As we plumb the depths of despair we stare into our dried out cups and see only dust. We remember the glorious days of taps and liquid, cups of tea and refreshing cold glasses of colourless wonder. We satiated our thirst as if it was always going to be there as if at the twist of a faucet we could be as strong and healthy as Lee Majors. Water, life itself, free to gorge yourself, damn – you could even swim in it, wash the dishes with it or clean your clothes, flush it away, pump it, make ice lollies, heat it up, cool it down, shower under it, submerge yourself in a bath with it, keep plants alive with it, surf on it, you could sail on top of it, you could take out your private submarine and sail into it, under it. You could float on it, waterski on it, go fishing in it (poor fish), be eaten by a fish in it (poor humans). In winter you can skate on it, ski on it, you can sledge on it, build a snowman with it, you can roll it up into balls and throw it at your friends, walk in the rain with it. If you are Chauncey Gardner you can walk on top of it. You are in fact ‘it’ and we take ‘it’ so for granted. So far the plumber has not made it but he is coming tomorrow morning at 8AM, what joy for a boy who likes to go to bed at 5AM.

Up on the Princess May recreation ground, the funfair has gone, taking their cacophony of screams, grinding metal cogs, rowdy music and cheap fluffy toys with them. One of the fairground workers told me that they were having trouble finding a place to set up because of the virus, festivals were cancelled and councils just wouldn’t let them come for fear of crowds congregating upside down in spinning machines, spitting and jabbering and screaming and laughing, it’s pleasure that spreads the virus most rapidly.

The evidence of their presence could be witnessed on the scarred landscape, these towering metal monsters, giant trucks and generators, brightly coloured towers of glee and sensation, tears and rapture leaving behind gouged-out turf, deep tyre tracks from heavy vehicles and the ghosted shapes of disappeared booths and kiosks, rides, both relentless and stationery, now quiet. It’s like alien spaceships have landed and left their scorch marks on the earth, only your imagination can determine how impressive their ships were by the residue and their shadowy imprint.

I tried to catch up today, I picked up the phone and reached nobody. I sent off emails but not to everybody and I managed to put away just half a dozen records. It’s all happening all at once. In 3 hours we have an exclusive premiere of the first available track, ‘Gone By Noon’ from the new MOAT album Poison Stream. The Big Takeover is a busy online magazine that always tries to help us out and we are most grateful. It’s not a single. What is a single anymore? It’s just a track we like and hope you do too. It’s not designed to catch your ear, have you sing with the milkman, reach the charts or sell records by the ton. It’s just a slice of mood and atmospheres, an evocative piano and voice over an organic background telling a tale of some soul somewhere.

I spoke to Salim today and we discussed his record and mixing and all those things that happen once you’ve recorded the record but are a long way from finishing it. Noel came to visit today before he heads off back to the hills of Surrey. He brought us lots of water so we could fill kettles and the like but the chaos of the weekend left us little time to talk guitars or songs but as Whizz Blitzer he did take some photographs of Olivia and I as we plan for our shows next year. I also found out today that the Anekdoten dates in November are being moved to the spring. One wonders if when the new year comes will we still be moving dates forward. “Life keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future”.

Music today relates to the alleged plumber’s visit tomorrow:

The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows (1966)

Today you might wonder at the conclusion of the episode where water was pouring out onto the archive and studio floor, the drama and discovery of the location of the stopcock, the search for an emergency plumber and how we might work in the studio with no water and no toilet if the plumber doesn’t arrive soon (at least we have electricity). Today I had a busy day of sessions, Tony in Sydney, Brian in Florida, Joanne in Portland and Doug in Wappingers Falls near Woodstock and if there’s one thing I needed it was water – water for tea, water for making food, water to drink, lots and lots of water and then of course water for the toilet, to use it and to flush it. My first session was at midday and the plumber was coming between 11AM and 3PM. At 2PM the company called me to tell me that they couldn’t find anybody that was available. This is a central office for multiple plumbers, a 24-hour emergency line and they had nobody. I was going to pay £165 to have them come and fix this and they couldn’t find anyone to do it. So, I went down to the shops and bought 4 bottles of still and 2 bottles of sparkling water. One lot to drink, one lot to use for kettles and boiling water in a pan. By the time I’d got organised it was time to speak with Brian and then straight into speaking with Joanne and then quick eats and then straight into speaking with Doug and then French and then it was midnight.

