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After yesterday’s journey from Germany we didn’t wake up till 12.30pm today and as we were having breakfast Biggles and Colleen were having lunch. Today was our Abbey Road day. I lived in London for years, I grew up around Liverpool as a teenager, I worked in Liverpool after school, I had an elder brother who had all The Beatles records, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, but I’d never been to Abbey Road. We walked out into a chilly sunny day (Colleen and Biggles told us that the morning had snow). We took the overground train from New Malden to Waterloo. When we got there we realized it was a big and beautiful Victorian station, originally opened in 1848 (rebuilt in 1922). This is the UK’s busiest station and was originally where the Eurostar was based until it moved to St Pancras in 2007. Apparently you can’t take pics here without permission, so I went to the station office and told them I had a blog. They asked me what it was called and gave me a visitor’s pass. All of a sudden, I felt like an insider.

The other reason I was hanging around here was because of one of the great sixties songs, The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset (the station is mentioned in the lyrics). What a lot of people don’t know is that the song was originally written about Liverpool and was originally called Liverpool Sunset (Waterloo is also a place in the North of Liverpool). Ray Davies was apparently in love with Liverpool and Merseybeat in 1967, who wouldn’t be? We were on the way to Abbey Road and Beatles land but Waterloo station and memories of The Kinks’ classic song was a nice distraction.

We took the underground (Jubilee line) to St John’s Wood and stood on one of those long, long, long escalators, where you can hardly see the top. It looked old and I imagined The Beatles must have ridden it, I wondered if they’d considered their album cover shoot here, photographer at the bottom as they sailed down? We walked out of the station onto Grove End Road that leads to Abbey Road and there it was…the zebra crossing, the studio building and tons of nerdy tourists taking pictures and stopping the traffic.

It’s just incredible how famous this spot is, Beatles nuts from all over the world, young and old, breathing it in and trying to find gaps in the traffic to get their pic. Of course the cars have to stop and there’s the occasional impatient driver, but it’s just fun, how can you deny the nerds their fun. We hung around there for a while, took some pics of people taking pics.

Olivia helped a girl from Buenos Aires get her dream pic. We got talking to Gal, an Israeli girl who’s writing a PhD, she was there to observe! Ha ha, studying the nerds, I love it.

We left, passed by Sir Thomas Beecham’s old house and I noted that there’s a lot of Bentleys and Maseratis around here, and got the train to Piccadilly Circus. So many people. People in the stations on the tube, in the streets. You shuffle rather than walk in Central London. We passed by the flashing billboards and the famous statue of Anteros (it’s not Eros, it’s his brother Anteros). A busker was drawing a crowd playing that horrible Ed Sheeran Body song. We hurried by into Charing Cross Rd and went up to Cambridge Circus where I had a look in Fopp (record store). A good selection of new and reissued vinyl, generally reasonably priced, but not today. Everything was too expensive and that David Axelrod album Seriously Deep that I wanted, stayed in the racks. I couldn’t bring myself to buy The Slow Rush (Tame Impala), they’ve gone somewhere I don’t want to go. The collector in me wanted to add it to the other 3 vinyl records I have by them. I did buy Mind Hive, the new Wire album and Tramp by Sharon Van Etten.

We headed out back to Leicester Square on the way to Wagamama for some tasty ramen, but we made a little detour. Just off Leicester Square there’s a small French Catholic Church called Notre Dame de France, I discovered it years and years ago. I like to go in there, one for the contrast of the outside versus the inside, but mainly because there is a mural in there, painted by Jean Cocteau in 1959/60. It’s religious themed (obviously) and if you are a fan, a real secret treasure. I’ve been there many times to see it and finally got to share it with Olivia.

Wagamama is always good, we talked to Michael who we’ve seen there before, he looked us up, asked how the tour in Germany went.

We decided to go to Soho for a coffee and dessert and walked up Charing Cross Road through China Town (ate some taiyaki on the way) and found our way across Shaftesbury Avenue to Soho and went to Bar Italia (opposite Ronnie Scott’s) for a decaf and a Portuguese pastel de nata. Great place, always football on (duh, it’s Italian). Commentary in Italian, Arsenal were playing Olympiacos from Greece (we’d run across some of the Greek fans on the tube), second half just starting, Arsenal lost after extra time. It’s a big loss for them. We waved goodbye to central London and found ourselves on the train from Waterloo to New Malden. Got talking to Carlin and Steve (his brother is in quarantine in a Tenerife hotel), she was from Jamaica. People are nice, you just gotta be nice to them and they’re nice back.

Last but not least I have to tell you about Chris and Sharon. Chris was sitting in his wheelchair in Waterloo. I noticed he had a front wheel. I asked him what it was? I’d never seen that before. He told me an American man had been in hospital and seen people out of the window struggling across the grass in their wheelchairs and he thought there must be a better solution than this struggle. So he invented this front wheel which takes the two smaller front wheels off the ground and creates more traction in the back wheels and that in turn means that the ride is no longer bumpy on difficult services. True genius! On that note Good Night.

The girl in the mustard sweater stood directly in front of me. She wore blue jeans and a pair of high-heeled dark purple suede boots with a zip. Her hair was streaked to be blonder than natural but it was growing out, it didn’t look too bad which was probably why she’d been putting off redoing it. She was in her early thirties, about 5’8” and conversing with a couple of friends in the queue, one woman shorter and a man about the same height. I couldn’t catch anything they were saying as they were talking in whispers with their backs to me. I never saw their faces, just the side of the shorter woman’s face and it didn’t give me much of an idea what she really looked like by just seeing her profile. I didn’t see what they were buying as I was standing back more than an arm’s length. The shorter woman had something in her arms, hidden by her right elbow, I suppose she was nursing what she had come for. Olivia joined me in the queue after a fruitless search for something the shop didn’t have, I can’t quite remember what it was. It was busy but not too bad, considering the circumstances and after all it was a Saturday afternoon. We checked out via the self-serve machines and as we were scanning our purchases, my phone rang. It was my friend and Anekdoten bandmate Nicklas Barker calling from Stockholm, I had to take it. I left the shopping with Olivia and let her pack and pay as I went to the front of the shop to take the call.

Nicklas and his partner Sophie were supposed to be coming here on Wednesday. We were going to be working on some music, rehearsals for the Canadian gigs in Quebec City and generally have a creative week of learning, listening to music and breathing in the fresh Cornwall sea air. I wasn’t really surprised to hear that they wouldn’t be coming. The situation is making it increasingly hard to travel and feel safe. Staying home, staying in, working from home seems to be the best thing to do until the world gets a handle on what’s happening. Nicklas told me that he’d been informed that his tickets for the plane and the train that he’d already purchased are still going to be valid for another date so for now we sit it out and hope for an end to the crisis.

It’s not just Nicklas that has had to postpone his trip. Steve and Lynne from Atlantaeum Flood have had to postpone their trip, too. We were booked into the studio early April to start work on the second album. The problem is that when they come down here to Cornwall to work with us they camp in their vehicle and it didn’t seem like the right circumstances to do that. So that album is now on hold. It gives everyone another year of ‘One Day’ and one day who knows when we will begin work on ‘One Year’. On a positive note this is going to give Dare and I more time to work on the new Noctorum album as well as Jed sessioneer’s Space Summit project. More time for general Skype sessions if anyone would like to get in touch. You can do that here:

www.songwritingandguitarguidance.com

Inbetween the studio and the sea is Morrab Gardens, a subtropical park that has a host of odd plants and shrubs that I’ll show more of as the spring approaches. Olivia managed to catch the sun shining out of the clouds as I stood in front of the flowering pink magnolia tree. The pathways are always inhabited by inquisitive squirrels that nervously get closer to you if they suspect you might have some food, flitting about with a lightning metabolism that sees them shoot up a tree trunk at the slightest hint of a rash move or unexpected shift. Overhead the seagulls cry like cats, moaning and then sharing their bird cries with their shrieks that crow out of their throats. On the ground they crane their necks and shriek and squeal equally, moaning and calling into cacophony. Sometimes you see them stamping on the grass, mimicking rainfall, dislodging the worms from the safety of the soil. These birds are huge, with powerful beaks and strong wings that remind me of the Hitchcock classic. In the summer I’ve seen them swoop down in the high street and take an ice cream out of a child’s hand. Other creatures are few and far between just now as spring is in its early stages, an occasional blackbird or a sparrow flutter in the bushes.

Tommorrow is a big sessioneers day so today I’ve tried to make it a big archive day, that is cleaning records, listening to records and filing records (although we also had a Skype chat with Salim in Dallas, trying to plan an uncertain future). I couldn’t decide what mood I was in so I listened to some disparate sounds. Queen’s Jazz, an odd record with some dated lyrics and drum sounds but with Freddie still killing it as a singer and Brian May parading his unique guitar tones. They are frustratingly hit and miss on this album. After that and very confused by what Queen were doing in 1978 when you think about what other music was happening in that year, I decided to reverse the numbers and go for 1987 and more politically incorrect lyrics but musically influenced by Queen. Def Leppard’s Hysteria came out when we were making Starfish. It’s a mixture of dodgy words, buried vocals, bizarre drum sounds due to the situation with their drummer, but has some great musical moments and is full to the brim with Pop Metal hits. Love Bites, Hysteria, Women, Armageddon It, Rocket, Animal, Pour Some Sugar On Me. I list them because in the time from making Starfish to the band breaking in the US (within its own genre but making the ‘real’ charts) and consequently leading the band back to LA to make a follow up in Gold Afternoon Fix, Def Leppard were still releasing singles from the same massive multi-platinum selling album.

On a more thoughtful level I listened to the first Roxy Music album from 1972 which is just magnificent on all musical, vocal and lyrical levels, but I also went all over the place and listened to my favourite Dutch ironists The Nits and singer-songwriter Henk Hofstede’s perceptive observations of the universe, smart in a wacky suit, perhaps in the same way Split Enz were, not so obviously theatrical, but sometimes I think a madder Dutch Neil Finn when I think of Hofstede’s creativity. I also went to Canada and listened to the surprisingly great third April Wine album, Electric Jewels, from 1973 and then the first Blue Oyster Cult album from 1972. So I was a little all over the place tonight. I did manage to clean a few records that had been waiting to be attended to, but I struggled with the filing. Every time I pull a record out I give it time and after that start looking at the other records by the same group, see what’s missing from the catalogue and that takes you down one long rabbit hole…and yes, if you were wondering, I read The Pool Of Tears to Olivia, chapter two of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece Alice In Wonderland.

Wakey wakey, it’s time to plan to be early and end up rushing around and panicking that we’re going to miss the train. One thing about taking the train to England is that I can bring all the records, because there’s no weight limit, but can we fit them in the suitcases? Can we move the suitcases when they’re in? Can we get them on and off trains up and down all the stairs, through the labyrinth of the London Underground? Well, as it happened and this must be a first, every station had a lift. Result! Getting to London was really straightforward, less stressful than the plane. Siv dropped us off at Rhöndorf and we took a train to Cologne (50 mins) and changed there for Brussels (2 hours). As soon as we we hit the Belgian border, there was snow. It was a reminder that it was actually winter in Europe.

I closed my eyes as soon as we got on the Brussels train and relaxed into Black Sabbath Vol. 4. Ha ha, really. It’s such a melodic album, Ozzy always sings catchy melodies and Tony Iommi always has great guitar tones. It’s a fascinating story about Tony Iommi, he lost the tips of two of his fingers in a factory accident, so he plays with caps on his fingers and uses super light strings.

Read about it here.

We were on the luxurious ICE train,‘flying’ across the countryside, Germany, Belgium, France and from Calais on the Eurostar through the tunnel to England. I managed to get a snap of the Atomium (1958 Brussels World Expo) as we went by.

We met all kinds of interesting people on the way. On the Rhöndorf to Cologne train we met Travis, 27, in acting school, nice fella, friendly, helped Olivia get her designated heavy record bag on the train (Ha ha). Favourite actors, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and more but had never heard of Richard Burton. If he gets back in touch, I’ll be sending him some lists. Arriving in Cologne, coming across the great iron bridge with the oxidized statue of the famous man on the horse that no one knows and the thousands of love locks attached to the walkway. You might have seen it before in Paris, padlocks of lovers, symbolically binding each other together forever. I wonder who did it first? How did it catch on?

It was the third train, the Eurostar, where we met Jake and Mitchell. Jake, a photographer from Sydney, Mitchell an environmental scientist or as he described it “I’m in waste management”! We discussed film, acting and music for two hours. We arrived in London at King’s Cross/St Pancras and although we had gone through customs on the other side it takes a while to wind your way through the corridors and passages to the other side of the exit and to where all the shops and restaurants are. It’s going to be so different when Brexit comes into force, when all these people of different nationalities will be in the ‘alien’ queue, like arriving in America. We will suffer going to Europe and our time there will be limited. Looks like Olivia and I will have to move to Portugal. Will keep you posted on that one.

