In the studio today and tomorrow working on Ahad’s record. Today we were on backing vocals and all three of us were in there, singing our hearts out, first Dare, then me and then Olivia. Harmonies, like percussion, are tricky, keeping the beat, staying in tune, singing along with another voice and trying to match the inflexions whilst singing different notes. The singer sings and you have to follow, stretching out the word and the end of the line like he or she does but you also have to be careful with the letters – for example the letter ‘S’, if you don’t say the ‘S’ sound at exactly the right time you get an elongated staggered hiss, if you don’t say ‘D’ at the right time you get ‘D-D’, it sounds wrong. So what we often do is try to infer the letter at the end of the line, slightly mouth it, caress it, suppress it. Think of those great harmony bands like The Byrds, Crosby, Stills And Nash, The Everly Brothers, The Andrews Sisters, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, all these people were highly skilled in singing harmonies and were famous for it.

You may know about the documentary film 20 Feet From Stardom that tells the story of the faceless backing singers that support the famous lead singers. These people are incredible singers in their own right but remain unknown to the masses (not the nerds like me but to the masses). The film documents the talented backing singers that stood next to major stars but never got to be the focus of attention despite their talents. Then there’s the story of Clare Torry who jammed the wordless vocal on Rick Wright’s The Great Gig In The Sky on The Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon (1973) and was paid £30 for her trouble. She eventually sued for royalties and co-authorship and settled for an undisclosed amount.

Talking of backing singers, David Bowie’s remastered Low (1977) arrived in the post today, it’s the second time I’ve bought it, the first time it was returned because the courier couldn’t find the archive. The reason I mention it is because of the backing singer on the song Sound And Vision which was none other than producer Tony Visconti’s wife Mary Visconti aka Mary Hopkin. Remembered fondly by those of us that had ears and eyes, a beating heart and a television for winning the talent show Opportunity Knocks presented by Hughie Green (Paula Yates’ father) in the sixties. We fondly remember Mary as the Welsh lass with the beautiful voice who had hits on Apple Records with the McCartney produced Those Were The Days (1968), Temma Harbour (1972) and the McCartney penned Goodbye (1969). She sang Knock Knock Who’s There, the 1970 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, she came 2nd. She later joined Oasis, no not that Oasis, the other band called Oasis that also featured the late Peter Skellern who was best known for his mega seventies hit You’re A Lady (1972), the song my mum hated above all others.

Out there in the awkward world of weather, I braved walking to the pool in shorts and T-shirt, waistcoat and an extra shirt, knowing that when I got there I would be able to fit everything in a small cramped locker. If I took my warm coat it would be awkward so I didn’t wear it. It was just bearable to wear so few warm clothes on a rainy, slightly windy, chilly day and yes, everyone else was wrapped up. It was a day of showers and drizzle and trips to pasty land were grim, trips to the greengrocers laborious, standing in a long queue with wet hair holding a cauliflower and bag of chestnut mushrooms, the three older women in front of me all with walking sticks and chatty.

At the studio, the pasty arrived and it was so hot that we were looking for cold metal objects to cool it down. It was almost nuclear and when I took it out of the bag it was in another bag so you didn’t scorch your fingers. It eventually cooled down and once we had checked it for any renaming radioactive materials I devoured it like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Which reminds me of the Tyrannosaurus Rex collection I purchased from the charity store opposite the bakers the other day – see, everything’s connected!

Music today was always going to be David Bowie’s Low because I’ve been dying to get my hands on a pristine copy of this eclectic album. Side 1 – short weird vocal songs, Side 2 – long weird instrumental songs. I do have this record about five times in different pressings but getting it brand new is really great. I’ve been buying up the back catalogue of remasters from the beginning and I now have everything up to Lodger apart from Stage and David Live. I love this arty music made for all the right reasons, searching, following inspiration and in this case we probably need to be thanking Jerome’s Dad as the Berlin trilogy goes wandering into Tangerine Dream territory as well as its own wonderful exploratory journey. Buy the remastered vinyl right now.

Concert Of The Daze

David Bowie doing Low live in 2002.

