For future tribute bands

I have to admit, this has made me happier than any press on the Clientele I have ever read. Guitargeek made a picture of my "rig"! It must have taken hours!

Amor de Dias will no longer be playing with Sean Lennon et al at Cafe Oto this Wednesday (17th)

Due, rather strangely, to everyone on the bill wanting to go on first. Anyone who bought tickets for us can ask for their money back, I'm sure. Sorry to be a flake!! Here's a nice picture instead, of a remote house in Loch Glendhu in the Western Highlands of Scotland, where there are lots of seals in the water and no shops for 18 miles.

Psychedelic Werther

Poor Werther, on top of all his other problems, in this 1960s paperback edition of his tragic story, he don't know whether he's in Picasso's blue period or his pink! What's a boy to do? Actually, don't answer that one.

I got this from the Oxfam book shop in Strutton Ground, Victoria, which is one of London's best-kept secrets. The key to its magnificence is the type of people who live nearby and donate their libraries to the shop when they move on or die. So close to Whitehall, they're all ex-civil service, ex-MI5, Chelsea aristocrats or Communists (generally donating militant pamphlets from 1920-1950), or all four put together, and the books they leave behind are fascinating.

Perhaps it has occurred to you
to compliment God
on the mysteries of the set
He designed
for you in particular:

hum drum afternoons
on the gravel and astroturf
of a wintry, luminous suburb

oceans of trivia break across the airwaves

to call this ‘home’;
it's hardly believable.

Who could ever have invented
such an illusion-like illusion?

DJ set at the Hangover Lounge this Sunday

Hello campers, Lupe from Pipas and I will be spinning some tunes at a club called the Hangover Lounge on Sunday (29th March) from around 1pm. It takes place at the Salmon and Compasses, 58 Penton Street, London N1 9PZ (Corner of Chapel Market) and it's free. I'm not sure what we'll play, but apparently all jazz is banned there, so in revenge I'm thinking maybe some Flamenco and Argentinian Folkloric music, as well as the usual Psychedelic, Soul, Flying Nun etc. etc.

ps the Smiths count as Jazz, sorry

Shell, (charcoal/pastel on conte paper) 240mm x 320mm, £50, $85, (email theclientele@yahoo.com for details)

Hampshire Woods (pastel) 240 x 320 mm, £50, $85 (SOLD)

Masquerade

When we sat, aged 17, by Tundry Pond
and talked and smoked, there was
a stillness; enveloping leaves;
nature seemed to open, briefly
the edges of things transparent
brittle as glass,
as focus sharpening in a camera
and I realised that perhaps there was
something else behind the world.

A car sighed through the far-off A-road
and with that gentlest of noises
the pattern fell apart
I swear the suburbs
were gathering us in like a parent
but we clutched our proof
through swaying heads of corn
the reiteration of our nowhere-ness
struck like a bell
neither in the world
nor quite out of it
and we knew:
we are NOT here
this is NOT now
I am NOT me.

it was a mystery
which we both shared
perhaps only I remember it now.

Amor de Días live in London

Another rare opportunity to see Amor de Días , the secret psych-folk / tropicalia supergroup formed by Lupe from Pipas and Alasdair from the Clientele, presents itself this Sunday afternoon (25th January), at Islington's Salmon and Compasses pub. The show is hosted by the Hangover Lounge, where DJs spin beautiful country and pop records, and the punters drink themselves into denial that the next day is Monday, or spend their giros on fancy cocktails, depending on how cruelly fate has treated them lately. The show will be upstairs, totally unamplified, and free to all comers. Our set begins at 5:30, before Darren Hayman and after the Vatican Cellars.

Dreamed conversation of 12th December

-Did you ever wonder if a building could be ill?

-In the sense of dry rot, collapsing floors?

-No, on a different level. The feeling that a certain part of a structure is working in opposition to the other parts, that somehow the equilibrium, the purpose of the building is being subverted by something within.