At midnight I started to tidy up as much of the mess as I could, you know, the mess of the chaos of just something major happening that throws everything into, well, chaos. There were boxes that had been moved out of the way of the exploding water, the printer had been in the hallway, the books by the stairs and when everything had been moved out of harm’s way it had been placed in the studio control room in a rush so things landed in a haphazard manner. So after the busy day, I felt like I had to get some order around me. Olivia was running around busy with a million things, the new MOAT track is coming on Wednesday, the sky needs to be washed, the arrows sharpened and the cats have to be born, so she was busy too. By the time we had got semi-settled, it was 2.30AM and that’s when I started writing this. So, dear humans that are waiting to hear from me, please be patient, I will get there and by the way, if you know a local plumber, please send me the number because tomorrow we will still have no water, no toilet and no plumber but at least the fees will be cheaper because it’s not a weekend. One thought, how rich must they be to turn down work with this kind of payday? Last of all, I’m sure that in the olden days, 24-hour emergency plumber meant 24-hour emergency plumber? What if I hadn’t found the stopcock?

I briefly looked at Sky Sports and missed the Wales game (they won 1-0) and then missed the Republic Of Ireland game (they lost 1-0) and I also missed the second half of the England game on flood day, they also won 1-0 with all the action in the last 5 minutes of a drab game. I was thinking about how I’ve heard people say I don’t want to do anything after work where I have to think, I just want fun or goggle box (seventies speak). In my twenties, I was thinking that fun wasn’t always what it was cracked up to be and the TV was a waste of time. I remember when I was touring a lot in America the first thing I did when I got into my hotel room was take the bedspread off the bed and put it over the television. I was killing two birds with one stone, the temptation of crap TV and removing the stage where unimaginable acts might have been played out and remaining unwashed after the event, a bedspread made merry by the previous 100 tenants. There could have been raging philatelists, archaeologists throwing caution to the wind, mycologists with their samples or psychiatrists just staring.

If I had any time and wasn’t going on a jaunt into the local groovy area (sixties speak) I would read, listen to music or play the guitar, not that we generally had much time, usually when we got into our room we had to leave for soundcheck, then it was dinner, then it was the gig, then it was waiting, talking and by the time we got back to the hotel it was so late and we had to get up for an early leaving time the next day. I wonder what the chambermaids thought when they saw the TV covered up? They probably thought something weird was going on when in actual fact there was probably much weirder things going on in the room when it looked normal.

Music today was easy to choose after yesterday’s theme of water. I suppose I could also have played Before The Flood but I was trying to keep it short and that’s a double album. Then there’s productions by Flood and I’m sure I have a CD by a band called Waterlilies?

But today after all that watery talk I was inspired to go dry so I dug out Nico’s Desertshore (1970) and once I was there I couldn’t escape her and continued with The Marble Index (1968), The End (1974) and Chelsea Girl (1967), finishing on the lighter of her albums for fear of falling into a deep dark reverie and being transported on the wings of a giant lunar moth leaving England over the sea from Penzance, touching Brighton and crossing the channel and flapping our way into France coming to Calais then inland over Lens then Metz and crossing the border and seeing Saarbrücken in Germany before finally landing in the Black Forest. And then I was there, Lothar the lunar moth laid me down in Nico’s garden where she was clipping the flowers off the rose bushes and admiring the thorns. “Guten Tag,” she said in a deep dark voice that made the bark tremble on the trees. Her eyes were like chasms, you fell into them and after several minutes of endless descent, you landed with a bang on the floor of her soul. There, a sticky black liquid restricted your movements and it was dark except for a single candle. Something scurried across the floor, if it was a floor, it was hard to tell, it could have been the hard shell of a giant flat mollusc or the surface of a distant planet. Beyond the candle in its dull light, blood red and beating like a drum was Nico’s heart where for a short moment I thought I heard it whisper: I love you.

