And there I was, driving into town just as the sun was getting ready to drop out of the sky when I saw what looked like smoke drifting up from the sea. But as a smaller smoky cloud peeled away, and as I got closer, the real picture became apparent. A murmuring of starlings were flash-mobbing the sky around Brighton Pier; my first sighting of the year. Simple pleasures but such a joy to beheld.
Flying by the seat of your pants, playing a miss-assembled guitar (like the one left) and generally just doing as you please for the sake of it is something we are less inclined to explain as we get older. Of old I would write and edit and edit and edit work before I would let anyone see it and yet recently I posted a Christmas story straight out there flaws and all. And though I haven't ever felt too troubled by such things, this week I did something I have actually never done before - though it relied on the cooperation of another. On Sunday I wrote a brand new song, on Monday I let my colleague and friend Hannah Curtain hear it and on Friday we played it live after one rehearsal half an hour before we went out - just like that. Hannah sang it with a wonderful soul voice and to be fair was superb (and indulgent of me) though I played fine, even if I say so myself. So ok, a small creative risk in real time and no one gets hurt. I did similar in the summer and played a song at the 'Make Every Word Hurt' pre-symposium evening at the University of Winchester, which I hadn't just written, I'd had the tune and chorus for a while it was just a case of finishing the verse. This new song was brand new, the tune the words, the hook on the chorus all fell together in around ten minutes in my study last Sunday and it went down very well indeed. Given time I will work on the lyrics, maybe change the theme a little but that's for another day. I also played a song called Dance With Me, a version of which I will post below and a song called Hold Me which Stevie Simkin played lap steel on - what a treat to hear. That song has been around for a while too - and its actually on someone else's album (Maraid O'Donnell and Lorna Bird as Loobie) but that's another story. Its just a note to remind myself how much I enjoy playing. It was right for me to stop, my kids took all the time in the world but now they are off, and now I have a new Martin D16 which for me is the perfect guitar. It has all the feel and sound of everything I like in a guitar, right down to the matt finish. Not much of a post for a Sunday morning I guess, but hey ho, there you go. This is not the new Martin, I will post a clip of that in time - happy Sunday:
On Sunday we took a stroll into town for some new guitar strings. Bitter cold in Kensington Gardens and Sydney Street was doing a roaring trade in woolen Himalayan hats (the ones with the ear flaps) but on the way home we popped into Mo's (where you can get warm, great coffee and GF cake). It is located on Preston Circus, just opposite the Duke of York, which is an independent cinema and has the most fabulous pair of stripey tight clad legs kicking out of the roof. As I have said before, spontaneous art installations are a Brighton norm. These legs have been around a long time I just kept forgetting to photograph them. Of course to some they will raise the whole question of what is art. That's fine, art itself would struggle without the ongoing debate. But I guess its the idea and the material conversion of the idea that separates it from the ordinary, the pointing light moment, Walter Benjamin might have said, before parody and pastiche steal it for other purposes. Of course this idea could be copied and adapted, we and our neighbours could have a whole can can troupe kicking out of our respective roofs (now there is an idea - imagine seeing that as you look down the street) but it would only be a textual intervention on the original idea (I guess). Which brings me to the idea of 'fakes'. My old stomping ground (when I lived there) is the Dulwich Gallery and they have an exhibition loosely called spot the fakes. Fakes are fun. Fakes are cool is a conceptual art project in which a replica made in China is concealed among its “real” paintings. Can visitors spot the fake? The intervention, said the gallery’s director, “will provoke a new way of looking at our collection”. No it won't, all it will do is show there are some people who can replicate what the real artist conceived in a moment of creative genius. What they cannot and never will be able to show is the copy as an original piece of art of its time, originally conceived and crafted and engaged in dialogue with the age in which it was created. They would have been as well posting a bunch of iPhone pics. I will not be going to it. Oh, and of course, 'spot the fake' is just one of those snobby art critic games. Me, I want to turn up in a gallery with the provenance of the piece already established so I can see it and try to understand what its really all about - well maybe that's just me. Mind you there is a lot of pastiche in this song, still, its good to hear Lucinda Williams back in the studio, even if it is a wrong number:
