Ideas

Have a look at Change This! , which is a free subscription for short manifestos delivered in email format. It's meant to be a vehicle for spreading ideas and encourages you to pass it on to others. It arrives in my mailbox every week and I usually have a read of one or two of the manifestos, which cover a huge topic range ( from blogging to bio-diesel fuel this week).

I won't be writing at all - or even talking - next week, as I'm on a retreat at the Western Chan Fellowship. Most of the retreats are run by John Crook, a retired anthropologist and psychologist, with a particular interest in the shamans of Bhutan, a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddhism in general and Zen in particular, and an inspiring balance of madcap humour and deep seriousness. This will be, I think, my fourth. There will be about thirty people of all ages, living in a farmhouse with no electricity and no mobile phone reception, in silence for most of the week. Silent companionship is one of the best things about these retreats, a joy to experience but very hard to imagine until you have.

In the meantime, a solo gig tonight at the Canon's Gait with William Mysterious and Nicotene Fingers, for which I'll probably do a few covers that I just feel like playing. I'll have to leave early as I have a 4.30 rise to get a plane to Birmingham for another two days of meetings, then home for one day and off to Wales for the retreat.

Hope to see some of you (I know you're out there!) tonight.

Submitted on 30.11.04

Time management for beginners

I had mentioned to Lynsey and one or two others (like for example everyone on my email newsletter) that I planned to have the first Romantic Fiction CD out by the end of January. Lynsey thought I was being ambitious. Nah, I thought, I can do it. At the same time I took on the revamp of the Out of the Bedroom website. Add to that two gigs, umpteen overnight stays in Birmingham for work, a six-day retreat and Christmas and I was beginning to realise I had an issue on my hands.

So I sat down tonight and created a spreadsheet. On sheet 1, down one side, all the tasks involved in the OOTB site and the various stages of recording still to be done on the five songs for Fiction 1. Add to that a column estimating how long each task will take. On sheet 2, go through my diary and add up the number of hours free in evenings and weekends between now and New Year. A picture emerges. An overload of perhaps 300 to 400%! Well, now I know.

Earlier in the week I had impulse-bought Simply Brilliant - a guide to getting things done by Fergus O'Connell. It's one of those 7-Habits type business self help books, which as a genre are much the same, but can give you a little push in the right direction when you need it.

So the upshot is that the OOTB site revamp will probably be finished around the end of January at the earliest, and the Fiction 1 CD probably March. But I will post individual tracks for download before then, maybe one for Valentine's day (I saw you cringing).

Submitted on 28.11.04

St Andrews Night at the Full Moon Club

This is from the Full Moon Club's newsletter:

We've got lots on for you this week. Next up is the St Andrews Day Hooly at The Canons Gait on Tuesday 30th November. This celebration of our national saint should rival St Patricks Day, so Nicotine Fingers are setting the ball rolling with some of the best of Scottish music. Apart from Nicotene Fingers, there will be sets from Norman Lamont and William Mysterious. It kicks off at 8, and your three quid ticket also gets you a plate of haggis, neeps & tatties. You get a free 'Best Of Scottish Music' C.D. if you are among the first 50 through the door. Come early, it'll be busy, and the live music kicks off shortly after 8.

Submitted on 27.11.04

Quagmired

Just back from a couple of days at work-related meetings in Birmingham. I'm involved in a big BIG project for my employer; it's a constant lesson in not making assumptions. No matter what you thought had actually been decided it hasn't; whatever you thought I.T. were co-operating with, they aren't; whatever you thought you had to produce, it's something else; whatever you thought you could buy, you can't; whatever you thought you'd contributed, it isn't right; whatever you thought was outside the scope of your bit of the project, guess what...? It's like building a brick house in which someone keeps trying to change the bottom row while you're trying to build the upper storeys.

Straight off the plane, compered Out of the Bedroom which was a curiously flat night. As compere I have to take some responsibility, but it just seemed there was a lot of introversion on the part of the performers and reserve on the part of the audience, and that spark that usually ignites the evening and gets cheers, percussion, and vibes just didn't happen with the fleeting exception of William Douglas's one-song spot. Some good performances, sure, but the whole was less than the sum of the parts.

