of course, absurd, silly, brilliant, surreal and if you haven’t heard the sad story of “Fremsley” then your life is not complete. It makes The Residents sound like Maroon 5. The previous album, Ludo (1967), was produced by George Martin who was, of course, EMI’s in house comedy producer when The Beatles came along, it’s probably what made him the right man for the Beatles job.

Martin Denny’s Exotica series was latterly hip lounge music for Tiki party goers and lovers of the Tiki culture but in the fifties, these records topped the Billboard charts. They have become famous for the album covers, the first 12 albums featured model Sandra Warner who changed her looks depending on the mood of the album. I have quite a collection of these records, this one, Exotica Volume 2, was released in 1958. What does it sound like? Well, sometimes there’s frogs, other times parrots, but always exotic instruments, percussion and piano, perhaps double bass, vibes and the occasional cicada.

Songs Of The Daze

A documentary about Jacqueline du Pré:

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Emerson Lake & Palmer – Pictures At An Exhibition, recorded at the Lyceum Theatre in December 1970.

1. “Promenade” – Mussorgsky
2. “The Gnome” – Mussorgsky/Palmer
3. “Promenade” – Mussorgsky/Lake
4. “The Sage” – Lake
5. “The Old Castle” – Mussorgsky/Emerson
6. “Blues Variation” – Emerson/Lake/Palmer
7. “Promenade” – Mussorgsky
8. “The Hut of Baba Yaga” – Mussorgsky
9. “The Curse of Baba Yaga” – Emerson/Lake/Palmer
10. “The Hut of Baba Yaga” – Mussorgsky
11. “The Great Gates of Kiev/The End” – Mussorgsky/Lake

Keith Emerson – Hammond C3 and L100 organs, Moog modular synthesizer (ribbon controller), clavinet (R.I.P.)
Greg Lake – bass guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals (R.I.P.)
Carl Palmer – drums, percussion

Audio & Video remastered by Bruno Samppa, 2016.

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Ivor Cutler – Looking For Truth With A Pin:

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Martin Denny being exotic: