News

On the 7th June 1982, 38 years ago, Priscilla Presley opened Graceland to the public. Olivia stumbled over this fact today and it immediately reminded me of my two visits there. Once with the ex band when we got some kind of private tour in the eighties or early nineties and once Olivia and I went there as we were staying about 3 hours away and thought it might be an interesting way to spend the day. Mostly, Elvis is a generational thing, too early in the history of R’n’R for the sixties kids and ancient history for the seventies kids despite his influence, charisma and talent. Elvis the Pelvis, you know the story about him only being filmed from above the waist because his gyrations were considered too sexually provocative. If the world then only knew about twerking.

 
Of course Elvis’ light shone long after his heyday and still shines brightly today, he is a bona fide icon. When I was at Graceland the first time I wanted to leave with a memento and chose to go to the shop where they had a large selection of 7 inch singles. I bought a copy of The Edge Of Reality which I’d seen a clip of somewhere and immediately liked in song and lyric and performance. Whenever I mentioned it to anybody they didn’t seem to know it. Of course all Elvis fans would, but generally people know Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up, Suspicious Minds, Heartbreak Hotel, In The Ghetto, Love Me Tender and into the seventies maybe Burning Love, An American Trilogy, I Just Can’t Help Believin’. When you think about Elvis for a second and not as a fan you can still name the songs, know the tunes, see the image. That’s why he was an icon – he transcended.

At the house, we were shown the legendary room with all the televisions. Everything in the front room was brown, the colour of the day. We asked could we go upstairs, but no, that was out of bounds and the place where he died one terrible night in 1977, a shadow of his former self, he was just 42 years old. When Olivia and I visited the house it had changed drastically from my earlier visit. Commercialized beyond taste it was $69 each to get in. There were a whole lot of local girls as staff. One drove the little bus, one sat on the plane, they were located at key spots to keep an eye on things. I mentioned The Beatles to the first one, “We have The Beatles, you have Elvis” I said, just making conversation. “Who?”, she said. So I asked every girl in the place, all but one said, “Who?”. The one that said she’d heard of The Beatles said she thought they were American.

New generations, different cultures, when you think about it, why would they know who The Beatles were? They would never have been exposed to them. Perhaps someone out there would be horrified to know that I didn’t know the name of some of the pre-war US presidents. Calvin Coolidge anyone? I suppose we are doomed to accept that the next generations are more likely interested in now than then. The balance between the past and what you can learn and the future and what you need to shake off so you can grow is something we all need to learn.

Studio today was prepping songs for the AA album which usually means that we take a demo and Dare puts it onto the computer and we try to bang it into shape arrangement wise. We look at drum patterns, parts, vocal melodies and Dare with his lightning fast fingers moves all these things around until we have a framework to work with for me to play guitars and bass and for Eddie to play drums. It’s a lot of work before you even start. Unlike the Space Summit album where I co-wrote the songs with Jed, these songs are all written by Ahad although there’s no bass on them and the drums are rough sketches of the real thing. Ahad sings and plays guitar on the demos and does a great job considering he’s working in the kitchen with a computer or an iPad. It’s our job to turn these demo songs into a real record and Ahad will come here to sing when we have the backing tracks ready and presuming that the quarantine laws don’t interrupt that process. We are going to be busy.

Music today has leapt great distances. I started with the two Gong albums from the mid-seventies, Shamal and Gazeuse!, both released in 1976. It became apparent that there was going to be different versions of this band as the commune that bore them had seen lots of different members. These albums were a transition between the original Daevid Allen’s Gong and the more fusion inspired Pierre Moerlen’s Gong of the late seventies. I’ve always really liked these two records and often play them together. A very different beast to the earlier Gong albums that are also great but in a different way. Sadly Pierre Moerlen died too early in 2005 at the age of 52. The legend that was Daevid Allen died in 2015 aged 77. The Gong legend continues with yet another incarnation led by Kavus Torabi on guitar and vocals. I can highly recommend the current band having seen them live a couple of times, once at Loreley, Germany, and once in Liverpool and having bought their last two albums, Rejoice! I’m Dead! (2016) and The Universe Also Collapses (2019). I saw Daevid Allen live once at a small venue in Glastonbury when I lived nearby, he was, let’s say, cosmic.

So, from Gong to Elvis! It’s never been done before. Early on in Elvis’ career he started acting and King Creole was apparently one of his favourite roles. It was his fourth film and also starred Walter Matthau and Carolyn Sue Jones who all you people that remember a group called The Beatles will also remember a TV series called The Addams family, she was Morticia and if you thought Elvis’ hips were memorable you probably also remember Morticia’s shuffle. King Creole reached No.2 on the Billboard charts in 1958, the soundtrack song Hard Headed Woman reached No.1.

Last album of the night is “Presley, the all time greatest hits”. It’s a double album released in 1987 with 45 songs that I bought in Oxfam for £1.00. What can you say about Elvis that hasn’t been said? An amazing and original performer with a unique voice who somehow lost his way. But even if he did come from an era before I was born, if it wasn’t for Elvis (and The Beatles) I might have been a successful businessman by now, how awful.

Song Of The Day is Beatles And The Stones, written by Guy Chadwick from The House Of Love. It’s a duet with Norwegian singer Marte Heggelund from 2008. Marte is coincidentally turning 40 today – two of her two sets of twins are also having a birthday today. I remember we went on Norwegian TV and sang it live at 7AM! Ha ha.

 

Beatles And The Stones

Look at him shouting out
Loud as thunder out at sea
He wants a bomb
So do we
A bomb from the sky
Is the perfect crime
Shoulder on shoulder and heat
The Beatles and the Stones
Sucked the marrow out of bone
Put the V in Vietnam
The Beatles and the Stones
Made it good to be alone
To be alone
Look at me, proud of being
Proud of being seventeen
Locking in the pocket a smile
Soft from the school
Cut by the rule
Oh I’m dazed and I’m dazed and I’m dazed
The Beatles and the Stones
Sucked the marrow out of bone
Put the V in Vietnam
The Beatles and the Stones
Made it good to be alone
To be alone
The Beatles and the Stones
Sucked the marrow out of bone
Put the V in Vietnam
The Beatles and the Stones
Made it good to be alone
To be alone
To be alone
To be alone
(Alone, alone, alone, alone, alone)
To be alone…

(Chadwick)
The House Of Love (1990)

The Art Of Listening should be the title of my next album should I find the time to make one. It seems like a forgotten skill, it even extends to the art of watching. I was in a movie theatre somewhere in America and during the film there was a couple who were both looking at their phones during the film. In Australia I was in an arty cinema watching a Tarkovsky film and a woman answered her phone and proceeded to have a conversation. Really? What is the matter with people? Last tour a ‘friendly fan’ sat at the front table and was looking at his phone during a rather heartfelt song, I came off the stage and continued playing right up to the table, I was right on top of him before he noticed. I think in the past people were better listeners. Distractions were few, nowadays the unfolding world is right there in your pocket and there’s a possibility that what’s happening outside where you are at that moment is more interesting. You could be missing an alien invasion, the starting of a war on Earth or a message from Daphne at the office agreeing to a date. This Banksy pic captures it, but am I going mad or is there another better one than this that I can’t find?

I was talking about listening because that’s what Dare and I did in the studio today. We listened to and started pre-production on the Ahad album, then we listened to the songs we have started for another new Noctorum album (looking at 2023-24). It’s been a while since we heard where we are at with it as we’ve been busy with Space Summit and the Jerome project as well as some guitar for Arno and Chuck’s daughter Gracie and her She’s King project in Chicago. (I don’t think I have posted that one yet, I’ll find it.) We are also still working on the mastering of Space Summit, but hope to be done by the end of the weekend. Tomorrow we are back on AA as the songs fly in from Istanbul. We’re going to be very busy with this one.

Because I have so much time, I started a Duolingo French course. You might wonder why not German, well Olivia has that covered and if I can do the French and the Spanish and Olivia can do the German and the Portuguese and we can both do Swedish that’s pretty good for Europe – Italian would be nice. Duolingo is a really smart way of learning if you are busy but have goals and language needs and brain stimulation challenges. As I had French at school there’s a lot of words and structure and accent I know, putting it all together is another thing, hopefully this is the way to do it.