Now to get back to all that work stuff and redefine:
- what exactly I'm trying to produce
- what the sequence of events is that will produce that
- who's going to do get things done.

Submitted on 26.11.04

OOTB site, Cohen and Aberfeldy

Went to Nelson Wright's flat for a discussion with him and Jim Igoe about the Out of the Bedroom site, which I'll be taking over for a year. They approved my general approach, and we looked at TypePad, which I'll be using to set up a lot of the site as blogs, enabling members of the committee to update it without rousing me from my torpor.

Playing in the background was the album by Aberfeldy, which is generating some heat on the OOTB discussion board, being described as 'pure joy' by some and 'twee pish' by others. Many at OOTB have a particular interest as Riley, the Aberfeldy songwriter, played there a few times. He struck many of us at the time as being particularly talented, and he's now the first OOTB performer to attain some industry success and acclaim, albeit as a new act. I wonder if the discussion represents the traditional divide appearing between he's one of us - ain't he doing well? and they all think he's good but we knew him way back and I always thought he's crap. It's not there yet but that faultline is so endemic in the UK (Morrissey even wrote a song about it, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful) that it may well appear. The album sounds wilfully innocent and cheerful, and will obviously grate when juxtaposed with Nick Cave or Leonard Cohen, but I'm happy for someone young to put out an album that sounds young. I can believe that more than I can believe 20-year-olds singing about what a hard road they've travelled or telling me how the world works.

Jim talked about how he got to Glastonbury one year by pretending to be his Friends of the Earth mate who had a job there picking up litter. In a bizarre twist on the Hell's Angels at Altamont, the security that year was handled by ...Oxfam?

Submitted on 23.11.04

More autobiography

I enjoyed my reminiscences for the Hungry Ghosts article, so I've written the next chapter post-Ghosts, which takes us from the end of the Ghosts band to just before the birth of the Innocents.

It also includes a link to a video (smallish file size so not great quality) of a performance of the song Hungry Ghosts with guitarist Gil Murray in the Ross Theatre in Princes St Gardens in 2001.

Two more articles to write in this series - the various versions of the Innocents, and the prequel to the series, featuring a series of daft hairstyles over the years. (Yes, I had hair once!)

Submitted on 21.11.04

Come With Me

For no particular reason, here's a lyric to a song that's been taking shape over the last six months:

Come With Me

So it came to pass again
Wisdom made its peace with men
And all the scholars raised their pens
It's going to be a long one

Tears of light rolled down his cheeks
He said Beware of what you seek
It's not enough to be a freak
You've got to be a strong one

Come with me
Come with me ...

I was lying on the grass
Summer days were drifting past
David Crosby, Mama Cass
The sun upon my eyelids

I'd walked away from this and that
Found myself a little flat
All around me as I sat
Came singing from the silence:

Come with me
Come with me ...

Come with me, I'll lay my hands on you
I'll lay demands on you
You'll learn to love it too.

And in time I came to see
What a piece of work was me
All that wasted energy
So fickle and so frail

Sternly then he came to me
Handed back my misery
'It's not enough to be set free
You have to love the jail.'

Come with me
Come with me ...

(Norman Lamont 2004 All rights reserved)

Why do I like it? For one, the melody (which you can't hear). For two, I like ambiguous lines. So the line 'Found myself a little flat' in the middle could be the narrator establishing his independence, his freedom, his adulthood or something like that; or it could be 'flat' in sense of all those things turning out to be disappointing, less enticing, the beginning of the descent. Every time he thinks he's made it, he's wrong and there's more to learn.

'Every time I think I've got it made it seems the taste is not so sweet' (Bowie)

Or as Dylan puts it:

Life is sad, life is a bust
The best you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well.

