impossible songs

1955

As a time traveling tourist I've recently had the opportunity to visit 1955, the year of my earthly birth. One thing I'd say is that time travel is not for the faint hearted or those of a nervous disposition and despite whatever you may have come to believe from too many Dr Who and Star Trek episodes, fashion choices and hair styles do manner. Anyway I'm glad to say I fitted in perfectly and not a soul suspected where I was really from, my cultured Fifeshire accent paved the way into many interesting conversational encounters with the somewhat dimwitted locals. I did have to cut the visit short and get back to what you might call the present (time travelers call it the Coalition Dark Ages or CoDA) in order to eat. I've made a solemn vow and a kind of cute little pact with the Devil not to eat any food whilst indulging in the time manoeuvres so imagine my surprise when I returned, hot, sweaty and time-lagged to find these bad boys were on offer at a minor burger emporium around these parts. Come to think of I've not made any Satanic pacts with anybody about not taking the odd piece of food backwards in time with me. I sense an interesting experiment coming on.

I left the office

Today: I left the office when I saw that the wind on the Forth Road bridge had been measured at 59 mph. At 70 mph they think very seriously about closing it when it hits it, at 80 you're going nowhere. With a mere 11 mph between me and a windy, traffic queueing and gridlocked disaster I made my escape only to find that few thousand other tortured souls were trying the same trick. Ho hum, but soon the virtual and spiritual border between the hostile Fife weather systems and the evil Lothians weather system was duly crossed - all a bit of a fuss about nothing really, apart from the relentless passage of blown about soot. It's time for back to winter measures and anti-soot routines to be established.

A home due to a complex technical error the heating appeared to be on, the cats were behaving as if they had been desiccated Turkish style and then spun out to dry, some were lazily sporting sunglasses, dipped to expose their in-coma eye effects. I wasted no time in doling out healthy rations of over-age chicken cutlets and sympathy before calling the RSPCA and spraying them with perfumed water. Then it was a tea of fishy leftovers, Nutella & Greek yogurt and random curry explorations, oh I stuffed more stuff onto bandcamp, hoping to have an oldie and a newie done by close of play today - the music business is a hard taskmaster.

A dogs life...

...is probably pretty good if set within a modern, balanced family environment. Here's Indy, now almost 5 months old and thriving and growing her new adult teeth in her mouth in Aberdeen. Shame about the perpetual damp weather but some say dogs get the maximum sensory smell experience when the air is moist, so they must be happy a lot of the time in Scotland. We can't have our own way in everything.

The music world has been rocked by us getting a five star review and some air play on Spanish Radio (?), particularly when a fictitious album that I simply made up last week is at the centre of it. The music is real enough (as are the stars) and this odd event adds another line to the mysterious history and legacy that is impossible songs. We actually have a real (new) album, more an EP I suppose, it's out now, it's here somewhere. The spit and polish part will follow.

Album of the weekend

Song for the day - Maybe I missed the point:

I know somebody whose life is tough.

I help a little, but it isn't enough

Cuz I go an' spend money on stupid stuff

When I know he's strugglin' to stay above.

An' I have so many chances to be

The hero I believe's inside of me

But I get busy and I get distracted

And I do nothin' when I could've acted

I laid low when I could've stood high.

I said nothin' when I should've asked why.

I saw somethin' that I might've done and I didn't,

A chance to speak my truth and I hid it

Inside, I'd like to believe I'm cool,

Easy to love and hard to fool,

But I know there's more I could've enjoyed.

Sometimes I find myself thinkin'

Maybe I missed the point.

So many times I turned down love,

Stayed in the dark when I could've lit it up,

But every time I did take a chance

Makes me happy when I'm lookin' back

I'm not sayin' my whole life feels like a joke

But I've been a master of mirrors and smoke

And I don't wanna live

No mo' without you.

Deaf cats like noise

Deaf cats like noise so we leave the TV on, the deaf cat can then relax in front of World Championship Athletics. Deaf cats like Channel 4, I wonder if their programmers know about this. It's a great opportunity for someone.

