Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Vashti Bunyan
After leaving Nashville we drive towards Memphis (past Loretta Lynn's ranch, which we briefly stop at and buy postcards, carefully avoiding the lumpen pub rock of Van Lear Rose - a mere $20 to you guv'nor) and on through vistas of crimson and yellow maple, the roadside gorgeous in the weak, early winter sun. I have just bought Vashti Bunyan's new LP, and hearing it floors me. I feel renewed in these lovely, wintry folk songs, I can almost believe that my country has a traditional music as complex and soulful and gorgeous as country music, or bossa nova. It'll pass, but what possibilities open up! The British past is usually something best avoided: days of no deodorant, itchy sheets, greasy hair and damp rooms, mutton and vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. The idea of a music we all share, that there could be some kind of connecting thread running back, through that middle-class landscape of streetlamps, parks, duckponds, from their music to mine, all coming from a dark space at the back of the skull.. what a thought. All this I see in Vashti Bunyan's folk songs. For now.
Atlanta and Nashville
The Atlanta and Nashville shows are very soulful affairs, in small venues to good, enthusiastic crowds. Annie in particular is wonderful in Atlanta. In Nashville, Willy and Kurt take us for Mexican dinner and BBQ for lunch the next day (a list of restaurants considered and rejected were 'Pig and Pie' and 'Judge Roy Bean') It's a pleasure to see them again, and Willy even sits in with us for every song we play in the key of B (the reason for the particular choice of key is never made clear). At this point playing for longer than 50 minutes feels like an endurance test, a long distance run, with all the elements of pain and euphoria this suggests! Or maybe it was the incredibly spicy 'hot chicken' that Chris Deaner supplied us with before the show.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Halloween in Chapel Hill
Arlington
The IOTA Cafe was another sell-out. Rottisserie chicken at Pollo Rico, Peruvian style for breakfast(!), with Inca Cola. Taco Hell for lunch, then the long drive down to Chapel Hill. The weather is beautifully bright, crisp and clear. People are wearing shorts down here in Dixie. There are a lot of old friends waiting for us, as always.
Chapel Hill
So hungry, giddly little efflorescences of the skin come and go, I feel dizzy and sick. I guess some people fetishize these feelings, but not me! I wait to eat until 3pm, when Ben, Chris and I eventually find our way to "the BBQ joint", a few miles out of Chapel Hill, and the wait is worth it. Complex, smoky chilli sauces based on vinegar, spicy collard greens, beer-baked beans. As we drive back, we see three turtles sun-basking on a log by a creek. Later, I end up in a completely deserted Indian restaurant in Chapel Hill, having escaped the Halloween crowds milling up and down the streets. I order, perhaps unwisely, a Vindaloo, which it turns out on an English scale is about as hot as a Madras. It feels fantastic to be alone, even for a few minutes.
There is complete insanity on the streets. Costumed psychos have taken over the town.
We meet Carmen, Annie Hayden's good friend and our acquaintance from past shows in New York. He is dressed as Papa Smurf and sings with Annie in a solemn and dignified manner. This Halloween, Annie is an old fashioned Prairie girl and Ben is a hayseed farmboy. We ask him if he would walk around Brooklyn with his straw hat and dungarees (he already has a Southern accent, coming from Atlanta). he thinks he would encounter a lot of confused stares, but probably no actual violence. Chris Deaner, the drummer, is dressed as Magnum PI; he wonders where he is going to sleep tonight, thinks maybe he will collapse at Time Out Chicken and Biscuits. Who's going to bother a guy with a handlebar moustache and aviator shades, sitting motionless and ambiguously super-violent behind a table. Not us. Carmen gives us some donuts and a lovely card. Sometimes you meet people on tour and it breaks your heart that you can only talk for two hours every two years. If he lived in London I would happily see him every week.
The IOTA Cafe was another sell-out. Rottisserie chicken at Pollo Rico, Peruvian style for breakfast(!), with Inca Cola. Taco Hell for lunch, then the long drive down to Chapel Hill. The weather is beautifully bright, crisp and clear. People are wearing shorts down here in Dixie. There are a lot of old friends waiting for us, as always.
Chapel Hill
So hungry, giddly little efflorescences of the skin come and go, I feel dizzy and sick. I guess some people fetishize these feelings, but not me! I wait to eat until 3pm, when Ben, Chris and I eventually find our way to "the BBQ joint", a few miles out of Chapel Hill, and the wait is worth it. Complex, smoky chilli sauces based on vinegar, spicy collard greens, beer-baked beans. As we drive back, we see three turtles sun-basking on a log by a creek. Later, I end up in a completely deserted Indian restaurant in Chapel Hill, having escaped the Halloween crowds milling up and down the streets. I order, perhaps unwisely, a Vindaloo, which it turns out on an English scale is about as hot as a Madras. It feels fantastic to be alone, even for a few minutes.
There is complete insanity on the streets. Costumed psychos have taken over the town.
We meet Carmen, Annie Hayden's good friend and our acquaintance from past shows in New York. He is dressed as Papa Smurf and sings with Annie in a solemn and dignified manner. This Halloween, Annie is an old fashioned Prairie girl and Ben is a hayseed farmboy. We ask him if he would walk around Brooklyn with his straw hat and dungarees (he already has a Southern accent, coming from Atlanta). he thinks he would encounter a lot of confused stares, but probably no actual violence. Chris Deaner, the drummer, is dressed as Magnum PI; he wonders where he is going to sleep tonight, thinks maybe he will collapse at Time Out Chicken and Biscuits. Who's going to bother a guy with a handlebar moustache and aviator shades, sitting motionless and ambiguously super-violent behind a table. Not us. Carmen gives us some donuts and a lovely card. Sometimes you meet people on tour and it breaks your heart that you can only talk for two hours every two years. If he lived in London I would happily see him every week.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Losing Haringey
A lot of people have asked (and painfully mis-transcribed), so here are the words for Losing Haringey:
"In those days, there was a kind of fever that pushed me out of the front door, into the pale, exhaust-fumed park by Broadwater Farm or the grubby road that eventually leads to Enfield: turkish supermarket after chicken restaurant after spare car part shop. Everything in my life felt like it was coming to a mysterious close: I could hardly walk to the end of a street without feeling there was no way to go except back. The dates I’d had that summer had come to nothing, my job was a dead end and the rent cheque was killing me a little more each month. It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much longer. The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now the summer stretched between me and that moment.
It was ferociously hot, and the air quality became so bad that by the evening the noise of nearby trains stuttered in in fits and starts, distorted through the shifting air. As I lay in the cool of my room, I could hear my neighbours discussing the world cup and opening beers in their gardens. On the other side, someone was singing an Arabic prayer through the thin wall. I had no money for the pub so I decided to go for a walk.
I found myself wandering aimlessly to the west, past the terrace of chip and kebab shops and laundrettes near the tube station. I crossed the street, and headed into virgin territory – I had never been this way before. Gravel-dashed houses alternated with square 60s offices, and the wide pavements undulated with cracks and litter. I walked and walked, because there was nothing else for me to do, and by degrees the light began to fade.
The mouth of an avenue led me to the verge of a long, greasy A-road that rose up in the far distance, with symmetrical terraces falling steeply down then up again from a distant railway station. There were four benches to my right, interspersed with those strange bushes that grow in the area, whose blossoms are so pale yellow they seem translucent, almost spectral; and suddenly tired, I sat down. I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit, but a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a moment I lost my thoughts in its unexpected coolness. I looked up and I realised I was sitting in a photograph.
I remembered clearly: this photograph was taken by my mother in 1982, outside our front garden in Hampshire. It was slightly underexposed. I was still sitting on the bench, but the colours and the planes of the road and horizon had become the photo. If I looked hard, I could see the lines of the window ledge in the original photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the silhouetted edge of a grass verge. The sheen of the flash on the window was replicated by bonfire smoke drifting infinitesimally slowly from behind a fence. My sister’s face had been dimly visible behind the window, and –yes- there were pale stars far off to the west that traced out the lines of a toddler’s eyes and mouth.
When I look back at this there’s nothing to grasp, no starting point. I was inside an underexposed photo from 1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey.
Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back - to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother’s car. All gone, gone forever.
I just sat there for a while. I was so tired that I didn’t bother trying to work out what was going on. I was happy just to sit in the photo while it lasted, which wasn’t for long anyway: the light faded, the wind caught the smoke, the stars dimmed under the glare of the streetlamps. I got up and walked away from the squat little benches and an oncoming gang of kids.
