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It was so bright outside today that when I went out for two minutes without my sunglasses, I came back blinded with stars in my eyes. It took me ages to adjust to the archive labyrinth and the studio control room. The real flashing lights on the mixing desk and the various pieces of Star Trek equipment in the control room were actually there in my head and it took me a while to find my sunglasses, because I simply couldn’t see well enough to look for them. It was 68 degrees here in Penzance, you could feel the sun wrapping itself around you like big cosy arms. The sky was so blue that it didn’t look real, it was as if someone had dreamed it up. People were out in the streets and I imagine that the beaches were full, especially as de Pfeffel has announced some easing of the lockdown from July 4th. So many things are opening up, except for the ones that we want, the venues and the swimming pool.

Ed arrived today with his car crammed with drums. Can you imagine the difference in experience for a drummer versus a singer? Especially in the early days of trying to get somewhere and the lug. That poor singer having to carry his poetry book around. Who’d be a double bass player? You sometimes see them on the subway, I guess they never travel in the rush hour. In the live room at the studio there’s a two inch square hole in the ceiling to accommodate double bass players, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to hold the bass upright. Dare soundchecked the drums after Ed had set up, but the start day for recording is tomorrow. You never think about how long it is to the end of an album even though it’s a very long way. When you look back on the process, listen back to what you’ve done, it all seems a very long time ago just in terms of the amount of work. But when you think about The Beatles taking an afternoon to record Please Please Me and Guns ‘n’ Roses taking 14 years to record Chinese Democracy you wonder at the chasm between the two and the different experiences those projects were to each other even though they were essentially the same thing.

I had two sessions today, one with Chris in New Jersey and another with Paul in New Orleans. Progress! The exciting thing about the sessions is that as we work on songs and ideas, singing, getting a body of work together, at the same time we start on the second sessioneer album with Ahad after Jed and Space Summit. There was a time that these were also at this early stage, progress is the key. I’m coming to the conclusion that anybody can do anything they just gotta wanna. I’ve been hitting the French for 20 days in a row and really feel like I learned something and even though I’m busy and feel like I would learn more if I could concentrate more, submerge myself in it, just the act of doing it is so useful and there will be times when I can really take it in. There will always be crazy times when there aren’t enough hours in the day. No time isn’t really an excuse, it’s priorities, even ten minutes a day adds up.

Today, finally, after over a year, I received a vinyl copy of Hanging Out In Heaven. It’s nice, isn’t it? It wasn’t that the label hadn’t sent it, it’s just that I hadn’t got around to having them send it whilst we are here at the archive. I spoke to Jan today who took those amazing pictures all those years ago and told him it was on the way, he was happy. Jan has also taken the picture for the cover of the new MOAT record, Poison Stream. He lives in Stockholm and is one of my oldest friends there. He told me today that he’s had the virus as have many of my friends and musical collaborators in Stockholm. Sweden was the country that followed a different path and there’s some quite scary numbers in the death department. There’s some bad news with flare-ups at the moment as they ease the lockdowns, but the statistic that says Germany 83 million people – 9,000 deaths, UK 66 million people – 42,000 deaths, begs belief.

So I head off into a busy week with the Ahad album, with Dare in the studio recording Ed’s drums and with me playing guide guitars and bass where necessary, some sessions later on at night and fitting that French in somewhere, too. So if you want to ask me a question or are waiting for a reply about anything at all – next week!

Music today comes from the perfect Soul pipes of Aretha Franklin. I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You (1967) featured the Otis Redding penned Respect as the opening track which became her signature song and helped catapult the album to the No.2 spot in the US charts. The album also has two Sam Cooke songs on the record, Good Times and Change Is Gonna Come – she was a great interpreter of Soul songs. Although it seemed to set the Soul audience on fire, back in the day the critics were less enthusiastic, Rolling Stone gave it a bad review, time put paid to that opinion. When you consider that this classic and first release on Atlantic Records, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You, was in fact her 10th album, it seems like she took a long time to get going having made 9 albums with Columbia that skirted around the 100s in the charts. Ultimately in her career Franklin had some impressive stats – from Wikipedia: 112 charted singles on Billboard, including 77 Hot 100 entries, 17 top-ten pop singles, 100 R&B entries, and 20 number-one R&B singles.

Her follow up album Aretha Arrives released in the same year (1967) opened with The Stones’ Satisfaction, but it was the single Baby I Love You that made it to No.4 on the US chart and sold a million copies. Franklin would become known as the Queen Of Soul. You gotta have your Soul party hat on to dig these vibey sixties Atlantic records, but she could belt out a ballad too. She released three albums in 1967 alone and then two a year till 1972 with a regular output through the seventies and eighties, this lady was prolific.

It was on Lady Soul (1968) that she sang another song that would be associated exclusively with her, Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman from an idea suggested by Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler. It was specially written for her and reached No.8 on the US chart. The album also features Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready and The Rascals hit Groovin’, written by Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati.