- Two men used to work on renovations in the church by the river. I remember them walking past most of that summer and each time I saw them they were a different age. Sometimes teenagers, sometimes old men. The same two guys.

Once I went in to watch them working; they were chiselling away at large, dank stones in the wall. For a week afterwards, people called at the house. People from different times. I remember men with sallow faces and greasy hair, odd accents and car tools in their hands. Faraway eyes. They were there but not there, and I think it all came from the church, there was something catching there, some contact was missing its mark.

One night, outside in the garden, a creature spread itself like a sheet over a long expanse of grass towards the back of the house. It was under the washing line, and right up against the fences. Indistinctly in the darkness, I could make out a breathing mouth, and eyes in the middle of the lawn. It reminded me of a time I had been walking towards an intersection on Shaftesbury Avenue as a bus swept round the corner. I caught a quick glimpse of a woman sitting on the near side, staring at me, utterly absorbed and fascinated in the contemplation of my face; I had felt shaken and upset, totally objectified by that split second’s exchange of glances. The same thing was happening here. In the morning, the creature had gone.

I spoke to the renovation workers, who were perfectly ordinary in every other way, and they were also convinced it was the building, that the building was ill, at odds with itself; they even went as far as to say that anything could malfunction in this way, any physical object, in fact even any proposition or idea. They said they’d seen it before, that it happened all the time in nature, just on the verges of our sight, and if you were patient you could see it everywhere.

Damon and Naomi show

I will be playing guitar with Damon and Naomi this Sunday (12th October) at Rough Trade East. Address is Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. It's free, but you need to show up to get a stamp or something and it's first come first served. There is a nice coffee shop and tons of great records for sale, including a D&N exclusive Christmas CD! Show starts 7 PM sharp.

Trees for Cities

The last time I ran with any seriouness was immediately after throwing up on a policeman in trafalgar square, new year's eve 1998. In order to recapture the thrill of that wild, mercurial chase through London's backstreets at the height of the Britpop era and also to do something for a good cause, I will be running around Battersea park for the Trees for Cities Charity this weekend.

Any sponsorship donations are more than welcome!

`It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. `So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
…....

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loose-strife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.

The Wind in the Willows - Chapter 7; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Jewels / Bay view Collage

The Street of the Love of Days

Amor de Días means "love of days" in Spanish. One day last year I was walking through Madrid's fashionable Central Madrid district looking for a restaurant, and I spied a street sign that made me smile with lighthearted wonder at the strange poetic ways of foreigners. It said "Calle del Amor de Dios", which my pidgin Spanish translated as "the Street of the Love of Days". (Of course anyone with half a brain will tell you that I'd got my dios and dias mixed up, and what it actually said was "the Street of the Love of God", which is after all a very common street name in Spanish towns.) However the original and misunderstood name stuck and I thought, what a beautiful name, what a beautiful and mysterious street.

Amor de Días has since become the name of a musical project I'm working on with Lupe from Pipas, which has so far come up all Spanish guitar, with a bit of Satie, and Beach Boys. I don't have any sounds to put up here cos nothing is finished, but we are making a record. And playing a very very rare show with our friends the Ladybug Transistor on Monday 28th April at the Luminaire in Kilburn.

I doubt even God would be able to transform Kilburn High Road on Monday night to a street of the love of days, but we will try our best.

The ClientELLE

During a recent briefing in the Clientele's hollow mountain / missile silo HQ it was pointed out to me that our sinister tentacles of influence now extend even into the fashion world, through our prominently placed infiltrator, the robot automaton known as Kiera Knightley.

This is no surprise. me and Keir go back a long, long way, in fact back in '96 we was the only two members of the Wimbledon chapter of the Monkees fanclub. Until that dispute over which Monkee had the tightest trousers in the video for "As We Go Along". Dark days. Still, you can't hold a grudge forever.

Perfection Pop

I aint no music reviewer, but as no one else seems to have mentioned The Pale Fountains one off 25 year reunion gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire last Sunday, and as I was there, I should say something. They took the risk of playing most of Forever Changes over the PA before taking the stage, and then…..

