Notes from a notebook #4

It's been a while since I posted a blog. I guess I just got out of the habit of doing so but maybe I can start to rectify that. There is something quite cathartic about the process which I forgot. I have been writing a lot recently. Songs and poems and fiction and I guess what I really need to do is get a structure to it all - if anyone can get a structure into a creative process. So I guess this is a way of saying, maybe I'll try harder. I have been thinking about writing a whole record about women. I have already written about Amelia Earhart and now Mary Queen of Scots and Frida Kahlo:

Frida Kahlo

She had a head full of colour and a heart full of love

A bed full of lovers and a passion for flowers

Revolution was a word she drank with blood red wine

And she danced – in Mexican time

 

She lived inside a box of paints red and blue and gold

Her hair was full of diamonds and the stories that she told

Moon and sea, ruby eyes, pink glass, mud and clay

And she danced – the Mexican way

 

She said, ‘I don't paint dreams or nightmares...’

But the truth stolen from the poor

Just because you’ve made your bed,

You don’t have to lie in it forever.

 

She drank to drown her sorrows but the damned things learned to swim

Divorced Diago but still loved him

She danced la conquista with Leon Trotsky

And made love - in Mexican time

It might be something different to do because I like thinking about different styled. For example, I absolutely adore Maria Elena by Ry Cooder and Flaco Jimenez with George Bohannon on a sublime trombone, what's not to like, huh? This week I got some very bad news. We both loved this tune. I wish we could have played it more.

 

And it has landed, my new record. It's hard to explain the excitement of seeing a project through from start to finish. I often wonder if all artists feel the same? There are many battles getting to this point - especially the songs left out. I have some which I will now have to record separately - next project I guess. Of course that is if I can get over the 'impostor syndrome' - which is another artistic condition. Will anyone like it; it's rubbish why will anyone like; I'll cancel the launch because no one will come anyway... sounds a bit crazy I know but its an honest assessment when completing an artistic effort. If you would like to hear the first track just click on here - just me and my guitar in a single take, can't get any simpler: Fairground

Fairground: Brighton’s seafront (where I live now) offers an amazing juxtaposition between the carnivalesque Palace Pier and the crumbling wreck of the West Pier, where the endless possibilities of a fickle world become compressed in the smell, the sound, the sight and the invitation to take the plunge into a wild swim of life. Composed during the Covid lockdown period when the streets and beach were empty, the song is about confronting the fragility of health and well-being – and the cure and solace that love and friendship can bring to a troubled soul - well that's how it felt at the time. The ghost train’s asleep, there’s no lights on the carousel and the fairground’s been closed all year...

Notes from a notebook # 3

It's Burns night tonight. I don't celebrate it much these days, just take time out to read a bit of his work.  And what a lot of it there is. Prolific doesn't cover the breadth of it - and all the more remarkable for the fact that he worked hard and died poor and young. But it takes me hame if I had a hame tae go back tae. I remember singing his songs as a boy in the classroom and it is what turned me onto words, the way words matter. This paen to Nancy who he will kiss then sever their love ' 'But to see her was to love her...' and they, '...lov'd sae kindly,' well it works for me. Happy Burns Night. There are many great versions but this one with Karen Matheson wi' Paul Brady on the Transatlantic Sessions is pretty sublime. Look out too for Jerry Douglas and Ally Bain - written in 1791, imagine. I am about to release Lingerwood  - I took great care on the lyrics before committing them to the record and equally, I hope I have sung from the heart (which seems to be the way of my songwriting these days - here's tae us, wha's like us:

Notes from a notebook #2

In my last post I referred to clearing  up my shelves and desk before preparing the release of my new record, Lingerwood, but I failed. The simple reason is the bloomin' notebooks. Decades worth which chart a life I couldn't seem to recognise. I mean every one is dated and has my handwriting to confirm they belong to me but can I remember writing half of that stuff down? Nope! I can remember writing this one (picture left) though because it became the bridge in a song which you can hear here: Icarus Over the Forth (engineered and produced by Phil Jones for Long Way Home Music). I would be happy to explain the song if I really knew what it was about but the truth is I keep changing my mind. It's a patchwork quilt of a song, made up of its pieces and each of those pieces is a feeling of connectedness to my past, about not being able to leave the past behind because its tattooed onto my skin. But sometimes songs are a bit like that. I am about to release Lingerwood and the album too is a patchwork of my life and ideas, full of quixotic echoes, or maybe that should be chimeras. The Icarus song though is on the Fisherrow album and it's one I love playing live. So here's a live version recorded for Portslade Railway Roots Club during the time of covid - the intro gives away the fact we were recording for the online shows Robb Johnson ran (and he still runs the club on the first Thursday of every month except August) which everyone should come to, if they can.

Notes from a notebook #1

Trying to clear up my shelves and desk to start the new year is a fateful business because I can't bear to throw things away. The never know when you will want/need it mantra is pretty futile most of the time. But notebooks are a must keep for everyone, surely? I opened this one at random and these three lines popped out. I was still living in London at the time (East Dulwich, just off Barry Road and walking distance to Peckham Rye and Dulwich Park). I have no idea what the lines refer to, whether it was the start of a new song that never got written or just a random thought. I am posting them here because in some ways they represent a stepping stone in my life because from there on  in my life changed dramatically. But its nice to reflect on reminders such as these as I plan a next move forward. Watch this space because it will include the release of my new record, Lingerwood. In the meantime, maybe you would like to listen to something on the last record, Fisherrow. 

The first track on the record is available here, called Portobello (engineered and produced by Phil Jones for Long Way Home Music) but I'm also posting a little live version I recorded at home for Portslade Railway Roots during the online Covid gigs we did (and the end of the video is a reminder of our isolation). The link between cutting kite strings in 1988 and this song may not be immediately obvious to many, but as the new year begins I am not forgetting my past, nord how lucky I have been getting here, thus far.

 

Route 66 # 7

Picture by Ewan Jones

In other times I travelled north to see the night and day collide in light, where the dark never manages to overtake; the clock on the cabin wall might say midnight but it could have been noon, for the darkness is dispersed elsewhere. I’ve seen the aurora too, between Shetland and Norway, through the porthole of a boat smaller than the trip required; tiny needles of light piercing the glass, a poem puncturing pin holes in the story to let the light in. There was no ship’s cat on board, no purring comfort, just the ringing of the rigging catching the breeze. This could have been a disaster, you said. The weather can change so quickly, we will be lucky if it stays this calm for the whole crossing. It’s coming back that worries me. When the going is good, why go back? I hold that thought close and let the strange time slip by, unjudged.

The picture above was taken by Ewan Jones for Long Way Home Productions and was part of my first ever record company photo shoot. I'm always open to new things, new ways of looking at life and this was certainly that. It got me thinking about John Berger writing Ways of Seeing and what other people see when they see a portrait like this. It's not my portrait, it's Ewan's and I am just the subject. But the poem next to the picture is mine and marrying the two brings its own sense of parallax. John Berger wrote, 

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

Each evening we might think we see the sun set, but actually and mostly we take it for granted and assume it does so as we pull the curtains and pour the wine. But as the poem suggests, go far enough north (or south) and there is a time when the sun barely sets at all, and the idea that the 'knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight...' comes to make sense.

I wrote this song very quickly to play at Portslade Railway (virtual) Roots, after 365 days of coronavirus. It had been a whole year and I wanted to tell a story about the kickback from that year. When the world just gets to be too big and the ghosts start moving in, sometimes it's best to take good advice and 'come to bed'.