Aretha Now was her second album released in 1968 and that too had songs that she made her own, Think (US No.7) and I Say A Little Prayer. Think was written by Franklin and her first husband, producer-manager Teddy White. I Say A Little Prayer was a Bacharach/David song which was originally a hit for Dionne Warwick, but it wasn’t long before Franklin released it, too, both reaching No.4 in the UK and Top Ten in the US. The album also features another Sam Cooke classic, You Send Me.

Whenever I listen to Soul music, the groove, the singers, the warm skillful easy expertise, I always feel the euphoria of talent and heart.

Song Of The Day is The Guessing Game from the Noctorum album Offer The Light, released in 2006. I wrote the lyrics to this song but Dare sang it as he has more of the Soul voice and that seemed appropriate for today.

 

The Guessing Game

Sometimes when I’m dreaming
All these worlds are spinning ’round
Can’t believe what I’m seeing
Through the clouds down to the ground

Into the distance
Into the darkness

And now that we’ve returned here
To see what we have hatched
Millions of people
A perfect little batch
So that’s what you call England
Sweden and Japan
The Himalayan mountains
Sri Lanka and Siam

Into the distance
Into the darkness
Should we just leave you
What are your chances
Have you the faith
Have you the hunger
All of the madness
All of the wonder
The guessing game

Slipping through my fingers
This tiny galaxy
All these shooting stars
The Men from Mars
And all eternity

Into the distance
Into the darkness
Should we just leave you
What are your chances
Have you the faith
Have you the hunger
All of the madness
All of the wonder
The guessing game
The guessing game

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – Offer The Light (2006)

Today is preparation day for being in the studio with our drummer Ed who is driving down from Bristol tomorrow afternoon. All the amps have been sitting in the live room as we were recording guitars and bass on the Space Summit album. They all had to be moved into another spot which was taken up with other things, the Vocoder, guitars, bits and bobs. So all this stuff had to be moved to the archive room which in turn has records all over the place that need filing away. When you are too busy to put records away, you are really mad busy and after all, messing around with the records is in fact high on the list of my favourite things to do. It’s going to be a busy week as we start with the backing tracks for the Ahad album. I’ll still be doing evening sessions, early sessions with Australia, learning French, writing and looking at the sea. And now as the world seems more confused than ever with everything opening up as the virus spikes are being reported everywhere, we try to plan. We even have a Berlin show pencilled in for February 7th 2021, I have Anekdoten shows in September and November, but will we be able to do these shows, who knows? We are trying to find release dates for the finished MOAT and Space Summit albums whilst trying to figure out when we could start campaigns for preorders so we make back the investment and try and raise the manufacturing costs, but when should we do that? The future is a mystery.

It seems that this week de Pfeffel will be making the two metre rule a one metre rule. Today at the greengrocers (where I bought the most attractive cauliflower you have ever seen) I was asking the scared man behind the perspex shield if they will be taking all the tape off the floor and making the distance one instead of two metres. He told me he couldn’t see that working and that’s the reaction I have got from everybody. The pandemic has struck fear into the populace. The bakers, the co-op, the charity stores, everywhere has barricades and two meter distancing has been strictly enforced. There’s special mass-produced posters and signs in the chains that must have cost a fortune that will be no longer relevant, but they are partly relevant, so do they scrap them all and manufacture them again with the new rules? Or do they scrub out the two and make it a one?

Has anybody noticed that these days shops have their own private radio stations. Co-op radio? Really? What is going on with that? Even Barnardo’s, the charity store, has its own radio station complete with prerecorded announcements about the imminent defunct two metre rule. It must be something to do with the costs of playing music in a public place, it must be cheaper to get a package deal with the PRS (Performing Rights Society) than it is paying your yearly license fee. Of course the chains have found a way to pay less whilst the independent have to pay full whack. Why doesn’t anybody realize that it should be the other way ‘round. It’s this system that wiped out the corner store, supermarkets buy in bulk, get their wares cheaper and can undercut the independent store. It’s the independent stores that should get discounts or at least the same deal as the big stores so that they can compete. Isn’t it obvious?

I have to say that the streets were rather busy today on this cold, windy, rain threatening summer’s day. I was running into people I knew, nodding at people I knew and chatting in the street. The great black-backed gull stood on the wall outside the Acorn Theatre across from the studio/archive like it was guarding the place. The size of a small dog, they only fly away from you as a last resort, choosing to run away down the street on their land-unfriendly webbed feet, they’re confident. This regular visitor had a dirty head today like it had been hanging around its chimney nest and got a good dose of soot. I’ve stopped seeing the chicks, but that’s probably because they grow so fast that they are no longer recognizable as chicks. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode where the kid grows abnormally fast, then they twig, it’s an alien.

Music today sees me trying to catch up with some hard to find albums that were trying to get themselves into the shelves without being listened to. It seems in the case of Dreamin’ (1978) by Liverpool Express I now know why. It’s a hard to find album only released and available in Brazil. But first a little about the band. I’ve mentioned them before and played their first album Tracks from 1976 quite recently, it was this that inspired me to find the second hard to find album. They are a Liverpool band that sound very much like Paul McCartney. McCartney said of You Are My Love, a hit single from their first album, that it was his favourite song at the time.