Pitchfork | Thirty Years After Her Death, Nico Finally Comes Into Focus

Song Of The Daze

The unedited version of Nico’s session for ‘Disco 2’ in honour of what would have been her 80th birthday on 16/10/18. Janitor Of Lunacy, The Falconer and some cutaway shots of Nico pedalling the harmonium.

The day started ordinarily enough although getting up before midday isn’t ordinary for me but I had to be at the swimming pool for midday. I made it, it was nice outside, a nice walk to the leisure centre. The clouds were big and fluffy, lots of that special summer blue spread across the sky and a slight breeze that made you feel like autumn might be coming into town on one of the next trains. At the pool, there was hardly anybody there, three people in the fast lane, two in the slow lane and I had the medium lane to myself. The lanes are wider than usual too so getting that much space is a real luxury. I went for the mile again so I could make it three miles this week, a strong return, but in my enthusiasm, I lost count at 23 and wasn’t sure if I was on 23 or 25. I’d got in there about three minutes before 1 o’clock so when I lost count I thought that when I reach 64 I’ll swim two extra so I know I really did make the mile. So that’s what I did and I finished at exactly the time I had to stop. So the day was going swimmingly.

I left the leisure centre and walked around the back past the overgrown football pitch and through the dappled sunlight glade and headed to pasty land (when I go to visit my friend in Joshua Tree who was our witness at our wedding in Vegas I go to Patsy land). From there I went across the road to the charity store and bought a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers DVD (Top Hat) and a Gene Kelly DVD (An American In Paris), a box set of Stereophonics singles and a DVD of Wilko Johnson live at KoKo in London. Seemed like a bargain for just under a tenner. But then I walked back to Steve’s record store to pick up a record I’d seen the day before, Susan Christie’s Paint A Lady from 1969 (it’s a reissue, the original would be a million quid because “Only three privately pressed vanity copies were produced (circa 1970-1971)”.

I chatted with Steve, a couple of local music lovers came in, Martin, and Indian Billy (from Liverpool), Reggae expert and Liverpool fan. I left for the weekend grocery shopping, a cauliflower, a broccoli and a big bag of fresh chestnut mushrooms. At this point, you are thinking, what a lovely normal day, what could possibly go wrong? Haha. I took everything down to the studio, records, CDs, books and groceries, we would eat there and I would attempt to sort records out until 5PM. I’d agreed to meet Noel there and we would watch the England – Iceland game together. Everything was going according to plan, Noel arrived, the game started, Kane had a disallowed goal that should have counted but overall the game was pretty boring. At exactly 45 minutes the ref blew the whistle for half time, 0-0. I put the kettle on to make tea, Noel went to the loo.

You can imagine the cosy scene, Olivia arrived ten minutes into the game, what could possibly go wrong? As I prepared the tea, I heard a shout from the toilet, Noel was soaking wet and a jet of water was coming out of the water heater above the sink and water was flooding out all over the floor. The handle from the heater was off and there was that awful smouldering electrical smell as the water poured out onto the floor. Noel was trying to hold it back but it was dribbling out around his hand. There was a switch that turned off the power to the water heater and that seemed to stop the electrical issue as the water mixed with the electricity. But the water was still pouring out. So, WHERE’S THE STOPCOCK? I called Dare (who is away) – answering machine. I looked everywhere in the kitchen area for a valve to turn to stop the water, pulling things out from under the working top in the kitchen, no luck. In the meantime, Noel was standing there mortified desperately trying to hold the water in whilst Olivia and I tried to find a solution. I went to the water meter and there was a tap, I turned it and water came out onto the floor, I turned it off. I looked everywhere, I couldn’t find where to turn the water off.