Somewhere in the archive I’ve lost my torch (my torch, not my touch). I have a place where I always put it, but it’s not there anymore. It could be anywhere in this maze of music. I must have used it to explore a deep dark corner, put it down and it’s rolled into oblivion and is now living with a million socks and left-handed gloves. I’ve had people say to me are the records in order? If they weren’t it would be a sorry old archive and finding anything would be impossible. Every day would be exciting in its randomness, but if you just had to listen to The Hapless Child by Michael Mantler you’d be very frustrated (especially because it’s so good). There are always records that need putting away, that’s true, but when it starts to get out of hand (like right now) then I attack.

With the weather turning cold, coats are back, skies are grey, it’s good to be trapped in here with the records and the guitars, online sessions, working on projects, playing, listening to amazing music and writing. The reading is still suffering, how do you fit that in? Sleep less maybe? But if I didn’t get proper sleep I wouldn’t be able to do the other things properly. How has this time vacuum happened? Is it just because of the internet? Visuals, posts, emails, Netflix, Amazon Prime, latest news? I have a theory that the more you do, the more you can do! We’ll see, hm, I must carry on with the cold fusion experiment.

Music tonight has been just one thing and I’ve been dying to listen to it. When The Beatles’ White Album reissue came out I bought it on vinyl. Then I realized that I hadn’t bought the version that I wanted because it didn’t have The Esher Demos, so I had to buy it again. Then I realized that there are three extra discs of outtakes that were only available on CD and it was some ridiculous price – a bag of Aztec gold, a head of the Hydra, the essence of the Madagascan crested newt and a donkey. I just couldn’t do it. Recently I found it on eBay, I bid for it and to my surprise won it for a reasonable price – the blood of a lark, a Mohican, four Citroen grills and an onyx egg. So that’s what I’m listening to right now, the Sessions discs 4,5 and 6. (It also comes with a great big book.) The nerd community loves this stuff and I must say listening to it for the first time I am as happy as an acrobat in aspic.

How many times have I bought this album? I have various vinyl copies from different countries, early CD versions in big bulky cases and thinner versions, I have it as part of the Mono CD box set, the Stereo CD box set, the Mono vinyl box set and the Stereo vinyl box set. Ha ha, mad! I love it. What a great addiction, what a fun hobby, what a brilliant disease, what a fantastic obsession. Thank you to whoever is responsible for making me love music.

Song Of The Day is The Muse whose visits I welcome.

 

The Muse

Nobody knows where you come from
Full of ideas and light
Down to your toes you are a song
With silver threads of night
You only appear where shadows play
And sometimes you like to hide
And then you’re a dove or a tiger’s claw
I feel you deep inside

And if you wear your cloak of jewels
Or your anger on your sleeve

If I imagine you into reality
Can we dance like man and wife
Can we fuse our souls to our dying breath
Then you bring me back to life

And when you don’t come I sit and wait
In a lonely room
Weaving my thoughts in complex webs
Waiting for your loom
The candle burns on till morning comes
I listen to my dreams
Whatever I wish in this reverie
You’re never what it seems

Can’t you grace this humble heart
Capricious spectre come to me

If I imagine you into reality
Can we dance like man and wife
Can we fuse our souls to our dying breath
Then you bring me back to life

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

Thanks to everyone that has managed to find some music or cloth that they like through the Bandcamp page. Also if you didn’t manage to make it within the 24 hour period you can still get records or T-shirts, it’s just that they charge us a commission. If you wanted to order Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics, the MOAT vinyl (with CD) or a Honey Mink Forever T-shirt probably best to go via Olivia because we have those items here at the In Deep Music Archive and that will save us those commission charges.

With the death yesterday of The Sweet’s bass player and sometime singer Steve Priest one might say, “We just haven’t got a clue what to do”. It reminded me of my clothes before I discovered scoop neck T-shirts and loon pants. I remember Dare had a classic pair of silver and black platform shoes with stars on them. I had my own pair of spectacular platforms that were a fluorescent blue but actually not as cool as Dare’s. I also had a pink denim suit with big lapels. We went on a school trip, to London I think, but we weren’t allowed to go unless we had some respectable clothing and for some reason we weren’t allowed to wear our school uniforms. This is all very hazy but I do remember that I bought the suit (or my parents did) at Burton’s in Chester which was equidistant to Liverpool. I’m not sure if I was being image conscious or whether all the clothing looked like that, the shoes, the shirts, it wasn’t till I saw that picture of Janis Joplin inside the gatefold of In Concert that I went more Hippie. I remember when I found the brown brush denim, low waist jeans. They were so cool. I used to wear them to school until one day I was caught by the headmaster’s secretary and told not to be seen in them again. It was probably around then that I decided that the first chance I got to leave this prison I would take and at 16 I was gone. Music was the thing and having to wear a school uniform from the 5th year in to the lower and upper sixth was just not going to happen. University just wasn’t an option, not because of my brains but because of the clothes you needed to wear to be allowed to study for pass results to be accepted. It was too late anyway, guitar had taken over and controlling my mind, there was no turning back.