They were formed by Billy Kinsley, Roger Scott Craig, Tony Coates, and Derek Cashin, who met at a football match. Billy Kinsley had been in The Merseybeats and later The Merseys (remember Sorrow?). Liverpool Express were initially having a lot of success, a hit in England, hits in Europe and then mega stardom in Brazil with number one singles. For some reason the second album Dreamin’ was only released there. It’s great, as good as their first album. Unfortunately the copy I bought from someone up north (someone who had bought it in Brazil and brought it back to England) has a problem with the roundness of the hole, so the tracks sound sour as the needle moves backwards, forwards and sideways on the spindle. Replacing it is expensive, so next trip to Brazil that is all I will be thinking about. Luckily I can listen to it on Spotify and hold the cover like it’s the real thing.

In 1979 they released L.E.X. which I recently bought from Germany. It has a track that is on the previous album, I guess they figured it needed another chance to grab the public’s attention. They cover a Dylan song (Is Your Love In Vain) and Joe South’s Games People Play. This record plays properly (phew) and follows that same effortless Liverpool talent path, but by 1979 New Wave was killing bands that sounded like this. There’s a dodgy picture of Jerry Hall on the cover and they sound a bit like later 10cc, out of step with the times but a success at their own game. It shows how much image matters. I remember when grunge wiped out the middle-sized eighties bands as another generation dismissed what the older kids liked as unhip, not turned on, and then it happened again to them, as it always does and always will ad infinitum.

When you listen back to the Liverpool sound of the early to mid sixties you can hear why it was the place to be, but isn’t it strange, it happened in Seattle, in San Francisco, Athens, Georgia, Minneapolis. A sound from a place can catch on. This Merseybeats album is a collection of songs from 1963-1965, three-minute Pop slices in the same style as The Beatles. You can hear the accents, something in that Liverpool vernacular that stands out. I Think Of You from 1963 could easily be The Beatles – it was a million seller.

Billy J. Kramer was managed by Brian Epstein and was given unreleased Beatles songs that propelled him into the charts as the Merseybeat sound became the sound of the day. He had many hits and this ‘Best Of’ album has five Lennon/McCartney songs, four of them unreleased by The Beatles. Do You Want To Know A Secret was released in 1963 on The Beatles’ Please Please Me album and sung by George Harrison. Kramer took it to No.2 in the charts as a single. Lennon and McCartney’s Bad To Me reached No.1 in the UK in the same year as did another Lennon and McCartney song, I’ll Keep You Satisfied, reaching No.4. In 1964 Little Children (Shuman/McFarland) also made it to No.1 and the last Lennon and McCartney penned hit, From A Window, reached No.10. Trains and Boats and Planes (Bacharach/David) reached No.12 and that was just about it as Merseybeat’s popularity waned.

Song Of The Day is She’s King. Although I wrote it in New Zealand, the seeds were planted in Liverpool.

 

She’s King

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

A thousand things to do
To follow them all through
Things to learn and see
And they will better me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

A throne of violent blue
And nothing to see through
Distant eyes to guide
And to enlighten me

An end to all our pain
An hour through her heart
Nothing there at least though
It encouraged me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king
She’s king

An unbelievable time
I would rush to find
Even if I thought
That it might threaten me

I would rush to find
Thumping hard, banging in my mind
It’s so easy, so easy to fly
If you try, if you try

She’s king

Ohhh

(Willson-Piper)
Art Attack (1988)

June 21st, midsummer’s day, the longest day of the year which means it’s going to be getting darker! Hm, that’s not what we want to hear when we’ve been trapped inside for months. Sessioneer Terje from Norway way up there where the sun never sets this time of year, has sent us a great picture that he took at 00:00 with the sun at its highest for the year. Wow!

Over here in England they were threatening us with nice weather, but it proved to be empty words, we got cold, we got rain, we got wind, we got mist. So later on in the day after sessions in Sydney and Portland with Tony and Joanne and a boring football game between Liverpool and Everton, Olivia and I decided to get out of the studio, put on our winter coats, scarves and long pants and wander out as we descend into winter. Granted it’s not a cliff drop into the ice age, but this is Penzance, we could be seeing a lot of rainy clouds spotted with sunny days, but then we aren’t hanging on the beach anyway, we are more likely looking for a walk around town and a look at the sea before hunkering down in the studio with the books, the instruments, the records and the red sofa. We aren’t sun seekers or hedonists, we are more like an art school here than a hive of R’n’R decadence.

But today we were glad we got out because down there on the oceanside it was special. The sea was calm in the bay but incessant waves, small in size, came roaring into the shore, breaking with determination onto the beach, like angry children. The gulls were all sitting by the freshwater stream that runs into the great sprawling mass further towards Newlyn – they were strangely mellow, peaceful, quiet. The sea was neither blue nor was it green, more opaque and you imagined something unknown stirring below the surface. There was a hint of ominous mist that gave the whole bay the feeling of impending doom. A fishing boat was slowly returning with its catch, little lights flashing on and off as it edged its way into Newlyn harbour. On the horizon another flashing light, but the boat it was coming from was too hard to make out in the mysterious haze. The seagulls seemed to know it was best to just keep quiet in contrast to the day before where they were hanging in the air, joyriding and shrieking on the wild wind currents.

