Immediate goggle leak! That’s goggle, not Google! Did you really think that Olivia would let such a typo escape her? I got in the pool, started swimming and water, chlorinated water, was pouring into my right eye. I had to stop several times to try and fix it but to no avail. I eventually got out and went back to my locker to get my spare pair (yes, I had a spare pair). Back in the water, I had to adjust them to fit and consequently, 15 minutes in, I had only done 13 lengths. I swam like a madman and managed to get the mile in with a little help from the staff giving me a couple of extra minutes. It was quite a workout but what I was thinking was how inconvenient these breakdowns are and when they happen.

Monday, no problem, today, a problem from the start. It’s like you get in the car, it doesn’t start, it did yesterday. You put the kettle on, it doesn’t work, an hour ago it did, you switch the light on, the bulb’s blown and tonight that very thing happened in the studio hallway between dinner and me writing this. Things have to break like people have to die but it’s the timing that’s hard to deal with. Things breaking randomly or at inconvenient times is a real hassle, especially if the plane breaks whilst you are sitting in it, 30,000 feet up. But sometimes you just finish something in time and then it breaks like in those films when the bridge is collapsing and the last person just gets across as the whole structure falls into the crevasse below. It’s such a random universe.

Robert Wyatt’s Greatest Misses (double vinyl) arrived in the post today, very nicely packed by The Domino Recording Company. It’s one of those records that would never have come out if there hadn’t been this resurgence in vinyl in the wake of CDs’ demise. It seems we are the generation of solid objects. My parents had a house full of ornaments, my Dad used to say, “every time I see one of these things it reminds me of a special moment in my life”. So in the digital world, you can listen to music, entertain yourself with games, watch films and TV series and ultimately it’s what goes into your eyes and ears that’s the point. But for those of us that like the album covers (and a proper stereo) we feel like we are enhancing the experience by incorporating the physical into the experience. Plus there’s an emotional connection to a physical object as much as there is, in the case of music, to what’s going into your ears.

Take museums, why do we need museums when we can have interactive trips through a program on the internet? Can the physical experience of standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica be equalled by a virtual version or a photograph? Does the experience of seeing a real Egyptian mummy, the casket, the faded colours, the actual being in the presence of such a thing become inconsequential? Does seeing a film about Paris or an interactive walk through the Paris streets equal the real trip to that incredible city? So what is all this ‘I don’t need a physical copy’? Perhaps you don’t need a real partner either, or a real pet, or a heart?

Dare came into the studio today to load Sydney sessioneer Tony’s tracks onto the computer and on Saturday we will be in the studio listening to them and seeing what needs to be done, seeing how we can contribute. The tracks have bass, drums, guitars, guide vocals, and a little keyboard. We will be working on this (it’s just 4 tracks) as well as all that needs to be done on Ahad’s record. We will be working on these projects until Olivia and I leave for Portugal. It’s hard to know exactly when we will be back, the future is so uncertain.

In February/March Olivia and I have shows booked in mainland Europe and we’ve been looking at the UK in April/May but if things don’t change in virus land we will possibly be forced to stay put in Porto like we have been forced to stay put here. Of course, the nice thing about being forced to stay here is that we have the sea, the studio, the archive and Dare and I can work on projects (and there’s the pasties too). In Porto, we will have a new country, a new language, a new culture and that will be exciting (also the sea and pasteis de nata). The Songwriting & Guitar Guidance sessions I can continue online, I can still write and study French (and Portuguese) and create. It might be the perfect time to learn the Logic music program on my computer and then possibly I can contribute to projects and work with people remotely, at least in exchanging ideas on songs. I won’t have my guitars or my amps or Dare’s technical skills so playing on someone else’s records from Porto might be tricky. If that needs to happen I’ll come back here to do it. But there’s also the continuation of the next Noctorum album to consider, I have to be here to do that.

And then there’s Brexit, the new visa rules and the restricted travel. There’s the registering in Portugal for us, finding a flat, opening a bank account, finding out where the grocery store is and what the Portuguese word for broccoli is (it’s broccoli). We also have to see if we like it there. We hear good things from everybody about Portugal so we are optimistic. Will the Anekdoten live shows happen next year? Will I be able to travel to Sweden to rehearse? We just don’t know, we live in a world of impossible planning.