There's a lightness of touch in their songs which is superb, all taut edges and perfect balance. The words are beautifully written too, simple and elegant, sort've cinematic and imagistic without being self consciously poetic. I honestly don't think any other guitar band from the 80s could touch the quality of those songs, they were that good. Felt and Cardinal have the same mysteriousness, Galaxie 500 have a greater sense of sonic depth and colour, but no one created such brilliant songs so effortlessly. Each one of them was like a restless breeze – ‘Jean’s Not Happening’ and ‘Just a Girl’ were the highlights: you can hear Love in them, but the Pale Fountains filter those rays of sunshine and Spanish chords through washed out skies and rainy days. This is what British guitar music is best at – nicking from America and bringing it back home, capturing California’s mythos of beauty and dread and sticking it right into the Norfolk Broads, if er.. you see what i mean.

Mr. Head appeared to be dressed in white pumps and a black Pale Fountains-branded tracksuit, he didn't seem to much care how it all went, whether it was in time, or even audible; the sound guy was half asleep anyway, fading up John Head's guitar solos a few seconds after they'd started. Arthur Lee must have given them some pointers in terms of trashing their legacy. None of it mattered that much - it was a shambles, but beautiful. In the right venue and with some rehearsal it would have been transcendent.

Unfortunately the big, half-empty hall, the pointlessly enforced house rules, the unpleasant security and the poster that announced the return of the "PALE FOUNTIANS" all contributed to the usual atmosphere of apathy and barely repressed nastiness we've come to expect from larger venues in London, but most of all the lack of crowds was a reminder that this type of baroque pop, which I love so much, only ever had any commercial bite for a few years in the 60s, since then the critics have raved but nobody buys it. The fact that no one knows that fantastic record by Mick Head’s other band, the Strands, (which, as I think someone said once, is like a collection of songs Robin Hood and his merry men could have sung in Sherwood Forest, as well as being like a beautiful Stephen Conroy painting - all ships returning home under dark skies) still baffles me.

They referred to themselves as ‘the Paleys’ too, which was endearing.

And for 20 points, guess which Clientele song 'Jeanne's Not Happening' um.. inspired?

The surviving dust of 1978

He was already drunk, and becoming slightly pompous; the pub jukebox blared in the corner, and outside, crowds flowed with supernatural ease through the Green Park arcades, and downhill to the river, sifting through glass-fronted boutiques, leaving for Metroland and the Christmas break. I listened because I had nothing better to do: all my friends had gone, and he'd bought me a drink.

"That winter," he said, "I went back to the family house, which was then at the edge of a large and half-finished estate. It was still and quiet, backing onto a copse the bulldozers had missed when they levelled the heath. The drab light lent everything an insubstantiality, intensifying the curious end-of-term feeling I had, the sense that the days themselves were somehow exhausted.

Three windows took up one side of the dining room, with a steadily murmuring radiator underneath. Enamel paint curled away from the window frame in flakes and peels, and the hot metal in the room gave off its alienating, faintly acidic smell. I remember clouds drifting in, and I watched them pick up the red flare of the streetlights."

This last point emphasised by a moment of silence, which he filled with a look around the bar.

"Late one night a figure appeared in the garden. It was almost pathetic; hungry-looking. boss-eyed and twisted. Under the faint light that the room cast over the gravel, I could see that its skin was made of flowers. It was hollow. It shied like an animal, and disappeared into the wood.

I knew it - you would have too, if you'd been there; it was a figure I’d glimpsed in a car park as a child; an expression crossing the face of a stranger late one night at Waterloo Station as I hurried for a train with my parents; a carving in the portico of a mediaeval church. In some nightmarish way it was particular, and it was also infinite. It was itself, it was the wood, it was the last roses in the garden, and yet it was also a wider sentience, perhaps best described as the feeling that the trees and fields we look at have always secretly been looking back into us.

