I was rudely disturbed from my sleep this morning by someone relentlessly banging something somewhere in the building. I thought it will be easier to take if I know what they’re doing. I came to the conclusion that random banging was worse than banging that I could understand. I imagined it was someone hanging pictures, hammering small nails into a wall, this gave me the advantage of imagining an end to the noise. And it worked, because it eventually stopped and because I’d made sense of it had a time limit instead of seeming eternal. Still, the problem was it happened a couple of hours before I was getting up and I’d planned for eight hours, six isn’t enough and although I dozed in the last two hours, it’s not the same as uninterrupted sleep and six hours simply isn’t enough for me. So I got up too early and headed towards a free Saturday.

I got up early to watch Man City – Chelsea (1-0) and the snooker semi-final Robertson – Williams. Good game, great semi-final, but I won’t go over it, you either like it and watched it or you didn’t and don’t. When it was over I decided to do something unusual – go out! I think it’s over a month since I’ve been into town and I live in town. Olivia and I left together but she took the train and I walked because we were going to different places. She had to return her new boots which broke the second time of wearing (zipper) and I was heading to the record store where we would meet. So, off I went, wow, it felt like an adventure. I walked past the ladies of the day and exchanged greetings, they were full of smiles. A slight chill was in the air but the walk kept you warm. Ten minutes later I was in the thick of the city of Porto. I don’t know if it’s that I’m used to empty streets (or no streets) but the city was packed with people. I suppose it’s Saturday afternoon, there’s been a lockdown and people are out for the shops and the cafes. It was buzzing and I thought if it’s buzzing now what’s it going to be like with no Covid restrictions and all the tourists back on a lovely summers day?

I went into FNAC for a quick look in case they had a January sale on in the record department, they didn’t so I went to see Jorge and José at Tubitek. It’s great to find a really cool record store, informed, friendly, helpful. I asked a whole lot of questions about upcoming albums, Beirut, Bon Iver, Jack White, Wet Leg, Spiritualized and if they can get me the Colin Blunstone dbl reissue of One Year (1971/2021). I looked at the pricey Bowie – Toy 10-inch box and thought I might have a listen first as I already have the bootleg album version. I inquired about FKA Twigs – Caprisongs (2022) and re-bought the re-issue of EP1 (2012/2016) because some records you need a spare. I also bought The War On Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore (2021) on blue vinyl.

We left the record store and walked through town to the Codfixe shop which is some kind of designer chip shop, ordered take out and got an Uber home just in time for the second semi-final Trump – Hawkins. Tomorrow is the final Hawkins – Robertson in two seshes, afternoon and night, and talking of seshes I have three tomorrow, as well as Liverpool – Brentford, language lesson and blog, I’d better go to bed. Also, Nicklas from Anekdoten sent me a potential setlist for our gigs this year, phew, only three months of practice available, better get to it.

Music today was one of my fave seventies albums, Cockney Rebel’s The Psychomodo (1974). I love this album but I just have to go to bed and let you discover it for yourself.

Music Of The Daze

I seem to have stopped coughing, that small hangover from Covid has had me holding off from swimming till next week. Venturing out into the park today, this time with a camera that worked, I waited patiently till the kiosk was free of clientele and took a picture that framed the palm tree, the streetlamp and the kiosk against a blue January sky. I went further into the park and noticed the two pigeon trees, leafless, exposing the pigeons sitting quietly on the branches, preening, occasionally fluffing up their feathers but otherwise all just sitting there. I didn’t count them but there must have been over 100 birds. What are they waiting for? Alfred Hitchcock? How do they know when it’s time to leave? Aren’t they hungry at different times? How can they all be sticking to the same plan? The wonders of nature.

In contrast, I’ve had my nine-year laptop not working properly, my eleven-year-old laptop not working properly and my six-month-old iMac not working properly. Two of them are really old in computer years (they’re like dog years) but one of them is new. This has brought me to the conclusion that like digital information, you need a backup and a backup of the backup and if it doesn’t exist in three places it possibly doesn’t exist at all in a digital failure. So, each machine needs a backup machine x3. Each of them was doing one thing I needed but none of them was doing everything. With Fred’s help in Minneapolis and Olivia’s ingenuity, I managed to sort it all out and have travelled from totally frustrated to relieved – until the next time. Add to this not having a kitchen sink for a week and the plumber’s daughter testing positive for Covid and it’s going to continue to be a hassle – having the dishwasher start leaking at the same time is even worse – first world problems.

Brix and I got another short and sweet review today in Scotland as I was also informed that the tracklisting on the CD is incorrect and if you bought the CD, they are going to send you another one. Classic. One of the hardest things is to keep the quality control under control. One lesson I’ve learned in the music biz is that everyone will tell you not to worry, everything will be fine, and it never is. On the subject of releases, the Lost Angeles vinyl album is still supposed to be coming in January but frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s delayed further, we’ll see.

We are almost ready with the artwork for the album I made with Jerome Froese from Tangerine Dream and at some point, we will do a pre-order fundraiser so we can get the album into production. We will keep you posted on that one. The Space Summit vinyl isn’t going to be available till well into this year, the queues at the pressing plants are so long and deep that you have to submit the masters and artworks almost a year before you want to release your record. The days of record in August, release it in September, are long gone. This is part of the reason why the record I have made with Ahad Afridi is digital-only – expense, manufacturing difficulties, competing with streaming are all factors that make it quicker and easier and that’s the way Ahad wanted to do it. The first single, the psychedelic sunshine pop of Plastik is available on all the streaming sites now:

Music today was inspired by an email that Dare sent about how he was getting into his record collection in alphabetical order and was seriously digging the debut album by the B-52’s (1979).

So I thought I’d give it a listen tonight. It’s part surf, part sci-fi, part cartoon, part new wave, part comedy but with all these elements, characterful, unique, engaging. Featuring Fred Schneider on vocals, Kate Pierson on vocals and keys, Cindy Wilson on vocals and percussion, her brother Ricky Wilson on guitar and Keith Strickland on drums. It also of course featured their ‘beehives’ that we’ve already seen this week with the sad loss of Ronnie Spector. The B-52’s, so-called allegedly because it looked like the nose cone of the plane. Sadly Ricky Wilson succumbed to AIDS and died at the age of 32 in 1985. In the meantime, Keith Strickland had adopted Wilson’s unique guitar style as the band took on new members in the rhythm section.

This first album was produced by Island guru Chris Blackwell. The irresistible Planet Claire opens the album but perhaps the song everyone remembers is Rock Lobster, too short at 6.52. The B-52’s went on to great success, if you don’t remember Love Shack (1989), you must have been living under a rock – lobster.

Music Of The Daze

Today wasn’t exactly a scramble, it was just full of different ingredients from the technical to the creative, the business to the sporty, the musical, the languages, the writing but again no reading and no trips to that wonderful place they call the outside. Still, inside is also where the action is and I jumped out of bed to see the great Australian sportsman and snooker player Neil Robertson, that nobody over there has heard of, knock Ronnie out of The Masters tournament. That led to a business meeting to get an accountant on board for tax issues living in another country and that led to listening to Brian in New Jersey’s songs for a later sesh and also Fred’s songs for a sesh Friday. Liverpool – Arsenal in the Carabao Cup (0-0) and the day is done via emails and music. I imagine everyone has different versions of this day in their daily lives depending on the work you do, full, normal.

Olivia managed to fix my laptop, it wouldn’t connect, it was something to do with the VPN but then my main computer suddenly wouldn’t let the audio work. Add to this, the camera disappears if I restart it and I’m willing to go back to rehearsal rooms with real people, plugging in, banging things and writing lyrics in notebooks whilst strumming an acoustic – wait a minute, that’s what I do anyway. The point is I’m trying to make it easier for everyone to collaborate remotely so I have to learn these things and have a clue how to fix something when it goes wrong – or at least have a tech close by who can help you sort it out. Using your home studio to experiment with riffs and beats, laying down a rhythm track to find a groove and chord progressions, or using the multi-track facility to record a song you have written on your acoustic, giving it a structure and having the ability to overdub guitar ideas, harmonies or in my case violin c/o Olivia. Or have a collaborator send me a song and have me play guitar or bass or sing on their track. Or can you put a tuba part on my track?

In the modern world of music, a world quite different to how we did it, learning guitar in the seventies, sitting in our bedrooms under posters of our favourite bands, bleeding fingers, joining a band and finding our way into plush recording studios with expensive equipment and rental charges, expensive producers and mega budgets that covered all these costs, these days you have to be U2 to afford that, already rich. Plus of course, record sales are low and ingenious homebodies have figured out how to use their home equipment to great success, think Billie Eilish and Finneas, although the list is long.