Music today is the other two Van Halen records which for some reason I didn’t play in chronological order – Women And Children First (1980) and 1984 (1984). These are the last two albums before the Sammy Hagar era and it only took Why Can’t This Be Love to lose them for me from here on. I guess their audience didn’t lose them though and although the brilliance of David Lee Roth’s showmanship was there for all to see and although he seemed irreplaceable, it was Eddie Van Halen’s spectacular guitar playing that was the crucial element in the band and they could have got Daffy Duck as the lead singer and the fans would have been there to hear Eddie play that magical guitar.

Interview Of The Daze

Thank you to everyone who has their preorders in for the new MOAT album Poison Stream as well as whatever else you have picked from the menu. It seems that with Indiegogo each thing you pick has to be ordered separately, who knows why? I’d like the nut loaf, the carrots and the new potatoes please, why can’t I have them on the same plate? That’s why we have made it so you can order the vinyl and CD together if you want them both, plus at a discount price. We could try and put other things together too but which things? We’re happy to see some people picking the mystery box. If you pick the mystery box, Olivia will send you a mail to discuss, we don’t want to send you something you already have. We’ve had a couple of positive reviews for Acid Rain here. The campaign is one day old and it’s been a good start, thank you. We have a few weeks to go finishing on Olivia’s birthday (December 5th).

It’s so exciting having a new record available and I really appreciate the support in purchasing it so we can continue to make these records into the future, at the moment they are queueing up but we have to sell them to continue to make them. Space Summit and the Jerome Froese project are coming next and then we’ll see with a new Noctorum album started, Ahad’s album near completion, Tony’s EP in Sydney. Don’t worry, they won’t all be in the same week or even the same kind of music (Salim), you can pick and choose over a period of time.

We were in the studio today with Ahad’s project, I was in and out, Dare was doing a couple of rough mixes to send to a piano player and generally listening through the tracks to get a sense of what more they might need. Mainly backing vocals are missing which Dare and I will do, but also cello, trumpet and piano before the mix will start. The process of making a record is quite a journey and in Ahad’s case even more so when you think that it all started with his brother booking him a sesh with me and us meeting in Starbucks in New York on December 4th 2017. From there to here and soon to have a finished album produced by Dare and I with me playing all the guitars and bass, Eddie on drums, what a trip.

I bought the November Mojo and Uncut magazines yesterday, they’re so expensive, £5.85 each but you do get an interesting CD and an amazingly deep analysis in the articles. I also bought the last issue of Shindig for £5.99. It would be way cheaper to get a subscription. In fact, In Deep Music Archive supporter Andy Collison bought us a year’s subscription to PROG magazine, one less for the overall bill (Thank You, Andy). I like to buy these magazines although I don’t read them thoroughly because there’s only so many hours in a day, but they often have interesting articles and it’s good to see what records are being released. We can be happy that albums are reviewed but you can only rely on your own taste and you only have to look at Pitchfork as a modern review site or Robert Christgau as an old review institution to know that you can’t take what they say seriously especially in retrospect. The NME used to do a great job of destroying people but not always a great job of objectivity. The problem for them was having a Go Betweens fan review AC/DC, they didn’t think that might be a problem because the excoriating music they didn’t like and hyping to the heavens the thing they did like was their modus operandi.

In my own experience, all you can do is not get carried away when you get a great review and don’t commit suicide when you get a bad one. Luckily these days the people who don’t like you tend to leave you alone and concentrate on their own thing which makes much more sense. Mojo cover – Queen, Shindig – CSNY, Uncut – PJ Harvey and Q and all the Metal magazines, the DJ magazines and all the other genres will all have their own heroes, what could be wrong with that?

I always wonder about art and time, politics and time. It seems to me that there should be more time to listen to an interview, or a band. There should be more time to listen to anyone. For example, every time a politician is interviewed it’s over in a minute. If it’s in-depth it’s over in half an hour. Why should things have an end, why can’t interviews be open-ended and why don’t the politicians want more time, why don’t the interviewers want more time, why don’t the public want more time? The length should be based on either running out of things to say or fatigue. Why not?

Music today is continuing with the much-missed Eddie Van Halen. Yesterday the Song Of The Daze was Jump, the reason being was that it looked like such a happy time for Eddie and the lads in the band, smiling his way through the video and playing a killer solo. Today it’s Fair Warning (1981) and Diver Down (1982), still two albums away from Jump which was on their sixth album (1984). But today and looking back at the music that was on one of yesterday’s albums, Van Halen 1 (1978), one of the most groundbreaking and awe-inspiring tracks was Eruption – it’s another world of technique and remember this was recorded in 1977. Here’s a later version of this track with Sammy Hagar introducing him, it’s 13 minutes.