Submitted on 19.11.04

Peel, a dragon and broken things

Good gig last night put together by Tommy MacKay as a John Peel tribute. Picked up a great Half Man Half Biscuit song about the lead singer in Slipknot visiting the Pope. My Ivor Cutler and Tyrannosaurus Rex songs (One Inch Rock ) worked OK using the guitar synth for Cutler's wheezy organ. My sitar-laden version of the Incredible String Band's Iron Stone was fine until the Curse of the Loop where a sitar and tabla loop I'd recorded for the end section played so quietly I couldn't hear it. Curiously a guy I spoke to later in the evening noticed the flash of a 'problem' onto my face and my instant decision to cope with it - play the guitar louder and ignore the loop! EWB did a good Seven Nation Army and I enjoyed meeting an enthusiastic character called Simon whose slightly anarchic band Torpedo Buoys incorporated mandolin, trumpet and a thumped (rather than played) darabuka. Peel would have liked them. Discovered that Simon and one of his friends had lived and worked in Cairo, although many years after I did, and knew Heliopolis well. Much nostalgia and struggling to remember street names.

A couple of amusing links:
- a paper dragon whose eyes follow you
- perennial favourite This Is Broken including the web usability site that says "Name Incorrect - please enter your correct name" and the sodium-free Perrier Water which contains, er, sodium.

Submitted on 19.11.04

Soldiers

Talking to Liam, my ju-jutsu teacher, about the calls for British soldiers to be brought back home. He's ex-Army himself and his son is in cadets, looking forward to signing up. It's fair enough for people to call for the Army to be pulled out on the grounds that the occupation is illegal/unwanted/unjust/unhelpful etc. That's a call for the politicians to make. But to call for them to be brought home, as many do, because they are getting killed, is offensive to the soldiers themselves. They knew what they were signing up for, and they know their job is dangerous. They feel, he tells me, undermined by such calls, as if people think they're not up to the job and should be taken home in case they get hurt. Personally I was squeamish about the fact that they are so young, little older than my son. You have to remember, he says, that they have had years of training so intense civilians can't begin to imagine it. Even at 19 and 20, they are - in the main - highly competent and highly disciplined. You might not like what they're there for but you have to respect them. They may not be educated, they may not be politically astute, but in order to face the training they've had they have had to attain a fair degree of self-mastery, which would be admired in the martial arts and spiritual disciplines.

It saddens me to see the contempt that many peaceniks have for soldiers, almost as vehement as the contempt soldiers have for peaceniks. My few tastes of discipline come from martial arts and from the zendo, but to me they beat hands-down the whinging of a lot of people I meet - especially musicians and artists - about the primacy of their 'needs' and 'rights' and what they 'just can't handle'. There's a lot of that in me, too, of course, but I fight it and I dislike it, which is what makes me such a delightful Grumbly Old Man. Slap a New Ager for me!

Submitted on 17.11.04

John Peel tribute (again)

Just quickly practised my stuff for tomorrow night. Some Ivor Cutler, some Tyrannosaurus Rex and some Incredible String Band. Hippies ya bass!

Submitted on 17.11.04

New Gallery - London

There's a new gallery in the Pictures section from the Innocents' 2-day tour of London; mostly photos taken by Mary (so not many of her). Performance at the 12-Bar club in Soho, setting up at the Acoustic Cafe, Clapham, tourism on the South Bank and at the Museum of Surgery.

Submitted on 16.11.04

Upcoming solo gigs

More details on the Live page about:

- this Thursday's tribute to John Peel
- next Tuesday's St Andrew's Day gig (Lee Patterson is no longer on the bill - his place is taken by the laconic William Mysterious)

Submitted on 16.11.04

T-shirt cartoons

Great cartoons at t-shirt humor!

Submitted on 15.11.04

Two gigs

On Friday the Artists Formerly Known as Brundlefly and Now Tentatively Known as Arkham took to the stage at the Caledonian Backpackers. We'd no sooner finished the first song than a young lady asked if she could make an announcement from the mic. She did so, announcing that 'We're moving on now to ...' some other pub in town. Immediately 90% of the audience trooped dutifully out, some with apologetic glanced stageward. We perservered and won the attention of the remaining 10%. As always it was a pleasure to play these songs with those musicians.

