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'.

Route 66 # 6

It's a funny thing but after writing and recording this record and the accompanying book in a quick flurry of creative energy, I only got a chance to reflect on what I was thinking after it was done. Actually, that's how it usually is how it is for me. I read the other day it takes Kazuo Ishiguro over five years to write a novel, so maybe he does the reflecting and mulling over work as he goes along. But that's what I like about songwriting. The immediacy of the form and the temporality is often thrown in the songwriter's face as a criticism but reflecting after the point of writing brings more to say about the moment in which it was conceived. 

    

This isn't actually to say I take it lightly but when I heard Leonard Cohen took years to write Hallelujah and he still wasn't happy, I was trying to consider what he was thinking about. It's not my favourite song, far from even being close, I much prefer the slicker, spontaneous Cohen in some of his less heralded songs (I think it's the internal and external heralding of Hallelujah which turns me off). But I realise now it was the effort to make it epic and deep and meaningful which stripped it of it's vitality. It lacked the immediacy of the cultural moment that writers such as Mitchell, Lennon, Dylan, Reid and Springsteen deliver. But I digress. I have come to realise that one of two things might happen as I write, which influences the rhythm and lyrical patterns. The first is that I write songs intuitively as an internalised, emotional response to something I can't quite figure out, or say out loud and the second is, it's not until later I realise that the tidal tugs which bring the ebb and flow of life events into focus, start to be reflected in what I was trying to say. It's a kind of mixed up, combined idea of analepsis and prolepsis. While I can be writing on a topic like homelessness or social concerns like forced migration or even Amelia Earhart's feminism, the underlying themes also reflect a subconscious concern (if concern is the right word) which I have stored up from past experience. 

Let me try to explain analepsis and prolepsis in this regard, it's less complicated than the words might suggest. Prolepsis is a projection of the future from the present, it's where and what we think the future (even tomorrow) will be, as informed by our past experience while reflecting from the 'now' of our own story. Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow isn't really a question but a rhetorical hope that you will. Analepsis, looks back, not forward, at the experience of what went before but which impacts on the 'now'. Childhood experiences, broken love affairs, heartbreak, young love, all the accumulated speedbumps in our life's journey which bring us to who we are. So, Carol King singing, will you still love me tomorrow, is aligned to the simple fact that past experience also says possibly not. Simple huh? When I'm songwriting, echoes of my past inform the lyric as I reach out in the present to where I am going in the future. The whole Fisherrow project is infused with this idea and its only now, after looking back at it, I can see the book and the CD aren't about nostalgia but hope for the future, and the wordplay isn't play at all but actually a voice finding a space to speak. These echoes we hear are our own thoughts, the continuities we carry with us through our lives, even if we don’t own them as anything but vague memories which take us forward. 

 

Route 66 # 5

I miss this, who wouldn't? But its a curious thing; how can we miss what we never knew we had? I mean, obviously I can't remember this. I don't even know for sure where it's taken I just know who the people are. It might have been taken in one of two places. The first possibility is Barleyknowe Road, just off Lady Brae in Gorebridge where my Auntie Jessie lived and where my parents lived when they first got married. The other place might be Burnside Road in Gorebridge, where I spent my first years - and those I can remember. Even though I left when I was about 7, growing up left a thumbprint of memories. I tend not to be nostalgic about my early life and pretty well because I have moved on a lot and I 
enjoyed it all so much. But what captures my imagination here is the sheer joy and love. What a moment. I was sent these pictures by my sister Debs only this week and I can't actually remember ever having seen them before, so the surprise was joy in itself. In fact I was actually thinking about the Gorebridge setting because one of my earliest memories was of a bitter winter and snow drifts so tall I had to sit on my dad's shoulders. There is something magical about that too - and I wish I had a picture of it. But we 'can't have everything,' as Jen Webb once said to me, 'where would we put it all?' I have been writing a lot recently - and actually composing a new album, even though Fisherrow isn't properly out. I even have a title for it, though it's under wraps for now. It's now February but the future still isn't what it was, in the meantime I wrote this little prose poem about then. It is followed by a self-refelcting song which I recorded for a Portslade Railway Roots gig. I guess this life during lockdown is asking us to reflect. 

Memory is milk frozen in the bottle while it sits on the doorstep, waiting for you to come home from the nightshift; your pit bag and empty flask on the kitchen floor; striking a match over the gas under the kettle; lighting a Kensitas with the flame, we saved the coupons for those books; kindling and coal for setting the fire. I haven't seen snow this year, I live in the soft south, watching pictures of it sweeping across the north; each flutter bringing another story, another memory, all snowmen melt in the end.

Route 66 # 4

This is my other Hockney (see previous post). Isn't it a delight? The delights of life have been simplified somewhat by the present circumstances. Things that were taken for granted, travel, visiting friends, family, lovers, galleries, gigs, theatres, I can't remember when I was last on a train to Lewes even, it has all taken a back seat for the day-to-dayness of living. There is no other way because the option is to be reckless to others. Of course, I can take a trip in different ways. This week I have been reading, Alice of the North by my dear friend, Anne Caldwell and its about a place I recognise and yet not at the same time. The great thing about the collection is how the pages turn on surprises. "The Piano" leaves us with a picture of Mary Shelley's monster on the ice and then effortlessly slides in to "a beautiful Swedish man on the mail ship and the possibility of sex..." and then back on land with "Kippers" and "memories that stick in the throat..." I move around the shelves, randomly picking out old favourites, another dear friend, Jen Webb's Moving Targets, and "The Long Man of Wilmington" nestled alongside "Icarus" and other mythologies, having moved through the garden and basil and tomatoes and the reek of compost and blood... "Later the scent of leaves... And on and on, the shelves stacked neatly in chaotic disorder, 

Katherine Coles, Paul Munden, Philip Gross, (I know a lot of poets) Wallace Stevens, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Robert Burns, I don't know them, of course, but lordy, its been a journey since getting my first serious book in 1967 (picture aside). How time flies when you have books to read. Perhaps these simplified circumstances are just a reminder that the new normal isn't so bad if you just roll with it. But that means shutting out the outside and the crap that is rolling with it, people and heartache; not having live music, watching and playing, visiting an art gallery and even just strolling round to the pub with a notebook and pencil and sitting having a beer... all pales into insignificance. But och, give me back the old normal. I sang this song at Portslade Railway Roots Club the other night.

 

Route 66 # 3

 

This is one of my David Hockney's. He painted it on an iPad during a TV show and then said the first 200 people applying could get it as a free download. Needless to say I was pretty chuffed to get one and it continues to give me pleasure. Today (as I write) is Epiphany and for many it is a spiritual moment of awakening, of realisation, of revelation even. It isn't any of these things for me. Its simply a time which allows me to remember how fortunate I am. I didn't suddenly wake up and realise I remembered, it wasn't revealed to me, I already knew. That's what I think of art does, it reminds us, it speaks to us, becoming more than just the item on display. Wallace Stevens wrote, '[The artist’s] function is to make his imagination … become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.' What I feel is, if an artist, be it painter, sculptor, photographer, poet or what and whomsoever, goes to the trouble of switching on the lights, at least we can work with it. So when Rilke asked, 

    Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

    hierarchies?

I'm not so concerned by the image of existential suffering he goes on to insinuate (which I care little about - there's too many people really suffering in the world), but by the light he switches on in making me think. Well that's how I see it anyway. Have your own epiphany, ultimately it really has nothing to do with me unless you wish to use it against me.

Route 66 # 2

This is the last day of 2020. It has been the strangest of years and yet I have finished it with a new record - on general release in the new year, which has been a source of creative joy to put together. It's called Fisherrow and is a series of echoes from the place and surrounding area. Fisherrow sits on the Firth of Forth leading out into the North Sea waves; waves which bring the Gothic quiet of the haar, where murder and love could stay secluded in equal measures. The Firth of Forth coastline, neither unchanged by centuries nor ignored by modernity, exists in my mind still as a place of restlessness, of longing, of escape and return; the sea can take us from and bring us back. The pubs, the streets, the shingled coves and sea-worn crevices in the cliffs which are fit only for seabirds to breed and exist and yet that familiarity is not. Coming back always feels like returning to a place which never existed in the first place. The sense of continuities is the illusion all of us carry for the places we leave. And the people too, especially those who are gone, come to exist as an echo - like when I took a last trip to Dunbar with my father:

Give me maps and a compass, some old bones,

a bag full of shells, beach washed pebbles, dried

seaweed, a clear stretch of water, a sunny day and a view

of the Bass Rock; it’s okay, you can sleep off the night

shift, while I plan the journey, there’s no rush,

I’ll no’ be far away.

