The tour has finally started. We left the Boydies’ house at 11.30 AM heading via the storage house in Wells to The Acorn Theatre in Penzance. We were looking for the FLN/AAE stools in the storage but the pile is so huge we couldn’t find them. We did pick up my Hofner bass to take back to Porto and my Takamine nylon string to lend to Noel who has in turn lent me his Tak 12 (tuned down to D) for the tour. Noel was lending it to me anyway but it just occurred to me that he might like to try the nylon out, it’s a kool addition to the armoury. That’s the thing about guitars, you can do almost anything and everything with one guitar, look at Rory, but the right one makes a big difference if you are more eclectic in your songwriting. A nylon string versus a Gibson SG probably means a different type of song, otherwise, AC/DC would be the Gypsy Kings.

We drove through Glastonbury and marvelled at the famous Tor. Last time we were here we walked up there to find a beautiful view and a whole lot of guys singing and playing guitars, it’s only what you would expect. The drive down to Cornwall was event-free unless you include the massive road works as they widen the roads to make access to this beautiful county easier for those from ‘up country’ as they say down in Penzance. As we came over Bodmin moor, the rain poured down as it often does down this way, green England, rainy England.

At the venue, we met Steve the sound man, and Rich the promoter, and loaded in. Regular faces from our time down there working with Dare at The VIP Lounge studio and building the collection for the In Deep Music Archive. Dare came down to help with soundcheck (he’s worked on a lot of the songs we were playing in the set) and the doors opened to a lot of familiar faces from our time in this town – I won’t list them all, it’s like thank yous on an album, you always miss someone out who was indispensable, and although they don’t exactly go to their grave wondering why, you always feel bad.

First gig, new songs, always a little tricky but everything went swimmingly, little errors here and there but nothing too drastic. It’s great to be back on stage again in England and it’s worked out perfectly as the landlord in Porto attempts to get the electricity and water on in the new premises before we fly home on April 30th. One issue, my TU-2 tuner doesn’t seem to like the guitar that’s tuned down to D, it doesn’t register the notes, so luckily I have a clip-on tuner that does work. It’s odd because these tuners do usually work with basses. Something to investigate in the coming days.

The drive back was four hours and the roadworks were as active at night as they were in the day – more so. Big lights and machinery, lots of men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets. It looked rather like a sci-fi brain processing operation, the aliens working at night, the already processed humans in the fluorescent jackets standing still with blank stares as we passed.

We pulled into services at Taunton, Boydie needed a coffee pickup for the drive back, as soon as we walked in, the fire alarm went off. The four late-shift staff members filed out and told us they had no idea how to turn it off, we went to the garage instead. We arrived back at the Boydies between 3.30 and 4 AM. Pretty much straight to bed, Bristol, Thursday.

Music today has been Harold Budd and The Cocteau Twins – The Moon And The Melodies (1986). It was the music we played at the gig in Penzance, beautiful.

Music Of The Daze

Last day before we start our British tour and we’re still struggling with the damn printer, haha. How can you go on tour if the printer is playing up? Setlists, lyrics, and, erm, erm, erm, other things. Ok, we’ll survive, three of us in a van, Boydie driving and tour managing and doing all those practical things, door, merch (with Olivia), loading in and out, although as Boydie recently fell out of a tree and my hands are less than helpful for picking things up, and Olivia can’t carry everything we might have to engage some local help to at least guard the open van door as we slowly do our best to unload – then there’s getting the equipment onto our hotel rooms in the early hours, we can’t leave gear in a van overnight in a city. Instruments, merch, bags have to come in with us, the reality of the practical side versus the creative side of the actual show.

I had an interview today with David White at BBC Radio Cornwall, easy casual chat about this and that but at one point I said the word ‘crap’ and apparently, that is not allowed on the radio. You’d think that there would be a better balance with the massive abuse problems that seemingly can’t be stopped, but saying ‘crap’ is a problem. Nothing to do with David, of course, he’s a cool guy, but company policy is another thing.

The last two packages arrived today, another tuner that I bought on eBay for the third 12-string that I’ve borrowed from Noel, and a dimmer switch for a lamp in Porto that I couldn’t seem to find easily in Portugal. So I think we’re ready, now all we need is an audience. So if you are thinking of coming to see us, get your tickets early, especially for the smaller towns, not because we’ll sell out in the smaller places but just to make those smaller venues a going concern, so they survive, so us musician types can go and play in Leek and Thornton Hough.

We booked our ticket back to Porto as the search for Ariel’s missing parts goes on. I’m taking my Hofner Senator bass back, Burns double six, and the Tak and Seagull 12 I’ll be using on the tour. It means I will have most of my guitars in Porto but it’s the amps that I really want, and we need Ariel for that or a big truck or two that brings everything.

Music today has been The Rain Parade‘s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983). Guitarist Matt Piucci will be joining us on stage at The Slaughtered Lamb in London on Friday, March 17th, be there, be everywhere.

Music Of The Daze

It was as if we were being hunted by the rain, as soon as we went out, it came crashing down. We arrived at the post office and just sat in the car for about 10 minutes just waiting for it to abate. At the psychedelic psupermarket as soon as we left the car, it rained more heavily. The drops were the size of light bulbs and even when the sky looked brighter the deluge continued. This is what keeps England green and people indoors although there were people getting drenched as if having a bucket of water thrown over you and the dog was normal. The snow is coming back, spring has been kidnapped, locked in a shed with summer’s lawnmower and the garden furniture, there must be a ransom to pay, perhaps to Mother Earth for all the mistreatment.