On Saturday the new improved Innocents played their debut at a charity event in Haddington in aid of Testicular Cancer Awareness. Well, we had two of the four new members. Of the Decibelles, Ali wasn't available that night and Alison was ill, so we had Karen, and of course we had Nelson on percussion. The set started off accident-prone in many ways - cable problems, mic problems, mics that fell off the stand, and regrettable jokes from me - but we got into our stride on Living Water and never looked back. Of the new songs IOU worked a treat while Roadblock was still more of a suggestion of how it could be. The difference in having one extra voice was great, so when we get three extra voices in action it'll be stunning. My own voice seemed to return after the week's coughing. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I had more CD sales and expressions of interest than at any gig since the CD launch.

There was a good range of other acts, from traditional folkies to Django guitarists (of jaw-dropping dexterity), but we were all struck by Sarah Dingwall, a 16-year-old who sang some covers and some original songs, accompanied on harmonies by her mother. She had a strong, pure and confident voice and clearly a lot of natural talent. She had the much-sought ability to create an atmosphere around her. I hope we'll hear more of her.

Chatting to the Swing Guitars, mentioned above, I broached the possibility of recording Beggar of Love with them (you can hear it on the songs page) and they were agreeable. Should be good, either them providing the backing for a re-recording of the song, or them doing an intrumental version.

There was a raffle with autographed CDs by the Proclaimers, Eddi Reader (I wanted that) and a DVD by Kate Rusby. Lyns was grumbling about how she wanted it but didn't buy a raffle ticket. Angels of mercy prompted me to give her one of my raffle tickets and - she won it! That's the last time I listen to angels of mercy, then. I was content to discover the aforementioned Sarah Dingwall got the Eddi Reader one, so that's all right then :-)

Submitted on 14.11.04

Various T'ing

A few hasty notes before I start work, which is unusually pressing at the moment.

On Wednesday I went 'home' to Ayr for my Uncle Jack's funeral, which gave me some memorable moments. Being back in the church where I sat almost every Sunday from the age of 5 to about 13 or 14 and finding it almost unchanged, maintained with love and devotion by a dwindling and elderly congregation. Of course much of the time I spent there I spent as a bored child, pacing out the long sermons with carefully-unwrapped sweets, daydreams and rapt gazing at the stain-glass windows. But the hymns and readings infused me with a kind of religious sense that later resonated with the biblical references in Cohen, Dylan, Cave and the String Band. I shouldn't be surprised when it comes out in what I write now.

At the crematorium, I thought of Jack and suddenly had a sense of his smile filling the whole hall, a sense of presence and benevolence.

Last night, Thursday, another rehearsal of the 'new' Innocents, the Decibelles backing vocal really beginning to come into its own. We'll perform together for the first time at Haddington on Saturday night.

Came across a recent Dylan interview in audio on this site - NPR. I haven't heard him talk for many years, and it's a nice interview. He's looking for an alternative career - says he can sail a boat and fly a plane.

Submitted on 12.11.04

John Peel tribute

See the poster!

Submitted on 11.11.04

Finding the song within the song

Played an enjoyable gig last night at the Stag and Turret, being run as a venue for music by taylormademusic. This was two bands - Lynsey's band, now provisionally named 'Arkham' after the asylum in Batman - and me. I was going to do it solo but given that the Innocents were there it was obvious we'd do some songs together.

Playing a song called Come With Me for the first time, again I became aware of how you don't really know the character of a song until you sing it for an audience. I don't fully understand what's going on there. It isn't a matter of how it's received, although obviously that affects your feeling for it. For me it's that I find ways to deliver the lyric, ways to phrase it, that I don't find just sitting at home. Maybe it's a question of focus - you have this one chance to get it right. But not get it right in the sense of reproduce what you rehearsed - it's that you find a new way to phrase something which immediately feels like the 'right' way. The song Jerusalem, which I was playing for only the third or fourth time in its 8-year life, worked the same way last night - I found a method of playing and singing that seemed better than I'd done before.