We walked past one of the churches in Penzance today where we took this photo. It was a Wesleyan chapel and apparently the cross where I am sitting was once on the roof of the building but it was hit by lightning (those angry gods) and is now there in the garden. I had to jump the gate to get in there because it’s now privately owned. This reminds me to mention that chapel I was talking about a few weeks ago that was for sale. It was £100,000 but in the middle of June it’s going up for auction starting at £50,000…dear God…

Tomorrow we are in the studio starting on a new project. Dare was in today downloading files onto the computer. At this point we don’t know what the project’s name will be, but it has been written by one of my sessioneers, Ahad, who lives in Istanbul. I’ll be playing bass and guitar and producing with Dare also engineering. Eddie, who is playing on all the records we make down here these days (Noctorum, MOAT, Space Summit) will be playing drums. I’m calling it AA, Ahad’s initials, because I have a solo album by one of the girls (Theresa Wayman) from Warpaint and her solo project is called TT and it bleeds cool so I thought AA sounded cool, too. It’s just my pet name for the project. But let’s not talk of pets, thanks for everyone’s kind words.

Olivia is in the other room making packages for the Bandcamp project. She’ll be sending everything out on Monday. Other things will be sent from the US. I hope that this crazy world will sort itself out and that the US election in November will be the beginning of a new era. There’s so many mad leaders in the world today, I don’t need to name them, mad stupid, ignorant. When do we get what we deserve, or is that the problem?

Music today reflects the death of Steve Priest, bass player and sometime singer with Glam Rockers The Sweet, he was 72. The band had thirteen top twenty hits in the seventies and nobody can forget their look and lead singer Brian Connolly’s hair. It was probably that look which had him severely beaten up in the seventies so that he had trouble singing on the Sweet Fanny Adams album (1974) due to injuries to his throat. The violent morons never go away and why do they get so angry when they see pretty men? Tonight’s listening begins when The Sweet are escaping their Teeny songwriters and Pop hit producer Phil Wainman and start working with Mike Chapman instead – just for one album, a step towards producing their own records.

Desolation Boulevard is the first album where they were released from the chains of the Pop hitmakers, Chinn and Chapman, and wrote their own classic Pop hit with Fox On The Run which reached No.2 in the UK charts and No.1 in Germany, a worldwide hit. Chinn and Chapman are still involved in the album, writing The Six Teens and Turn It Down, but this is the album where the band wanted their autonomy and got it. (Although the US album has a different track listing with more Chinn/Chapman songs.) Nobody really seemed to notice what a great band they were singing Bubblegum melodies dressed in their Mum’s reversed blouses and wearing silver trousers, yellow jumpsuits and pink boots. They were in fact talented musicians and in the seventies the singles always had a great Rock track on the B side where they sounded more like Deep Purple or The Who than a Teen sensation. Mick Tucker, who sadly died in 2002 from Leukemia, was a flashy drummer with double bass drum and twirling sticks and even the drum solo on this record is listenable. There’s a cover of My Generation where the band were in fact more at home than what they were known for. A great melodic Rock album for all of you that ever raided your Mum’s wardrobe for the photos but spent a lot of time at home practicing as well.

Give Us A Wink (1976) was their first album with all the songs written exclusively by the band. The record didn’t chart in England but made the Top 10 in Sweden and Germany. It was a departure for the band, some sort of missing link between Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack and Deep Purple’s Machine Head. I imagine that the teen fans were deserting them in droves and fans of heavier music could only see them with their Glam Rock image and catchy hits. Plus the teen fans were getting older and times were changing, Glam didn’t have much life left in it. Doomed to failure marketing-wise but not musically and of course as usual with The Sweet nobody cared about skills, their image wasn’t about that. They had a single, The Action, opening Side 2 that was a Top 20 in the UK and the US and Top 10 in Canada. It’s a really good seventies melodic Rock album.

