From Brighton Beach to Santa Monica

Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault

2011-10-05T22:20:00.003+01:00

Clérambault (1872 - 1934) was a photographer and psychiatrist (apparently he invented, ahem I mean discovered, the concept of erotomania). He travelled to Morocco and obsessively took photos of women in veils. I don't know much more about him; about a year ago I found a book in a second-hand shop that contained some of his photos. They're troubling: the odd, repetitive overlap between woman and apparition. The apparent hint of cruelty and objectification. I wonder what he was doing? what was he looking for in these images?

More about painting

2011-08-05T12:45:00.001+01:00

I've been enjoying the British Masters series on BBC4. Oxbridge Art Historian Dr. James Fox stares at symbolically thorny twigs in front of a sunset glow and roves up and down damp northern streets. He also talks about British (for this, read English) Painters of the 20th Century. He sees an unheralded and almost-forgotten 'golden age' of figurative painting stretching from the end of the Edwardian era until the suicide of Keith Vaughan in the late 1970s, taking in Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton and Lucian Freud, after which it all became about pickled sharks, diamond skulls and money.

Cray Fields - Graham Sutherland

Bonfire Night, Hay Bluff I - David Inshaw

(Except that it didn't: Peter Blake, Paula Rego, John Bellany, Stephen Conroy and Stephen Cambell all carried on the painterly tradition that Dr. Fox celebrates, but apparently they don't count cos they're a. women b. Scottish or c. some other reason.)

The Forest - Graham Sutherland

I love the art of most of these artists; I definitely respond to their 'Britishness'. And they deserve more international recognition. In some ways I like Dr. Fox's ludicrousness. I like the fact he flies in the face of received opinion. But his loose way with facts is quite shocking for an Oxbridge professor (e.g. on Keith Vaughan: he didn't kill himself out of despair because the conceptual artists had edged him out, as the program strongly intimates; in fact he had cancer and was at the end of a long and successful career.) Still, nice to see some of my favourite painters on the telly.

The Vanishing Map

2011-06-23T15:53:00.000+01:00

This week Amor de Dias are 'editing' the online version of the USA's Magnet Magazine, which means writing 6 or 7 pieces each about some of our favourite things. One of mine is about Ida Ekblad, a Norwegian painter and sculptor, and Julian Hyde, a writer and artist. What links them is a belief in walking and looking, gathering lost objects together and re-presenting them, whether as sculpture, photos or narrative accounts.

Box containing 'Book of Days' and ephemera, Julian Hyde, 2009

Julian's work has been a major inspiration to me over the years. I see him as one of a peculiar breed of English writer-artists who experience something transfixing in the landscape: sometimes beautiful, sometimes unbearable; I'm thinking of painters Samuel Palmer, John and Myfanwy Piper, Paul Nash and the Brotherhood of Ruralists; maybe the tragic poet John Clare. In his work, visions of the woods combine with the liminal spaces where road meets forest, the edges of private estates, car wrecks in forgotten B-roads.

The Books of Days in paperback form

Julian has most recently written two Books of Days, each detailing a year in his life. I've contributed drawings to illustrate both, along with his own photographs; the second, darker volume, 'The Ecology of Memory' details a crisis of confidence and a slow recovery through the rhythms of nature and friendship. The books are based in Windermere in the Lake District, beauty spot and home of Wordsworth. He finds meaning in walking, looping through the woods and lakes. He sometimes extends these walks into cordoned-off areas, getting up before dawn to witness and photograph the derelict and abandoned places that the authorities have marked off-limits to the public. I think to have a genuine sense of place you need to be aware of these kind of spaces on the margins and refuse to be hemmed in by footpaths and fences. It reminds me of John Clare, and his dismay at the 19th century Acts of Inclosure, which closed off tracts of common land to local people, essentially forcing them out of their own landscape. As I know from my own walks down the Lea Valley by the London Olympic site, this still happens today, and it's every bit as undemocratic and shameless.

Julian collects his impressions in beautiful books of photos and text, lovingly bound, sometimes mounted in Joseph Cornell-style boxes surrounded by the leaves and ephemera that inspired him. They describe a kind of archaeology of the abandoned, objects observed day by day as the year moves on, as well as catalogues of his own emotions and political observations, and not least, unforgettably vivid and real portraits of the people and places around him. His small town world is genuinely and convincingly described, a true testament to a life lived in England in 2011, with all its beautiful and depressing minutinae, and all its fetishistic details.

Page 7, 'The Ecology of Memory'

Incidentally, and much less importantly, 'The Ecology of Memory' also contains a CD with a classical guitar piece by me, called 'The Secret Commonwealth'. Julian’s books are labours of love and, as such, aren’t produced in large numbers. In fact, I don't even know if they are for sale, or whether he just sends them to me and a group of like-minded people. He has no web presence, except this Flickr page, which he can be contacted through. He's one of the very few genuine artists I know.

Liverpool

2011-06-19T15:35:00.000+01:00

On Friday, Amor de Dias played at the Scandinavian Seaman's Church in Liverpool. It was magical. We played in the church itself, a whitewashed room with lovely natural reverb. If you got bored you could go downstairs to the lounge where the church staff served soup and home-made bread, and the walls were covered with nautical engravings. There was no bar, so everybody brought their own alcohol. We ended up sleeping on bunk beds in the basement.

Harvest Sun, the promoters of the show, seem to specialise in finding unusual and fascinating places to play around the city. A year ago, they put The Clientele on in the Williamson Tunnels, a warren of unearthed Victorian tunnels which were commissioned and dug by the tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson for no apparent reason. Our backstage space was the tunnel museum! The Williamson Tunnels show also ranked as one of the Clientele's favourite outings.

Above is a video of Amor de Dias playing Harvest Time at the Scandinavian Church. The wonderful Seek Magic blog has footage of a lot of the other songs we played. Thank you to Wally for filming it, and Harvest Sun for putting us on. It was one of my favourite nights of music ever.

O you brittle concrete swans

2011-05-10T23:21:00.000+01:00

I tried to put my heart and soul into every Clientele record (succeeded with some more than others I expect). Maybe one day we'll make another record. I hope so. But for now we are resting, an ageing actor, a monstre sacré killing time at the Cadogan Hotel, ignoring the cards left by the young acolytes in the Beatles wigs.

I like the idea that any group of people in suburbia, who had encountered the same books and records we did at the same times we did, could have formed The Clientele themselves.

Meanwhile, if you're interested, I am working on a few new things. The main one at the moment is Amor de Dias. You can read about that on the Merge website, but it's a slightly different kind of band, more acoustic and formed around different kinds of rhythm (literally and metaphorically). I write half the songs and Lupe Núñez Fernández of Pipas writes the other half. Our first record is out on May 17th and we're touring the US with Damon and Naomi around that time.