Hurrah! Tomorrow is Friday and an impulsive M&S food shop is predicted, a selection of quality products will be selected and the with a little forward planning the pesky red light on the oven can be overlooked or ignored. My intake of friendly and useful bacteria is set to increase.

At the Voodoo Rooms last night another Jim Igoe planned extravaganza; as expected Sam Barber and Outcasts (action photo above / obscured by PA) did not disappoint nor did quirky headliners Lost Telegrams. Nice to get out and see the good people of Edinburgh and drink a little Guinness.

Space Monkeys

For some alien reason mostly likely based around space junk, space dust or space monkeys, the web is moving very slowly in this part of the world. Frustrating. I may well venture out and visit the Voodoo Rooms to sample the various delights set up to delight, err tonight. Sam Outcast and the Barbers being a significant draw likely to bring together musical chums of all backgrounds and preferences. As I have a personal taxi standing by I could partake of at least two if not three large beers if finances, weather and those pesky space monkeys allow. They are watching, not sure if they are listening though.

In other space related news: Today I saw a photo of the moon showing the Apollo tracks and debris, I never doubted for a minute, I knew those brave young men had made it. In fact the whole moon generation experience came flooding back, I was so young and innocent and in the Army Cadets.

Upload

Uploading: The things that go through your head, waiting to upload. Artistic temperament is a strange beast, throwing out random phrases, ideas, strange phases, unpredictable, sometimes barren, sometimes busy, crazy, boring. This is none of this or that. It's more like buying three T shirts that don't fit and wearing them inside out, as a protest against the price of petrol. I forgot to stay that they are Shell T shirts, I wish they were BP though, that would mean more and be more effective, more relevant, more edgy.  Daft to protest but we still think we have freedom of speech.

There are many more ways to protest, more things to to be said about more injustice, more noble causes to champion, not just over  a stupid petrol based economy. In twenty years we'll think nothing of it, there will be no petrol stations, there will be no forecourts, no pumps and pump prices to bother about. There will be other things to protest about however. Hydrogen, electricity and Mr Fusion. I'll be 75 going on 76, ready to be uploaded.

Lazy repetition

Still busy doing nothing other than holding things together in the cut and thrust world of the Scottish music business. At least we've got a little more product delivered into the market place and we're only awaiting approval from the EEC mandarins and the Sentinels of the Golden Pacific Coast and Guardians of Californian values - we need to pay them a visit soon. Once we've done that it's uphill all the way and our fortunes are assured. I'm also written a spotty and snotty letter to Soptify which should clear out the whole rancid sewers of blank artist's profiles and peculiar revenue streams and will that person who keeps playing "I miss that boy" 10 times a day just find a copy to down load and have done with it (or send us a stamped addressed envelope; AKA an SAE).

Back in the soup kitchen Ali made a load of seasonal chutney, I made a video and a pot of tomato soup. It looks like a vintage year ahead for the ever versatile and sticky chutney - the cupboards are fit and ready to bulge. Once we've tested it on the cats (now that they don't need the steroids or the cat mint) we'll start including it in all our recipes, though I draw the line at scrambled eggs and New York Cheesecake.  That line is particularly fine.

Books: Mostly about Francis Vincent Zappa, Marianne Faithful and Shakey (old) Bernard Young. The Keef phase seems to have died with the eternal promise of a sunny summer even if "Exile on Main Street" remains stubbornly stuck in the car stereo. Is there a special tool anywhere that can be had to extricate it and why is it that Radio Scotland fills it's barren schedules with repeated long passages of accordion music? This is not what the people want and yes, Karl Marx was right about quite a few things.

Great album covers of our time

Busy for a period of time today on various music related undertakings. First task was to upload more music onto the Pan-European monster of pop-rock that is Jamendo. It seems that their servers are powered by Swiss cheese or some other sullen and belligerent agricultural power source. Two hours to upload ten tracks and that's after converting each one back to a wav. format. The upload percentage bar is really some kind of modern torture device. What a grindingly slow procedure and still ten more to do. Then in a sudden outburst of enthusiasm I had a go at scanning in and so revisiting some old pieces of art work, our album covers, lovingly created in various formats but now at least (almost) captured for posterity. Wild West Lothian (above) is the latest unpublished masterthingy and remains a bit of a work in progress but is as near to completion as anything we've completed so far. A few more turns of the screw and it'll be ready push out into the ether and to sell in millions like it's predecessors.