We’re staying with our friends Biggles (Pete) and Colleen. Biggles produced our (with Dare) first demo, The True 100’s. I’ve mentioned him before (he was the A&R man for Carrere Records). Biggles was at the Fulham – Swansea game, 1-0 (94th minute). We got to the house about 20 minutes before he did, Colleen met us and fed us, Bear, the dog looked at us, oh it’s just them.

So we’ve just spent that 3 hours chatting away and realizing that we’ve been travelling for 9 hours and should probably go to bed. So goodnight.

Last day in Germany, Shrove Tuesday, Siv made us pancakes for breakfast, English style thin with sugar and lemon. It takes me straight back to childhood, not only because of the taste, but because we only had this treat once a year. I really thought that you were only allowed to eat pancakes on this one day…and then I went to America. In Sweden they eat semlor, a creamy super sweet cake and it seems like this tradition exists in the Christian world to use up what’s left in the cupboard before the fast to Easter. I had no idea, Siv did some research. I didn’t even know that Christians had a fasting tradition. If you are not brought up with religious ritual these things pass you by.

It was get up and pack day today, will the records fit? Do I need my two acoustic 12 strings? Can we carry everything bearing in mind we are on the train and not flying? Is there a baggage limit on the Eurostar? Do I need my big coat? Are we taking sandwiches? Are my iPods charged? Do I have the right adaptor plugs? How long will we be in England? Despite being a veteran traveller it’s not easy to remember absolutely everything. I’ve started to make lists: Gym/pool lists, shopping lists, record lists, Brahms and Liszt.

Despite all these mind-numbing responsibilities we had arranged to go to Bonn today to meet Barbara who supported us at the Düsseldorf gig and livestream. Siv lent us the Fiesta and I broke all cool protocol and listened to Double Vision by Foreigner on the iPod. Olivia had to go and pick up her cellolin today from the luthier in (wait for it) Mozartstrasse (Mozart street), so while she was in there I took the opportunity to listen to the first Foreigner album, too (formed by Mick Jones who was in the latter day Spooky Tooth and Ian McDonald who was in the early days of King Crimson). 80 million records later, yes they sold that many records but despite being much maligned by anybody who might have taste, I think there’s one album that has great songs, Double Vision, that’s the only one. Hot Blooded is of course very silly, but I Iike the other songs. After that it was Fire And Water by Free and Houses Of The Holy by Led Zep so I went a bit seventies Rock mad today. We went to Nobbi’s record store and I bought Sound by The Mighty Lemon Drops (1991) and Permanent Damage, the last Icicle Works album (1990), so big jump from the seventies sound to the nineties sound. A record by Alan Ross (I already have two records by him, but nobody really knows who he is), last but not least I bought a vinyl copy of the brilliantly titled Electric Landlady by Kirsty MacColl. You may know she was tragically killed, run over by a boat whilst on holiday. It’s one of the most terrible stories, I won’t retell it here.

We arrived right on time at A Taste Of India in a part of Bonn I hadn’t been to before. It was a Southern Indian cuisine. It’s funny, I’m not a foodie, but Barbara was telling us tonight how she was a foodie after we discussed our hobbies, (ha ha, mine were…) Olivia and I are so picky with food. Whenever anyone invites us to dinner I always say “Are you sure you want to do that?”. But anyway, nice chat about the universe with Barbara. We ate the typical dish of this cuisine, vege dosas, nice. I never talk about food and that’s twice in one day.

We got back to the house in time to see Chelsea get hammered 0-3 at home in the Champions League against Bayern Munich. Then I listened to a bit of new artist Hazel English, before listening to the new Ozzy album, Ordinary Man, the last two tracks featuring rappers Post Malone and Travis Scott. It’s a long way from seeing Black Sabbath on the Vol. 4 tour at the Stadium in Liverpool in the seventies, or is it? I was talking to sesh man Tony on Sunday about how unheavy Sabbath’s sound actually was, especially Vol. 4 onwards and when you compare it to what happened in Metal music since…Ozzy has a kinda sweet voice actually, is it double-tracked all the time? It’s always so smooth. I went to see them with the Anekdoten lads in Stockholm on their final tour, Ozzy sang Iron Man so flat, all the way through. No one seemed to notice. Flat Iron Man. I’m back on Hazel English now, so keeping it eclectic.