I've been playing guitar with a few people - I did a bit here and there on the new Comet Gain record, which is called 'The Howl of the Lonely Crowd' and comes out soon. I'm also playing in uncle Louis Philippe's live line up at the moment, with gigs coming up in London and Madrid. It's a lot of fun.

Also, I'm trying to write something. A truthful account of what it was like to be young and directionless in the mid 1990s in England. Maybe I'll have some progress reports here before long. It's humbling how hard it is to write interesting prose at any length. So on that note... see you soon.

Totes Meer

2010-11-04T10:38:00.002Z

I designed this rabbit tote bag for Merge Records the other month, and now they have some for sale. It'll carry vinyl, groceries, or a brace of weasels.

Two Songs

2010-08-05T19:19:00.005+01:00

I have been listening to two very beautiful songs this week, over and over again: California Lullabye by Spectrum, and Water Wolves by the Chills. That is all.

duh duh duh duh duh duh duh

2010-04-26T16:44:00.006+01:00

I finished a song earlier, my first in about 18 months. I'd been feeling really inspired to pick up a guitar by the Clientele's very pleasant trip to Liverpool at the weekend, listening to lots of Shack and the La's. Anyway, as I was walking down Lower Clapton Road I had it playing in my head, no words yet, just a tune that went duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

To my complete astonishment, a pub on my left was playing my tune through their loudspeakers, I could hear it from the pavement. It sounded fantastic. I was puzzled and alarmed. Then I had one of those melancholy moments of realisation. I had written "I Feel Fine" by The Beatles.

Confused but grateful

2010-03-30T09:46:00.007+01:00

We're all home safe and sound from our US road trip now, except for the sneaky feeling I have that my apartment, ahem I mean, flat, is perambulating up some American freeway.

This tour was the biggest and best we've ever done, with some wonderful opening bands (the elegance, restraint, and musicality of Vetiver in particular, while initially inspiring, slowly became breathtaking as the nights wore on). But everyone we played with was great; we were extremely lucky to have Field Music and The Wooden Birds; and I still can't believe Liam Hayes opened for us in Chicago, as well as The Mad Scene in New York. We also got to be on TV, caked in make up and hair wax - it was like Romo had never gone away.

So thank you for coming out, if you did come out. We'll hopefully see you again before too long.

And now to mail order a breakfast burrito, as well as vow in writing never to fly Delta Airlines again (I hope we get a decent royalty for the fact they use our music as in-flight entertainment, it may offset how badly they gouged us on every charge they could invent, in both directions)

ps the silkscreened poster above, inspired by the song 'Harvest Time', is available from Piecemaker Design

We Are Making a New World

2010-02-20T20:41:00.004Z

Landscape of the Vernal Equinox by Paul Nash.

I snuck in a visit to the rather snooty Dulwich Picture Library just before leaving to tour the USA for a while. They have a Paul Nash exhibition on; judging by the ecstatic reviews it appears to have resurrected his reputation as a major British painter, a worthy addition to the line of Blake and Palmer, a key mythologiser and re-imaginer of the ley lines of the English landscape. In fact, all the things I wish people would say about me. But, er.. maybe there's some more work to be done there.

I thought it was incredibly inspiring, almost physically affecting at times. The last room brought a tear to my eye. See it if you can. Surrealism in Swanage: sign me up!

Haunted Weather

2009-11-05T15:11:00.004Z

"I had set up my recording equipment on the edge of a clearing, with the microphones pointing up the hillside. As the light faded, the distant roar of stags rolled down through the forest and into the clearing. It began to rain. As usual I had heard the rushing sound of the wind blowing down the glen and across the canopy, but just at the point when the light was almost gone, the wind changed. The effect was dramatic. The atmosphere changed very quickly, as did my mood and perception. I can honestly say that I felt something blow down that hillside and into the clearing - the quality of the sound changed, the deer seemed to stop calling, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck - what few I have - stand up. I packed up as quickly as I could, and I left. Over the next few days I went back there to similar locations and made a series of successful recordings without ever feeling the same effects."

- Chris Watson, of Cabaret Voltaire on making field recordings in Glen Affric, Scotland.

Felix Hess, on his work with infrasound microphones, recording the inaudibly (to the human ear) low frequency sounds of air pressure fluctuations:

"Using a time compression factor of 360, one hour of audible sound on a CD represents 15 days and nights of recorded infrasound, originally in the range between 0.03 Hz and 56 Hz. {note: the human ear tends to hear between 20 Hz and 16,000 Hz} The sensation of hearing this … is deeply strange, like being buffeted by a high wind and at the same time hearing the extreme high frequency activity of neural processing. ‘One hears high-pitched whistles, beeps and insect-like buzzes’, Hess writes, ‘which come from the deep rumbling of factories, trains and trucks, and other motor cars, or even nearby washing machines. The opening and closing of doors gives rise to countless tiny clicks, which may add up to form a sound like soft rain on autumn leaves. Finally, an extraordinary presence: a rich, deep drone, originally at 0.2 Hz, audible like a multi-engined heavy airplane in the distance. This deep droning sound, at times all but inaudible, is formed by oscillations in the atmosphere – microbaroms – caused by standing waves in the Atlantic Ocean, far away.' "

Both quotes taken from David Toop's fascinating (and occasionally infuriating) Haunted Weather. Seascape Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

A New York evening of music and laughter with The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean

2009-10-23T10:18:00.003+01:00

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that her friend Stephin Merritt was being flown from New York to London solely to 'do press'. This seemed impossibly glamorous to me, I mean they fly you to a different country and put you in a hotel just so you can talk to people… about YOURSELF! You must have some weighty pronouncements to make to the world if that’s how you’re being treated, better greet the journalists with a faintly melancholy smile (oh, the loneliness of genius, the weight of one's towering intellect) and an honest, if distracted, handshake.

Anyway every dog has its day, and they’re flying me over to New York this week to 'do press'. And a bit of radio, and a seated show at Joe's Pub where I hope to have a pleasant stroll down memory lane / through the Clientele’s back catalogue. So this is the bit where I plug the show. It's on October 29th. The press, containing my views on all the important matters of our times, will be forthcoming.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises

2009-10-07T13:46:00.004+01:00

After a cold, bright weekend, we’re in the middle of a dark and drizzling week here in London, a week which sees the new Clientele LP released in the USA. Many people advised against releasing it this late in the year, but I don’t really mind how this one sells, and I love the feeling that everyone is experiencing these Autumnal songs together as Autumn really kicks in (unless you’re Australian of course). Also great from the limited amounts of press I’ve read that people are finally beginning to appreciate the mental distress and paranoia behind my work.