 Scapes - 2003 or thereabouts

Heartburst - 2004 exactly

I love these guys

Notes from a man of a certain age and stature: When you are trying to lose or simply manage your weight suddenly food that didn't matter suddenly matters. Worse than that you begin to obsess, just a little but enough to make a mark on your psyche. Food should be somewhere in the greater needs hierarchy but not at the top, not for me in this day and age. I suppose it's not as acute as I'm making it out to be but it sits, square and irritating, stubbornly taking up valuable space in my conscious mind. This space should used for love, family, creativity, working(?), playing and looking at ancient monuments whilst reading well thumbed paperbacks. My space has been invaded. Oily fish, strawberries, chocolate, dark beer, stir fry chicken, yogurt, chips. Thank you for taking up my attention but I must insist on taking it back.

Rock Star Biographies

They are out there, on Amazon, in every bookshop (those that have survived the cull that is), in charity shops and on Play.com. Rubbish biographies of rubbish rock stars, beware innocent and naive reader, you get less than what you pay for. Anyway these hairy, gaudily shirted chaps look OK and no doubt they have a decent tale to tell. I believe that they were all rather good at playing their instruments too, happy days.

Tea tonight: Cheesy pasta and football with a cheeky rocket and tomato selection on the side. Yum.

Halfords visit: Not one but two headlight bulbs blown today - £15.99 and a brace of screwdrivers.

Oh for summer

Wearing winter clothes in August, plumbing the temperature depths, no European football, getting used to petrol prices being £1.32 a litre, mud, another day at work in Scotland, the best little drab country in the world. Write a song about it then.

Building character

It's assumed that real men do not eat it but neither do imaginary men either. Those of us marooned in the inconvenient space between those two diametrically opposed compass points, conflicted, bemused, deluded and just a little bit hungry would certainly consider it at a pinch. So it seems I've come to that point in my life where I can tolerate and even enjoy this form of food. So I ate some whilst my youngest grand daughter pasted herself and the surrounding area with the remains. In the end I feel that the overall experience has in some hard to fathom way built me up inside, something I'm sure many commentators would say is badly needed.

I don't quite know why I take some perverted pleasure in the Edinburgh Tram smash or the crisis in Scottish football's status and self confidence. I suppose it's a benchmarking thing, you know your gut feeling is right and that your opinion is sound. Then it's as if events stack up and prove to you that the awful truth you feared (but questioned your own judgement over) is indeed the truth. So what's wrong in these two completely separate areas?

Trams: a bad idea from the start, the railway system should have been used to create an airport station with a light railway from there connecting to the terminal - saving £500m at least. Bloody obvious. To make that happen a few councillors and politicians would need to admit that they got it wrong - not likely in my lifetime.

Football: At the roots the 11 a-side youth teams are often run by competitive dads who field a) their own kids first and/or b) tall kids who can punt a ball but lack skill c) pitches and facilities are poor and the weather kills enthusiasm stone dead. Skill is not developed because it's win at any cost, kid's are disillusioned and the risk of hypothermia haunts the touchline of every fixture - a lot of still born talent is the result. The fix, refresh structures, encourage skills, bring in trained and unbiased coaches and be prepared to wait ten years for results to show. The actual professional clubs need to reduce prices, allow standing and encourage families. Tricky.

Anstruther daily photo

Following the week's football fever to Bankie Park in Anstruther, a home from home of grassy untidiness. I'd a few minutes to check out the harbour, tranquil, quiet and all early evening weekday within minimum tourists present. The grey clouds and summer chill hanging over as expected. The clouds were soon to turn into two hours of relentless rain, built in hell on the hills and set to accompany the football. Meanwhile, all over Anstruther a flick of the nostril and all you smell are chips cooking in the distance and corn oil vapour hanging like smog as the two main chip emporiums battle over who is the greatest in the western world, kind of pointless really. I can remember there being at least eight chip shops in Anstruther at one time, the best ones have actually gone now, lost in a flurry of chrome counters, polystyrene cartons and food hygiene regulations. Shame.