Maybe the fact that I was, and am, struggling with yet another cold/fading voice, helped. I had limitations on my range, and had to make up for it with - I don't know - character? Singing Wolf that way was a struggle, though. I should go back to writing songs with only three notes, none of them more than a semitone apart. Safer. Room for character ;-)

I've been invited to join an evening of tribute to John Peel, taking place at the Subway on November 18th. There are a lot of short spots, all doing covers of songs of Peel favourites. I won't disclose exactly what I'm doing but you already know that my people were fair and had sky in their hair but now they're content to wear stars on their brows. Wonder if anyone'll dare cover the Fall?

Submitted on 08.11.04

The best excuse

I liked this from John B of Out of the Bedroom. I'm missing a committee meeting tonight to sing my little songs and play bass for Lynzoid.

John writes:

Best wishes for tonight's gig/tupperware party/flotation tank workout/pagan funeral*

* delete the worst excuse.

Regards John B

Submitted on 07.11.04

Two new articles

On a whim, I've written up two new articles. One is an expanded version of my contribution months ago to a Desert Island Discs discussion on Out of the Bedroom. Ten albums, why I chose them, and links to Amazon so you can hear clips. There's also the first of a few autobiographical chapters, mostly around various musical enterprises. This one features the band Hungry Ghosts, which was a major part of my life for the 90s.


Other activities: working on Grade 1 music theory, learning to sight-read, working fitfully on recordings for Romantic Fiction and rehearsing with the new, expanded Innocents.

Ben has not yielded to interrogation about his whereabouts last week. You have to admire his determination.

Submitted on 07.11.04

Fond farewell

I got the news yesterday of the death of Jack McKillops of Ayr, whom I knew throughout my childhood as my Uncle Jack. He and his wife Nancy were the last survivors of the close-knit group of four families with whom I grew up. The four couples, each with one child, met every Sunday night, taking turns to host an evening meal, which would be followed by a chat, sometimes a sing-along to the radio or watching the Sunday night film on TV. In summer we would have a picnic on Sunday afternoons. During the week, the women met on Monday nights for the 'sewing bee', and the adults formed part of the church dramatic club, rehearsing plays and variety shows most of the year. They were my extended family - I knew each of them as Aunt and Uncle - and it's hard to think there's only one left. The children are all far-flung, although I know I'll see their son Ian at the funeral, and maybe some of the others.

Family is important, even when it's not family.

Submitted on 06.11.04

The Power of Nightmares (3)

Watched the third part last night. Very revealing and provocative.

Here's a good review of the series from the excellent Al-Jazeerah news site.

Submitted on 04.11.04

Back and Forth, up and down

Just back from two days in Birmingham followed by a day in Bristol at work-related presentations that were quite frustrating, in that neither presenter was able to present what I'd gone there to see. I had booked flights so that I would be back for the protest-songathon at the Forest Cafe last night but when I got to the airport, the flight was cancelled due to a broken on-board computer (fair enough!) and rescheduled for 6.45, which would be too late for me to get home and get to the Forest Cafe. I decided to stay in Birmingham and get a lift to Bristol with a colleague.

Halfway through Monday, though, I got a voicemail message with the best news I could have hoped for:
Ben had just wandered in, a week after he went missing, seemingly fit and well.

I went to bed last night happy and encouraged by the news from the US, and turned on the news at 6am to the full crushing reality. It will take time to sink in that Bush has power for another four years. I can't begin to think what will happen - radicalisation, a folding-up and despondency, the growth of a populist movement, maybe a violent one? And always the question How could they do this? Is the answer just fear? Tonight's programme in the Power of Nightmares series might shed light on it.

On the bright side, I got home to a parcel from Amazon with Lenny Cohen's new album, which I will keep until I have a good period of privacy to enjoy it.

Submitted on 03.11.04