Up early (for me) today and down in the archive for a sesh with Tim in Sydney starting at 11AM due to daylight saving (also not relevant in WA as well as Queensland I found out yesterday). There’s something about the mornings, it’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that it’s already the morning when I go to bed, I bet the mornings are amazing if you got to bed at 11PM the night before. What the early to bed people don’t experience is the stillness of 2AM-5AM. I mean, I have seen mornings many times between 7AM and 11AM but I don’t think the early to bed people know much about 2AM-5AM. It’s a wonderful time, it’s so quiet. How is it possible that such a busy world can just switch off completely for these hours? It’s a time of peace, the phone doesn’t ring, the traffic stops, the night is a cosy black blanket that even mutes the sounds of the animals. I realise that I’m talking about a small English town in winter. In the hotter countries, night creatures come out, in cities, clubs are dancing and out on the freeways, some trucks are speeding to avoid the daytime chaos, delivery trucks, garbage trucks are working, road-workers and the sex industry. Well, some of these things are on hold, but in normal times the early mornings have a smaller population and for me it’s a time of creativity, undisturbed by the distractions of the daylight and early evening hours, populated by the masses.

After the sesh, I had to go to the post office to pick up a record. It was a vinyl copy of Teenage Fanclub’s classic Bandwagonesque (1991). I also ordered Grand Prix, cheap at £15 and £12 for these two classic early nineties Brit albums. Inspired by Big Star and collecting old guitars, harmonies and what we used to call Pop songs before the term was hijacked. Although they call Katy Perry types Pop these days, I think it was actually Michael Jackson who hijacked it, calling himself “The King Of Pop”, it always felt like a square peg, round hole for me. He couldn’t call himself “The King Of R’n’R”, Elvis already had that crown but surely “Pop” didn’t accurately describe MJ, nor did R’n’R. He was great, sure, but he wasn’t the king of either Pop or R’n’R.

Outside on the pasty hunt and the package hunt, I swept through the drizzle as fast as possible, umbrellaless but wearing jeans finally on this nippy wet day and grabbing my favourite Italian coat that was soon covered in thousands of small glimmering droplets.

It’s autumn and when Olivia and I went down to see the sea today, the darkness was falling and silhouetted against a winter sky, the leaves were turning brown and were beginning to pile up on the pathways. It was nice to have to wear clothes instead of removing them. In the summer months, I’m always too hot and clothes are suffocating but it is with great joy that I can return to the jackets and the long pants.

By the time we’d reached the beach the distant sun was almost gone, puffs of small black clouds hung in the sky where the light was sinking and we climbed from the tip of the sea over the grinding stones back to the supermarket. Inside we bought our usual list of brie for 2AM snacks, butter for the mushrooms and the peas, muesli, bran, tissues (when it gets soggy, the bran kind of tastes the same as the tissues) and 400 toilet rolls in case the world ends (if that happens won’t the toilets also end, making the 400 toilet rolls redundant?). The supermarket down by the beach is a German company, Lidl, pronounced Liddle in English, pronounced Leedle in German. At this time of year, they start to get German Christmas treats and Olivia’s face lit up as she relived her childhood.

On the way backwards and forwards to the post office, I went past a house that is being renovated and in the front garden there was a cement mixer with a workman mixing the cement. I thought to myself isn’t it fascinating that cement has to keep moving so it doesn’t set? So it’s not just a cement mixer, it’s a cement liquefier. You sometimes see those big cement mixer trucks on the road with their load turning so they can get to their destination and still be carrying liquid cement. But what happens when the mechanism that keeps the load spinning breaks down? Does that mean the cement sets in the truck? If it does, how do you get it out? Do they drill it out? Or do they just throw the truck away?

Music today is the fifth Genesis album and the fourth of their classic run. Selling England By The Pound was released in 1973. Artwork by Betty Swanwick from a painting she had already done called The Dream where she added the lawnmower to connect to the album’s future hit single, I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe, No.21 in the UK). The album reached No.3 in the UK charts and yes it’s true I’m always talking about these four classic Genesis records between 1970-1973 but they are so influential to me and I realise that my 12 string thing, which I haven’t really analysed, probably comes from these Genesis albums and of course Jimmy Page’s amazing 12 string playing, not The Byrds’. Of course, there’s other 12 string influencers, Pye Hastings from Caravan and Patrick Mata from Community FK, George Harrison, but apart from Mata and his crazy fuzz 12 string influence, it’s all English.