The air felt charged, somehow electric, and as I stared at the place it had been, I became aware of a smell of dust. I smelt the billions of falling microscopic specks, the ghost dust-rain that surrounds all of us, all the time. For one moment of hyper-awareness I could read its mixtures and vintages, the histories and provenance of each particle of dust in the room. And faintly, hauntingly, somewhere on the edge of all the others, I smelt the surviving dust of 1978.

It was a dust of forgotten piano lessons; church halls; school gatherings in terrapin huts. Back then, to a child's nose, even the smell of glass differed from room to room, and for one second I could smell all the mirrors and the windows of those lost days, the unbounded spaces between them; it was a dust of the exhaust fumes of Austin Allegros, the naked wooden floors of a new house, bike tyres and long-discontinued cigarette brands. A dust that conjured pools of evening light, mysterious journeys, finished lives, dreads and hopes of an almost atavistic intensity.

I blinked, I seem to remember I was terrified, but at the same time so surprised, so overwhelmed with longing, with love for the past, love for the dead, that at that moment fear had no real meaning: I inhabited a bright, blank space that I'd encountered once before when I dislocated my knee on a rugby field.

Then neither quickly nor gradually, it was gone. The room returned, and with it the seamlessness, the ordinary loneliness of the night. I never saw that figure, or anything like him, again.

Days later, when the weather had broken, I looked over the hill, past the woods, and the developer's tracks and pylons. The freezing air seemed to distort the sounds of the construction vehicles, and their bleeps and revs sang like human voices. I remember thinking, 'If the world was one degree stranger, one degree more fluid, I could have escaped and joined myself back there, I could have disappeared forever. But it isn't, and I’m stranded here, split into two, getting ready for bed in a dormitory town.' "

He drank. Dark had fallen; the world was moving forward confidently, tangibly.

Wishing you a mysterious shadowy Christmas

With this study of Odilon Redon's Virgin with Halo. See you in 2008!

Thank you

Thanks to the people who’ve been in touch about recording and buying artwork. There are now some cheaper drawings for sale here. If anyone wants them, just write to the usual address – theclientele@yahoo.com

So from now on I will farm all this ridiculousness off to the other blog, and only use this space for the usual paranoid and drunken rantings from tour.

I'm for sale.

If anyone wants a producer or a session guitarist, get in touch.. theclientele@yahoo.com

I also have some pastels for sale, £50 / $100 each. Same address, folks.
210 x 297mm. Email me for a list of drawings for sale too.













1. flowers (SOLD), 2. woods in hampshire (SOLD), 3. face at window (after Redon) (SOLD) 4. Boats of the Glen Carrig (SOLD)

An old wolves’ route leading from Rumania through Poland into Lusatia

Text and photos by Sven Johne

A Walk in Lusatia

1.) I first stumbled across a photograph in the spring of 2005 whilst surfing on the Internet. I made further investigations and found out that it had first been published in the Sächsische Zeitung on May 2, 2002, in the local section for the district of Weißwasser, with the following caption: On Tuesday morning, at 6 am, the shepherd Frank Neumann made a gruesome discovery – he found about 20 sheep lying around in a meadow near the old railway line next to Mühlrose. Certainly not recommended viewing for anyone with a sensitive disposition. The animals’ throats had been torn open, and one of them had been almost completely eaten away. The sheep were all females; some of them were pregnant. The local authorities provided a tractor for the removal of the corpses.

2.) The case aroused my interest, and I looked it up in all the regional newspapers appearing around that time. On May 3, 2002, anxious inhabitants of Mühlrose and Weißwasser voiced their opinions: I always used to go and feed the wild animals in the woods around there. But I wouldn’t dare go there again now. Or: I shall tell my grandson not to go out on his own any more in the evenings. On May 6, 2002 three sheep disappear in the woods and the Dresdner Morgenpost gives as its headline “Whole Village in Terror!” On the same day, the newspaper Bild advises its readers to hunt down the attackers with rubber bullets.

