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Today I swam a mile, 64 lengths, freestyle, non-stop 46 minutes. It’s almost a record for me, although I don’t really compete with myself, I get in, do the best I can and hope I don’t get too much slower than before. I actually swam a little more, 70 lengths, I usually finish off with some backstroke and breaststroke to stretch some different muscles. The pool was pretty empty (unsurprisingly), I said “Hello” to one of the regulars as he was getting in. In the lane next to me was a woman. “Hello” he said to her, “How was the cruise?”. Inside I said WHAT?! Their conversation continued. “We went around New Zealand.” she said. “They almost didn’t let us off the boat. We only just managed to get the flight home…”. “No problems on the boat then?”, I offered tentatively. “No, no.” she said. She didn’t look ill, but she was really made up for the pool. I was hoping that she always did this.

Swimming is great, low impact, cardio, lots of muscles being used, the lungs love it. The chlorine is a bit of a problem though. Mostly when I get out my nose starts to run, then comes the sneezing. I suppose that all the good I’m doing to myself might be being ruined by the chemicals. Talking of chemicals some of the older women that come to swim seem to feel the need to wear perfume between home and the leisure centre. The problem with that is that as soon as they get in the water some kind of chemical reaction happens. You can almost see the fumes. The perfume aroma becomes so exaggerated it’s an instant headache if you breathe it in. Another thing that the older ladies do is keep their heads above water, never getting their hair wet. That would drive me mad, getting in the pool and not getting my head under the water, it’s one of the best things about it. I suppose I don’t have a ‘hairdo’. Not anymore, anyway.

Although the terrible situation in Italy is most serious right now I must share with you a moment when I was trying to find out about swimming in an Italian pool whilst being on tour in Italy. I think it was Milan, the ex band was doing some shows there and swimming on tour was the flavour of the day. Putting the effort in to stay fit whilst travelling (even harder work than trying to stay fit whilst at home). I found a pool, really nice place, one of those 100 year old pools with dark green tiles. There was no time to swim before soundcheck or at anytime on arrival day into the city, so knowing that the bus would be leaving early the next morning I asked the woman what time they opened as I’d like to get there between 8AM and 9AM. She looked at me with a confused look and said “Italians don’t swim in the morning, we open at midday”. Am I imagining this? Did this really happen? It sounds absurd.

Jonas arrived from Trier today. We met him on our German tour. Trier is the birthplace of Karl Marx and is also famous for the Porta Nigra (Latin for black gate). It is a Roman city gate, built sometime after 170AD. Jonas is one of the people that runs the venue that we played at in Trier. Small but lovely gig, we slept upstairs and when we awoke and looked out of the window, the Porta Nigra was right there, massive and dominating in the street. Consequently, this is a big tourist town in the summer, there were even tourists there in January. Anyway Jonas was telling us about his frustrations with the universe and we told him he should come and visit us at the Archive, see the lovely Cornish coast, breathe in some fresh sea air, so he did. AND he brought me an album, Marc Ribot and friends, Songs Of Resistance 1942 – 2018. Very cool.

I ran into Steve, the in-house soundman from local venue The Acorn (twice) today. I played there with All About Eve two or three times. It is actually where we recorded most of Fairy Light Nights, I think? Derek, is this true? So Steve and I were discussing if the booked shows at the venue were going ahead (Dom Joly, Boo Hewerdine). It’s the wrong time to be on tour for ticket sales. Us musician types are going to be finding other incomes if we can’t play live and can no longer sell records. Thank the lord for the sessions and the sessioneers. We put a cheeky donate button up for the blog on the website, no pressure. Although for many musicians and people generally out there, this is a nightmare. I heard today that Canada is closing its borders. Does that mean our May gigs in Quebec City with Anekdoten are off? Which means the Olivia and I gigs will be off. I guess we just have to wait and see.