We walked down onto the beach, we couldn’t tell if the tide was coming in or going out. Beyond the pebbles and the larger stones, the sand seemed soggy which suggested that the sea was retreating, we took some photos and nearly got caught out by the occasional rogue wave that seemed stronger than the half dozen before it. It was twilight and as the invisible sun sank behind a thick belt of clouds, the atmosphere became eerie and we walked back up the beach, over the steep piles of ancient stones and sat on a bench just staring out at the sea. We watched the darkness slowly descend, small clouds of gnats hovered above our heads. On the way down swallows had been swooping like magical fighter jets feeding voraciously on these and other midsummer insects.

I love the word crepuscular which in zoology means appearing or active at twilight. Olivia taught me an English word that was also relevant today, petrichor, the smell emanating from the ground and in the air after the rain. So really who needs the noon day sun beating down, ruining your skin, demanding you pay homage when it bothers to show its face. I could never sit still long enough to just lie there and let it trespass on my body. When I see it, I think I should cover up, but then I’ve lived in Australia where the sun is unquestionably a problem, a life threatening invader, coaxing you into the frying pan with your dinner.

I had a mega French training session today on Duolingo, learned a lot, topped my gold league and now I’m into the sapphire league. The higher up the leagues you get the more serious the students are so you have to be serious if you want to compete and really do the work. On one level that’s just another incentive, competition, on the other you can just do it at your own speed, it’s like yoga, no one is watching, just doing it is the thing, there’s no winning if you don’t want the pressure, just exposure to something good that eventually seeps into your brain and makes you better at life. That’s what we all need, to get better at life.

Music today came out of the mist and I found myself with my hands on the first Black Sabbath album (1970). I wonder if parents really thought this music was evil when they first heard it blaring out of the kids’ bedroom? Imagine what Mum and Dad thought of the name, Black Sabbath, and the dastardly devilish deeds that the band members got up to as they were corrupting the children. The long hair, the mysterious album covers and that goddamn noise. My parents used to say to me, “You can’t hear the words”. If they only knew what a cuddly creature Ozzy actually was, nuts, but cuddly. It’s surprising how these albums have endured. The first album is 50 years old and people still listen to it and love it. It’s simple, it’s Ozzy’s voice and Tony Iommi’s characterful guitar. “My name is Lucifer please take my hand,” Ozzy sings. I love how the devil is polite in Sabbath songs. What the parents didn’t understand was it was all a bit of fun, like Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, horror with tomato ketchup and plastic vampire teeth. I promised myself I wouldn’t write about all the individual songs, uh oh…

On the second album Paranoid (1971) War Pigs has drummer Bill Ward and bassist Geezer Butler marauding through the speakers, anchoring Iommi’s thick riffs with Ozzy off again into Satan’s lair. It’s noise, but it’s perfect noise and Ozzy manages to make even the darkest of deals with the devil joyous, melodic, accessible. There’s no guest list for this party, everyone is welcome and to prove it the next song is the title track, and who doesn’t love that, accessible psychosis, free relief from the pain in a memorable riff and an odd drum beat. The Psychedelic Planet Caravan follows – it wouldn’t be out of place on Satanic Majesties or A Saucerful Of Secrets, or even a Tyrannosaurus Rex album. But then the Japanese Godzilla movie companion song Iron Man comes blaring out of the speakers, scary and as entertaining as an episode of Lost In Space and as cute as Will Robinson.

Side 2 opens with Electric Funeral, riffs, thick Gibsons, long-haired music, it’s like treacle. Hand Of Doom sounds like The Doors, really it does. Rat Salad steams in and there’s that timeless feel and sound that a million Metal bands got from this band, none of them as good. Fairies Wear Boots showcases Bill Ward’s perfect drumming, appropriate, clever, but not too clever, clever enough, real animal from Sesame Street stuff, mad, unpretentious, Birmingham boy unleashed, if he wasn’t doing this he’d be banging on the pipes in his mam’s house, “Yeah fairies wear boots, you gotta believe it”.

Oh that repeating cough on Sweet Leaf, the opening track on Master Of Reality (1971), what a riff and the next one, After Forever. I’m really trying not to mention every song, but the riff and Geezer Butler’s bass is great on this one. I love the way that they overdubbed solos, double-tracked the vocals, had guitars duelling with themselves, but when it came to live shows they just turned up and let go and nobody noticed. Led Zep did that too, there was never going to be a second guitarist in that band, even though the songs had rhythm guitars, riff guitars, lead guitars. Iommi and Page were going to carry the whole thing live and they did. On Into The Void, the last track, there’s that sound again, the sound that launched a thousand riffs.

Black Sabbath Volume 4 (1972) was my real introduction into the band, because I saw that tour at Liverpool Stadium in the mid-seventies. It was amazing and although I’d heard earlier albums this was the one they were touring. I remember the support bands too, Badger and Necromandus. I remember I bought a poster at the gig, it was huge, it had all three bands’ names emblazoned across it. My parents threw all my memorabilia away when I was out travelling, posters, programmes, everything, just tragic. The music lives on, the albums are still in my collection and really, without trying to mention every track from Wheels Of Confusion to Under The Sun, these songs are branded into my brain…Supernaut!! But so are The Beatles’ songs, I was blessed with not having to abandon one style for another, one era for another. I may have had phases of getting into certain things more than others, but I simply kept records in the shelf until the feeling came back again for whichever style suited the mood, it could never be just one thing. That’s why Noctorum albums are eclectic.