Unfortunately we couldn’t rush-release the European version (preorder it here) for October – although I was hoping for a Bonfire Night release on November 5th. But let’s hope it’s a mild early winter and November 30th still hits the spot. Don’t forget I’m playing at Joes Pub in New York on the 29th Oct, and that there are at least two full band Clientele gigs before the end of the year. And if you buy the record, thank you very much indeed.

John Clare in Hiding

2009-08-28T20:15:00.001+01:00

It was often the fate of the religious
who went to hear God in desert silences
to hear instead some other, unbearable, voice.

- Ronald Blythe

Amor de Días, Damon and Naomi: it's summer duo madness!

2009-08-25T12:15:00.003+01:00

Next week sees the return of Amor De Días, the new psych-folk / tropicalia duo I play in with Lupe from Pipas, opening for Damon and Naomi at the Dulcimer in Manchester on 3rd September and Café Oto in London on the 4th. And no, we will not cancel this time. Excited to be sharing the bill with the Left Outsides in London too!

Manchester tickets
http://www.heymanchester.com/upcoming/damon-naomi

London tickets
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/54864

We’re also much closer now to finishing our record, hopefully we will be able to unveil some tracks soon. Watch this space, or see you in Chorlton or Dalston. The choice is yours.

Don't Look Now

2009-08-14T21:34:00.011+01:00

As the last post on the Victorian spiritual underground helped connect some people to Samuel Palmer’s art, let’s have a look at a Victorian painter of a very different character. I first encountered Atkinson Grimshaw’s work on the dust jacket of a collection of M.R. James’s ghost stories.

Grimshaw was initially a railway clerk, but abandoned his day job to become a painter of moonlight scenes and rainy nightscapes in northern English towns. It appears he’s remembered now for the very good reason that there was pretty much no one else like him, although there are parallels with Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich. His pictures may have been meant to communicate a kind of idealised rustic beauty, but to modern eyes the best of them come across as essays in loneliness, a wintry counter-argument to Palmer’s ecstatic landscapes.

His pictures perfectly compliment M.R. James’s stories, and they echo Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC Omnibus treatment of James’s most famous (and terrifying) story “Oh Whistle and I’ll come to you” in which a pompous academic on holiday in Norfolk discovers an ancient whistle in the sands with the words “And who is it that is coming?” inscribed in Latin. He blows through the whistle, and soon, in the indistinct horizon where the sea meets the sky, he sees a figure running, unreally, towards him….

Miller’s only other film project of this era was a version of Alice in Wonderland (1966) starring Peter Sellers and Peter Cook. Unfortunately neither of them are very funny in it, but it doesn’t matter, as the project is saved by a slowly building, beautifully hallucinatory ambience, centred around Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice, and the English woods and trees she drifts through, in floods of sunlight, at the height of summer. To the sound of none other than … Ravi Shankar.

When Peter Blake was a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists he painted some very similar depictions of Alice, which reminds me to note that the Brotherhood (and sisterhood) are still active, and still exhibiting in 2009. And there was recently a monograph on Atkinson Grimshaw published in the UK. I just wish Jonathan Miller would make another TV film.

England's Lost Eden

2009-07-24T22:07:00.003+01:00

The original, archaeological site of the Garden of Eden is believed by the members of the Panacea Society to be at 18 Albany Street in Bedford. This is so obviously a delightful idea I hardly need to expand on it; God and Adam arguing on a suburban lawn, sprinklers twitching over the grass. Then the Fall and the Exile, or more specifically the beginning of life at no's 16 and 20. As cults go, the Panacea Society seem like quite nice people, they take their creed from an 18th Century 'prophet', Joanna Southcott, who, like some other very interesting ranters, shakers and jumpers who formed a religious subculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, believed she was receiving messages directly from God, and that the end of the world was close. Jesus would re-enter triumphantly through the streets of Bedford. I can very vividly imagine this, perhaps cos there is an early Peter Blake painting of a similar scene, called Christ Entering Venice:

He painted it while studying at the Royal Academy. Much later, after Sgt Pepper and the swinging 60s, Peter Blake becomes part of the Ruralist Brotherhood, and his paintings take on a beautiful folkloric feel. He reaches back to the art of Samuel Palmer and William Blake, tapping into a sense that the land itself is sentient in some mysterious way. I love Samuel Palmer's eerie paintings of fields at night with the harvest moon hanging over them, ghost-figures walking through the furrows. Seeing an exhibition of his work at the British Museum a few years ago, I was struck how hugely ahead of his time he was. Sadly, the death of his son, Thomas, chastened him, and he abandoned or lost his original ecstatic vision and ended up as a Victorian academic painter, forgotten for many years after he died.

18 Albany Street, The Site of The Original Garden of Eden, was eventually bought by the Panacea Society, and is now rented to non-religious tenants, apparently kept on two months notice should anything of a millenarial nature happen. A Channel 4 documentary crew recently filmed the inside of the house. Alas, God's signs and wonders kept themselves under wraps. But I love the idea of people still re-imagining the English suburbs and countryside as a kind of sacred, prophetic landscape. It's part of the Blakean tradition still alive in 2009, however eccentric it seems, however ironically distanced from it we've become. This magical sense of symbols being hidden in the everyday: symbols of the ancient, of the sacred agrarian, old as history itself. You can find them in the corners of suburban cul-de-sacs as much as in the fields themselves. Our forgotten Gods waiting for us in the long grass, just behind the forecourt of the empty shopping centre, as a long evening begins to fall.

More on this in England's Lost Eden, Adventures in a Victorian Utopia by Phillip Hoare.

For future tribute bands

2009-06-23T10:44:00.003+01:00

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!

Psychedelic Werther

2009-05-02T23:15:00.006+01:00

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.

DJ set at the Hangover Lounge this Sunday

2009-03-24T11:13:00.002Z

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) (SOLD)

2009-03-04T18:39:00.003Z

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

2009-02-23T10:02:00.003Z

Masquerade

2009-02-07T21:15:00.005Z

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

2009-01-22T11:53:00.006Z

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

2009-01-11T17:52:00.003Z

-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

2008-10-07T09:28:00.001+01:00

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

2008-09-17T09:35:00.000+01:00

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!

2008-09-05T12:00:00.002+01:00

`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

2008-05-16T14:11:00.001+01:00

The Street of the Love of Days

2008-04-22T11:05:00.001+01:00

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.

Perfection Pop

2008-02-08T14:45:00.000Z

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

2008-01-22T20:30:00.022Z

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

2007-12-23T12:50:00.000Z

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

Thank you

2007-12-09T16:42:00.000Z

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.