3.) Continuing with my research, I found a press release by the Saxon Ministry of the Environment dated June 13, 2001, which was repeated more or less word for word on June 14 in the Lausitzer Rundschau: It appears that a pack of wolves has settled in an area covering approximately 700 square kilometers, stretching from the Polish border to Weißwasser. The adult animals followed an old wolves’ route leading from Rumania through Poland into Lusatia. One day later, the Sachsische Zeitung announced: The last wolf in Germany was killed in Lusatia in 1850. Now, 150 years later, the nocturnal animals have returned to their ancestral territory.

4.) At some point while I was going through all the press material, I noticed that there is not a single photograph of a German wolf (Bild) on the prowl at night. Newspaper articles are usually illustrated with pictures of animals living in captivity. So in December 2005 I made some enquires at the Wolf Office of the Free State of Saxony. Here it was officially confirmed that the movements of the pack of wolves and their hunting behavior in Lusatia had been reconstructed solely on the evidence of the tracks they had left behind – trails, droppings, and the remains of their prey. Of course, there are no historical photographs of wolves on the prowl, as the animals had been wiped out by the time photography was invented.

5.) I was fascinated. In January 2006 I decided to walk along the wolves’ route. I read up on all the relevant specialist literature and had a Lusatian forest warden teach me how to read tracks. He advised me to imitate the wolves’ howl in order to attract the animals.

6.) At the end of May 2006 I got myself an infrared camera. And on June 12, 2006, I set off walking from a place called Podrosche on the Polish border. On June 17, after walking for five nights, I reached Zosel near Weißwasser, 80 kilometers to the west, where in the meantime a second pack was said to have settled.

The wolves’ route is a sandy path, mostly leading through pine forests and birch woods. I began walking at dusk, using the viewfinder on the camera as orientation. I decided where I was heading for each night with the help of a map, usually choosing a crossroads where there was a small settlement, or at least a few buildings.

7.) To come straight to the point: it was very quiet in the forest. On my nightly walks, I saw nothing but deer, a herd of wild boars, and a small fox. And yet I did have a rather strange experience – every time I had reached my destination, I heard noises in the dark. I took photographs in the general direction the sounds were coming from, hoping to find something later when I blew up the pictures. I could have imagined it all, of course, but the next morning I always found the typical, straight wolves’ tracks in exactly the same area, like some kind of proof. Today I believe that I only came really close to the wolves at these places. They almost seem to have been waiting for me there. In an attempt to discover why, I looked for more information on my five nightly destinations.

Sorry about the lack of an encore at Cargo last night..

.. but the 23:48 to Basingstoke waits for no man, and it is the last train back to Hampshire. We got it with seconds to spare thanks to the unflappable mental clarity of a Black Cab driver. Thanks to everyone who came out and made it a great night for us.

There is only one more show in London this year, at the Union Chapel on November 11th, opening for that close personal friend of the Clientele's, Kurt Wagner of Lambchop. This will be interesting as they've told us we have to play acoustically. So it'll be very stripped down and quiet I guess, maybe with some Sting-style acoustic bass solos. So bring firearms.

Perhaps the Last Judgement has Taken Place

BAUDRILLARD: We have undertaken to inflict the worst on ourselves, and to engineer our disappearance in an extremely complex and sophisticated way, in order to restore the world into the pure state it was in before we were in it.

NOAILLES: Perhaps the Last Judgement has taken place and we’re carrying out the punishment.

-Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles in conversation, printed in Harpers Magazine, Oct 2007

(I think maybe they are interpreting global warming and terrorism as a collective suicide, but who knows?)

Today, for reasons of my own, jetlagged and weary, I was fussing around the library in a small town where I grew up. Outside, the shopping centre we loitered around as teenagers is being demolished inch by inch, which gives the remaining shops a strange air of evanescence and uselessness. All the big companies, the chain stores, have pulled out – a fabric shop called “Material Goods” and a Christian bookstore / café hold out against the developers and the increasingly bleak autumn light and dead space.