So, what to do, PLUMBER! I got on the net and tried to find an emergency plumber, Olivia did the same, we found some local numbers (eventually). I called the first one, phone switched off, the next – answering machine, the next two were also answering machine. Noel is still standing there drenched trying to hold the water in. My phone rang, one of the plumbers called me back, but he called me to tell me he doesn’t do call-outs! I picked his brain as to what to do, who to call, where would the stopcock be? I told him about the water meter, he said it must be there. I went back and hidden in the corner there was a valve, I turned it, it worked. Excess water was still coming out, water that was still in the pipe and still flowed but not uncontrollably. The floor was a river, luckily the record boxes didn’t get hit too badly and Olivia moved them into the studio control room. Upstairs there are two toilets for the rest of the building’s offices. I went to check them, no water, I flushed the loo to see if it filled up again, it did but water began pouring out of the water heater again downstairs. Why? The valve is closed…

We found a 24-hour plumber who answered, all the other 24-hour plumbers didn’t answer. It was going to cost 90 quid for someone to come out according to the answering machine messages. This plumber was going to cost £175 plus VAT. They’d have someone here before 9.30PM. We couldn’t prepare food, use the loo and we had to be here for the imminent plumber’s arrival. No water, unable to wash the dishes even if we made food, no toilet in the archive or upstairs. I told Noel he should go get changed, the plumber was coming, there was nothing he could do by hanging around except feel terrible. The handle that came off, I never touch it, Olivia does. I wash my hands with the cold water tap after using the loo, Olivia uses the water heater but she’s a woman, delicately turning the handle, we presume that Noel just wrenched it too hard and it broke off.

Noel had gone, Dare called, I told him the story, we waited for the plumber. I emptied the dehumidifier down a grid outside, worried that pouring water down the sink might cause another issue. I chatted with the lads we know from the building across the road who were trimming their out of control hedge. I went back into the building and thought well, I might as well sort some records out. At 8.30PM the phone rang, it was the central office for the 24-hour plumber – they couldn’t find anybody to come out (wasn’t there a number 24 and the word emergency written in the ad?). What if we hadn’t found the stopcock? He was very apologetic but told me that they thought their work might be done for the week and were probably out having a drink. I thought – aren’t they supposed to be on call, justifying the massive cost to come and fix it? So, they are coming tomorrow between 11AM and 3PM, Sunday rate £165 plus VAT. In the meantime, we are still working down here with no water, no toilet, and the dehumidifier and the fan outside the toilet door trying to dry the carpet.

So lessons learned:

• Have a list of emergency numbers that you know will get a response.
• Try not to have water heaters from the seventies in your modern world.
• Don’t panic, even though there’s gallons of water spewing out all over the floor.
• Have more sympathy for the poor souls on the Titanic and be glad that this disaster happened on land and not in a freezing sea.
• GO RIGHT NOW AND FIND YOUR STOPCOCK.

Music today was obviously going to be coming from The Waterboys and their/his latest album Good Luck, Seeker on good old reliable Cooking Vinyl, the place where cred bands go in the wake of the collapse of the record biz that once supported credible bands. And don’t get me wrong, they are a great place to be, great people, they are the saviour of a band that would be on a bigger and more cashed-up major label if the internet hadn’t happened. But the album is a bit of a challenge, stylistically wavering to places you might not expect. It’s a long way from the earlier extremes of A Pagan Place and Fisherman’s Blues. Is it too consciously modern? Is it too poetic? How can those two disparate points be asked about the same album? He’s brave or mad, or confused or really clever, I’m not sure which. The Kate Bush cover Why Should I Love You? from The Red Shoes is odd with a Kate sample to boot. Spoken word with punchy backing tracks – for all his passion, I think he’s lost his way on this one.

Roger Waters is serious. In 2017 he released Is This The Life We Really Want? and it’s rather like watching a traumatic black and white documentary. It was produced by Nigel Godrich, incredible what Radiohead did for him – McCartney to Waters. When I listen to Waters he transports me to a troubled dark place in his soul. A place where his childhood haunts him, a place where pain is never sorted out, a place where he never got any satisfactory help. In The Floyd, it was Gilmour that added the beauty, like McCartney often did in The Beatles. You feel like you are getting the horse but not the cart, the yin without the yang, it’s fascinating how we need each other for balance.

On Picture That he tells it like it is, like the world we live in is already dystopia, it’s all too late. Musically it reminds me of Marianne Faithful’s Broken English via Animals. Roger Manning Jr. (Jellyfish, Beck, Air) on keyboards, Jonathan Wilson on guitar, who seems to get in with the most grand of English legends like Roy Harper, plus Waters and in America contemporary hipsters Bonnie Prince Billy, Father John Misty and Conor Oberst, he must be good. You can hear him or is it Godrich or Gus Seyffert desperately trying not to do anything Gilmouresque in case it might remind us of that old partnership and also put too much colour on the grey and desolate canvas. The album works, the songs, the mood, the sounds, the production, the lyrics, you just have to want to go there.

Song Of The Daze

Due to the water traumas of the day and the trauma of these two albums, I’m going to stick with just these two today. Busy day of 4 sessions tomorrow but I will leave you with one of the great songs of the sixties, unfortunately not with a video worthy of its quality as a song, so here’s the audio only for The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset.

Post 200 (and 233 counting the ones I started on the road in January). I told myself today, you must start sorting the boxes of records out! It didn’t happen, I went out to pasty land, fuse land, Mojo land and found myself in record shop land. There’s a new store here in Penzance, Steve the owner has a shop in Newquay that I’ve been to but he decided to open a little place here too. It’s great if you live in Penzance, go and investigate – it’s in Arcade Passage. So chatting to Steve had me lose all track of time plus I had two sessions today with Ava in Minneapolis and Stefan in Hildesheim in Germany, two rapidly progressing sessioneers (so cool to see). So the day was already done before it started and I didn’t get to sort one record. I did manage to check emails and found five that I have to reply to last week! Oh my, the world is so different to how it used to be, not only time management but how could anybody be bored? There is so much available to stimulate mainly due to the internet. Of course, stimulation was only a book or a record or a walk away before but now there’s those things – and everything else in the world, all available for you 24/7 without taking a step outside your bedroom, you just have to wade through the crap, the trick – stay on the path.

In town today, I bought a couple of second-hand CDs in one of the charity shops, Guillemots, Marillion singles collection, Epica, all quite different things. I bought Shindig and Mojo magazine. Mojo had The Beatles on the cover. They were a band from the sixties that split up 50 years ago but despite there being so many great bands around unless you put The Beatles or legendary equivalent on the cover of that particular magazine, it won’t sell. It’s the age group but the magazine had a free CD with contemporary American singer-songwriters and the CD cover featured my current fave, Phoebe Bridgers. It’s sad to think that despite how great her albums are, if you put her on the cover, the magazine would sell substantially less.