2007-11-13T22:39:00.000Z

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

2007-11-01T20:16:00.000Z

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..

2007-10-11T11:31:00.000+01:00

.. 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

2007-09-28T20:40:00.001+01:00

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

2007-09-21T01:19:00.000+01:00

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

2007-09-02T13:09:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-31T12:44:00.000+01:00

Copied from Odilon Redon

Woods in Hampshire

2007-08-31T12:39:00.000+01:00

The Garden of Forking Paths

2007-08-14T22:36:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-09T12:37:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-06T19:28:00.002+01:00

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.

The Goat-God's City Cousins

2007-07-18T20:23:00.000+01:00

..it was always easy, in open and lonely places, to be visited by Panic wilderness fear, but these are the urban fantods here, who come to get you when you are lost or isolate inside the way time is passing, when there is no more History, no time-travelling capsule to find your way back to, only the lateness and the absence that fill a great railway shed after the capital has been evacuated, and the goat-god’s city cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing the tunes they always played, but more audible now, because everything else has gone away, or fallen silent ... barn swallow souls, fashioned of brown twilight, rise towards the white ceilings ... they answer to the new Uncertainty. Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence – some still live, some have died, but many, many, have forgotten which they are. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, page 303.

Penelope's Dreams

2007-07-17T22:14:00.000+01:00

The Odyssey, Book 19:

“Ah my friend,” seasoned Penelope dissented,

“dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things-

not all that we glimpse in them will come to pass..

two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,

one is made of ivory, the other made of horn

those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved

are will-o’-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit,

The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn

Are fraught with truth for the dreamer that can see them."

Book 19, Translated by Robert Fagles.

Surely the most beautiful passage in the Odyssey?

Hundreds of years later, Virgil describes a tree that grows in the terrifying entranceway of Hades;

"a huge dark elm" with "ancient arms, the resting place ... of flocks of idle dreams, one clinging under every leaf" (the Aeneid, Book 6).

Instead of looking for the Loch Ness monster, (which we all know to exist, anyway, 'scientific' opinion on the matter being no more than an ambiguously desperate cover-up) perhaps explorers should set off to the remote corners of the globe to find this ancient dream-architecture, this tree and these gates of horn. For Virgil's tree, the caverns at Cumae, found today on the bay of Naples (and home of our old friend the Sybil), are said to lead to the Greco-Roman underworld. So they could start by running that terrifying gamut, if they dared.

Those exquisitely described horns, though, could be anywhere, they are only described by Penelope, never seen by Odysseus on his travels. And given the controversy over exactly where the Acheans sailed to and from in the Odyssey, (Greenland, the North Pole, Asia Minor, Cilicia, Zembla?) it's impossible to pinpoint even where they definitely aren't. They may equally be nowhere other than inside Penelope's head, a Greek woman dead for at least 2,700 years. I like to imagine them hovering over the sea in some undiscovered Arctic region, next to the bones of Captain Oates, still trapping and guiding our 'evanescent dreams'.

Native American Owl from New Mexico

2007-07-16T22:19:00.000+01:00

Now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

the Monsters of the Fjords

2007-07-09T15:40:00.000+01:00

"...a terrible sea monster.... was seen in 1734 outside the colony. It was an enormously big creature: Its head reached the yard arm when it rose out of the water. The body was as thick as the ship and was 3 - 4 times as long. It had a pointed nose, and blew like a whale. It had big broad limbs, and the body seemed to be covered with barnacles, and the skin was very rough. The general shape was that of a serpent. When it dived, it lunged backwards and then raised the tail above the surface a ship's length away." - Hans Egede, 'Det gamle Groenlands nye Perlustration eller Natural Historie' (1746)

Thank you everyone who came out to our Swedish and Norwegian shows. The highlight for me was the epic last 80 miles into Egersund where we drove winding, u-bending roads through spectacular granite cliffs, and forests so altitudinous they were filled with cloud (though all this did provoke a small amount of car-sickness). As I stared down the immense chasms, into the sullen fjords below, I remembered Bishop Egede's account of the sea serpent he had witnessed in the coal-black waters of Greenland in 1734, and I scanned the surface for any movement I might consider suspicious or sinister. The same creature, (an 80 foot long black sea snake, with a camel-like head) was spotted by over a thousand people off the coasts of Gloucester and Maine in 1817, as well as by crew members of the HMS Dedalus in the late 19th century, and is still officially unknown to, and unexplained by, science. (the usual submerged giant squid theory not really explaining the 1000s of eye witness reports of a head with teeth, given by terrified New Englanders) .

I would even have been happy with a washed-ashore giant squid carcass, of which there were a mysteriously large number on the Norwegian west coast during the late 19th century (evidence of a larger, infinitely more predatory beast lurking in the waters perhaps?)

Or a giant octopus (Pacific wartime reports exist of monsters more than 200 feet long, 4 times the size of the largest giant squid); or a Megalodon, a type of enormous pre-historic shark, which may or may not be quite extinct, if certain recent accounts from the South Sea Islands be taken seriously. The megalodon could/can(?) grow to 100 feet, 3 of them together could have eaten our ferry for breakfast.

But the Norwegian waters refused to render up their secrets, much as the Norwegian audiences had refused to render up their merch-money (heh heh, just kidding). I did see a jellyfish from the jetty as we waited for our ferry. Only it turned out to be a bit of seaweed.

Keep watching the waves.

The Sybil at Cumae

2007-07-01T15:04:00.000+01:00

"When you have landed and come to the city of Cumae and the sacred lakes of Avernus among their sounding forests, there, deep in a cave in the rock you will see a virgin priestess foretelling the future in a prophetic frenzy by writing signs and names on leaves … but the leaves are so light that when the door turns in its sockets the slightest breath of wind dislodges them. The draught from the door throws them into confusion and the priestess never makes it her concern to catch them as they flutter round her rocky cave and put them back in order, or join up the prophecies.”

The Aeneid – Book 3 – 440-450

A woman is haunted by a phantom as she sits at a table, or perhaps she is the phantom herself. Her face flickers like a silent film between the shapes of a human and a bird. Her hands move restlessly over piles of leaves, painting each one with a Greek letter; and even to an antiquarian, familiar with modes of Greek no longer used in the modern language, the sentences and words she is fashioning would make no literal sense. But there is somehow a weariness, a strange, tangible lassitude in the leaf-prose, as if there can be an exhausted quality to words, as if they can finally not even refer to themselves; to their own meaning.