 

Even now I think of you every day.

There will come a time when I won’t. Maybe later,

when dusk settles over the Firth o’ Forth, I won’t hear you

saying, ‘Think we could swim tae Fife fae here?’

‘Aye,’ I always said,

though we never did,

but that was okay.

 

Last year was the strangest of years and I started it by posting this picture, not knowing how fractured it would be. But it has also been a year for learning that life is for living. In a curious way, instead of losing the year to lockdown and all that goes with this strange C19 pandemic, I have made new friends, written new music, made new inroads into this new part of my life (since giving up work) and in many ways it feels liberating. I wrote this song for the record and recorded for the online Portslade Railway Roots Club - the half empty bottle on the table, can be half full... if you like.

A guid New Year tae yin an aw, an monie may ye see

An durin aw the years tae come, O happy may ye be

An may ye ne'er hae cause tae mourn

Tae sigh or shed a tear

Tae yin an aw, baith great an sma

A hearty guid New Year!

Route 66 # 1

 

This year I am travelling on Route 66. Life has a way of lining our journey along this road with milestones; age is another. In official pages I am a pensioner, an OAP and all that goes with that, and this and that and whatever is, is of no real consequence. Some say age is but a number, that may be so; others suggest it is a signifier of something else, experience perhaps and that is also so; I'm not sure what it is for me, except, perhaps, a sense of contentment. Well in the first week of Route 66 I will be releasing a limited edition of my new record and chapbook called Fisherrow. Fisherrow is a small harbour town at the delta of the River Esk where it meets the Firth of Forth. I lived there for seven years. The record and chapbook isn’t in any way a biographical account of my life there, or a travelogue of the place, but echoes I heard during the time of Covid (2020) when I had lockdown and quarantine time to listen out for them. Like all echoes they are imprecise and often only loosely attached to the source, so it’s only a true story, maybe... Only a true story maybe, echoes of a past which like nostalgia is a return to a place which never existed in the first place - and yet... and yet the echo persists. So on Route 66 I propose a new echo every month. It will be my milestones on that road. Because on the very first day this also occurred - I gave a poetry reading in Patros, Greece. 

Yesterday we travelled to Patros, in the northern Peloponnese; Jen Webb, Anne Caldwell and me. There wasn't an Odysseus sailing us there, or a Circe to delay our journey (that would have been such a swine); neither was there a Daedalus father providing wings for guiding us away from the hot sun, those flying days are suspended for now; but it was warm all the same, and we read poetry and listened to the thoughts of colleagues scattered, far flung, across Europe, Australia and the Indian sub-continent. It was my birthday, what a special way to say how much we all cared.

At the time of writing we are still in the middle of the 'pandemic' - no point in saying its not a pain in the backside, it is no way to travel, but it is what it is - the future is no longer what we thought it was. 

This is a track from the new record which I recorded for an 'episode' of Portslade Railway Roots Club, online.

