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.