Whenever I’m in a foreign country and heading back to my own country, I always hate to leave. Not because I have a problem with my country, but because I like the strangeness of somewhere I didn’t grow up, especially when it’s a foreign language. I’ll miss the left hand drive cars, the signs that I can’t read and all those odd little differences that make you feel like you’re in a parallel universe. It’s exciting, isn’t it? I don’t identify with home, not a home, that would be nice, but home as in where I’m from (Heimat in German). I’m at home with people from all over the world, like I’m at home with other people’s ways of making music. I don’t have to like it to appreciate it and the image never hides the quality or blurs the intent. Remember when Bowie toured with Peter Frampton as his guitarist? Remember when Aerosmith and Run DMC did Walk This Way?

Did you know that John Mayer plays with the Grateful Dead? What a wonderful world of surprises we live in.

Drachenfels (Dragon’s Rock) is the scene of the legend of Siegfried and the dragon where the Burg Drachenfels (Castle Dragon’s Rock) sits above the Rhine in the mythical Siebengebirge (seven hills) region. A mixture of famous legends, Siegfried sailed down the Rhine to slay the dragon after which he bathed in the dragon’s blood to become invincible, but a leaf floated down onto his back which became his vulnerable spot, leading to his demise. Look out George and the dragon and Achilles. So today we went to the scene of the myth.

The castle on the top of the hill was built between 1138 and 1167, originally to protect Cologne from attacks from the South. The castle was ‘slighted’ (deliberately demolished) in the 17th century after the Thirty Years’ War. Lord Byron has a poem where it features. Ok, history lesson over.

You can either walk up a steep incline to the castle or take a cog or rack railway, which was our chosen transport. That is an experience in itself as you are dragged up there (not the same as not wanting to go). The carriages built in the fifties just have doors on one side and inside and out have that wonderful design style of the period. When we got to the top we were soon standing in front of this awe-inspiring ruin but in truth there’s not much of it left, it’s the legend that lives on.

It was very windy up there and the path to the actual ruin was closed off, so we took our life into our hands, presumed the dragon was asleep and went up to the observation point (check out the sci-fi galaxy viewer). The view is rather spectacular, you can follow the curves of the Rhine and see all the barges slowly making their way towards their destinations in the direction of Switzerland or The Netherlands. In the distance you can see Bonn and beyond that Cologne. With my zoom lens I can just make out Cologne cathedral. The other way Olivia and Gerd were trying to figure out where their village was in the hills beyond Königswinter and Rhöndorf.

I rather like being a tourist even if the locals can see tourists just as a necessary evil, an economic compromise. Apparently in Venice there are so many tourists that they are being encouraged to stay away.

We decided to walk back down past an abandoned mansion and steep winding paths with forest all around us. Looking up into the twilight sky there were arrows of returning geese. Even they seem to know that the spring is upon us early. Halfway down the hill is Schloss Drachenburg, built in 1882 by a financier called Baron Stephan von Sarter, neogothic in design it would be a great location for the In Deep Music Archive.

At the bottom of the hill in the car park someone has scrawled ‘UFO’ on the wall, I wonder if it is the band, because German guitarist Michael Schenker was a member and it seemed like it was graffitied a long time ago, because another graffiti was ‘Kilroy Was Here’, anybody born in the fifties or sixties or before would recognize that phrase even if you never knew what it was supposed to mean, another mythical character.

Listening to some seventies German and Dutch music before we leave Germany on Wednesday. Inga Rumpf’s Frumpy, By The Way 1972. I bought it in Lucerne in Switzerland, hard to find outside the continent. Successful in Germany in the seventies, unknown in England. There’s some great footage online. I also listened to the very hard to find George Kooymans’ solo album, Jo Jo, from 1971. Kooymans is the guitarist in Golden Earring and I found the record those 3 days we were in Amsterdam. Kooymans was 13 when he formed the band in 1961 with his 15 year old neighbour Rinus Gerritsen. They have been together for 59 years. I saw them in the seventies in Liverpool at the Stadium when Radar Love was a hit. I can still see him strutting across the stage all dressed in black with his black Les Paul, Gerritsen super cool with his Dan Electro Longhorn bass, Barry Hay singing and playing the flute and Cesar Zuiderwilk jumping over his drum kit (as you do). This concert was also where I discovered another of my fave Dutch seventies bands, Alquin, the support that night.

Ancient legends, ruined castles and seventies rock bands, what a perfect day. But for those of you that don’t go for the seventies sound and you only know one song from The Netherlands in the sixties (Venus by Shocking Blue), go and blow your mind and listen to the AMAZING Group 1850, the album is Paradise Now from 1969. You won’t be disappointed. Interestingly the cover photo is taken by Herman Kooymans? I wonder if…