Although I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the NME’s excoriating reviews of bands they didn’t like and excessive fawning towards the ones they did, one had to admire a magazine that put an unknown band on the cover. But in those days, the magazine had the power to influence and when America saw say, The Slits or The Fall on the cover, there was interest from the American underground who were looking at the UK’s underground. One presumes that the NME made Punk. So in fact what’s happening is that an older generation that grew up on the sixties and the seventies will buy a magazine with bands they remember from their youth but have little interest in something they would like that’s new. Who could possibly not love Laura Marling if their favourite artists were singer-songwriters of the sixties and seventies? But see how many copies Mojo sells if you put her on the cover. Younger people have learned to love The Who, Kraftwerk and, yes, The Beatles, it’s about time older people learned to love Phoebe Bridgers, Laura Marling, Aldous Harding, James Blake, FKA Twigs, Jonathan Wilson, Flying Lotus, Bright Eyes, and stop thinking that all young people do is listen to meaningless shiny Pop, music with bleeps and nasty sexist Hip Hop. The equivalent existed in your day but you probably liked it, I know I could dig Led Zep and T.Rex simultaneously. They might have been seen as quite different in those days but time has brought them much much closer. There is so much great contemporary music out there, you gotta dig like you did then.

Music today took a heavy turn but only in the context of 1969. It’s still pretty heavy but when you listen to heavy music of the modern era Led Zeppelin sounds closer to Frank Sinatra than they do to the nastiest Death Metal. Grand Funk Railroad were a power trio and they released their debut On Time in 1969 and like Uriah Heep were panned by the critics and despised by the hip, but for all the bludgeoning and the negativity and all the bludgeoning by the band on their instruments I heard power, melody, peacekeeping lyrics and a sound, just a great sound. Also characterful players, Don Brewer on the drums, Mel Schacher on bass and Mark Farner on lead vocals, guitars, occasional piano and harmonica. It’s Blues-based (of course) but it’s energy-filled, garage band Rock that translated into stadiums. Perhaps best described by my friend, wordsmith and critic David Fricke in this piece from Rolling Stone published in 2003.

Because David’s review was stretching beyond On Time, I’m sticking with them tonight. If you haven’t heard the second album released on December 29th 1969 and strangely titled Grand Funk (the red album), ooh are you in for a treat! This is why you need to own a stereo, a proper stereo system. Are you seriously listening to Rock music on computer speakers, or heaven forbid your phone or even earphones? Agggghhhh! You need proper speakers with spread and bottom end and a couch and a proper stereo amp that can give you volume. And guess what, all the music you like, all the genres, sound better, really. What are you waiting for? Every new technological device is nothing compared to a proper stereo. Otherwise, your music player is like owning a Bentley with no seats.

The third album, Closer To Home (1970), is where I discovered Grand Funk Railroad for the first time. Somewhere in Liverpool in the seventies or in Birkenhead in a second-hand record store, possibly Skeleton Records which is still there, or in Probe in Liverpool which is also still there, like Skeleton in a different location. That first track, Sin’s A Good Man’s Brother (what a title)! It was one of the first big Rock riffs I ever learnt to play. It was very exciting to get to America and pick up a copy with the original gatefold sleeve. You either love or hate this kind of music but really we don’t need to know about intense dislike do we, don’t we just move on to what we do like and ignore what we don’t, that’s what I couldn’t understand about the NME, the destruction of people on the way to what they liked.

The last album tonight is Survival (1971), same kind of thing as Closer To Home, there’s a rousing version of Gimme Shelter that I suppose Stones fans would think was sacrilege, but the bass on it is amazing! There’s also a cover of Dave Mason’s Feelin’ Alright. A double live album separated these two releases. When I got to America, I found an original copy with the three original photographs, haha, exciting stuff! So if you are feeling like some early seventies Rock that nobody liked except for me, David Fricke and the people, here it is.

Song Of The Daze

Grand Funk Railroad – Into The Sun, 1970 (make sure you get to 6.20):

Today was the day that Noel was bringing down the eight boxes of records that once belonged to his late friend Norman Armstrong as a much-appreciated donation to the In Deep Music Archive. It sounds a little maudlin but more than one person has left their collections to the archive in their will. We are trying to preserve the music as a cultural library and the idea of a collection being split up, sold on, thrown away, or the gems cherry-picked and the rest discarded, seems rather sad. Records I already have from donated collections go into the dupes boxes and I intend to use them to swap for albums I don’t have. That’s the plan and one hopes that in a donated collection there’s different versions of albums I already have, different pressings and even better condition albums of records I already have that I can upgrade. So thank you Noel and thank you Norman wherever you are for your generosity and contributing to this amazing library of music.