Song Of The Daze

So at midnight tonight here in England, we began with the Indiegogo campaign for the new MOAT album Poison Stream to be released through Schoolkids Records in the not too distant future. The album is the second collaboration with Swedish-German multi-instrumentalist composer Niko Röhlcke who plays with popular Swedish band Weeping Willows. The album was made with our usual crew with Dare at the controls, Eddie John on drums and Olivia on strings and design. The front cover picture was taken by my old Swedish friend Jan Uddenfeldt. It’s exciting. A new album ready to launch, two songs released, GONE BY NOON and the latest ACID RAIN and a whole new album to discover. A gatefold sleeve with all the lyrics, translucent green vinyl and CD digipak and there’s even music! There’s going to be all kinds of items available to support the campaign including, handwritten & illustrated lyrics, house concerts, skype concerts, postcards from exotic locations, signed prints and mystery boxes! So check out the campaign here.

 
I seem to be filling up every minute of every day with something and by the time I got to bed last night my head was spinning (like The Exorcist) with the following days’ responsibilities. I was up for day 16 of my ‘swim a mile’ regimen and it was tricky today because the pool was full of turtles. The problem with the turtle is that it has no concept of rhythm and if there is a slick streamlined dolphin (that’s me) coming up behind them they have no awareness and don’t let you pass. It’s not all of them but enough of them to make it a problem (caravans in August). It’s hard fitting in a mile in 50 minutes and when you have to stop and wait it means you have to swim harder to fit it in. But I’ve knocked five minutes off that mile from when I began 16 miles ago, I’m down to 45 mins which seems like about 10 minutes behind the fast lane but makes me fast in the medium lane (it’s all relative). If I carry on like this I’ll be finished before I start.

Thanks to Gert Volkmer for sending some ex-band artefacts, two bootleg cassettes and a 7-inch single, all good material for the archive. Donations to the archive are most welcome whether they be rare Peruvian Psych or the ticket you saved when you went to see ABBA in 1978 and can no longer think of a reason to keep it. I see the archive as a museum of artefacts as much as I do of music. Books, instruments, and concert tickets as well as anything else you can think of – it’s a veggie Hard Rock Café, except instead of Prince’s jacket, it’s Robert Wyatt’s. Instead of Eric Clapton’s guitar, it’s Tom Verlaine’s but really as I write this, I realise everybody is welcome, it’s just that we include those that are not welcome at the Hard Rock, too.

Outside the trees were shaking so hard that they were blurred. As I walked past them I wondered about the birds, where are they when the wind blows like this if not in the trees? But what do they do when the branches are bending and catapulting anything that sits on them high into the air? You couldn’t see the birds anywhere. Where were the seagulls? Even the hardy crows were missing. The smaller birds, the sparrows, the wagtails, the chaffinches and the jenny wrens, the robins and even the magpies and the jackdaws were simply gone. The wind raged on and up in the sky the rain clouds were being blown in and blown out just as quickly. The blue patches seemed like they may endure but the winter’s grey was too thick and eventually, the drizzle came down and drove everyone inside, the birds remained aloof.

I had sessions today, Jeff in Ohio, but Noelle wasn’t well (get better Noelle) and Chris was taken up with work, but it freed me up to finally write down all those records I was playing in September. They’ve been leaning against the stereo for weeks, I just haven’t had time to add them to the list but finally today, I did. If you ever want to see what’s being played at the In Deep Music Archive, then go here. I’ve kept it up for about four years.

Music today comes with the shocking news that Eddie Van Halen has died of cancer at the age of 65. I knew he was sick, I’d heard a rumour but to lose this giant of the electric guitar is hard to take. All those virtuosos, all those unbelievable guitar players that adopted that style that blew our minds in the late seventies into the eighties but it was him that never sounded like anyone else, a true innovator. His style was so personal and so perfect, he destroyed the old school, he did for guitar players what Punk did for Top Of The Pops, he rewrote the manual on how to play the guitar for the masses. How sad that he has gone. RIP Eddie.