Concert Of The Daze

Interview Of The Daze

If you are in Australia and you are reading this, you are probably awake. In dreams it seems you can sometimes see words written in pages of open books but they always seem hard to decipher like the dream doesn’t want to give up its secrets. But as you are awake and entering daylight saving (as I remember not in Queensland) as your spring is on the way and your covid cases are not exploding like they are here in Europe and in America and everywhere else west of Taiwan, then you should tune into Purple Haze at 7.30PM East Coast time on 98.7 or 98.3 FM in Melbourne or stream via www.rppfm.com.au where I will be doing A LOT of talking and hosts Bruce and Steve will be playing A LOT of music with selected tracks from all my lesser-known projects from years gone right up to the present with old favourites and new songs you will not have heard before. Tune in, turn on and drop out – it’s summer.

The show will also be available from noon GMT on Marty’s YouTube channel here:

 
Sunday is always a big sessioneer and football day, although I’m not sure how many of the sessioneers actually play football. We could actually start a team, Sessioneers United, we could have a special kit with a modern look, a guitar and a book and pen as the team logo instead of the name of a sponsor and a logo designed in 1885. Our kit would of course be all black. We could have a nickname, The Darkness, nope too late, there’s a silly band called that already. What about The Wailing Writers? Whenever we move forward with the ball we wail poetically at our opponents, it would be some kind of artistic haka.

Today I had a big talk with Tony (artist) and DC (engineer) about the EP we are working on. That went straight into Wales vs Ireland and then straight into Jed and writing for the next Space Summit album, even though the first one hasn’t been unleashed as yet (two songs on the Purple Haze radio show Monday). Both these seshes were a success with a route forward on the Tony project which I believe will be called Arctic Lake, so from now, that’s how I will refer to it. I wrote two pieces for Jed to take away, one mad, the other less mad, but both with lots of potential.

From there it was straight into England vs Belgium, the No.1 ranked team in the world. Over here in England, we have all learned to hide behind the couch when England are playing an important game against a hot team. We also used to hide behind the couch when we were watching Doctor Who, always when the Daleks appeared and especially with the Cybermen and sometimes we thought that we could only succeed as a football team if we had Daleks and Cybermen on our side. Like a miracle we won 2-1 and didn’t look terrible, I wonder how it is to be Olivia where her national team expects to win, where the fans expect them to win and – they win.

Olivia disappeared into the day taking tons of recycling from the studio to designated places, the skateboard park and Dare’s house, whilst I concentrated on preparing the vegetables for studio dinner tonight and executed Day 129 of French. It’s getting harder, they have this section where a French person talks at you quite fast and then you have to answer a multiple-choice question. I must be learning because I get things right – I also get things wrong but that’s how learning works.

Olivia returned and over dinner, we watched part of the France – Portugal game where I was listening for French chatter and Olivia for Portuguese chatter – it was 0-0, they cancelled each other out, star players against star players, France are the world champions and Portugal the European champions – this is what happens with top teams.

Straight from that with all its connections to our lives and the future and to Doug in Wappingers Falls for the third and final sesh of the day. Only three sessions but they were long and involved and were bookmarked by football games so there wasn’t a lot of time for playing music.

But, music today wanted to be another early Genesis album, their second, Trespass, released this month in 1970. On release, it didn’t chart and sold just 6,000 copies BUT it went to No.1 in Belgium which was appropriately topical after today’s game. It was the first and last album for their third drummer John Mayhew before Phil Collins joined and was also the last album for their guitarist Anthony Phillips before Steve Hackett joined (with Mick Barnard in between). It is another Paul Whitehead cover. As usual, AllMusic got it all wrong and the album is the beginning of their brilliant Gabriel-fronted career until he left after The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in 1975. What a glorious five years of music those albums were.

Song Of The Daze

More Genesis from Belgium, the whole Belgian TV show, this time in 1972, earlier video material for the Trespass period is probably lost.

The Fountain Of Salmacis 0:05
Twilight Alehouse 7:24
The Musical Box 13:20
The Return Of The Giant Hogweed 23:00

In the studio today working on two sessioneer projects. Dare did some backing vocals on one of Ahad’s songs but today we were supposed to be working on Tony’s project – the idea was Dare was going to sing the song but the lyrics were sent to me but not to him so he started working on an Ahad song instead. I arrived after swimming (18 miles in these 6 weeks) and I found the lyrics and we decided to get on with the Tony project anyway as I have a sesh with him tomorrow. So we listened to the tracks (there’s 4) and started work on one of them, Dare singing the lead vocal, me the backing vocals. Dare has a bit of a higher range than I do and this one was too high for me so Dare sang it (it was high for him too). I just sent it to Tony and his bassist/engineer DC and I’ll find out tomorrow what they think. This will be the third sessioneer project that Dare and I have worked on in the studio, three of many more we hope and in fact tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll be seshing with Jed for Space Summit Two before Space Summit One has even been seen. That though will change this coming Monday.