My wrists are hurting from moving records around in the shelves, grabbing a pile of records and moving them somewhere else, making space. I noticed yesterday working on Ahad’s album that when I was playing some bar chords on my Fender Telecaster, the angle I needed to have my wrist was painful. I managed, my guitar playing days aren’t over yet. In fact today I was back in the studio again, Dare and I had worked till latish and Dare got too tired to carry on so we continued today to make as much progress as possible, also because Dare is about to go away for a week. So Dare did some rough mixing, some technical stuff that we mere mortals don’t understand. I played a little extra guitar and we both sang some backing vocals. It’s actually song 9 that we are up to, 4 to go with all kinds of musical bits and pieces to add to the songs we’ve already worked on. We’re making an album, we go back, we look, we add things.

I had a session with Tyler in Portland tonight. He’s another sessioneer with tons of talent, lots of ideas and has just finished with his latest self-financed project. I’ve been giving him some guidance on a project where he writes and sings and plays all the instruments. I’ll be letting everyone know about where to get it when it comes out. So many talented people out there and so difficult to get their music to an audience that would love it if they knew about it, if they had time to know about it, if they could get through the mess of the relentless bombardment of the senses.

Yesterday, I donated a measly £5 to Wikipedia. It’s an amazing resource and it’s free, it’s the least I could do and they ask for support now and again and I never get around to it. They do have a way of making you feel guilty about using the service though. When you donate they then start to ask about donating more, I suppose they have to be pushy to keep it going. It is an amazing free service and although there’s lots of room for error, you get the feeling that the basic information is about right. I think a lot of people use it and consequently, you’d think that the musicians might keep their info up to date. For example, there’s a cursory note that the Gong album has been released but nothing else, no link, no picture. If I was 1000 people I would fix every page and get all the information right so nerds like me could check out discographies, release years and any other factual information, band members, their instruments and their history. But Wikipedia isn’t just about music, it’s about the world, it’s an encyclopaedia of knowledge compiled by the people, it’s a bold project, we should be supporting it.

And yes, I did also swim today. 1PM at the pool, 50 minutes and I hit 1 mile again, 64 lengths, I really had to push to make it. I got into the water a little later, just by a couple of minutes and I finished exactly at stop time. My body feels good, better than I expected but getting into shape is like learning French, it takes time, it doesn’t happen overnight and it seems like a hell of a lot of effort for little result, you just have to remember it’s the long game, most things are. Patience, concerted effort, belief, discipline and before you know it you have the body of a 25-year-old and you’re speaking fluent French.

Music today had me craving Cream’s Disraeli Gears (November 1967). What kind of music is it? Sixties? Psychedelic? Blues? Well, it’s Sixties Psychedelic Blues, with real songs and words and excellent sounds. It opens with Strange Brew, written by Eric Clapton and the late Felix Pappalardi, lyrics by the late Gail Collins and what I realise is that this music doesn’t suffer from the chains of Blues tradition or the loose risk of Psychedelia despite its legacy and influence. Even the second track, Sunshine Of Your Love, which should be oozing safety in the Blues genre, doesn’t dominate when you put together the personalities, the talents and the visions of these three unique individuals – Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. It’s such a great album, I recently bought a brand new copy (because it was so cheap) when I already had multiple original copies, to have a copy in pristine condition is essential. I did the same with T.Rex’ Electric Warrior.