Rehearsals continued today although I was distracted by a nuthatch on the tree and the woodpecker on the feeder. Yesterday a pheasant in the field and throughout the day the robins, the dunnocks, the bluetits and the blackbirds, the squirrel balancing precariously on the thinner branches at the top of the tree. Today Olivia shooed a large wasp out of the bathroom and on the wall a spider in the same spot for a week. The crows gather in the fields beyond the house, a lone seagull and yes, a lone pigeon.

A sesh with Jeff in Ohio today and a plan to come back to America to work with sessioneers on their projects is about to be put into action. Atlanta Craig’s Blueburst project has been getting some well-deserved attention. You can peruse the world of Blueburst on Bandcamp or on the website blueburst.band and you just must listen to the debut single, Vanish.

Power adaptors arrived in the post today and printer ink at the Amazon hub at the post office. It’s so quick, you order and it’s here. I generally don’t need things this fast. It’s a bit different because I’m here in England and needed some things for the tour but at home in Portugal I can wait. Fast food – worse food quicker, what’s the point?

Music today has been Aquila, the band that Ralph Denyer joined after he left Blonde on Blonde. There’s just one self-titled album released in 1970, unfortunately, it’s turned into a collectable rarity and an original copy will set you back 200-400 Euros. The album was produced by Patrick Campbell-Lyons of Nirvana fame.

Music Of The Daze

Today was torture my hands day, sorry I mean rehearsals. It’s a bit of a struggle at the moment because the ends of my fingers haven’t got hard yet and my thumbs are giving me some trouble, so slowly one of those painful events will sort itself out by simply playing. But the thumbs are something else that’s not going to get better by playing. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get worse. Without giving anything away, we’re trying some songs we haven’t played live before, there are so many to choose from. It’s been a long life, a lot of bands and a lot of records. My thumbs are nearly 65 years old, not much lasts that long, apart from turtles.

Boydie and I went out today, him to the tip, me to Screwfix (exciting Sunday) where I couldn’t make myself understood. I asked for a ‘power board’ and he had no idea what I meant, eventually we translated it to ‘extension lead’. But then I couldn’t get him to understand what a 9V power pack was. When I got back to the house I looked on Amazon and they are called 9V power adaptors here in England. So I hit the sidewalk, checked that Boydie had emptied the trunk, made sure he didn’t need gas, and drove back to his hood.

I bought some batteries for the clip-on tuner and the reading light and talked to a very old man with the broadest West Country accent who told me that he couldn’t find anything in the psychedelic psupermarket aisles – I also spoke to a very young cashier who had terrible difficulty in speaking at all. In the car I noticed how overdressed I was, it was warmer today and I didn’t need all those layers but then the rain came, the weather forecast threatened snow in the week and we were back to where we were with 8th March in Kinbrace in the Scottish Highlands experiencing the coldest day of the year so far at -15°C. But then again, we were in Minneapolis at Christmas, we would have been throwing our coats off and having picnics in our swimmers if it had been -15°C.

Two seshes tonight with Rajan in Brooklyn and Jed in Minneapolis where it’s still snowing. We’re planning to make records but then can you even say that anymore? We made a great record with Ahad (Afridi/Willson-Piper) but it was only streamed. Is it still a record when it’s not physically available?

Music today has been the first Blonde on Blonde album Contrasts (1969). The band was from Newport, South Wales and made three albums between 1969 and 1971. This album has an odd cover of Eleanor Rigby. Guitarist/vocalist Ralph Denyer left after the first album and joined Aquila, but that’s another story. He wrote the well-known Guitar Handbook. He sadly died in 2011.

Music Of The Daze

The day started with Liverpool losing 0-1 to the team at the bottom of the league, Bournemouth, after last week’s 7-0 bashing of Man United. But it made me think about the hardest thing to achieve, consistency. It’s the same for the humans out there on the planet, you are faced with different situations all the time, people who play by different rules, your game plan might not work with everybody. Your tactics have to change sometimes, you need different solutions to different weather and right through till your last dying breath you will be both brilliantly avoiding trouble and inadvertently walking into disaster.

It was nice to see the woodpecker today first flying in and clinging to the tree trunk, checking out the scene before hitting the feeder. The robins seem to have control over the smaller birds, chasing off the sparrows and dunnocks but they don’t dare hassle the much larger great spotted woodpecker, black and white with its red flash. I could sit and watch the birds all day. At one point a squirrel arrived, fidgety but this one wasn’t just sitting up and eating what it had found on the ground, it was collecting material for its drey (yes, that’s a new word for me too), carrying everything in its mouth. I haven’t seen that before.

The day eventually evolved into rehearsals on either side of dinner, trying different songs that seem to work well but it’s hard trying to remember all those pesky lyrics, the guitar parts come easy, despite the issue with my thumbs – we’ll see how that pans out a few gigs into the tour. But this is why we have music stands and reading lights and if it’s good enough for old souls like Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams, it’s good enough for me – at least until those words are branded into my brain – how did Laurence Olivier do it? I guess he didn’t have the internet.

I’ve had to buy yet another tuner because I now have three 12-strings that I will potentially be using. I was trying to use one of those that clips onto the end of the guitar or in the Seagull’s case an in-built tuner but nothing works better than a Boss TU 2 or 3, quick, efficient, and easy to see, the best tuner I’ve ever used and as I have three 12-strings, I don’t need any struggle, keeping 36 strings in tune is enough to worry about.

Music today was The Legendary Pink Dots‘ album Any Day Now (1988), something of a rarity by this intriguing Anglo-Dutch band that has released 32 studio albums, and 52 live and compilation albums. Where do you start with this experimental, catchy, psychedelic bunch of intellectual punks? The answer – here.

Music Of The Daze