65 # 5 Eddi Reader in a shopping mall in Japan

My dear friend Phil (sometimes known as Ian for no sensible reason) McCutchion took this picture at Portslade Railway Roots Club. Its not a nod at narcissism to post it, its because its relevant to a story I heard twice inside two days from two different sources. Boo Hewerdine, who was heading the bill at the club, told us how he was playing with Eddi Reader and her band in Japan, when Eddi announced a new entrance for herself. The band (with Boo) were to go onstage and start playing and Eddi would come on, open her arms wide and the lights would come on just as she was about to start singing. Yay, 'show business' - it doesn't happen at Portslade Railway Roots club - however, it was all going to plan, the band got on stage, made a start and waited... and waited... and waited - it seems Eddi opened the wrong door and instead of walking onto the stage she ended up in a shopping mall attached to the venue. Subsequently she had to run out of the mall, round to the front of the venue, get inside and then run down the aisle while the bewildered band were playing and playing, waiting for her entrance. We laughed, of course, Portslade Railway Roots club is a friendly place. Boo went onto sing his song, Bell, Book and Candle which Eddi had recorded (a fine song it is too) and it should have been the end of the story. However, on Saturday my friend Ray Knight (a very fine harmonica player) said he had a spare ticket for Transatlantic Sessions at The Brighton Dome, would I like to go? I had meant to get tickets, the cast was hugely impressive, Gerry Douglas, Aly Bain and a host of some really special players. One of those was John McCusker who announced he had written a new tune called Eddi Reader in a Shopping Mall - and then proceeded to tell a story about being in her band in Japan... and well you know the rest, I nearly shouted the punchline but didn't want to spoil it for the other 1699 people there (it was full). But it got me thinking about stories and tunes and songs and how we carry them around as part of our own cultural identity, as part of our own story. Who can claim to own them at all. I always try to write with an underlying social concern and meaning, and sometimes it hinders my own writing process. Sometimes I wonder if I should worry about this at all. I mean a song never changed the world, all it can possibly do is expand life with a range of observations, a depth of empathy, sentiment and expression which might make a difference to some. As the poet Wallace Stevens once put it (I'm paraphrasing his idea) poetry, songs, music, all art gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself. As Simon Critchley says, it's, 'an experience of meditation that occurs not through a retreat from the world, but by relearning to see it in all its quotidian banality and violent beauty.' So whether you're lost in a shopping mall or confronting your world with thoughtfulness and humility, take a moment to enjoy the experience - unlike the story of Eddi Reader in a shopping mall, it may never come round again. Here's a poem from a compatriot of mine, that became a song featuring John McCusker, Boo Hewerdine and Eddi Reader - take a moment:

65 # 4 Sonder

Sonder is a word which defines the idea that everyone we encounter in life are leading lives as vivid and as complex as our own; lives populated by visions and hopes and friends and the inherent agency of love and lovers and families and dreams and desires. Pondering this while looking back on what you know of your own mother’s life is fraught with its own problems. Do we ever really know our parents or our children? Or indeed that of our friends and lovers? And yet it’s hard to escape the influence and impact they had and continue to have on our lives.  Its with this in mind that I ponder the life of this young woman, pictured left. Born in 1933 and so I reckon this must have been taken around 1950-ish, sitting on the cusp between teen and womanhood. Before she was married, before I was born, because she was 21 and I was a honeymoon baby - 9 months and a day after their wedding. Such memories I hold of her, and yet this period reveals nothing except the joy of the moment - I'm reading a pony and candy floss. It could be Portobello and the beach, or equally the miner's gala or some other such fair. But she looks happy and I remember this look from my own childhood. Its nice to reflect. It is said Harry Houdini grew up as a witness to his own father’s failings, a man who was always haunted by the shadow of his own past. Yet evading that past was probably Houdini’s greatest escape, as he guided himself into the culture of the new world that had left his father so disappointed. We all escape our own pasts to some degree because we all move on - and its what we want for our own children, is it not? I suspect Houdini's father would have been proud of his boy. One of the things that has helped me to move on is music, which I have a passion for. And today we can grab this out of the ether. Take a moment and listen - I have tried in vain to translate it, but does it really need that because its just lovely. Take time to sonder about the people in your life.

65 # 3 Happy New Year

And that's the end of that and the start of this. The first decade of the twenty-first century has gone and now we are into the roaring 20s - bring it on I say. I'm not sure how to gauge the success of a decade, or compare one with another because the ups and downs seem to even out - thank goodness. And that's how it seems to have gone for me. But I guess I'm hitting the final third of my life. Some might say that's optimistic but hey, what's wrong with optimism? Many's a guid tune frae an auld fiddle, and all that. So what will the new decade bring? Well this month I will be recording - just waiting for my new mixer to come, as well as tidying up the space I use as a studio (in the attic), which I will do today. But I have a plan to record a themed record, bunching songs together - and they have been written that way, though not necessarily intentionally. Its just the way they have come out. But I am looking forward to it. So a month at a time is just fine - and maybe I'll even take a drive and listen to this:

65 # 2 Nightjar

Christmas started with a walk down to the beach to see Jade (Adams)| swimming for charity. Huge effort on her part and small effort on ours, but well worth the effort all round. I guess the time of year brings out that kind of event but I have to say its becoming the new normal. Food banks and charity giving for the sixth most successful economy in the world and all the Queen can say is its 'been a bumpy year' - well how to be patronised with one sweep of the hand. But this is not the time for looking back at another annus horribilis. What propels us forward is optimism that 2020 will have the vision to be better. Is that too much too hope for? Christmas came with a new assortment of jumpers and a new electric mandolin for those tricky live events. And I will post a picture of it before the year is out but it has been a horrible year and now the corner is turned. So onward to new and better days. I feel a change in my bones and optimism is a good way to start. As my dear friend, the poet, Katharine Coles once wrote:

      And if we grieve in anticipation, will we
      Take the edge off or only bring grief

The question remains unanswered but I know what I think - I raise a glass to optimism and good cheer. And this tune 'Nightjar' by my very dear friend Nigel Horn always raises my spirits.

65 # 1 Soul for Sale

Well its been quite a year though not a 'groundhog' one I want to repeat because the speedbumps have been more like mountains, at times. Still, I guess life can only get quieter and where would that take us. As I write this in preparation for the beginning of my being 65, votes from another general election are being counted. I am not holding out great hope for my team - unashamed socialism in the mainline! My neighbour just over the fence (Caroline Lucas) should get in, and I hope so. And if we can bookend Brighton Pavilion with Labour each side of her, in Kemp Town and Hove, then we will be doing okay. But there is a lot about voting that I don't understand - like how can any reasonable person swallow the lies. But I guess we do. People lie to us all the time, the lad in Spec Savers lied to me (new hearing aid not glasses) just because it was easier and we accept with a tolerant nod because its what people do. Now this isn't a theme I am riffing on, or will be chasing this coming year which I will be recording here, though it might become one.

They lie those that say I lost the moon,

those that prophesised my fate of sand,

they assert so many things with cold tongues:

they wish to ban the flower of the universe.

Pablo Neruda knew a thing or two, 'and look what they did to him, I'm not ready for that parade...' (which is a line from a new song I've written). So anyway, here I am at the end of my 65th year and starting out on number 66 which I will begin recording here. This video was of a good event, a high point, we launched The Briar Band's first record.

It was a lovely thing to do and here's my song Soul for Sale. Playing music is such a lovely thing to do - long may that continue because as I write news os a landslide is just filtering in. See you around, I hope. 2020 is just around the corner and there is symmetry to that if nothing else. I wonder what the poor will do now? I have written a new song, 'No room at the inn' - its going to be a long decade - sigh.

January 2018: A premonition

Inner hope or outer hope, what's it to be?
Hope and Anchor looks the best bet all round