The woman is immensely old, the bird older, an inhuman eye with intimations of pyramids, archaic astronomies, pre-human heroic ages. A long day has passed and night is coming in, vast tracts of irreclaimable time have been and gone, with only the day and the night, the sun and the moon rising and falling in rhythm. As an evening wind stirs the leaves through the open window, exhausted, half-seen sentences begin to creep across them, in fact it’s as if the letters and the numbers of the future flit lightly, kaleidoscopically, in and out of their order and recombine into nonsense.

And the strangest thing is this wind moving the leaves, it seems to carry some tang of lost memories, forgotten moments of clarity felt during childhood trips to the sea, an uncategorisable but intense yearning, as strong as thirst or dread. Animals yelp at doorways, deep sea fishermen returning to the cove cast their lines up into the sky in the gathering darkness, as if to snare birds, bats, unknown configurations of stars. Tourists dressing for dinner in nearby hotel rooms shiver and momentarily lose focus, seem to follow some invisible presence passing hugely under the waves.

Helenus, the son of Priam, warned Aeneas about this woman 2,800 years ago, how she writes her prophecies on leaves and then allows the wind to blow them into incomprehensibility.

For Aeneas it was an inconvenience, he needed a magic spell to unscramble the messages from his future. In our era, in the long track of years since Aeneas, all the magic spells have disappeared.

the saddest postcard in the world

2007-06-21T18:15:00.000+01:00

it just says, 'my dog drowned here'

Tea and Feist

2007-06-21T17:33:00.000+01:00

One of the great things about being home again, is that I can have a decent cup of tea. Somehow despite all efforts, hopes, and good intentions, it's just never the same in North America. The best cup of tea I've ever had was made for me by Brian O'Shaughnessy of Bark Studio. It's rare for Brian to condescend to make a cup of tea for a mere visiting musician, so to show my gratitude I asked him to share his techniques with the world, and they are as follows

1. rinse the dry cup with a little boiled water, then discard the water. This warms the cup, which is important although i don't know why.
2. add teabag (PG Tips, or equivalent British brand, NOT Lipton) and fill mug up with water, which has now slightly cooled
3. now add just a touch of milk. Apparently this prevents oils in the tea leaves separating and floating unappetisingly on the surface of the cup
4. leave for between 3.5 and 5 minutes
5. discard teabag, squeezing it into the cup
6. add milk and sugar (if you take sugar), and stir very well.

Of course many people would ask why he isn't using a teapot or loose leaves or anything posh like that, but he would probably reply simply by staring over the rim of his glasses at you, and believe me you would fall silent. And I do have to say it was the best cup of tea I ever had.

Other than the shock of quality tea, I have been getting over my jetlag. The week after the tour some friends and I were hanging out with Feist, as she taped Late Night With Conan O'Brien and then played at Town Hall in Manhattan. The two things that struck me were how very pleasant, friendly and down to earth everyone involved was, and how organised they were too. In contrast to the gin-soaked carnival of the Clientele backstage, all of Feist's guests were calm, orderly, sober and clean. There was an 'espresso girl' too, who's job it was to walk around asking if anyone needed any more espresso. There's a lesson there I guess, maybe someone can tell me what it is.

Supernatural, perhaps; Baloney, perhaps not.

2007-06-15T19:10:00.000+01:00

Just off a dark stretch of highway in Quebec, at certain, specific hours of the night, one may find a deserted Econolodge, hidden in the shadows of industrial buildings and surrounded by yawning wastegrounds, litter, dereliction. We rolled in around 2am, delirious and tired, having driven from Ottowa where everything was booked. Maybe it was this fatal exhaustion that led us to ignore all the warning signs.

Because if this Econolodge existed at all, and was not merely a group hallucination, it was most certainly haunted. Observe the evidence, and quake in fear:

1. reception staff with a manner that definitely suggested they had something to hide; indeed with an appearance that had a kind of indefinable intangibility about it.
2. a bloodstain that inexplicably appeared over two beds during the night.
3. an open door to an empty room, which we kept finding re-opened, despite closing it each time we passed.
4. whining noises of static and a cacophony of tv channels playing simultaneously from this cursed room, despite no one being there.
5. one of the band members had a dream of a black dog and awoke so frightened they were almost screaming
6. the few other guests we met were old old enough to seem decrepit, with odd accents and 1920s clothing
7. upon discussing this hotel with locals once we got to Montreal, we were told there hadn't been a hotel in that area for nearly 80 years!
8. ok that last one was a lie

Needless to say, after our evening of curious hauntings we felt bound to stay for another night, and Mel even dared to do her laundry. Yet I am still left with the lingering feeling that this hotel never really existed, and passers by - if indeed there were likely to have been any passers by in that remote and desolate hinterland - would have seen five figures giving the impression of sleeping, doing laundry, talking to hotel staff, all out under the night sky, the wind whistling around them, surrounded only by the littered flints and rusting wires of what seemed to be the ruins of a once-elegant hotel, marked with the scars of a horrible accident.

James's tour Ideas

2007-06-04T03:35:00.000+01:00

As James doesn't have a blog, i need to publicise these myself. My ideas are even better but i don't want to share them until they're patented. More to come as they are newly minted on the road.

1. let's not drive 14 hours across the country, let's just settle in Missoula and become farmers
2. let's make some alterations to the van and create a hovercraft, thereby sailing up the river and avoiding the traffic. special bonus is that we will shadow the route of lewis and clarke
3. rather than playing a show tonight, let's see if we can find a wolf sanctuary and look at some wolves, it would be more fun for us
4. let's drink gin in the van, if a police officer stops us and finds us with illegal open containers of alcohol (which is of course an imprisonable offence in the usa), we can just put on really posh english accents and he'll let us go. don't worry, we'll handle it.

i want to do all of these btw

Madison Wisconsin

2007-06-02T05:22:00.000+01:00

Today is my birthday and I am happy to be in Madison, Wisconsin, which locals tell me is the home of the squeaky cheese, whatever that means. I am 33, but I swear I look 19, I think I'm getting younger and more stupid as life goes on

This morning we played a set on Minneapolis Public Radio which was great fun, they had a Steinway grand piano that Mel loved, and even I could tell as I had a little tinkle on the ivories that it was a beautiful instrument.

Beach House are playing their last song as I write and seem to be going down well with the crowd. I am a little sad that we have only seven more shows in the US, it's passed like a dream, but I did use my van time to get my teeth into "Mason and Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon, which only really kicks off around page 350 in my opinion. Well cheers, I will end this exhibitionism and have a gin and tonic, after all i actually have an excuse to get drunk this evening.

good morning campers

2007-05-22T18:37:00.000+01:00

I am in Phoenix Arizona, or at least I think I am, i may be in Tempe, or half way to San Diego. I haven't had much time on the internet in the past three weeks, and i have generally been lacking mental clarity.