On this point, as we flirted with heavy rock and glam, krautrock, pop, prog, punk and reggae, folk and the legacy of sixties music in those glory days of our teenage years, like everyone, it seems we are infinitely connected to the tunes we heard that drove our parents wild. I sadly learnt today that Burke Shelley, singer and bassist from Welsh power trio Budgie, has died aged 71. I try not to always write about the death of a musician whose records I own, if I did then this would simply be an obituary blog because at this point many of those that I followed as a teenager are into their seventies and eighties and off to The Great Gig In The Sky. I saw Budgie live at St George’s Hall in Liverpool in the mid-seventies. I was in the front row and remember “freaking out”, that meant shaking your head around to the music in those days. I got a broken drum stick from the stage, took it home as a trophy, glued it back together and proudly owned it until all my treasures were thrown away when I was out of the country, discovering the world. The support band was an unknown Judas Priest and everyone wondered who the singer with the short hair was. There will always be a place in my heart for Budgie and his crazy high voice and his clunky pick-played bass guitar, drummer Ray Phillips and guitarist Tony Bourge, the original band. The Roger Dean cover of Never Turn Your Back On A Friend (1973) and mad titles like You Are The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk and In The Grip Of A Tyre Fitter’s Hand, Welsh humour perhaps, but their most famous song Breadfan was covered by Metallica and later another Budgie song with a silly title, Crash Course In Brain Surgery. Breadfan was one of the first riffs I learnt to play. Burke Shelley, singer-bassist, RIP.

Music Of The Daze

I was out in the street today (yay), more just looking for an excuse to go out rather than desperately needing anything, I thought I’ll take my camera and find something to take a picture of – anything. It was a nice day, blue sky, and I walked up to the Marquês square and looked up at the bare trees which were striking with their crooked fingers against the backdrop of blue. I saw the kiosk in front of me and it seemed so, I don’t know, authentic? I hadn’t noticed it in this way before and I realised that it was the two weeks indoors, telling me to appreciate things and not to take things for granted. So I raised my camera to my eye, click, nothing happened. I’m sure there’s a rule book somewhere that says, “If equipment has not been recently used, check out that it is functioning properly before you try to use it”. So the revelation of newfound appreciation for simple things was sadly not captured but maybe you’d have to have been inside for two weeks to appreciate today’s normal through my eyes, to anybody else it would have just been a kiosk on the side of a square.

Whilst out I went to the shop where I bought the last two lava lamp light bulbs. I switched on one of the lamps this morning and the bulb blew, it hadn’t lasted long. We needed two bulbs above the stove and I went hopefully into the store with the cardboard box the lava lamp bulb came in knowing that the man (who was very nice) had sold me his last two bulbs and had no more. I thought, well, I might as well bring it up again whilst picking up the two bulbs for the stove. I showed him the cardboard box and he said no he had no more as I knew he would and then I think I used the word “tragic” or perhaps that was in reference to the whole LED takeover. He repeated the word “tragic” and came from behind the counter and picked up a very tradesman-like looking catalogue and started leafing through it. He asked me to show him the box again and noted a reference number. “Here it is,” he said, they are still available for order. WHAT?! I ordered 20 on the spot. The moral of the story is never give up on lost causes.

I went past the psychedelic psupermarket on the way back and picked up some grated cheese for Olivia and searched for queijadas at the bakery counter, again on the off chance that they would have some. Olivia was there yesterday to no avail. I walked up to the counter and there in the display case were ten queijadas. I said to the lady I’ll have them all (rare to see ten all at once). She then took to explaining to me very thoroughly in Portuguese that I could only get the discount price on lots of four. She was so concerned that I might have to pay some small amount more for the extra two that eventually I said fine, just give me the two lots of four. That seemed to make her happy and that made me happy. On the way back home I looked in the window of the cafe on the corner, the nearest cafe to us on our side of the road. It always seems to have a lot of locals in there but there’s five cafes in the thirty seconds it takes to go from where we live to the square, how do they choose? Each place must have its own special vibe and clientele. In there was an old man, even older than me, with the newspaper open on the sports pages and I wondered if he’d been going there for decades, I’d wondered the same thing about this lovely lady in the bakery.

The landlord’s assistant came by with two Portuguese plumbers today to look at all the leaks, the kitchen sink, the dishwasher, the sink in the bathroom and we talked about the lack of fire escapes and smoke alarms in this building, it seems that there’s not much attention to that kind of thing here in Portugal. We live on the fifth floor and Olivia has ordered a very long roll-up ladder that we can have as a safety option. I’m sure some of you will have seen the terrible fires and loss of life in Philadelphia and New York in recent days and then there’s the Grenfell fire in London. Viv Stanshall died in a fire, as did Steve Marriott, as did Monica Zetterlund.