By 1977’s Off The Record their popularity was seriously waning but you’d never know it by listening to the album. There was always Germany and Sweden and they would ultimately have their popularity last longest in those places, their last two albums not even released in the UK whilst they were still together. Off The Record has great high harmonies like Queen, lots of guitars and catchy songs, but no memorable singles.

Level Headed, the last Sweet album with a hit, was a change of direction abandoning that harder Rock sound. The hit was of course Love Is Like Oxygen, those high harmonies and catchy melodies remain. I always loved this song, there’s just something about the simplicity of the riff that I always found attractive and then there’s the intro riff and if that’s not enough the instrumental middle part that sounds like something from Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Then there’s the disco outro, bizarre. The song in an edited form reached No.9 in the UK charts, No.10 in Germany and No.8 in the US. On the album you can hear Steve Priest singing lead vocals on California Nights and guitarist Andy Scott singing lead vocals on Dream On and Fountain, that’s three of five songs on Side 1. This was to be lead singer Brian Connolly’s last album. Connolly died in 1997 aged 51 (after a life of chronic alcoholism and heavy smoking) of liver failure, kidney failure and the consequences of multiple heart attacks.

I couldn’t leave the night without listening to some of their super hits, so glad I did, so harmless. Blockbuster, Ballroom Blitz, Teenage Rampage, Wig-Wam Bam, Co-Co, Funny Funny, Little Willy, Poppa Joe, Fox On The Run, The Action, Love Is Like Oxygen. The Sweet have now only one member alive, guitarist Andy Scott who recently made a record with Suzi Quatro and Don Powell from Slade. He has a very silly haircut.

Song Of The Day is Cascade from Rhyme. Simple and partly inspired by Julian Cope’s Pop period it seemed like a good idea at the time.

 

Cascade

(Oooh, cascade!)
(Oooh, cascade!)

A seaweed look at you
Through the salty beach
The blossom stone’s a flower
The acrobat’s a peach

You gave a pebble party there
Why is it no one came
You sold yourself to a shiny man
And spread yourself insane

(You) Take the heart out of slightly weighted clouds
(Oooh, cascade!)
If you’re a cascade I wish you’d touch the ground
(Oooh, cascade!)

From crumbled peaks
I sentenced you to me
Your skin was shrinking
Into paper dolls that see

You climbed out of your scrapbook
Lit matches to your find
You burn your very own escape
Returning back inside

Take the heart out of slightly weighted clouds
(Oooh, cascade!)
If you’re a cascade I wish you’d touch the ground
(Oooh, cascade!)

Take the heart out of slightly weighted clouds
(Oooh, cascade!)
If you’re a cascade I wish you’d touch the ground
(Oooh, cascade!)

You shout a language you hope no one will know
(Oooh, cascade!)
And sinking into lasting death, again you start to grow
(Oooh, cascade!)
You start to grow
(Oooh, cascade!)
No one will know
(Oooh, cascade!)
We’re like a rolling stone
(Oooh, cascade!)
Whoa…

(Willson-Piper)
Rhyme (1989)

Today was a sad day for Olivia’s family as they had to have the family cat put to sleep. Feline (pronounced Feh-lee-neh) had been in the family for 14 years. She was having trouble breathing and it was the only alternative to stop her suffering. When we first met she ran away from me but she eventually warmed to me as she realized that I was more likely to scratch her behind the ear than attack her. It’s so sad when you lose your pet, you become so attached to them. I have been attached to cats in the past, Blackie when I was just a boy, then Lee Chang (Siamese) when I was a teenager, Herman, Sherman and Rocket when I lived in Bondi Beach and then Mio (Burmese) when I lived in Stockholm. Dare’s cat Babs lived over 20 years and when she died Bootsy arrived, but then Bootsy went to meet his maker, too. Dare told me today that he’s going to get another cat and if Olivia and I weren’t travelling all the time we would have all kinds of pets. Having grown up with animals I’ve always loved them, but who can explain people that are cruel towards them? I guess you can prefer dogs or cats or fish, although fish make quiet companions. Of course if you are a bird, a cat is an assassin and in fact Feline killed a blue tit a couple of days ago. You need a lot of commitment to have a pet, walking the dog, feeding them, grooming, picking up their poop, and vet costs! Cat litter, diamond encrusted collars, pets are an expensive business but it’s a labour of love. Farewell Feline – we miss you.