A bus was rumbling to my rescue down the hill, with a great big “via Alexandra Palace” on its front, and I realised I did want a drink after all."
Top facts about the London Borough of Haringey
"In those days, there was a kind of fever that pushed me out of the front door, into the pale, exhaust-fumed park by Broadwater Farm or the grubby road that eventually leads to Enfield: turkish supermarket after chicken restaurant after spare car part shop. Everything in my life felt like it was coming to a mysterious close: I could hardly walk to the end of a street without feeling there was no way to go except back. The dates I’d had that summer had come to nothing, my job was a dead end and the rent cheque was killing me a little more each month. It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much longer. The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now the summer stretched between me and that moment.
It was ferociously hot, and the air quality became so bad that by the evening the noise of nearby trains stuttered in in fits and starts, distorted through the shifting air. As I lay in the cool of my room, I could hear my neighbours discussing the world cup and opening beers in their gardens. On the other side, someone was singing an Arabic prayer through the thin wall. I had no money for the pub so I decided to go for a walk.
I found myself wandering aimlessly to the west, past the terrace of chip and kebab shops and laundrettes near the tube station. I crossed the street, and headed into virgin territory – I had never been this way before. Gravel-dashed houses alternated with square 60s offices, and the wide pavements undulated with cracks and litter. I walked and walked, because there was nothing else for me to do, and by degrees the light began to fade.
The mouth of an avenue led me to the verge of a long, greasy A-road that rose up in the far distance, with symmetrical terraces falling steeply down then up again from a distant railway station. There were four benches to my right, interspersed with those strange bushes that grow in the area, whose blossoms are so pale yellow they seem translucent, almost spectral; and suddenly tired, I sat down. I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit, but a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a moment I lost my thoughts in its unexpected coolness. I looked up and I realised I was sitting in a photograph.
I remembered clearly: this photograph was taken by my mother in 1982, outside our front garden in Hampshire. It was slightly underexposed. I was still sitting on the bench, but the colours and the planes of the road and horizon had become the photo. If I looked hard, I could see the lines of the window ledge in the original photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the silhouetted edge of a grass verge. The sheen of the flash on the window was replicated by bonfire smoke drifting infinitesimally slowly from behind a fence. My sister’s face had been dimly visible behind the window, and –yes- there were pale stars far off to the west that traced out the lines of a toddler’s eyes and mouth.
When I look back at this there’s nothing to grasp, no starting point. I was inside an underexposed photo from 1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey.
Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back - to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother’s car. All gone, gone forever.
I just sat there for a while. I was so tired that I didn’t bother trying to work out what was going on. I was happy just to sit in the photo while it lasted, which wasn’t for long anyway: the light faded, the wind caught the smoke, the stars dimmed under the glare of the streetlamps. I got up and walked away from the squat little benches and an oncoming gang of kids.
A bus was rumbling to my rescue down the hill, with a great big “via Alexandra Palace” on its front, and I realised I did want a drink after all."
Top facts about the London Borough of Haringey
New Jersey
Listening to Shooby Taylor on WFMU, and laughing my head off. I had never heard Shooby before today, he scats over other people's records like some kind of cartoon parasite nesting in the song.
Maxwells was sold out, thank God. We have beautiful coffee, salad and a guava milkshake at a Cuban cafe called La Isla, on the main drag between 1st and 2nd street, on Annie's recommendation.
A very nasty accident happens seconds before we emerge into Manhattan from the Lincoln Tunnel, there are people scattered over the road. It seems unreal was we drift by under 3am Manhattan lights, a couple are lying restfully on the asphalt 6 feet from each other, the onrush of horrified onlookers towards the scene seems to be happening in slow motion, towards this point of stillness, the motionless eye of a tragedy. They must have tried to run across the street and been hit. The police arrive as we pass.
We head back, shaken, to Gary Olson's Marlborough Farms house in Brooklyn, which has room for everyone to sleep, a cluttered studio downstairs and unique inhabitants: a death row defence lawyer, a professional dancer, and two visiting Swedes from Gothenberg.
Listening to Shooby Taylor on WFMU, and laughing my head off. I had never heard Shooby before today, he scats over other people's records like some kind of cartoon parasite nesting in the song.