On the awful subject of losing musicians, I was sad to see that Ronnie Spector died today. She was on the bill when I played with The Saints in New York at Joey Ramone’s annual birthday bash. I know her keyboard player Joe McGinty from living in New York and I know he and a lot of fans of Ronnie and The Ronettes will be grieving tonight. What a voice she had! They toured supporting The Beatles in the US and The Stones supported them in the UK. You will be familiar with their Phil Spector produced singles with his famous Wall Of Sound. Be My Baby (1963), Baby, I Love You (1963), (The Best Part Of) Breakin’ Up (1964), Walking In The Rain (1964) being their most famous. If you are yet to discover their album “Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica” now’s the time. Ronnie Spector (Veronica Bennett) died today age 78. RIP.

Music Of The Daze

Olivia’s mum sent me a picture of the Bee Gees 1970 album, music from the film Cucumber Castle (1970) that I bought on eBay in Germany and had it sent to the house there. They put the wrong house number and half the name of the street but somehow it arrived. I posted the crazy hard to find YouTube bad quality film the other day. It’s the period before the disco explosion and Robin has left the band for this album, so it’s an interesting artefact. If you don’t know Bee Gees before the disco years, the amazing songs they wrote in the sixties, listen to the sixties greatest hits album Best Of Bee Gees from 1969 (one of Olivia’s faves). It’s hard to shake off what you think you know about something when an impression has been formed and for people of a certain age the Bee Gees is a perfect example. If you heard the first Japan album Adolescent Sex (1978) and compared it to their later Tin Drum album (1981) that you loved then you’d be shocked. If you discovered Genesis some years after Peter Gabriel left you’d be in for a shock if you heard Trespass (1970), Nursery Cryme (1971), Foxtrot (1972), and Selling England By The Pound (1973). If you thought that Liverpool group was all about She Loves You (1963) and then you heard Revolution 9 (1968), well, enough said.

I watched Ronnie beat Jack Lisowski 6-1, Ronnie Wood was in the audience, it made me think of The Two Ronnies. I carried on listening to sessioneer Minneapolis Fred’s huge list of songs. Olivia went for her violin lesson and as the light faded I went into the bedroom and opened the window wide as I had done earlier in the day with the front room, I then went and opened the window into the kitchen and the little washing room before going to the front door and opening it wide too. There was a nice breeze flowing through the apartment and I left the door and windows like that until Olivia came home. It was warm enough and airing out the place this way felt really freeing, invigorating, healthy. Olivia’s mum sent pictures of misty Germany and I sent her pictures of sunny Porto.

Before I carried on with my listening I leaned out of the window into the dusk. The workmen below were still plastering the outside wall of the ground floor flat, racing against the light. A bat was on its twilight run, presumably hunting invisible insects at supersonic speed. How do they catch them when they are moving so fast? A lone seagull sat on the roof of the opposite building waiting for tomorrow. I was happy to look out at the city of Porto and be able to interact with it should I choose to but I still seem to have a very slight cough today and I might just hold off from swimming for another couple of days although I’m really missing it. I hope there’s nothing lingering beyond the negative consequences of the encounter.

We got two Christmas cards today. One from the Argir’s and grandchildren in Minneapolis and one from the Pagnano/Bakers. We got one from the Farley-Persauds and one from the Hintons before Christmas. So two before and two after, gotta love the Portuguese postal service, I think the Farley-Persauds and the Hintons sent their cards in July. Thank you all. We have a package coming from Michel in France that we just can’t get delivered, the post office doesn’t recognise the carrier, the carrier says they have attempted delivery once and we haven’t been out. So frustrating and this package has more cassettes! The post is an amazing thing and we expect it to work but I think if we went to the Dead Letter Office we might not be so confident, although if it’s there it’s allegedly the fault of the sender or the recipient, not the post office. We thought we could send some cards out too but they don’t seem to do it here as a tradition, plus we’d have to start sending them so far in advance and the Christmas spirit doesn’t come till, well, Christmas.

Music today has been Sasami’s debut album (2019). I had a sesh with Jeff in Ohio tonight and we were discussing Sasami. He decided he likes her, I thought I’d listen to her more thoroughly than I have in the past. I was ambivalent, then I heard something I wasn’t too keen on, then I heard some tracks I really liked. So, it’s trendy and I like it, contemporary, inventive, somehow primitive, homemade and young-sounding. Would I recommend it? Well, only if you like it.

Music Of The Daze