Dare and I are in the studio tomorrow, Tuesday, for more Noctorum sessions. All this is certainly giving us more time to work on this, our fifth album, but I hope they keep the electricity on. Today we took down some recycling to the beach recycling bins. The supermarket is opposite, we went in and for the first time saw the results of the panic buying. I’ve never seen so many empty shelves. The supermarkets here are rationing toilet paper and pasta. It’s probably worse in the big cities. It’s like being in one of those end of the world movies…as long as we finish the album before it all goes South.

Music today has been an investigation into some records I bought at the behest of Steve Slimm who used to have the archive room before I did. He knew about the collection coming in and asked me if I had records by two bands, Marsupilami and 9.30 Fly. I’d never heard of either of them. They are progressive, folkey, flutey, guitary, too, great. I bought reissues of their records ages ago and I’m listening to them tonight. The Marsupilami album I have is from 1970 and the 9.30 Fly is from 1972. These are the times when it really matters having a good stereo.

Next came Gnidrolog, Lady Lake, odd Progressive band that released two albums in 1972 and broke up due to lack of any commercial success. They were formed by the Goldring brothers who named their band after rearranging the letters of their name and adding an ‘o’. Later in the decade they formed a controversial Punk band called the Pork Dukes that enraged the feminists, it’s all quite unexpected. The band also included Nigel Pegrum who joined Steeleye Span and Peter Cowling who joined Pat Travers. Next was Gryphon, described as Progressive Rock and Medieval Folk. They are allegedly famous for being on Radio 1,2,3 and 4 in the same week. BBC stations that feature different styles, catering for all age groups. Gryphon somehow managed to qualify for all of them. Interestingly, like Gnidrolog, two members of Gryphon, Richard Harvey and Jonathan Davie, formed the Punk band The Banned in 1977.

From Prog to Punk, a leap no-one could predict until perhaps you consider one peculiar connection between Prog and Punk…the Rickenbacker bass.

By the way, did I tell you that Jon Bon Jovi was at the Abbey Road zebra crossing yesterday, having his picture taken along with all the nerds? I heard him say to the photographer “Did you get it?”. Rainy old day today, started by sitting in the kitchen with Colleen, all cosy with a cup of tea, watching a pair of goldfinches on the bird feeder. Today was Hampton Court day, we were off to see Henry VIII and the remains of his wives. It’s so close to Biggles and Colleen’s house. We took the train from New Malden, 4 stops and we were there. We walked over the bridge and there it was, the Hampton Court Palace. We went through the gates into the ticket office, I went to pay and as I pulled my card out the woman behind the counter said, we close at 4.30pm today. I looked at her, sighed, weighed up £55 for just over an hour and decided on the spot not to stay. We’ll come back another day, maybe take the boat up the river instead of the train, find a nicer day and spend an hour at least just getting lost in the maze.

So unplanned we went into Central London again. We got off the train at Oxford Circus, Olivia looked at some clothes shops and I went to Sister Ray records on Berwick Street in Soho. Opposite the store is a Swedish cafe (Hi Adam) that Olivia likes, so she went and camped in there whilst I did my best not to buy any records. The problem is that it’s Sister Ray and finding that last Agitation Free record I don’t have, a reissue of the Forest album (the original goes for £600), two early Audience albums and that David Axelrod album, Seriously Deep, that I’ve been dying to buy. What are you going to do? I also bought the new Grimes, Miss Anthropocene, £16 – very affordable. Not sure I’m going to like it, but I wanted to sit down with a latest release, a contemporary album by an artist that isn’t my usual choice. I did it with Solange.

Although it wasn’t planned, it was nice to have another walk around Central London. Oxford Street, Soho, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, Waterloo Station. Record shops, clothes shops, cafes. Walking through Chinatown, being on the underground, hearing all the different languages.