I got a missed call from Israel today (the country of origin now flashes up on the screen). I have no idea who it could have been; most likely a wrong number but you never can tell. I mean do we really know anything when coincidences, happenstances, flukes, twists of fate and even deja vu come to be such a potent force in our lives. I've been lucky all my life. I mean I wanted to write and I do, make films and I have, sing my own songs and have people like them and that happens too, and it might sound dramatic but I have also nearly bled to death after an operation, been run over by a car, stabbed, shot, fallen off a motor bike, fallen off a ladder and driven a car head on into a brick wall; but I'm still standing, as Elton once sang. Its been a busy life. But I wanted to talk about a premonition which happened sixty years ago but I have only just been told the story. When I was a wee boy, as opposed to a wee man, two going on three, my dad would put me to bed. I confess I have no recollection of that time, in what I recall as happy years in Burnside Road, Arniston, before an ill-fated move which I am not sure I really recovered from. Anyway, he had put me in a cot (which I do remember, we had two, a big one - where I slept - and a small one for the baby (Debs then Mags). According to my dad's telling only last week, one night he was tucking me in and I said, 'Dinnae go tae yer work tonight, Daddy... Daddy dinnae go tae work.' (that's the first I have ever been told or knew that I called him Daddy, which I rather like). But the words held more force than that. My dad grew up with a deeply superstitious mother, 'Dinnae put thae new shoes on the table - its bad luck!' She had a bad luck story for every turn. Took her years to get over my mum breaking a mirror in her house (seven years come to think on it). As an adult I would have thought it a bit daft. I have only been off sick one day in twenty five years of working at the University of Winchester, far less taking a fly day off. He wouldn't have missed a shift for anything - after all, you didn't get paid. But after a chat with my mum they agreed it was a 'premonition' that he shouldn't go. Well, guess what happened in Arniston Colliery that night? We take this idea for granted, especially these days when we are much more cynical, more secular and more in tune with ideas. Does anyone really believe in horoscope and premonition? But the history of such things isn't as clear as it could be. Indeed, we still suspend our disbelief for films and books and the like, mostly because at the time we want to believe it. And then there are dreams; if I am honest, I think all of my dreams have actually come true and maybe I have some new ones too. I wonder if in hoping I could have predicted that away back in Arniston? Who knows? But back to the premonition - after a sleepless night we discovered that... oh... nothing at all untoward happened on the night shift, nothing at all, that night in Arniston Colliery. Well all I can say, in defence of my premonition, is thank goodness he didn't go to the night shift that night, because if he had he really might have been the trigger to some catastrophe. Well you never know do you? His not going avoided that! As I said, you never can tell. I mean do we really know anything when coincidences, happenstances, flukes, twists of fate and even deja vu come to be such a potent force in our lives? I wrote this song (coming up) thinking about Allepo but also about the enormous homeless problem in the UK - its huge down south, here in Brighton. We were a working class family growing up, with a coal miner father and school cleaning mother, but we grew up in a house which had loads of laughs and premonitions. And the point of this song is, surely somewhere to live should be a basic human right! Forgive the recording, its in my attic, but you'll get the gist of it:

January 2018: My dad the stripper

We took a drive down to Dunbar to see the harbour (and a good chunk of the Scots against the predatory English in history). To be honest, its one of those small Scottish towns that has been there forever (since the year 600) with fishing and a harbour underpinning its existence - though its dominated by Dunbar Castle and historical stories of battles and Mary Queen o' Scots and Stevenson-like adventures. We were just there for the fresh air (it was bracing) and a look at the sea (a bit too early to catch sight of a seal or two). But inevitably we ended up chatting.There is something especially endearing in getting my ageing dad to talk about his early life. Finding out things you never knew about, that he was a 'stripper' is just one of the great joys I heard this  week. 

Having lined himself up an apprenticeship as a butcher, my dad (who gets letters from the Inland Revenue addressed to Andrew Melrose, Jr, which I guess makes me Andrew the Third and my nephew Andrew the Fourth) was awoken by his mother shortly after his fourteenth birthday to be told he was going to work at the pit. He protested, reminding her of the apprenticeship due to start next week, but she replied, 'We need the money now.' And so it was, a neighbour called at 5.30 in the morning to walk him down to the day-shift at the pit. His mother packed him off with a snap box with two jam sandwiches and two cigarettes. When he asked about the cigarettes (because he didn't smoke) she told him, 'You're a miner now, all miners smoke.' And so did he from that day until he was made redundant decades later. When he stopped being a miner he stopped smoking, it was a simple decision. And then he began talking about those days. On your knees, working in a space about three foot high, 'stripping' the seam (we get to him being a stripper eventually), digging the coal out by hand, shoving in a prop to stop the roof coming down on your head, and then pushing on, stripping more coal. 'In those days you could be on your knees for seven hours in a three foot high seam,' he said. Arniston pit was better, the seam was six feet high and at five two he could easily stand up. Though he said it was scarier because the higher the seam's roof the easier it fell. Of course then things became mechanised and he became an explosives expert as a mine driver with a team working for him. Things changed, but a working life underground; it takes some thinking about. This song is very much on the surface but the title suits him - and it takes me back to when I was learning to play harmonica and guitar together - which I will post some time:

Wild flower meadow in Brighton's Preston Park

Every year, part of Preston Park, near where I live in Brighton, has a small area, actually the old bowling greens, set aside as a wild flower meadow and at this time of the year it is glorious. Dan gets to see it every day because he is a voluntary worker at Whoopsadaisy - which is a charity for children with cerebral palsy - yesterday he said they had a water fight just beside this spot. But while the pictures don't really do it justice I thought I might put them up so others can see them.