A few weeks ago I did an interview with Bruce Hutchins and Steve Meyers at RPPFM radio in Melbourne. The programme is called Purple Haze and Bruce and Steve have interviewed many different musicians for their show which is long and involved. It runs for 2hrs 38m and is a retrospective of all my projects excluding the ex-band, All About Eve and The Saints – so all the projects that the masses don’t know. We are talking and playing songs from solo albums, MOAT, Noctorum, Atlantaeum Flood and Anekdoten, we have also slotted in a couple of teaser tracks from the Space Summit album which will appear at some point next year. Nothing yet from Jerome Froese and me because that is a work in progress as are other sessioneer projects like Ahad and Tony. So if you wish to listen to this very involved radio broadcast you can do so on Monday, October 12th at 7.30PM Australian East Coast Time, 9.30AM UK time and 1.30AM US West Coast time, the rest of the times you can work out for yourselves (if you live in Mauritius for example). If you miss it we will be putting it on YouTube at some point after the broadcast so you don’t have to get up at a ridiculous time to hear it. This from Purple Haze:

ARIA inductee Marty Willson-Piper joins Purple Haze this Monday night, Oct 12 from 7.30pm to discuss his career, music, new projects and thoughts. Tune in on 98.7 or 98.3 FM in Melbourne or stream via www.rppfm.com.au or your favourite Radio App.

I was in the greengrocer’s the other day and the lady was talking about pet guinea pigs. I was in Peru to visit Machu Picchu some years ago and I was staying in the town of Cusco (which by the way is the town where John Peel died of a heart attack at the age of 65). On the menu in the restaurants they had “Asado conejillo de indias comida tradicional en Perú”. If you haven’t guessed, that’s roasted guinea pig, traditional meal of Peru. If you put those Spanish words into Google and you are brave enough, you will see the delicacy displayed. So to us, it’s an awful idea, you might as well roast your cat or get the freezer stocked up for a week and roast the dog. But to them it’s normal and without getting into eating animals, being vegan or vegetarian, it seems that if you bring a human up to think one way, do or act one way, to eat or to live one way it’s hard for them to shake it off. It’s hard to break the tradition, the ties of the family, the indoctrination of the parents, the authorities and any other major influence in your life when really the first thing you should ask is – is what I’m being told to do correct? And the answer is always, make up your own mind shedding the influence of others completely so you can make an objective decision about how to live your life and what is right and what is wrong. That’s freedom.

The clocks have changed in Australia which means I have to get up an hour earlier for the sesh with Tony tomorrow. There’s talk of them doing away with daylight saving but this is a tradition I like, not because of the benefits it’s supposed to give but because I like how something so routine suddenly changes. I also like forgetting about it and either getting an extra hour of sleep that I didn’t expect or losing an hour without realising and finding yourself perplexed at why everything seems to be not quite right – and then you remember. So don’t change it, keep time weird!

Music today has been very weird. I woke up Olivia today with another Genesis treat and put on Foxtrot for her as she rose from her golden slumbers. The album was released this month in 1972, a mere 48 years ago. How come it sounds so good when so much music from beyond the seventies sounds so horrible? I suppose we have to blame progress or at least the engineers and producers who brought terrible drum sounds into music and destroyed the possibility of listening to so many albums that might have been good if they hadn’t been released in the eighties. Even Kraftwerk sounds amazing whereas bands that were influenced by them often don’t. Foxtrot includes the classic 23-minute Supper’s Ready which is a tour de force in its genre and although it might not appeal to anti-proggers I never tire of it.

Song Of The Daze (note the three 12 strings)

On the edge of the forest stood two figures, one taller than the other. The woman wore a long black skirt that made her look taller than she was, her torso’s clothing was hard to distinguish disappearing into a blur of fabric but her face, her face was white like the face of a ghost. Standing next to her a child, also giving the impression that she might be tall. He (I’m pretty sure it was a he) wore a suit, a dark brown pinstripe, well-fitted and he was groomed like he was visiting the cousins. He was probably 12 years old, hard to say with the adult clothing. They stood perfectly still, both staring outward onto the clearing in front of the forest. It wasn’t just a field, the grass was long in tufts, unruly, a result of the influence of the trees. It wasn’t a paddock for animals, deer may have roamed there, foxes and rabbits hidden in the tangle but it was no place to keep stock or crop.