Just being in London and taking it all in. I love the city. But I love the countryside, too, different flavours, watching the birds through the window is as stimulating as watching the humans in the street. We walked past the Palladium (where we saw Roy Harper last year) towards Carnaby Street. Outside the Palladium was a long queue of boys and girls in their late twenties and early thirties, all the men had beards. Who was playing? City and Colour, except Color must be spelt without the ‘u’ because Dallas Green (get it) is American. I suppose fans look like the bands they are queuing to see and the picture outside the venue proved that. The length of the queue and the size of the venue proved how big he is.

This trip to London has been so quick, just passing through. We were hoping to spend more time with Biggles and Colleen, see my luthier buddy Scrim and hang with Boydy and Trish and visit Henry and Abbey Road together, but the problem with life is that it gets in the way with the things you want to do…in your life. Well at least we got to see Bear the fluffy keeshond after his grooming, all fresh and ready for tomorrow morning’s muddy walk. I’ll finish up by saying that the last two days we have been with zillions of people in London, on the tube, in the street, in the shops, we’ve walked through Chinatown twice, hung out in Bar Italia and are staying in the area with the highest concentration of people from Korea in Britain. All alleged Coronavirus hotspots. Masks are a rare sight, there is no feeling of worldwide pandemic panic over here. I just thought you should know that. Although Boots in Oxford Street has run out of hand sanitizer. The best advice I’ve heard is wash your hands regularly, in fact Lush (soap shop) had a sign outside “come in and wash your hands for free”, seemed like a bargain, so we did.

Tomorrow we get the best of both worlds, travelling 6 hours to the Cornish coast. A small seaside town, all kinds of wildlife on the land and in the water, in the streets, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Lots of familiar faces and the In Deep Music Archive where I can deposit and alphabetize all this tour’s record purchases and continue working on the Noctorum, Atlantaeum Flood, Space Summit, Anekdoten, Olivia and I and sessioneers’ projects. So much music, so little time.

After yesterday’s journey from Germany we didn’t wake up till 12.30pm today and as we were having breakfast Biggles and Colleen were having lunch. Today was our Abbey Road day. I lived in London for years, I grew up around Liverpool as a teenager, I worked in Liverpool after school, I had an elder brother who had all The Beatles records, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, but I’d never been to Abbey Road. We walked out into a chilly sunny day (Colleen and Biggles told us that the morning had snow). We took the overground train from New Malden to Waterloo. When we got there we realized it was a big and beautiful Victorian station, originally opened in 1848 (rebuilt in 1922). This is the UK’s busiest station and was originally where the Eurostar was based until it moved to St Pancras in 2007. Apparently you can’t take pics here without permission, so I went to the station office and told them I had a blog. They asked me what it was called and gave me a visitor’s pass. All of a sudden, I felt like an insider.

The other reason I was hanging around here was because of one of the great sixties songs, The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset (the station is mentioned in the lyrics). What a lot of people don’t know is that the song was originally written about Liverpool and was originally called Liverpool Sunset (Waterloo is also a place in the North of Liverpool). Ray Davies was apparently in love with Liverpool and Merseybeat in 1967, who wouldn’t be? We were on the way to Abbey Road and Beatles land but Waterloo station and memories of The Kinks’ classic song was a nice distraction.

We took the underground (Jubilee line) to St John’s Wood and stood on one of those long, long, long escalators, where you can hardly see the top. It looked old and I imagined The Beatles must have ridden it, I wondered if they’d considered their album cover shoot here, photographer at the bottom as they sailed down? We walked out of the station onto Grove End Road that leads to Abbey Road and there it was…the zebra crossing, the studio building and tons of nerdy tourists taking pictures and stopping the traffic.

It’s just incredible how famous this spot is, Beatles nuts from all over the world, young and old, breathing it in and trying to find gaps in the traffic to get their pic. Of course the cars have to stop and there’s the occasional impatient driver, but it’s just fun, how can you deny the nerds their fun. We hung around there for a while, took some pics of people taking pics.