Song Of The Day is Volumes from In Reflection (1987), listen to that guitar sound. The ex band ended up recording this one on Remote Luxury (1984). This version is essentially the demo version as are all the songs on this album. I wonder how this album may have turned out if all the songs had been rerecorded in a proper studio and I’d actually got to replace the Sydney Morning Herald with a real snare drum.

 

Volumes

Borrowed grapes from stores of gold
Put plastic back where metal’s sold
Men in quarries connect their bomb
One two three, a new Saigon

Check the bottle, is it full?
Have you found which pin to pull?
Boys in shirts get dirty hands
Smoke kills seagulls on the sands

They have pages
They take ages
To read and to learn
They’re heavy to carry
And easy to burn
Volumes have secrets
Take them on holiday
Book them a room
Save them a moment
Swallow their swoon

Pretty things all in a row
Flowers who can’t seem to grow
Finding the pearls, then finding the blood
And finding the water is wood

The something I wanted has just flown by
It looked at me sideways and told me to try
I hope it’s a message from someone obscure
I hope it’s the man next door

They have pages
They take ages
To read and to learn
They’re heavy to carry
And easy to burn
Volumes have secrets
Take them on holiday
Book them a room
Save them a moment
Swallow their swoon

They have pages
They take ages
To read and to learn
They’re heavy to carry
And easy to burn
Volumes have secrets
Take them on holiday
Book them a room
Save them a moment
Swallow their swoon

They have pages, they take ages
To read and to learn
They’re heavy to carry
And easy to burn

(Willson-Piper)
In Reflection (1987)

I was talking on the phone to my friend Boydy today about music, life, possible UK dates for Olivia and I next year and of course the general malaise of lockdown. The malaise comes in waves but at least where we are we do actually have real waves. The subject of this very blog came up briefly and I was commenting that in the future with more experiences and different situations there will be more to say but ironically, less time to say it. When you think about the physical experience of travel and in my case playing shows in different cities, in different countries around the world and meeting all kinds of different people with different languages and their own fascinating cultures, there’ll be a lot to write about – observations, revelations, experiences. But as in George And Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary Of A Nobody, perhaps there is something to be said about the everyday. Those that have followed this blog will probably be fascinated to know the next installment of ‘The Broken Belt’ story and today’s successful finding of a temporary replacement in a charity store. Yay! It is so ugly and brown and looks ridiculous atop black shorts. Still it must be better than a maroon paisley dressing gown cord. The red sofa hasn’t had much of a starring role in text recently, but it is always there in the album pictures and is still considered the sexiest piece of furniture in Penzance.

Many writings come not from the experiences of the world, of travel, of unexpected encounters, but from the mind, from thoughts, from investigations inward, from knowledge gained from study, not everything has to be physically experienced first hand. To some the imagination might be a safer, more creative source for inspiration than the entire universe. The surreal scenario in Dare’s bathroom might appear more in these musings that flit between anecdotes and looking at the world outside from the inside of a building albeit a cool one that holds a recording studio and a music archive. In reality with the depth of the internet, all that information, I wouldn’t need the vinyl records I have to listen to and write about music. There’s just something really nice about it.

Last night we went to bed at 6AM and at 9AM I got up. We were expecting courier deliveries at the studio and if the main big door is closed they just put a slip through the door and take the parcel away again. So there I was, early, all the doors open, notes on the door, my telephone number, super tired, just waiting. I kept on going up the stairs to check and because Sod’s Law is a real thing, I got up there and the postman had not bothered to leave the parcel he was delivering and had put a slip through the letter box of the open door. I love the expression, “You can’t get the staff”. So I was faced with the dilemma of running to the parcel office to get the parcel that they didn’t leave whilst waiting for two couriers that hadn’t arrived yet. It was midday, they should have been here! But the post office closed at 12.30. Grrr! Why couldn’t he have delivered the parcel? So I took a chance to run (ha, run!) to the parcel office to get the undelivered parcel whilst hoping that the two couriers didn’t show up. I was desperate to pick up something after 3 hours of sleep and 3 hours of waiting.

I managed to get back in time with a deeper realization that I have something wrong with my hip. It’s cracking all the time, it hurts often. I’d been thinking it was a muscle issue, but the recurring grinding, cracking bone probably suggests otherwise. Not a problem, you know how men love going to the doctor. When I got back to the studio neither Hermes nor DHL had been. I opened the package I got from the post office, it was the vinyl reissue of Kevin Ayers, Eno, Cale and Nico, June 1st, 1974, I felt like I needed a pristine copy of that album and all these classic obscurities are made in such limited numbers.