Last night we played to a wonderful all-ages crowd in an art gallery. I wish we could do more of these sort of shows, we used to all the time before we became internationally renowned celebrities. Tomorrow we are taping a show in Santa Monica for Yahoo Music just after 50 cent (or 50 pennies as he's known in England). People from LA should come early to the Knitting Factory show on the 24th for two reasons 1. i will be at the merch stand to share anecdotes of my new friendship with 50 cents(s) and 2. you should not on any account miss the opening band, Pipas, who you will love.

and now, avanti!
to san diego and don't spare the horses!

The Manga Clientele!

2007-05-03T12:50:00.000+01:00

Watch out for a Clientele appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga (vol. 2), hitting bookshops this Autumn. The story concerns a Chinese girl called Lee who visits Scotland and falls in love with a member of the band, much to her boyfriend's disgust. And yes, since you ask, we really are this good looking. See Boychild Productions for more info and other exciting creative projects.

Retiro Park in April

2007-04-26T20:05:00.000+01:00

wh- what is that.... THAT ABOMINATION?

2007-04-09T20:39:00.000+01:00

Getting your parents to buy you 'Look and Learn' was easy; wheedling cash out of them for the horror comic named 'Scream' was another matter altogether. 'Edited' by a sinister, cloaked figure named Ghastly McNasty, Scream only ran for 15 issues (from March to June 1984), but it had unusually beautiful artwork and the occasional very atmospheric storyline such as The Drowning Pond, one of many favourites from the series known as "The Library of Death". And not to forget the Dracula Files, wherein the evil Count is hunted by his obsessed, grimly indefatigable fellow-countryman, Colonel Stakis, 'a former secret policeman who had defected to the West in order to continue his hunt for the Vampire'. Sounds like a man with a bit of a past I'd say.

the maiden who fell in love with the sun / the rocks of doom

2007-04-07T22:49:00.000+01:00

Ok, this is what happens when you never leave the house, no one tells you anything. First I discover, Look and Learn have a website, with an amazing picture library, searchable by keyword, which stretches right back to 1961. Secondly, I discover the magazine was re-launched in January 2007. So once more a certain type of kid will enjoy reading about Apollo and Flor in a deserted classroom, while all the others are at rugby practice mashing each others faces into the mud. p.s. good old Hylas, he had the right idea.

They don't make them like this anymore

2007-04-07T19:37:00.000+01:00

Today I picked up this October 1973 issue of 'Look and Learn' at the Bourne Mill antiques and bric-a-brac market near Farnham. As well as "another in our series about strange disappearances"; in this case the 9th Legion's absence from the historical record once they wandered past Hadrian's Wall, we have articles about 'the secret signs of the Romanies', cartoon versions of Spartacus and the Trials of Sir Isumbras, a cheery, upbeat guide to the Isle of Man, and the derring-do of "Eagles over the Western Front", wherein a foolish young aviator challenges Baron Manfred von Richtofen himself to an aerial duel. I don't remember reading 'Look and Learn' when i was a kid but it is very charming, and I wonder if there's anything similar today.

bit in Ovid about Julius Caesar's murder

2007-04-06T12:05:00.000+01:00

"Men say that the crime was foreshadowed by clashing arms in the black clouds;
trumpets and horns were awesomely blaring and braying in heaven.
The sun's face also was gloomy and steeped the uneasy earth
in a ghostly pallor, shooting stars were constantly streaking
across the sky, and drops of blood were discharged from the rainclouds.
The face of the morning star was dimmed and bespeckled with dirty
rust-coloured spots; blood spattered the chariot bearing the moon.
All over the city the Stygian owl was hooting its sinister
omens, ivory statues wept, and voices chanting
dirges of doom, so they say, could be heard in the sacred groves.
The night was disturbed by the howling of dogs; the streets were haunted
by roaming ghosts of the dead; and the city was shaken by tremors.
But warnings from heaven were powerless to halt the plot or forestall
what fate had decreed."

-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 15 (782-798)

Dionysus turning pirates into dolphins (copied from Exekias)

2007-04-03T11:01:00.000+01:00

disquieting muse / not very scary pigeon

2007-03-30T12:11:00.000+01:00

The Sibyl at Cumae

2007-03-30T12:00:00.000+01:00

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 14 innit

Greek tile found in a pub near Alton

2007-03-22T23:58:00.000Z

Athena changing into an eagle

2007-03-06T14:07:00.000Z

From book 3 of the Odyssey, Poindexter.

Collage for new Clientele record

2007-03-05T19:36:00.000Z

Man with flower (from the artist's late 1970s felt tip period)

2007-03-05T19:32:00.000Z

Parque del Retiro, Madrid

2007-03-02T10:55:00.000Z

Theseus entering the labyrinth

2007-02-06T23:37:00.000Z

The Captured Robin

2007-02-04T15:22:00.001Z

Sea Monster witnessed at Shandwick Bay, 1986

2007-02-04T11:46:00.000Z

Apollo and Daphne

2007-02-03T09:46:00.000Z

Centaur in Shopping Centre

2007-02-02T19:09:00.000Z

Strange Happening at Boating Lake

2007-02-02T17:14:00.000Z

The 9th Legion

2007-02-01T16:05:00.000Z

Thomas De Quincey's Nightmares no.1: London

2006-12-21T17:27:00.000Z

"Opium, (like the bee that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and the soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a compliance with the master-key. Some of (my) rambles led me great distances; for an opium eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly on such knotty problems of alleys, alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of steeets without obvious outlets or thoroughfares, as must baffle the audacity of porters and and confound the intellects of hackney coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. Positively, in one line of communication to the south of Holborn, for foot pasengers (known, I doubt not, to many of my London readers), the road lay through a man's kitchen; and, as it was a small kitchen, you needed to steer cautiously or else you might run foul of the dripping pan.

For this however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannised over my dreams , and the perplexities of London came back and haunted my sleep. with the feeling of perplexities, moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the reason, that brought anguish and remorse to the conscience"

Thomas De Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1821-22

Alan Garner / the valley of the dread

2006-10-28T00:21:00.000+01:00

From an interview in the Times online:

"I've always been attracted to trying to find an explanation of the sense of the religious," Garner says. "I take it straight from the Latin root, religio: a fear or sense of awe. What is due - to a place, or a concept or god. That is religio. And from a very early age I became aware that wherever I looked or read, there seemed to be no group in the world that didn't express this in some form. I didn't go along with the notion, simply, there is a God - but there's something. There's a line in Horace: 'I don't know what god there is in him, but there is a god'."

...