Olivia helped a girl from Buenos Aires get her dream pic. We got talking to Gal, an Israeli girl who’s writing a PhD, she was there to observe! Ha ha, studying the nerds, I love it.

We left, passed by Sir Thomas Beecham’s old house and I noted that there’s a lot of Bentleys and Maseratis around here, and got the train to Piccadilly Circus. So many people. People in the stations on the tube, in the streets. You shuffle rather than walk in Central London. We passed by the flashing billboards and the famous statue of Anteros (it’s not Eros, it’s his brother Anteros). A busker was drawing a crowd playing that horrible Ed Sheeran Body song. We hurried by into Charing Cross Rd and went up to Cambridge Circus where I had a look in Fopp (record store). A good selection of new and reissued vinyl, generally reasonably priced, but not today. Everything was too expensive and that David Axelrod album Seriously Deep that I wanted, stayed in the racks. I couldn’t bring myself to buy The Slow Rush (Tame Impala), they’ve gone somewhere I don’t want to go. The collector in me wanted to add it to the other 3 vinyl records I have by them. I did buy Mind Hive, the new Wire album and Tramp by Sharon Van Etten.

We headed out back to Leicester Square on the way to Wagamama for some tasty ramen, but we made a little detour. Just off Leicester Square there’s a small French Catholic Church called Notre Dame de France, I discovered it years and years ago. I like to go in there, one for the contrast of the outside versus the inside, but mainly because there is a mural in there, painted by Jean Cocteau in 1959/60. It’s religious themed (obviously) and if you are a fan, a real secret treasure. I’ve been there many times to see it and finally got to share it with Olivia.

Wagamama is always good, we talked to Michael who we’ve seen there before, he looked us up, asked how the tour in Germany went.

We decided to go to Soho for a coffee and dessert and walked up Charing Cross Road through China Town (ate some taiyaki on the way) and found our way across Shaftesbury Avenue to Soho and went to Bar Italia (opposite Ronnie Scott’s) for a decaf and a Portuguese pastel de nata. Great place, always football on (duh, it’s Italian). Commentary in Italian, Arsenal were playing Olympiacos from Greece (we’d run across some of the Greek fans on the tube), second half just starting, Arsenal lost after extra time. It’s a big loss for them. We waved goodbye to central London and found ourselves on the train from Waterloo to New Malden. Got talking to Carlin and Steve (his brother is in quarantine in a Tenerife hotel), she was from Jamaica. People are nice, you just gotta be nice to them and they’re nice back.

Last but not least I have to tell you about Chris and Sharon. Chris was sitting in his wheelchair in Waterloo. I noticed he had a front wheel. I asked him what it was? I’d never seen that before. He told me an American man had been in hospital and seen people out of the window struggling across the grass in their wheelchairs and he thought there must be a better solution than this struggle. So he invented this front wheel which takes the two smaller front wheels off the ground and creates more traction in the back wheels and that in turn means that the ride is no longer bumpy on difficult services. True genius! On that note Good Night.

The girl in the mustard sweater stood directly in front of me. She wore blue jeans and a pair of high-heeled dark purple suede boots with a zip. Her hair was streaked to be blonder than natural but it was growing out, it didn’t look too bad which was probably why she’d been putting off redoing it. She was in her early thirties, about 5’8” and conversing with a couple of friends in the queue, one woman shorter and a man about the same height. I couldn’t catch anything they were saying as they were talking in whispers with their backs to me. I never saw their faces, just the side of the shorter woman’s face and it didn’t give me much of an idea what she really looked like by just seeing her profile. I didn’t see what they were buying as I was standing back more than an arm’s length. The shorter woman had something in her arms, hidden by her right elbow, I suppose she was nursing what she had come for. Olivia joined me in the queue after a fruitless search for something the shop didn’t have, I can’t quite remember what it was. It was busy but not too bad, considering the circumstances and after all it was a Saturday afternoon. We checked out via the self-serve machines and as we were scanning our purchases, my phone rang. It was my friend and Anekdoten bandmate Nicklas Barker calling from Stockholm, I had to take it. I left the shopping with Olivia and let her pack and pay as I went to the front of the shop to take the call.