We were in the studio today working on three different projects, all at different stages, we were sending a track to Jerome in Berlin for the Froese/Willson-Piper journey, listening to the Space Summit masters and starting a new record with another of the super sessioneers that I will tell you more about as it evolves. Outside you could see the rain trying to fall, but it was weak, it was struggling, the clouds wouldn’t let it go. About 6.30 we decided to chance it and go down to the sea, but it was cold, I was digging out the winter scarf, jeans and layers, what the hell happened? On the way down through the empty park, the man that feeds the squirrels was there and one of them was bouncing down the path with a nut in its mouth. He waved at us (the man, not the squirrel) and as we came to the gates at the other end of the gardens, crossing into the alleyway between the houses that lead to the sea, there was a strong aroma of creosote. (You probably remember Mr Creosote and his mint from Monty Python.) But what is creosote? This from Wikipedia:

Creosote is a category of carbonaceous chemicals formed by the distillation of various tars and pyrolysis of plant-derived material, such as wood or fossil fuel.

At the sea, the waves were almost non-existent. They barely lapped and by the sea wall it was more like an outdoor pool with no force at all. The water was so clear and in green and purple bands as the underwater undergrowth coloured the surface. There was a boat sitting in the bay slowly drifting and as I zoomed in on it there was someone on a surfboard on his knees pushing the water back on either side of the board. I couldn’t believe how fast he was moving with no waves and no wind, he must have been in a trough of current. He finally gave up with his arms and lay on the board. How or why he was out there on a board quite far from the shore with no waves was anyone’s guess.

There’s an amusement arcade at the seafront in Penzance housed in a building built just after the turn of the last century. At this point they were still ornamenting public buildings and this one has decaying statues of mythical figures, you can see the rusty rods in their arms where the sculpture has fallen away. Their worn out faces once austere are now crumbling to dust as no one has the will or the cash to repair them or protect them. There’s lots of talk of protecting the ownership of property but not its beauty, it’s no one else’s to destroy but yours. Don’t blame the pigeons, you are supposed to be smarter.

Last but not least, before we get to tonight’s album listening, we posted on FB earlier:

Hey All,
Bandcamp are waiving their fees again and this time we have some different things available. There is last year’s Record Store Day release, Hanging Out In Heaven on double blue vinyl with two extra tracks, there is also the Atlantaeum Flood instrumental album on vinyl and CD and the last couple of dozen MOAT albums on vinyl that include a CD with the purchase. We are also doing Handwritten & Illustrated Lyrics, see the pics on Bandcamp. There are lots of other CDs including Noctorum’s Sparks Lane, Offer The Light, and The Afterlife on CD and vinyl. There’s various T-shirts and with every T-shirt sold you get a free Afterlife magnet. The waived fees are in operation from midnight to midnight, Friday June 5th – US West Coast time.

https://martywillsonpiper.bandcamp.com/merch

Start Times:
LOS ANGELES – Friday, 12am
NEW YORK – Friday, 3am
UNITED KINGDOM – Friday, 8am
CENTRAL EU – Friday, 9am
PERTH – Friday, 3pm
SYDNEY – Friday, 5pm

Thanks for all your support!
Marty & Olivia

Music today has some bearing on the Amoeba Hollywood closure as the first album I played was Dave Mason’s first solo album after leaving Traffic, Alone Together (1970). I noticed when I was looking at some different copies of the album on different labels, that one of the copies had an Amoeba $1.00 sticker. I’ve bought a lot of records from Amoeba over the years and the dollar bins often had some unfashionable gems and this was one of them. I imagine that an album like this would be more expensive these days as vinyl has become more popular, but when I bought this the bins were full of great albums for little money. The album was also released on marble vinyl which is quite unusual for 1970. It’s a warm breezy record with some nice guitar work and at this point Dave Mason was lauded for writing Feelin’ Alright recorded by Traffic in 1968 and a hit for Joe Cocker in 1969. He also wrote the Psychedelic classic Hole In My Shoe, parodied by Neil from The Young Ones, remember? I hadn’t realized that I liked this album as much as I do, every day in the In Deep Music Archive is a lovely surprise. Another surprise tonight is that coincidentally all four albums are debut solo albums by musicians who were previously in bands.