So I wondered down to the library, and what should I find in star position, sitting incongruously at the head of a great flotilla of books on display, but “Complete Microwave Cookery” by a woman whose name I forget. This book, published in 1988, had been checked out many times in the 80s and early 90s but hardly ever since, and is dedicated to the creation of complete meals in the microwave. Hollandaise sauce, swordfish, rabbit, foie gras with crackers, you name it, here are instructions on how to make it in a microwave, and solely in a microwave. On the cover, the author stands showbiz-wackily in front of variety of dishes on a large trestle table, in the airbrushed suggestion of a manor house, with a lurid green shoulder-padded dress and bleach blond hair in a kind of horrendous Lady Diana doughnut-shape. It buried me in the 1980s with a sudden feeling of panic, and I remembered that they were no fun at all. I don’t think I could survive back there now, it would all be too alien, too incomprehensible, bright and stupid.

I walked through the mall for one last time, tracing the footsteps that my friends and I had taken when we were 16 and 17. A faint dizziness made me reel a little. The others, of course, are all elsewhere now, and their youthful ghosts seemed at peace. It struck me as I shuffled through, maybe we all actually ARE ghosts. Maybe the Last Judgement has already happened and nobody bothered to tell us. Letting me go on wondering around, trying to make sense out of nonsense, and talking to moronic Christians at bookstores, keeping me in hope and ignorance, that would be part of the punishment, wouldn’t it?

I returned to the library, wanting, for purposes of verisimilitude, to note the Microwave author’s name, but of course the book had vanished. I’m sure if I had searched their records there would have been no trace of it either. A clue, a small part of the world's infinite and secret catalogue, had been left out, then hastily hidden away. In some abstract sense, as I cycled home in the rain, I realised the attraction of engineering one’s disappearance and returning the world to the pure state it was in before one was in it.

Bed Bugs

I woke up this morning covered in bites. Not inflicted by an enraged Peter Bjorn and John fan. I think the hotel bed had bugs in it. Now I wonder if I should burn my clothes. Maybe I will anyway. Tour madness has set in I think. Thanks to all who have come out and cheered us on though, it's been great fun.

We are in Seattle waiting to soundcheck. This venue always gives me the heebie jeebies for some reason, a strange melancolia falls on my shoulders the minute I walk through the door.

Today I read that the Neolithic peoples of Scotland fled from the invading Celts by pushing deep into the forests and sheltering in their ancient and remote burial cairns. Apparently the Celts' sightings of this mysterious and almost historically undocumented people gave birth to the legend of the "little people", a magical race which were called fairies in a more innocent age.

I also read that the Celts believed that if you dreamed of a grey horse, it symbolised the sea, it was the spirits of the sea attempting to invade your mind. And that the German poet Holderin believed that the banks of the Danube were haunted by all the old Greek river Gods, long missing from Greece. How all this connects is currently beyond me but I'll get it into a song somehow when I get home.

Unemployable

At work, in the late 1990s, I would attend several weekly meetings during which the window caught my full attention, Soho Square's gardens murmured in the breeze, and I would... drift away a little. Soon a sharp question about "batches" or "output" or something would be barked in my direction and I would hit the earth with a thump. The remainder of the time I half-listened and half-doodled, hiding my notebook from those traitorous colleagues who might snitch on me and expose my lack of attention to our Great Leader.

For some reason I kept the notebook; I re-found the doodles today, 10 years later, and stuck them together into a collage. I feel I have reclaimed some of my wasted time, or at least condensed a load of stupid shit I went through on to a page. It's a bit like the Surrealist exquisite cadaver game, except with a mysterious leaden weight of boredom crushing your mind into a pancake. I suggest anyone who reads this and works for an honest living does the same, using the stains of spilt coffee, biro marks, a scalpel and some glue, and whatever bizarre images pop into their head whilst they traverse the psychological Himalayas of boredom during a business meeting. We could invent a new, truly democratic art movement.