I went back upstairs and there was the Hermes lady, it’s usually a moody bloke. Last time he told me he couldn’t wait two minutes for me to get upstairs from the studio, because they had a schedule and if they didn’t deliver all packages on time then they get penalized. Oh my God, the world’s gone mad. So in the process of delivering a great service they put the couriers under such pressure that the man that gets me the package is so stressed out that he’s getting angry with the customer for keeping him waiting for two minutes. Customer service designed by a soulless, cold, profit-making corporation. In today’s package was the reissue of House Of Love’s She Paints Words In Red from 2012. Why on earth they had to send it by courier and not by post I don’t know.

What I’m trying to do with the ordinariness of today is show the tension, the aspects, the philosophies, the commitments, the difficulties of such simple things. So one more package to go and the realization that lack of sleeping wasn’t helping with the patience. This remaining package was coming from Olivia’s Dad, who sent it normal post but because DHL is a German affiliate to the post office, even if he sends it from the post office in Germany, the post office sends it DHL which means it’s not post here, it’s courier. Eventually it arrived, but I waited four hours with three hours sleep. I watched some football as I was waiting, Leicester vs Watford. Pretty drab, but in the last five minutes two spectacular goals, which taught me something about waiting for the couriers.

I went for a walk around the half-open town, found a cheap vinyl album in a charity store from the South Sea islands called Savage, which I bought for the title more than anything else (£1), I also bought Elton John’s book “Me” for the archive library, hard back (£1), and the ugly brown belt (£2). Now with the belt, instead of before where the dressing gown cord looked obviously temporary, now it looks like I chose this ugly brown excuse for a belt. You can’t win. Still, I risked a trip through Morrab Gardens down to the recycling, the sea and the supermarket with Olivia. It was windy and cold, despite the weather forecast (Boydy’s wife Trish had told me that they’d been sitting in the garden in the sun north of London). The choppy waves and the wind blowing in our faces had us stand there on the prom for just a short while. Olivia stood behind me, using me as a shield, my thick brown belt emanating a low hum that scared the seagulls and directed the wind away from us. Over at the supermarket we shopped, got to the till, went to pay and I’d forgotten my card at the studio. It was going to be one of those days. I left Olivia behind in the supermarket with our basket of groceries and walked all the way to the studio and back again.

On the way back the weather was getting angry, we took a different way to the studio and walked through Penlee Park and took a picture by a fabulous tree. Obviously from the palm family, the trunk and the shape were magnificent and really there’s nothing better than a palm tree in a storm, there’s an incongruity. We had dinner, Star Trek was pretty stoopid again, but it’s not always about the story, it’s the set design, the colours, the clothes. When I watch it I think about the music that was coming out at the time. The Beatles, The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Who. What a time for the imagination. If we think change is going on now imagine the change that was going on then. As I type I am thinking about President Shrimp’s stoopid Tulsa rally, where he’ll provoke violence, lie about his achievements and lie about the number of people turning up whilst ignoring the rising pandemic numbers. One thing I realized today from the lies about his popularity, there are actually more sane people and he’s going to lose in November.

Music today had me intrigued about bands that became huge – but not yet. Supertramp made two albums before the release of their breakthrough album Crime Of The Century in 1974. The self-titled debut arrived in 1970. The band had been put together by keyboard player, singer-songwriter Rick Davies with the financial help of a Dutch millionaire. Multi-instrumentalist Roger Hodgson answered an ad in Melody Maker as did Richard Palmer-James who played guitar and wrote the words for the Hodgson/Davies compositions, and Keith Baker played drums (he also made one album with Bakerloo). Baker left before the first album, but eventually found himself in Uriah Heep. It was Robert Millar that played drums on this first album. These seedling albums before mega success are fascinating, because you can hear the sound of success in a record that wasn’t successful. There’s lots of falsetto vocals and meandering musical sections which I like and I guess other people don’t. As the band became less Progressive and more Pop-orientated they became less interesting. It might be hard for you to put ‘interesting’ and Supertramp in the same sentence, but once they were just that.

By the second album, Indelibly Stamped (1971) with its unlikely artwork, Palmer-James and Millar were gone, replaced by Kevin Currie on drums, Frank Farrell on bass and piano and Dave Winthrop on flute and sax. Later, Palmer-James wrote the lyrics on three King Crimson albums, Larks’ Tongues In Aspic (1973), Starless And Bible Black (1974), and Red (1974). A different lineup and a different songwriting arrangement with Hodgson and Davies writing their own words and composing songs separately saw a change in direction abandoning the Progressive melancholia of the first album. The songs are weaker, the guitar isn’t as good and neither are the words (Palmer-James was a better guitarist and a better lyricist than Davies and Hodgson at this time). That’s most likely why the band became so affiliated with keyboards, although Hodgson played guitar he wasn’t really a guitarist.

There’s a note in the album cover that suggests that the second track, Travelled, is more similar to the songs on the first album than any other track, but I can’t hear it. This album sounds like they are more on their way to ‘songs’ and less attention paid to the instrumental section arrangements. That’s just what I like about Crime Of The Century, how the songs are strong and the instrumental passages are also strong, integral, it’s what makes that album so good.