Nicklas and his partner Sophie were supposed to be coming here on Wednesday. We were going to be working on some music, rehearsals for the Canadian gigs in Quebec City and generally have a creative week of learning, listening to music and breathing in the fresh Cornwall sea air. I wasn’t really surprised to hear that they wouldn’t be coming. The situation is making it increasingly hard to travel and feel safe. Staying home, staying in, working from home seems to be the best thing to do until the world gets a handle on what’s happening. Nicklas told me that he’d been informed that his tickets for the plane and the train that he’d already purchased are still going to be valid for another date so for now we sit it out and hope for an end to the crisis.

It’s not just Nicklas that has had to postpone his trip. Steve and Lynne from Atlantaeum Flood have had to postpone their trip, too. We were booked into the studio early April to start work on the second album. The problem is that when they come down here to Cornwall to work with us they camp in their vehicle and it didn’t seem like the right circumstances to do that. So that album is now on hold. It gives everyone another year of ‘One Day’ and one day who knows when we will begin work on ‘One Year’. On a positive note this is going to give Dare and I more time to work on the new Noctorum album as well as Jed sessioneer’s Space Summit project. More time for general Skype sessions if anyone would like to get in touch. You can do that here:

www.songwritingandguitarguidance.com

Inbetween the studio and the sea is Morrab Gardens, a subtropical park that has a host of odd plants and shrubs that I’ll show more of as the spring approaches. Olivia managed to catch the sun shining out of the clouds as I stood in front of the flowering pink magnolia tree. The pathways are always inhabited by inquisitive squirrels that nervously get closer to you if they suspect you might have some food, flitting about with a lightning metabolism that sees them shoot up a tree trunk at the slightest hint of a rash move or unexpected shift. Overhead the seagulls cry like cats, moaning and then sharing their bird cries with their shrieks that crow out of their throats. On the ground they crane their necks and shriek and squeal equally, moaning and calling into cacophony. Sometimes you see them stamping on the grass, mimicking rainfall, dislodging the worms from the safety of the soil. These birds are huge, with powerful beaks and strong wings that remind me of the Hitchcock classic. In the summer I’ve seen them swoop down in the high street and take an ice cream out of a child’s hand. Other creatures are few and far between just now as spring is in its early stages, an occasional blackbird or a sparrow flutter in the bushes.

Tommorrow is a big sessioneers day so today I’ve tried to make it a big archive day, that is cleaning records, listening to records and filing records (although we also had a Skype chat with Salim in Dallas, trying to plan an uncertain future). I couldn’t decide what mood I was in so I listened to some disparate sounds. Queen’s Jazz, an odd record with some dated lyrics and drum sounds but with Freddie still killing it as a singer and Brian May parading his unique guitar tones. They are frustratingly hit and miss on this album. After that and very confused by what Queen were doing in 1978 when you think about what other music was happening in that year, I decided to reverse the numbers and go for 1987 and more politically incorrect lyrics but musically influenced by Queen. Def Leppard’s Hysteria came out when we were making Starfish. It’s a mixture of dodgy words, buried vocals, bizarre drum sounds due to the situation with their drummer, but has some great musical moments and is full to the brim with Pop Metal hits. Love Bites, Hysteria, Women, Armageddon It, Rocket, Animal, Pour Some Sugar On Me. I list them because in the time from making Starfish to the band breaking in the US (within its own genre but making the ‘real’ charts) and consequently leading the band back to LA to make a follow up in Gold Afternoon Fix, Def Leppard were still releasing singles from the same massive multi-platinum selling album.