It was then that the pair began to move forward towards me but they weren’t stepping one foot in front of the other, their legs weren’t moving at all but still, they were advancing. The long grass was hiding their feet so it was difficult to say what was causing their momentum. It was then that the reality began to reveal itself. As they moved forwards everything behind them began to wilt. The trees drooped, the branches sagged and everything became black and white. They were killing the vegetation, draining the colour out of the forest and the field. A rabbit shot past me at breakneck speed, a flutter of birds flew up from a small bush but too late as the landscape turned them to dust in mid-air, their remains a cloud of flaky soot and feathers slowly spiralling back to the Earth.

For me there was nowhere to run, they were advancing too quickly and although I wasn’t exactly frozen to the spot, I remained static. The area behind them, desolate and dead, was now extensive and I wondered what poison they emitted to kill life so quickly and easily, to decimate and destroy and just by their presence create a wasteland that resembled a war zone or the surface of a dead planet. They had been perhaps a mile away and through my binoculars, I could see the grimaces on the faces, their dead eyes, yellow with thin lines of blood vessels in the eyeball and a bleak pallor. Still, the closeness of the two like mother and child was apparent, connected by that unseen force between parents and their children. But their lips were dried like they had little water in their bodies, like they might flake into dust like the birds at a touch.

I felt no fear, more curiosity. I questioned the power they wielded, the ability to create such chaos on a whim. Was it revenge, a haunting, a searching for those responsible for their own demise? And why obliterate nature, what harm could the good green Earth deserve? As I looked up I saw a line in the sky that separated that which was alive from that which was dead and it was then that I noticed it was moving more quickly. It was moving forwards in waves like a creeping smouldering flame on a blackened piece of paper taking the print and the colour to black until it was an indecipherable layer.

I removed the binoculars from around my neck, placed my hat down on the ground in front of me. I slowly undid the laces on my boots, removing one then the other plus two odd socks, red and brown, and placed them in the throat between the laces and the back of the leather. Barefoot in loose shirt and shorts, I stood and faced the oncoming surge and closed my eyes. There was no fear, no panic, no desire to turn away. There was no sound except for the quiet whistle of a mellow wind, consistent as a draft under a door. It made me shiver slightly as the cold fingers of that insistent breeze hit my chest and ankles simultaneously and then my face as my head was slightly raised and leaning back beyond my shoulders, my chest thrust forward catching the light air on the pecs, nipples and breastbone.

The aroma of summer had gone replaced by the cold damp smell of rotting leaves, the green mould on the walls of the cellars, the petrichor, the worms on the lawns. Slugs left their slime in trails on the footpaths. A murder of crows circling dilapidated turrets of a disused collapsing mansion, ripped dirty curtains trembling beyond a broken pane of glass.

Early evening empty streets, only lonely orange lamps unable to penetrate the dark but for an eclipse of moths circling the deeper darkness beyond the light. The plague of winter had come.

Music today was early as I had a session late with Noel, French, writing and another bout with the diamonds that made me close my eyes and wish away any oncoming pain, it seemed to work but I lost a lot of time. It might have been the fact that I didn’t have to get up today and I slept too long. The new Pretenders album arrived in the post and I’m dying to hear it as I heard one song online that I really liked, a return to form but it was Genesis’s Nursery Cryme that found its way onto the stereo more for Olivia than anyone else.

Released in 1971 it was the first to feature Phil Collins on drums and Steve Hackett on guitar who was tapping long before Eddie ever was. The bizarre cover art of a croquet game with severed heads and the childlike macabre of it all was a sensation for the imagination for a young teenager in the seventies. Mellotrons and 12 string guitars from Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, Victorian fairytales and lyrical wonders from Peter Gabriel. Collins sings For Absent Friends and adds new depth to the group with his vocal skills to support Gabriel. The album cover is by Paul Whitehead, also responsible for Trespass and Foxtrot as well as Van der Graaf Generator’s H To He Who Am The Only One and Pawn Hearts (ask me about that title someday). Whitehead also did three Le Orme album covers and Tom Fogerty’s Myopia – and many others.

When they bury me with my records, you can put this one in the casket to enjoy in The Afterlife.

Song Of The Daze