Indelibly Stamped sold worse than the first album, but in those glorious days lack of success didn’t mean you got dropped. Labels stuck with you and in the case of Supertramp the label’s faith was rewarded with a band that would go on to sell 60 million albums in their career.

In between the success of sixties Pop group Manfred Mann and seventies Progressive Rock group Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, Manfred Mann went jazzy and made two albums under the moniker of Manfred Mann Chapter Three. Manfred Mann had previously been together having hits for 5 or 6 years, but times were changing and this more Progressive and experimental sound was fighting to get out. It’s hard to hear the past band in this record, but you can hear where they were going. It would take Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s hit Blinded By The Light before a connection appeared between Manfred Mann the Pop group and Manfred Mann the Progressive group. The hybrid was most certainly a memorable and successful formula as they topped the US charts with the Springsteen song reinterpreted and turned it into a timeless classic.

On the demise of Manfred Mann the Pop group there had allegedly been an attempt to form Manfred Mann Chapter Two with vocalist Mike d’Abo, but that hadn’t worked out. (d’Abo had replaced original singer Paul Jones.) The more experimental Chapter Three (1969) saw original drummer Mike Hugg become the lead singer and piano player. Mann played organ, Steve York was on bass, Craig Colling on drums and Bernie Living on sax and flute. They toured with a brass section, this version of the band with elements of Progressive and Free Jazz was a huge departure – and I really like it. There’s some other connection in there to Dr. John that Hugg is channelling in the vocals – odd.

The second album Volume Two (1970) with the creepy doll cover follows the same pattern. After listening to the first album and now the second, Mike Hugg’s vocals are really very weird. If the album was just the instrumentals then it wouldn’t be so odd, but the vocals take this record to another place completely. He’s not really a singer. It’s like somebody had to do it, but because of that, the record doesn’t have the sound of established artists executing their skills. It adds an element of chance in between the competence of the musicians and it’s much better that way. But there’s some great jazzy instrumental section. Good luck finding vinyl copies of these albums. I have a New Zealand and an Australian copy of Volume 2 and an American, Australian and English copy of Volume 1 (US has a different cover). It’s so cool collecting different versions of the same thing. There was another album recorded and not released and it seems that you can find some of these tracks on a compilation CD from a series called Radio Days Volume III. Please check this band out, nobody else will ever tell you to.

Song Of The Day is Trick from the Noctorum album The Afterlife released in 2019, because it’s a bit odd.

 

Trick

You are there for me
I am there for you
I sit down on a chair

I don’t know if I’ll

Ever dream again
All I know is I care

You stare straight at me
I stare back at you
Clench your fist ‘round my heart

I’ve a trick for you
It will delight you
Or will tear you apart

You might not think you can choose
In a world of pain
But you will find if you lose
You will win again

The sun will rise in the east
You know that it’s true
If you can just trick the beast
Let your love come through

I see diamonds and
I see crimes and I
Know a thief loves the dark

You run through the streets
And you’re chased by defeat
And she won’t catch you up
Can’t deceive or disrupt you

A calmness negates
All the tricks in the fear
And the trick in your mind
And the trick in your ear
That’s deaf
To its lies

You won’t be tricking my soul
With your subterfuge
You’re just a big empty hole
There is no refuge

The sun will set in the west
You know that it’s true
If you can just trick the beast
Let your love come through

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – The Afterlife (2019)

Don’t you hate it when they screw you with customs charges at the post office? Our friend Julie sent us over some fridge magnets from the US, homemade by our other friend Reid. Value, £3. Customs and post office charges £21. Really? I refused to pay it. I have a phone number to ring but I don’t hold out much hope (I’m sorry sir, it’s obviously a mistake). I have little faith in the system or in the spirit of cooperation in these circumstances because there’s not really any recourse and I don’t believe they will see this as a customer service problem worth solving and they really don’t have to care. We are at their mercy. Is a blog a valid place to complain about annoyances such as this? In the seventies there was a TV show called That’s Life hosted by Esther Rantzen (and her teeth) where they humourously dealt with this kind of thing. So frustrating, almost as annoying as the belt.

Out there in vegetable land there’s a new kid in town in the highly competitive market of quality versus shrink-wrapped, moldy, maggot-ridden supermarket refrigerated old vegetables. At the top of Causeway Head, the paved area in Penzance where the greengrocer Thornes is, there’s Mark, the friend of farmers. He has a wide range of quality products that still have the loving dirt on their skins. What’s this thing about waxing apples? Why is the world convinced that if something looks clean and polished then it’s going to be higher quality than something which is in its natural state? Vegetables are rather like men in suits, do the frightened populace really trust the groomed man in the suit and the polished apple over the characterful original dresser with the long hair and the apple with the leaves and stork still attached? Surely not, not anymore. Next you’ll be telling me that people might judge character by skin pigmentation, ha ha, ridiculous, that would be laughable. Then there’s this weird story about respect and money.

I ran into local Uffie today, he’s recently lent me a USB stick with some images he put together: a whole lot of photographs relating to the famous shot of the men eating their lunch at the top of a skyscraper in New York just sitting nonchalantly on a girder. Plus a very interesting documentation of the swastika and how it was hijacked by the Nazis. I read today that President Shrimp has had images associated with the Nazis removed from the net as they appear in his adverts. What the hell is the matter with these people? I’m not concerned about the ignorant, there’s no hope for them, but I wonder, horrified, at the silence of the evolved.