World Of Pain swirls around like a wind (Collins’ lyrics again), Dance The Night Away features Clapton on electric 12 string and the side ends with Baker’s slightly strange Blue Condition. Side 2 opens with the amazing Tales Of Brave Ulysses and its surreal lyrics, Bruce’s voice, that Clapton wah-wah and Baker’s tom-heavy drum beat. The song was a collaboration between Australian Martin Sharp and Eric Clapton. Sharp not only wrote the lyrics to this song but was also responsible for the Disraeli Gears artwork as well as for the next double album, Wheels Of Fire.

Tales Of Brave Ulysses

(Lyrics by Martin Sharp)

You thought the leaden winter
Would bring you down forever
But you rode upon a steamer
To the violence of the sun
And the colours of the sea
Blind your eyes with trembling mermaids
And you touch the distant beaches
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
For the sparkling waves are calling you
To touch their white laced lips
And you see a girl’s brown body
Dancing through the turquoise
And her footprints make you follow
Where the sky loves the sea
And when your fingers find her
She drowns you in her body
Carving deep blue ripples
In the tissues of your mind
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
And you want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter
Her name is Aphrodite
And she rides a crimson shell
You know you cannot leave her
For you touched the distant sands
With tales of brave Ulysses
How his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing
Yeah
The tiny purple fishes
Run laughing through your fingers
You want to take her with you
To the hard land of the winter

AllMusic’s Matthew Greenwald calls it, “One of a few overtly psychedelic songs to have aged gracefully…Lyrically, it’s a relatively factual and colourful rendering of the great Greek tragedy Ulysses”.

She Was Like A Bearded Rainbow or SWLABR is next, with lyrics by poet Pete Brown who was a lyrical collaborator with Bruce on Dance The Night Away and Take It Back and with Bruce and Clapton on Sunshine Of Your Love. Outside Woman Blues was written by Blind Joe Reynolds, despite the solos and the Blues riffs it still sounds like something beyond the genre, that’s Cream’s genius and if you want humour then final track Mother’s Lament somehow manages to justify its existence too.

Gong’s The Universe Also Collapses (2019) carries on the tradition of this bizarre group which when it formed in the sixties might have been seen as more of a lifestyle, a philosophy, rather than just a purely musical endeavour. In the wake of Daevid Allen’s (Gong guru) death in 2015, the responsibility for the world of Gong has been handed to singer-guitarist Kavus Torabi and his merry men – Fabio Golfetti on lead guitar, Dave Sturt on bass, Ian East on sax and Cheb Nettles on drums. You can see Daevid Allen smiling down on its unlikely success without him, although it was with his blessing, he knew it would work with these people. It’s Progressive Rock with a twist, spacey stories and cosmic vibes permeate the music. Olivia and I have seen them live twice and they are a cosmic inspiration. Fabio even sent us CDs of his Brazilian band Violeta de Outono, highly recommended.

Steven Wilson’s collaboration with Israeli musician Aviv Geffen began in 2004 with the Blackfield project. It’s perhaps the strongest project outside his Porcupine Tree and solo output that has now grown to five albums although his involvement has been sporadic in the middle period. It’s that classic thing he does, Progressive but with real songs, melodic, memorable, beautifully produced. If you have not yet discovered Blackfield, the first two albums are gems. Both Wilson and Geffen sing and write. Geffen is a big star in his own country (Israel), Wilson is married to an Israeli girl. This album is Blackfield II (2007), Olivia’s favourite Blackfield album – and she knows everything about Steven Wilson’s output.

Last but not least one of the great song-orientated Porcupine Tree albums, Steven Wilson’s vehicle that has catapulted him to the solo success that he now enjoys. Lightbulb Sun was released in 2000 and is packed full of catchy melodies, memorable lyrics and great sounds. Ideas galore, it’s that fine mixture of instrumental sections in songs.

The band features ex Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri, with Colin Edwin on bass and Chris Maitland on drums. One of my favourite albums of the period.

Song Of The Daze is Cream’s Mother’s Lament, also two live performances by Blackfield and Porcupine Tree (with Gavin Harrison on drums and John Wesley on additional guitars and backing vocals):