That night, away from the valley, Garner and I sit by the fire as the day dies. The images of the novel, and of the extraordinary, disturbing place to which Garner took me, dance in the flames. "If I could see any purpose in life as to why I should go on existing - and I see this in everyone when they are working, when they are selfless in their selfishness - it is that they are trying to bring about the future. We all have different ways of doing it. We all have our tessera; like a mosaic. Some of us are lucky to have two. And perhaps we make a picture."

Subject: New House and Surroundings

2006-10-26T20:28:00.000+01:00

The Mad Dogs

2006-10-26T20:18:00.000+01:00

The Rooks II

2006-10-26T20:17:00.000+01:00

The Ghost Werewolf

2006-10-26T20:15:00.000+01:00

The Burnt Down Forest

2006-10-26T20:14:00.000+01:00

The Howl

2006-10-26T20:11:00.000+01:00

The Shape

2006-10-26T20:10:00.000+01:00

The Clinging Rhododdendron Bush

2006-10-26T20:06:00.000+01:00

The TV Room

2006-10-26T20:03:00.000+01:00

The Strange Happenings Investigation Group

2006-10-25T17:32:00.000+01:00

Between the ages of 8 and 12, my sister and I were members of a secret ghost-hunting society. The society was kept religiously secret from our parents and any children other than our next door neighbours, who were in on it too. We fearlessly investigated anything spooky within a 200 metre radius of our houses.

As there was never anything particularly spooky within a 200 metre radius of our houses, (just the woods, railway heath and semi-detached homes of a commuter town outside London), we had to conjure spookiness up from nothing, from the mundane world around us; and this created the eerie feeling that there were magical, invisible forces at play, dancing just behind the visible world, contradicting its boredom and normality.

Increasingly, we wove taller and taller tales, and we wrote them down and filed them away in secret. They formed a body of evidence that desperately strange things were afoot, and that we were fated to be at the very epicentre of them. Only we could read the signs, and the signs showed that our little town was an enchanted and savage place, no different from the Manchester of Elidor or the Buckinghamshire of the Dark is Rising, both of which we had read, but as coded messages, rather than works of fiction. Sort of like Buffy if every character was Willow, and with Arthurian legends rather than vampires.

In a spring clean last week I rediscovered some of our files, and I laughed til i could hardly breathe. We hadn't realised what comedians we were.

I remember

2006-07-25T20:48:00.000+01:00

Arthur Hughes - The Knight of the Sun. 1859-1860

When we were children, we found a Knight in the back garden; just beyond a patch of scrub grass, and hidden by green laurel leaves. The first thing that struck us was how tiny he was, like a jockey or another child, and I realise now that his delicate frame could only have been nourished by mediaeval foods; turnips, blood sausage, perhaps songbirds roasted in a thin, toxic sauce of mercury. He looked pained, pinched-in, fanatical. He waited stock-still on his horse, seeming to absorb the light from around him; blanched like an underexposed photograph, with the blues and purples of Edwardian illustrations, faded through the years into an otherworldly, sun-infused palette of the distant past. He was separate from the light and the shadow of the garden, and he sat in an obvious posture of hesitation and -it seemed- slight disdain, without seeing or reacting to us. We were shocked, and milled around him with hushed respect. On other days we found him drenched, with rain drilling the laurel leaves, streaking long, dim lines down the sides of his face, before our mother called us in from the wet, and we left him to his meditation.

Stitched into the pommel of his saddle was his name, Roland. He never moved from the bottom of the garden, and we visited him less and less. The last time I saw him I was 8 years old, and a burning summer day had bleached the grasses and dried the moss on the lawn. He was there but not there, as usual, the wrong colour and shape for the oppressive light, the heat that made the new tent I had pitched an uninhabitable furnace. I thought his face had changed a little, as if he was exhausted by the long trek through the years, from laying King Arthur to rest by the sea on a fresh, chilly evening, to seeing the Pre-Raphaelites paint the same scene wrongly nine centuries later. But maybe it was me who was becoming tired. By September, I was ill, they moved me to the sanatorium. When I returned, he'd gone.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

2006-05-21T21:36:00.000+01:00

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, by Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside ("since all is o'er," he saith,
"And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;")

While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among "The Band" - to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed
Their steps - that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now--should I be fit?

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.

So, on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers - as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure trove.

No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See
Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly,
"It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free."

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards - the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

Giles then, the soul of honour - there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest men should dare (he said) he durst.
Good - but the scene shifts - faugh! what hangman hands
Pin to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof - to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which, while I forded, - good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage--

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

And more than that - a furlong on - why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood--
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains - with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me, - solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.

Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when--
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den!

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

Not see? because of night perhaps? - why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,--
"Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!"

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

New York City

2006-05-14T15:39:00.000+01:00

The New York show was good, the first time I felt we managed to captivate the entire audience. But people with the wrong sort of qualities come to our shows now and hammer on the backstage door, expecting to be allowed in just because they bought a t-shirt. And there are a lot of them, an unnatural light burning in their eyes, spit spraying as they lecture us on the musicanship of Phish. I wanted to concentrate on saying goodbye to Annie and her band... and when I do it's heatbreaking, every muscle and bone in my body aches, aches, aches. My mind finally closes down into a trance of dog-tiredness, a tunnel from which I will emerge in London, waving goodbye from the other side of the Atlantic. If the plane doesn't crash, of course. Au revoir America (and Canada), it's been a blast.

THE END

Danville, PA to NYC

2006-05-14T15:36:00.000+01:00

Another snowstorm stops us making it all the way from Cleveland to Brookyln, so we have one last night in a hotel. In Danville PA, we find a Days Inn with an enormous bar, a musician howling Neil Young songs at three dazed punters and a strange deadening ambience that hovers around the oversized foyer and corridors, basketball court-sized and completely empty. One last eerie night in rural Pennsylvania before our final bow in New York, the day before Thanksgiving. With pitchers of beer at $1 each, it's not long before everyone is screaming requests for Johnny Cash. 'I'm here next Tuesday too' the singer tells us, more in sorrow than hope.

Today is our last day, I am in between the mental process of turning this into a memory, distant colours recalled from posters and pamphlets carelessly stuffed into bags in hotel foyers (rediscovered years later in a hurried spring clean, held for three seconds of recollection then tidied away again) and the feeling that these things actually happened days back, that Stein's Ghost Town or the lights of El Paso, or the cold of Lake Erie are just down the road, existing as part of the immediate world. Today I'm stranded in between the two; self conscious of this fading away, (the curse of reading Proust) even as we drive through New Jersey under a bright winter sun, colouring the drab birches and scrub grass a Pre-Raphaelite auburn. Soon, all this will be gone, eaten by the drone of a flight deck, the flicker of other people's movies. The strange abstraction of playing music night after night after night after night will become a memory.