Song Of The Daze

In the town today the sky was half black and half blue and by the time the day had closed its doors, it was a low grey with spits of rain. I’d gone out to pasty land to find that there had been a delivery problem and they had none…but only none of the one I like. So I had to hit the competitors (Warren’s instead of Rowe’s) and despite their multiple shops, there was only one item I could eat, a rather forlorn-looking vege sausage roll. The pain we must suffer some days. On my travels I ran into Uffie, Christine, Steve, cool locals who I chatted with and saw Richard, Sean and J and various other familiar faces in a town that gets familiar when you’ve been here for seven months (we came for two). I went down to the Nag Champa shop and bought a box, the grocery store for broccoli and mushrooms and by the time I got to the studio, it was time to leave again to take some pics, see the sea and hang in the graveyard!

The Penzance graveyard is an atmospheric destination when the black side of the sky is engulfing the blue side of the sky. The result is a dirty grey with an underlying wind that threatens an early darkness, a wet return to studio land and the rattling of windows once inside. A man walked by with his dog, a cocker spaniel, I said hello and chatted with him, a really friendly man, originally from Newfoundland and here since he was 13. Somewhere in there was his Canadian accent which he told us was very “Irish like” and when he went to Dublin, he fell back into it and people thought he was Irish. There were squirrels foraging in the ground for their hidden stores and crows strolling between the gravestones like they were killing time and waiting for a grave to open and give them their orders.

On the way back we walked up Chapel St past where Steckfensters was. The shop, once the biggest fascinating curio shop in town, closed down last week after years of browsing and buying mad ornamental knick-knacks and mysterious metal objects that were hard to determine their use. The ladies that ran it, Zoe and Julia, were unable to continue in a world where the boot sales aren’t happening and finding interesting stock for the shop had become too hard. Sad to see it go but businesses like this are failing all over the world, anything interesting is dying.

Today the weather drove me to my beautiful Italian coat that I bought in Buenos Aires one summer. It was completely the wrong month for such a thing but it fit me so perfectly I had to buy it. It wasn’t too expensive, the only issue was carrying it back to Europe. Anyway, I’m soo glad I did. It’s that time again, the time of layers, adding items as the weather worsens. It’s a good opportunity to find cool shirts, long pants, waistcoats and all kinds of groovy jackets. It’s also the time to look forward to what Olivia will be wearing from day to day as she always has phenomenal sartorial elegance.

As we have to endure more and more political absurdity I feel myself returning to the future, looking for relief by immersing myself in music, imagining sanity. I bought another copy of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfant Terribles today, just to see it around to remind myself of the world of books that I once lived in far more often than I do at the moment. I also bought Ian McEwan’s novella The Cockroach, a political Brexit satire based on Kafka’s tale but here a cockroach is transformed into the prime minister. Read the review from The Guardian here.

I miss my books and like my records I have a library, boxes and boxes of gems collected on my travels around the world. Plus I also have my father’s and my grandfather’s book collections which I managed to rescue after my father’s death. I never met my grandfather but after inheriting his book collection I know I missed out on a fascinating man. His wife, my grandmother, and where the Willson in Willson-Piper comes from is another story but I can tell you she was a rather scary woman who after my grandfather’s death lived in a hotel on the seafront in Blackpool. She wore a rather pungent perfume that would make me gag when she came near and whenever she walked her stockings rubbed together at the top of her thighs, signalling her approach and my chance to escape. Reliving your early childhood can be dangerous, you never know what you might uncover.

Music today took a rather large step into Avant-Rock with post-Henry Cow crazies Art Bears, featuring Fred Frith, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause. It rather makes Nick Cave sound like Phil Collins, ok that’s an exaggeration (no, surely not?), but in my mind, it is everything Nick Cave fans, Rowland S. Howard fans, These Immortal Souls fans and The Wreckery fans should like, except it’s seventies and comes from a more Progressive fountain but it also somehow connects musically to Robert Wyatt and with Dagmar, Amon Düül II. Frith’s guitar sounds like a chain saw, Krause’s voice like a madwoman escaped and Cutler’s lyrics, tales from beyond. Brilliant.

Dagmar Krause was a member of Slap Happy and part of the Slap Happy/Henry Cow collaboration. She also made an album (Babble) with Kevin Coyne and was a member of the unforgettable Art Bears. She made this tribute to Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler for Hannibal records, produced by early Floyd and Nick Drake producer Joe Boyd, released in 1986. You might need to be versed in German cabaret and theatre to appreciate this but you’ll be happy to know that Richard Thompson plays guitar and Danny Thompson double bass with a cast of unknowns (to me) playing the more exotic instruments – but Wix is there on Synths in his pre-McCartney days.

Song Of The Daze

Warning: Football talk appears in today’s blog, alongside music, talk of brains, neuroscience, weather, surfing and Portugal.