My mum used to tell me a princess lived in the town once upon a time but I didn't really believe it, clearly I was wrong. She probably didn't come for the climate, the witty Fife banter or the culture. Must have been the chips, quite understandable really.

Mystery

A cat is locked in a pen made of fine wire mesh. Inside the cat is asleep, (the cat has been in the pen all day) beside the cat on the floor of the pen there is a dead mouse. How did that happen?

Soul Breakfast & misunderstandings

An extract from “Doing the right thing at the right time and other random thoughts” by Kay Debenham:

Soul Breakfast

Today's attempt at a Soul Breakfast consisted of a lonely white coffee, a bottle of Tropicana orange juice with bits and a cherry Elevenses bar by McVities. To my mind this isn't a soul breakfast, this is an unsatisfactory, disappointing, makeshift, solitary, at your desk at work kind of breakfast conspicuously lacking a soul of any kind. The term “soul breakfast” needs to be defined and described in more accurate and creative terms. Firstly I generally don’t do breakfast, when I wake up I'm not really hungry normally, I'm happy to shower and go, start the day on the hoof and catch up later, maybe at eleven or so and generally speaking ignore the soul and breakfast thing altogether – but something tells me that they are both equally important and need to be catered for.

Of course the problem is that therm soul has been hijacked by charlatans, religions, quarks and other unscrupulous groups becoming a debased airy-fairy way to describe the indescribable ghost that allegedly lurks in the centre of our skulls and eventually passes on either to heaven or hell or moves on in reincarnation or some other altered state. It also describes an intense musical culture and performances filled with heart and emotion that cross over at times into a clearly religious territory of some sort. Then there is actual soul food: Cajun cooking, catfish, red beans and rice, chicken, corn bread, garlic, eggs, bacon and various herbs and spices. Good as this food is it's not what I want from a soul breakfast, I want something else. Something that will nourish me and those I share it with, in a complete, holistic if you will, way. No religion or belief systems, prayer, meditation, Tamala Motown or fried chicken then please.

So what should a soul breakfast have?

1. Sunshine – that's important, hard to come by round here but a basic part of the set up. At a pinch daylight might have to do.

2. Company – you can't soul breakfast alone, loved ones, guests, friends are necessary.

3. Set up table – comfortable, pleasant but uncluttered.

4. Oven – on and whirring in the background, keeping the food warm so time can stretch.

5. Conversation – easy, tough, doesn't really matter, it should ebb and flow and rise and fall.

6. Smile – if you can, better to start the day that way. Laughter good if possible.

7. Dress code – isn't one.

8. Music – again keep it light, let it gather in the background.

9. Chef – somebody has to take this on, it can be shared which may be better, lend a hand if you can.

10. Food – whatever you like, whatever is available, simple as that. It's good to eat but it's better to get together.

    
    

Misunderstood lyrics: I heard an earnest sounding Christian lady on a religious radio programme pick Bob Marley's Redemption Song as a favourite. I don't think she could get beyond the title, that's always a problem with songs, taking the first available message and misunderstanding it without bothering to check. Of course Redemption Song isn't about any Christian redemption or “payback”. It's about singing songs of freedom instead of singing the old missionary redemption songs. Redemption Songs was in fact the title of the deep red songbook passed out by Christian missionaries containing the old hymns and standards that formed the basis of the strict European worship passed to and imposed on confused children and “converts” across the Great British Empire for over a hundred years. Some publisher must have made millions from it as it was handed out as a foundation and anchor for church services across the globe. I guess Bob Marley and his generation must have come to hate it and see it as a piece of the relentless propaganda trotted out by generations of oppressors, teachers and overlords to indoctrinate the masses and keep them occupied on a Sunday.