On a more thoughtful level I listened to the first Roxy Music album from 1972 which is just magnificent on all musical, vocal and lyrical levels, but I also went all over the place and listened to my favourite Dutch ironists The Nits and singer-songwriter Henk Hofstede’s perceptive observations of the universe, smart in a wacky suit, perhaps in the same way Split Enz were, not so obviously theatrical, but sometimes I think a madder Dutch Neil Finn when I think of Hofstede’s creativity. I also went to Canada and listened to the surprisingly great third April Wine album, Electric Jewels, from 1973 and then the first Blue Oyster Cult album from 1972. So I was a little all over the place tonight. I did manage to clean a few records that had been waiting to be attended to, but I struggled with the filing. Every time I pull a record out I give it time and after that start looking at the other records by the same group, see what’s missing from the catalogue and that takes you down one long rabbit hole…and yes, if you were wondering, I read The Pool Of Tears to Olivia, chapter two of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece Alice In Wonderland.

Wakey wakey, it’s time to plan to be early and end up rushing around and panicking that we’re going to miss the train. One thing about taking the train to England is that I can bring all the records, because there’s no weight limit, but can we fit them in the suitcases? Can we move the suitcases when they’re in? Can we get them on and off trains up and down all the stairs, through the labyrinth of the London Underground? Well, as it happened and this must be a first, every station had a lift. Result! Getting to London was really straightforward, less stressful than the plane. Siv dropped us off at Rhöndorf and we took a train to Cologne (50 mins) and changed there for Brussels (2 hours). As soon as we we hit the Belgian border, there was snow. It was a reminder that it was actually winter in Europe.

I closed my eyes as soon as we got on the Brussels train and relaxed into Black Sabbath Vol. 4. Ha ha, really. It’s such a melodic album, Ozzy always sings catchy melodies and Tony Iommi always has great guitar tones. It’s a fascinating story about Tony Iommi, he lost the tips of two of his fingers in a factory accident, so he plays with caps on his fingers and uses super light strings.

Read about it here.

We were on the luxurious ICE train,‘flying’ across the countryside, Germany, Belgium, France and from Calais on the Eurostar through the tunnel to England. I managed to get a snap of the Atomium (1958 Brussels World Expo) as we went by.

We met all kinds of interesting people on the way. On the Rhöndorf to Cologne train we met Travis, 27, in acting school, nice fella, friendly, helped Olivia get her designated heavy record bag on the train (Ha ha). Favourite actors, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and more but had never heard of Richard Burton. If he gets back in touch, I’ll be sending him some lists. Arriving in Cologne, coming across the great iron bridge with the oxidized statue of the famous man on the horse that no one knows and the thousands of love locks attached to the walkway. You might have seen it before in Paris, padlocks of lovers, symbolically binding each other together forever. I wonder who did it first? How did it catch on?

It was the third train, the Eurostar, where we met Jake and Mitchell. Jake, a photographer from Sydney, Mitchell an environmental scientist or as he described it “I’m in waste management”! We discussed film, acting and music for two hours. We arrived in London at King’s Cross/St Pancras and although we had gone through customs on the other side it takes a while to wind your way through the corridors and passages to the other side of the exit and to where all the shops and restaurants are. It’s going to be so different when Brexit comes into force, when all these people of different nationalities will be in the ‘alien’ queue, like arriving in America. We will suffer going to Europe and our time there will be limited. Looks like Olivia and I will have to move to Portugal. Will keep you posted on that one.

We’re staying with our friends Biggles (Pete) and Colleen. Biggles produced our (with Dare) first demo, The True 100’s. I’ve mentioned him before (he was the A&R man for Carrere Records). Biggles was at the Fulham – Swansea game, 1-0 (94th minute). We got to the house about 20 minutes before he did, Colleen met us and fed us, Bear, the dog looked at us, oh it’s just them.

So we’ve just spent that 3 hours chatting away and realizing that we’ve been travelling for 9 hours and should probably go to bed. So goodnight.