Picking albums today was based on a feeling for a certain something that I don’t hear a lot in newer records. What is that? Is it warmth, a feeling, a sincerity or maybe just a longing for an era where there seemed to be an underground of music lovers who weren’t hip, they were just music lovers. So with that in mind I picked Ronnie Lane’s debut solo album Anymore For Anymore from 1974. There’s some lovely songs on this mostly forgotten record including an absolute classic in The Poacher as the last track on Side 1. We played it live at one of our shows last time in the US. I sometimes hear a similarity between Ronnie and George Harrison’s voice. Sadly Ronnie died at the age of 51 (he’d suffered from Multiple Sclerosis for years). You can hear some of his greatest work as a member of the Small Faces and the Faces.

Nils Lofgren is another one of those well-known artists that nobody knows. You might recognize him from playing guitar with the E Street Band, but before that he was in a great band called Grin and then in 1975 he released his debut solo album. He’s a pretty great guitar player and singer and has a three-piece band on this album that features Wornell Jones on bass and Aynsley Dunbar on drums. Lofgren also played with Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He appears on After The Goldrush and also on Tonight’s The Night. I highly recommend listening to the Grin records, too, which I will probably pull out to play at some point in the future.

Last album of the night is Rory Gallagher’s debut and this particular copy I bought in Japan when I was there with Anekdoten. It’s not hard to dig Rory’s thing, his vibe, his guitar playing. I saw him live twice in the seventies, once at Reading Festival and once at Liverpool Stadium. When I was pulling out my copy tonight I noticed there was something extra in the sleeve that I hadn’t noticed before. When I pulled it out it was a piece of card from the record label with Rory’s autograph. Yay! If you haven’t discovered Rory yet start here and keep going. Rory Gallagher died in 1995 aged 47 of liver failure.

I just heard that Steve Priest from The Sweet had died. RIP Feline, Rory Gallagher, Ronnie Lane, Steve Priest, and George Floyd.

Song Of The Day is All Those Wires from Hanging Out In Heaven (2000), because some people’s wires don’t seem to be connected.

 

All Those Wires

Life’s a rolling stone
Are you prepared to be alone
To go to battle with your mind
But can your head put up a fight

All those wires coming out of you
Don’t confuse them
Yellow, pink and blue

Gracious, turn you inside out
Chasing all your demons out
Just knowing disconnects their hold
You warm up as they die in the cold

All those wires crossed inside of you
Thoughts don’t tire
Don’t tangle yellow, pink and blue

All those wires coming out of you
Don’t confuse them
Yellow, pink and blue

Hair hanging loose in grief
Come turn over your new leaf
Put your money on your self
Let me suck on all your wealth

Heaven’s upstairs
First door on the right
Don’t stay under
Just make sure your grip is tight

All those wires coming out of you
Don’t confuse them
Yellow, pink and blue

(Willson-Piper)
Hanging Out In Heaven (2000)

And suddenly it was gone, the sun not the blog. A cold, cloudy, gusty day in Penzance today. Us nutters that wear shorts in the winter call it “fresh”. The trees were swaying from side to side like the bridge crew of Star Trek during a Klingon attack. There were no birds, no birdsong, wherever they were they were surely huddled. Fluffed up and still in the lower branches they wait it out. It wasn’t raining but there was moisture in the air, like a threat. Outside the studio window there was a van broken down with its bonnet open and a man trying to figure out what was wrong (perhaps a family of sparrows were sheltering behind the radiator). There weren’t even any seagulls around today, they are usually so hardy, large as small dogs, aggressive. I’ve seen them swoop down and take an ice cream out of a child’s hand.

Dare and I were in the studio today working on vocals and guitars for my project with Jerome Froese (hence the pic), we don’t have a name yet, Jerome and Marty isn’t quite doing it for us but the music is. I redid some bass that might not have needed redoing, I redid some guitar that needed redoing in places and Olivia and I made a whole lot of weird noises with guitar and violin with Dare turning knobs that made things go whoosh! Dare and Olivia added backing vocals to the lead vocal that I did the other day and we left the studio with such a cosmic vibe that Olivia and I watched Episode 1 of Star Trek – The Original Series, Season 3 (“Spock’s Brain”). All this spilled out into tonight’s music, but more about that later.