“Wont you help me sing, these songs of freedom? 'Cause all I ever have: Redemption Songs, Redemption Songs, Redemption Songs.”

The bigger hope clouded by the years of frustration, despair and disappointment is clear in the lyric and in the delivery, this isn't about Christian redemption but about the opposite albeit Bob M get's the Almighty in there for a quick mention, but on his own terms. It's his defiance that still resonates, even after all these years and as we all know defiance, regardless of the cause, always strikes a chord. People sing, hum along and buy into all sorts of things set in lyrics sometimes quite unwittingly. You've all heard the church choir having a poke at Lennon's “Imagine'. I suppose that once it gets out there, you have to let it go.

Traveling backwards in time

I'm quite enjoying the time travel experience. I've just arrived and it's 1971, various things are happening - so thank you for the days but they are moving across my field of vision very quickly. That's time for you, here today, gone tomorrow.

Diary of silence.

When I'm on my own, or omo as it's known, I hardly make any noise. I creep and slink and pad around the house and behave as if noise, either generated by me or in the background is to be avoided at all costs. To make noise sometimes feels like smashing a mirror or attacking a piano with a sledgehammer, crazy and unacceptable behaviour. Occasionally the radio might be on or some music may be played but always set to the low end of the sonic spectrum. Changed days from rocking out and constant noise pollution, screaming guitars and vocals, pounding drums and out of tune singalongs. When did the golden silence start, when did it first descend? I guess it goes back to the early days of “baby in the house”, now some 30 odd years ago. At that point all my learned and adopted behaviours began to change and as the little tikes exerted their right to sleep the volume control came down like a slow turning guillotine of parental, self induced pressure. In turn they are given licence to bawl, shout and play games and watch TV at whatever level, parents rights erode into the vapour. Now there is truly only the occasional need for me to be quiet but despite that quiet remains the default. I listen on head phones, I strum the guitar gently, the amplifiers languish in a cupboard and cats sleep on top of them unaware of their potential as unexploded bombs. So I'm here, trapped and oddly guilty, stuck behind a wall of habitual silence that cloaks and chokes. This isn't the way I planned things but it is the way things are. A science fiction reality, breathing through tubes in noiseless cocoons avoiding ASBOs and not allowing the outside world to eavesdrop on my life, shutting in and shutting out. Paradoxically it's the opposite in the car, a noisy speeding coffin filled with spewing speakers and karaoke banter and ranting. Baffling really.

Tiny robots

He is in there somewhere.

I was thinking about writing a short story describing the social and domestic adventures of Hamish and Fiona. They live in a Wimpy house in Bishopbriggs, drive a Renault Clio, holiday in Tenerife and have cat called Simon. Fiona is a social worker and Hamish is an excavator operator but he's currently on sick leave with back pain and vibration white finger following a spell on the tools. Fiona would like to travel more but worries about budgets and bank accounts, her job keeps her interested but she's sure there is something more fulfilling for her just around the corner. Hamish's ambition is to rescue abused and abandoned greyhounds and then find them decent homes with stable families. Anyway I was thinking about starting on this, naturally adding in few bizarre twists and strange events along the way. Then, as usually happens I completely forgot about the whole thing.

More Steampunk

Yes it is Jessica Rabbit. It's a good design but maybe not appropriate for a T shirt. Click the link to buy via Red Bubble if you will, a useful site where I occasionally dump photos myself.

In other news I've been traveling back in time with more living zombie members of the Rolling Stones, this time to the existential Exile period, memories are made of this (and also electrical brain sparks and connections). I just can't quite fathom where the time has gone. Back here in the wild west the neighbours are showing the film Super 8 in the garden, unfortunately the weather has closed in and picnics will be on the damp side of soggy, not a great year for outdoor events apart from the miraculous day we spent at Wickerman. A distant but very pleasant memory (currently being relived on the August credit card bill) which must have used up all my available Karma Points for the summer. Total eggs eaten this week = 9. Yogurts = 7. Bananas =4. Cereal bars = 6. Vimto = 1 can. Yogurt goes on to meet eggs in the final tomorrow, who will be the champ?