Profile behind Gothic Arch

Copied from Odilon Redon

Woods in Hampshire

The Garden of Forking Paths

I hasten to say I am not religious personally, but I think that these meditations on Jesus's last words on earth are profound and wise and beautiful:

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break.

In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.

In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

And now let the revolutionists of this age choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

This is brilliant, almost Borgesian, and of course the campy Gothick-Edwardian prose ("In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss") only adds to its oddness. For a moment Jesus didn't know who He was, He lost sight of Himself.

If, as Chesterton speculates, for one dreadful moment on the cross God lost faith in His own divinity, Himself, then perhaps His own creation, which seems to us like a hall of mirrors, like a landscape reflected in the glass of a window -illusory, unreachable- dazzled Him too for a moment, and he felt a sort of vertigo, a spasm of wonder at his own existence. Perhaps He went through that sense of emptiness as an example, so we could better understand the mechanisms of His own creation, and find some crumbs of comfort in His long silence.

David Lygon - Correspondences, 1989

Amen.

Clientele songbook ideas

Mark & I are thinking about putting together a songbook of Clientele stuff, with guitar tabs / chords etc.

So what songs should we do?

Also, is the exact tablature for the fingerstyle guitar useful or should we just show the chords with a piano stave for the vocal melody? or both?

answers on a postcard please, on the comments page here, or to theclientele@yahoo.com, and we'll get to work.
Alasdair

Robert Scott for President

I left England a few weeks ago, after a long night of thunderstorms that rattled the brick walls of the house, great sheets of black rain, metric tonnes of water falling. These were the beginning of the floods that gripped the news for a while (I noticed on one occasion, the Daily Mail blamed the government for the fact that rainwater isn't drinkable; I take my hat off to them).

We played the Benicassim festival in Spain, drinking in the backstage bar with friends, acquaintances, and some currently very famous musicians like the Arctic Monkeys, whose popularity is an enigma to me. Amy Winehouse's gothically silent 14 piece band accompanied us on the coach to the airport at the end of the weekend. She strode into a waiting camouflage-painted hummer instead. Her hair is big. I guess her music exists somewhere far in the background, at most a rumour, a trace, a sort of vaguely defined crutch which may or may not support the fact that people in the press are probably waiting for her to die, right as you read this. Pete Doherty's music occupies this kind of dream-space too. What legendary band was he in again? He's got that moon-calf look, a holy fool, Prince Mishkin with periodical drug busts instead of epileptic fits... wait..... no, hang on.... how does it go again?

So with such ugly mutterings I ran away, all the way to Australia! There, and in New Zealand, we played with Robert Scott, who you may know as a member of The Bats and The Clean. Bob was selling some of his (very beautiful) paintings from the merch stand, as well as hand-made CDRs, in between getting up on stage with a guitar and singing with his silvery, mournful voice. As well as being a New Zealand music legend, Bob also gives guitar lessons to kids and has a band that plays covers at weddings, stuff like Jonathan Richman. I vote Bob Scott for President of the World, with George Henderson of the Puddle as Minister without Portfolio. There’s a DIY ethic in New Zealand that’s so inspiring. If you want to write poetry you just write it and sell it yourself, if you want to paint you don’t moan cos there’s no gallery to broker your work, you just paint and sell your paintings at a merch stand or at the side of the road. The focus is on the making, not the reception, or the selling; all of which should be blindingly obvious but often seems to get corrupted and lost.

I don't know if artists should have values, or really ‘stand’ for anything. Today I think that what they should do is bear witness, in an almost Biblical sense, to what they see in their lives, in their psychic area, use their imaginations to conjure it back into art, show that they were truly here, whether anyone will be listening tomorrow or not. Cos I think a key doubts nowadays might be: 'am I truly here?' How the communication takes form, or what is said, well, choosing that is the fun part. But when art becomes a career, it’s surprisingly easy to lose your way and, shortly afterwards, your soul. Watching Bob at work reminded me what is truly important, and what I should just turn my back on.