In the bathroom today Olivia put her jewellery down and it fell through a hole near the radiator and behind the skirting board. She lost one earring and her necklace, luckily Dare was in the house with his trusty tool box, but instead of unscrewing the skirting board and retrieving the jewellery he sent a small glowing disc through the wall into the skeleton of the house. Inside the wall the disc was able to turn itself into a smooth blue liquid that seeped behind the plaster, invisible, dripping slowly down towards the spot where the jewellery lay. It then solidified and turned into pincers that grabbed the missing items and pushed them back up through the hole where they fell and were retrieved by Olivia’s grateful fingers. It rose again as a liquid and reemerged out of the wall transforming into a sphere, then back to a disc and slowly ascended to its place in the toolbox, disaster averted.

It occurred to me today that at some point the trusty British telephone box will disappear altogether from the British streets. I’m sure that we used to hang about in the local telephone box in the seventies, it was as close as we got to a den. This telephone box with its Cornwall-themed stickers was looking pretty grungy, I mean who uses a telephone box anymore? Feeding coins, talking for a limited amount of time, it is such a thing of the past. They weren’t always used for their function either, I’ll leave that to your imagination. I wonder if they can actually survive? Sometimes the unexpected saves things. Did DJs save vinyl? Has Amazon saved the postal service? You don’t need to remind me of the damage caused by certain institutions, but one must always wonder if progress is in actual fact a series of rearrangements and eventually the good will out – except at the customs office.

Music today is continuing with great records that no one remembers (apart from in this case my mate Ed Rogers). Today it’s Marvin, Welch & Farrar. Their first album was released on Regal Zonophone in 1971 and was an example of musicians associated with one thing trying something different and succeeding even if the public and the press didn’t notice. Marvin and Welch had of course been in The Shadows and this was a major departure as they became a melodic seventies three piece harmony group. Australian John Farrar had been with The Strangers and had opened up for them in Australia and was asked to join as a third voice. The songs were written by the members individually or collectively and they took it in turns to sing. Session drummer Clem Cattini played drums (Shakin’ All Over, Telstar) and Dave Richmond (Manfred Mann) played bass.

Marvin and Welch craved change, they just wanted to do something different after being in Britain’s top instrumental group and of course the audience wouldn’t have it. Hank Marvin was the lead guitarist and was famous for the tone emanating from his Fender Stratocaster, his playing style as well, his black-rimmed glasses and of course the dance steps. The Shadows were famous in their own right, but they were also Cliff Richard’s backing band and consequently very popular, because Cliff was a big star in the UK. The Shadows had been on the TV a lot with Cliff, they’d been in films with Cliff, galas, live shows, they were famous, too. Bruce Welch was the talented underrated member playing that tricky job in The Shadows of rhythm guitarist. He also co-wrote many songs for Cliff, Marvin, Welch & Farrar and Olivia Newton-John who he was engaged to. The most well-known (there’s a few) would probably be Summer Holiday which he wrote with drummer Brian Bennett.

Marvin, Welch & Farrar released Second Opinion (with Brian Bennett on drums) in the same year as the first album, again on Regal Zonophone (an EMI affiliate), and carried on with the style and the quality of songwriting and singing, but the fans were getting angsty. They finally gave in and started adding Shadows songs into the set. Marvin and Farrar made one more album on EMI proper mostly without Welch, released in 1973, but in the same year all three of them were back together as The Shadows for Rockin’ With Curly Leads (1973). It was their first album since the suicide of bassist John Rostill.

Rockin’ With Curly Leads contains an ill-advised instrumental version of Pinball Wizard as the opening track which must have kept Pete Townshend awake at night. It’s generally without the pizzazz of their sixties recordings. In the same year Mike Oldfield was releasing Tubular Bells and one wonders if they heard it and realized how out of step they were in the instrumental market. There are actually some moments on this record (Gutbucket), but it is mostly middle of the road and intended to appeal to that audience. I was so disappointed that I played it twice and found more in it the second time around.

As happens with most bands that have had a huge success, the audience doesn’t seem to notice that they’re no good anymore (neither do the band). In concert they pray for the old hits and put up with the new songs. I could never understand why mega success led to mediocrity, it should lead to freedom to experiment, if you could afford to do anything, then – you could do anything! It’s not that you shouldn’t play your old songs, it’s that the audience that wants your hits isn’t helping your art. In the case of Marvin, Welch & Farrar, the public won and pushed them back into a faded version of their glory days, another example of the tail wagging the dog and their great vocal albums slipping into obscurity. I was actually starting to like it a bit especially the last track with its dumb title, Jumpin’ Jack Input, but then two cover songs ruin everything with Side 2 of the album, opening with a half-baked version of Heroes and Villains – exactly.

Song Of The Day is the homemade instrumental Hamburg from the In Reflection album released in 1987. These were the days of trying anything and at least hoping for something atmospheric in the result.

 

(Willson-Piper)
In Reflection (1987)