Jed and I listened to the Space Summit mastered tracks yesterday and were really happy with the results, maybe a couple of adjustments here and there. Dare and I will be in the studio tomorrow and the first thing we will do is listen to the album and let Joe the mastering engineer know what we think. Sequencing, time between tracks, fades and bringing out the essence of the sound are all done in mastering, what fun to be so near the finish line, we hope the world won’t end before we cross the tape.

Yesterday’s ‘Blackout’ had us consider and contemplate, meditate on the issues that for the sane would not be issues. Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. I paraphrased this once on stage at an outdoor lunchtime show at Sydney University, I didn’t notice a reaction. The attentive part of the audience sitting on the lawn may have been looking for a context, but I was probably just trying to make the roaming lunchtime hordes take notice – it was never going to work.

This was also the show where a young ‘white man’, ha ha, stole my computer from behind my back whilst I was playing. It was a makeshift stage on some elevated steps that led to the rather large lawn. There was a small PA and behind me footpaths that led into and around the campus. There was no backstage, I just put my guitar case and belongings down on the floor behind me. There was a girl who used to come and see me play called Laetitia Rodriguez, she saw him do it and she and a friend followed him and as I remember confronted him and got it back. Thank you again and really, what can you do with people like that?

Every now and again I get a moron on Facebook, that’s what the delete button is for. Do not engage. You hear people say I have to get off Facebook because it’s driving me crazy. Arguments with trolls is to be avoided at all times. I mostly don’t follow anybody so I don’t get to see today’s breakfast. Try it (not the breakfast). Only follow people you like, inspired people, people you trust, interesting strangers. Facebook is not the place to have conflicts, because the cowards either hide behind anonymity or they are out to bait you. Delete, move on.

Music today has been inspired by the cosmic experience of working on the Jerome Froese project. So I decided to go Hawkwind crazy and only play Hawkwind albums tonight, oh what fun. I started with In Search Of Space from 1971, an album Dare and I and other members of our first bands would listen to all day in the early to mid-seventies. It’s a Space Rock classic and we used to play the track Master Of The Universe in our eternal rehearsals just because we liked it. I saw them live in the mid-seventies at Liverpool Stadium with Lemmy playing bass.

By the time I saw them, Terry Ollis on drums and Dave Anderson on bass who played on In Search Of Space, were gone, Lemmy and Simon King were in on the next album Doremi Fasol Latido (1972). It features the classic Hawkwind song Brainstorm written by Nik Turner who was always wailing on his effected sax, playing flute or singing. Lemmy sings The Watcher and mainman guitarist/singer Dave Brock sang and wrote the other songs including Lord Of Light that in a crazy experimental band Mercator Projection (I think) we played live at The Basement in Sydney to a shocked audience. Earlier in the year Hawkwind had managed a surprise hit with Silver Machine reaching No.3 in the UK chart in 1972 – sung by Lemmy.

Various musicians appear and disappear in Hawkwind’s history. Noise maker Dik Mik had gone by the next album Hall Of The Mountain Grill (1974), replaced by ex High Tide and Third Ear Band violinist and Mellotron man Simon House. Del Dettmar had gone by Warrior On The Edge Of Time (1975). Only Dave Brock and Nik Turner appeared on the first self-titled album (1970), which is somehow different to the following records. Space Rock might not have even been a term when this one came out, it was just freaky music from the underground. It was produced by Dick Taylor from The Pretty Things, but that might have meant he told the engineer to press record and sorted it all out later. I really love these three albums.

Also tonight I played their last album, All Aboard The Skylark (2019), which seems like a massive return to form. I really lost them after 1982 and have occasionally dipped into releases since then. The thing with Hawkwind is that you have to buy into it, like everything I suppose, like God! I saw them at Night Of The Prog a couple of years ago and they sounded like a Punk band. I haven’t even played all of the records that I love by them tonight and I wouldn’t be surprised if you loved their thing too, although I would never recommend them, it would be like recommending ice cream to a seagull.

Song Of The Day is some crazy track from Noctorum’s Sparks Lane, Qu’est-ce Que C’est (2003). Perfect after Hawkwind.

 

Qu’est-ce Que C’est

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Ich weiß (weiss) nicht
Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Ich weiß nicht

Hurt your feelings

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Warum fragen Sie mich das? Ich weiß nicht.
Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?
Warum fragst du mich das? Ich weiß nicht.

Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?

(Willson-Piper / Mason)
Noctorum – Sparks Lane (2003)