Maxwells was sold out, thank God. We have beautiful coffee, salad and a guava milkshake at a Cuban cafe called La Isla, on the main drag between 1st and 2nd street, on Annie's recommendation.
A very nasty accident happens seconds before we emerge into Manhattan from the Lincoln Tunnel, there are people scattered over the road. It seems unreal was we drift by under 3am Manhattan lights, a couple are lying restfully on the asphalt 6 feet from each other, the onrush of horrified onlookers towards the scene seems to be happening in slow motion, towards this point of stillness, the motionless eye of a tragedy. They must have tried to run across the street and been hit. The police arrive as we pass.
We head back, shaken, to Gary Olson's Marlborough Farms house in Brooklyn, which has room for everyone to sleep, a cluttered studio downstairs and unique inhabitants: a death row defence lawyer, a professional dancer, and two visiting Swedes from Gothenberg.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Northampton
We leave for Northampton after breakfast, under a sullen, grey sky, listening to the Galaxie 500 Peel Sessions CD that Damon and Naomi gave us the night before (along with a tote bag, and a novel). Already, everyone is very tired. Ticket sales have also been poor for Northampton, and the promoter wants to cut our "guarantee". I wonder what's going wrong, and mentally prepare myself to find a job when I get home: something repetitive and unchallenging, like nightwatchman or lighthouse keeper, although these are probably pretty competitive, given the amount of out of work authors in circulation.
Listening to a collection of Burt Bacharach songs in the car - "most of all, when snowflakes fall, I wish you love" - I sometimes think my whole musical career is a reaction to the promise songs like these seemed to give about the grown-up world when I listened as a child, and how the world eluded and disappointed me. Moons and Junes, all those early McCartney ballads, Merseybeat songs, it seemed like life and love would be a kaleidoscope, a beautiful and noble reverie.
Northampton was indeed quiet, but a great show and a lovely place, and suddenly I feel in rhythm to tour again. We drink at a bar just opposite the Iron Horse and are slyly accosted by some "Celtic" musicians, who play reels on the harp and violin around our table. The others find it funny, none of us have the stomach for this stuff, but for me there is a genuine danger in the past - I find myself thinking, "what if they play "Down by the Sally Gardens"?" - the music would lead me all too clearly back to people and living rooms where I last heard the tune played, and which are now gone forever.
As we head down towards New York, we leave that cinematic Vermont / New Hampshire autumn behind. No more scarecrows, pumpkins, piles of chopped wood, crimson leaves blowing through the murky, descending evening. I loved it while it lasted.
We leave for Northampton after breakfast, under a sullen, grey sky, listening to the Galaxie 500 Peel Sessions CD that Damon and Naomi gave us the night before (along with a tote bag, and a novel). Already, everyone is very tired. Ticket sales have also been poor for Northampton, and the promoter wants to cut our "guarantee". I wonder what's going wrong, and mentally prepare myself to find a job when I get home: something repetitive and unchallenging, like nightwatchman or lighthouse keeper, although these are probably pretty competitive, given the amount of out of work authors in circulation.
Listening to a collection of Burt Bacharach songs in the car - "most of all, when snowflakes fall, I wish you love" - I sometimes think my whole musical career is a reaction to the promise songs like these seemed to give about the grown-up world when I listened as a child, and how the world eluded and disappointed me. Moons and Junes, all those early McCartney ballads, Merseybeat songs, it seemed like life and love would be a kaleidoscope, a beautiful and noble reverie.
Northampton was indeed quiet, but a great show and a lovely place, and suddenly I feel in rhythm to tour again. We drink at a bar just opposite the Iron Horse and are slyly accosted by some "Celtic" musicians, who play reels on the harp and violin around our table. The others find it funny, none of us have the stomach for this stuff, but for me there is a genuine danger in the past - I find myself thinking, "what if they play "Down by the Sally Gardens"?" - the music would lead me all too clearly back to people and living rooms where I last heard the tune played, and which are now gone forever.
As we head down towards New York, we leave that cinematic Vermont / New Hampshire autumn behind. No more scarecrows, pumpkins, piles of chopped wood, crimson leaves blowing through the murky, descending evening. I loved it while it lasted.
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