Congrats to Everton for their winning streak and their topping the Premiership, Calvert-Lewin is on fire as are all long-haired people with double-barrelled names (sorry). Today also saw one of Liverpool’s greatest massacres losing 7-2 to Aston Villa in a match that Villa deserved to win – by more goals! It’s a pattern – today Man U also lost 6-1 to Spurs and last week Man City lost 5-2 to Leicester. Impressive Leeds held Man City to a 1-1 draw and Leicester lost 3-0 to West Ham. David Moyes and Mané are out with Covid (we wish them a speedy recovery). Allison is injured and Adrián let in 7 goals but you can’t just blame the goalkeeper and the loss of Mané. Liverpool were terrible, as were Man City, as were Man U. What happens to these teams? One must always remember when you are watching a football game that you are often watching 11 millionaires playing against 11 millionaires managed by millionaires at a club owned by billionaires. They say the trophy and the competitive spirit is the motivation, winning for your club, but when you see lesser teams, teams with smaller budgets and fewer stars, destroying the mega-teams, you have to wonder if it was a bad day at the office or anger at the caviar for not being the right temperature.

Today was Ahad’s last day in the studio. We managed to complete lead vocals on 13 songs in 5 days, good going. We finished at 7PM, just before the Liverpool game. Ahad was catching the night train to London at 9.15PM, which arrives at something like 7AM. He was catching an early flight back to Istanbul and this time tomorrow he will be there – like nothing happened, although we have the proof that it did. Dare and I will now continue with the project, hiring a piano player, a trumpet player, a cellist and whoever else we need. We will also concentrate on all the backing vocals that need doing and there’s a lot. Then it’s mix time and then we see what we have. Thanks Ahad, it’s been quite a journey from your first sesh to finishing your lead vocals on this album.

The cold was penetrating the walls of the archive today and October’s signals had me contemplating clothing. We hope to be leaving for Portugal in November but we’ve been told that just because it’s Portugal it doesn’t mean that it’s a lovely warm winter. Porto is in the north and winter means winter in Portuguese (inverno). Another widely unknown thing about Portugal amongst non-surfers is that one of the world’s greatest surfing locations is at Nazaré where they have giant waves – who knew.

Tomorrow is a well-deserved lie-in day, except I have so much to do in the archive – putting records away, writing down the records I played in September on the website. Two days away from MOAT’s Poison Stream Indiegogo launch there’s lots to do. Also, when it’s cold and windy, that’s the time to go and look at the sea, watch the waves, breathe in the air, inhale some massive doses of oxygen. The brain wants oxygen, perhaps brainy people have more direct access to oxygen through wider, more open, channels to the brain, oxygen as brain food. Oxygen tanks every morning for breakfast. I wonder if we will ever conquer the brain’s secrets, the mystery of consciousness, the potential, the powers we have locked inside us to invent, create, understand, evolve.

A few years ago I read a book by V.S. Ramachandran and co-author Sandra Blakeslee, it was really amazing, if you are interested in the brain – go here.

Ramachandran discusses his work with patients exhibiting phantom limbs, the Capgras delusion, pseudobulbar affect and hemispatial neglect following stroke, and religious experiences associated with epileptic seizure, among other disorders. Ramachandran uses these cases to illustrate the construction of body image, and the functioning of mood, decision-making, self-deception, and artistic skill. In the final chapter of the book, Ramachandran addresses the so-called hard problem of consciousness, discussing qualia and various facets of the self.

Music today comes from Tempest, formed by drummer Jon Hiseman and bassist Mark Clarke from Colosseum and joined by vocalist and keyboard player Paul Williams and guitarist Allan Holdsworth. Their first, self-titled album, was released in 1973 and is what might be considered Heavy Prog. It’s great to hear Holdsworth as a riffing Rock lead guitarist instead of a jazzer. I have a white label of this album which I can’t remember buying but must have found somewhere in a dusty record store in the back of beyond. Their second album Living In Fear (1974) saw Allan Holdsworth leave, replaced by Patto’s Ollie Halsall another talented player who would later join Kevin Ayers. There’s a weird version of The Beatles’ Paperback Writer with the riff incorrectly played, it’s too fast and one wonders what they were thinking but it’s interesting hearing it as a Rock song with mad guitar solos. This album seems to be leaning more to songs than Progressive workouts although in truth there’s both. If you’ve never heard Holdsworth or Halsall play the guitar…speed and feel, technique and heart.

Song Of The Daze