I have this bizarre reluctance to end the tour, which I have often found utterly miserable, longing for home, feeling ill and restless. The winter is really coming in. Maybe I will just miss being abroad and the intense tenor of life on the road, hope, disappointment, uncertainty, romance. The end of an era in my life. The major feeling now is weariness and the usual faint tinge of foolishness.

Michigan and Ohio

2006-05-12T14:44:00.000+01:00

Are drab and sullen at this time of year, dirty grey. Detroit was a good show for a lovely audience, but the amount of shit we take from pan handlers loading in and out defies belief. Today the sky is like varnish aged by smoke. The tour is winding down now, just two more dates and no more long drives, everyone is weary to the bone, just keeping on. I am full of worries about home, gazing out at these colourless stretches of trees, fields and farmhouses, too grey and flat and for even me to romanticise.

At a service station 20 miles west of Cleveland, I hear a conversation between 2 Burger King staff about 'a haunted castle' in Ireland which one of them is planning to visit, 'With sharks and alligators in the moat... and... and... and... lobsters with their pincers too'. We drive 4 more miles and I see a small lake to the left of the freeway that in every way resembles an ordinary natural lake, except for the 3 foot spume of water rising from the centre, clearly artifical and serving no apparent purpose. Last night someone asked if my name was really Alasdair Maclean. 'It just sounds so Art Nouveau'.

Heather's parents live right on the edge of lake Erie, which we visit after the Cleveland show and just before the onset of a filthy snowstorm. We take the dogs, Billy and Sadie, out to the lake shore, where the white horses are rolling in, driven by the bitterest wind I've felt since living in Edinburgh. The light is pale grey, dim with moisture, a few flakes of snow dancing in the air. The cold is incredible, but bracing. We are really winding down now, getting ready for the last hours and minutes in this country, the very end, the finale to an 8 week tour, perhaps the end of making music together at all. It's all so unreal and I feel beaten down and sad, somehow unrecognisable to myself. Dry, thick lines of snow snake over the highway like little tracks of polystrene beads, driven side to side by the wind. What a dismal day. At last, I have finished the first trilogy of Remembrance of Things Past.

The snow is coating the side of the freeway now, the light dimming by 4pm into a charcoal twilight, sad snowy woods and telegraph lines glimpsed through clearings that recede and fade. They look as grim as some Polish forest, interspersed endlessly with car parks and vast ugly motorpart stores like gulags. I really get a sense of the isolation of this country, the loneliness: scratching out a mark on these endless fields of snow, whose message to us can only be that we should leave as fast as possible, and go as far as we can.

Minneapolis - Chicago

2006-05-12T14:41:00.000+01:00

We play a version of 'Graven Wood', an old Clientele song written by Innes Phillips, on Minneapolis Public Radio, and listening to it today as we wearily drive down to Chicago, it sounds magical, perfectly echoing the drab, grey copses and snow-littered fields passing by the window. We also played it live at the show, and I enjoyed explaining the origins of the song; four of us in a wood clearing as dusk fell, coming down off a heavy dose of er.. illegals, the world was a beautiful and frigid autumn red, the rhoddodendrons sheltering us from distantly passing cars, a sense of dread just barely creeping into the scene. Innes later told me this was not what he wrote the song about at all, I misunderstood, but for me it still spells out this moment perfectly, the peak of a magical and unreal phase of my life, a group of adolescents in the countryside, each beginning to face the fact that people aren't safe after all.

The skies are so big here that it's been comparatively easy to tell the time and the direction we are travelling in just from the movement of the sun. I've also been watching the moon rise and fall, move left and right, as we travelled further and the days went by; it gives more of a sense of the complex orbits and rotations of the earth. It's the first time in my life I've thought about this. As we travel East, back across the country, I can estimate how many hours of daylight we have left as the sun sinks across to the West, and how enthusiastically I should attack the Proust I've brought with me, before darkness silences his magisterial voice.

Beginning the Drive Back East: Seattle to Little Bighorn

2006-05-11T13:21:00.001+01:00

Driving East towards Ritzville, the first snow we've seen in weeks, coating the mountain peaks down to the freeway edge. As we cross the Idaho/Montana pass in darkness, an icy, impenetrable fog hits us like a wall, it's impossible to see beyond a few feet, snow coats the road, and we slither down the Bitterroots with our hazard lights on, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of frozen pine trees. The Radar Brothers tell me, with a twinkle in their eyes, that in Montana it's illegal not to stop for a broken down motorist - if you break down, the chances are you'll freeze to death. Our Chrysler seems to be doing OK. The fog abruptly lifts as we lose altitude, and we drive on through the pass between gigantic moonlit mountains, fields of snow and dimly-seen pine forests. I realise, looking at a map of the area in a service station, that we are very close to tracing the route of Lewis and Clark, discoverers of the North West passage.

Missoula, the hometown of David Lynch appears and disappears in the darkness, ringed by oppressive mountains, orbited by monster trucks. The snow is falling all around us, I gaze out at these streets and houses traced by lamps, before long it's all gone and we are back in the wilderness again.

The next day is very bright, snow reflecting the sun and presenting us with an alternating vista of mountains and plains, as wild and inhospitable as the desert. We eat breakfast, grudgingly, in a Denny's that has an amazing 360 degree Alpine view through bay windows. I am now so tired and upset and pissed off I can hardly think straight. A 12 hour drive ahead of us just to make it half way to Minneapolis.

We stop at Custer, MT around 4pm Mountain Time, a mile west from the site of Custer's last stand, Little Bighorn. Mark walks past a little house between the petrol station and a 'Hunter's Pub' offering 'broasted' chicken, and is accosted by two dogs and a goat that run free onto the road. The goat is friendly but the dogs are not. He retreats, and so do we. Less than half way through the drive. The goat remains on the road, gazing enigmatically at our departing van.

Portland, Oregon

2006-05-11T13:18:00.000+01:00

Portland was fun
Our venue, the Doug Fir Lounge is custom built for musicians.
Sand inside the stage to prevent nasty bass vibrations.
A tartan carpet in the dressing room.
Hotel and restaurant are part of the same complex, only a stumble away.
The whole place is covered in mirrors and silver
The show is good.
Someone shouts 'let's get fucked up!'
We head to a bar.
A big, middle aged man approaches me and snaps, 'you're the Clientele guy, right?'
He's smashed, drunk out of his mind
'Sububbbban Light was... fuckin A......but after that.... what the fuck happened?'
'You win some you lose some'
'Right' he says, slumping, wagging his finger at some inner weariness he recognises, 'Right'.
Then, abruptly, he sits down on a poker machine where his glass of whisky was resting
Crushing it with the seat of his all-American pants
'You better get that seen by a doctor,' I say
'Right... right,' the weary finger wags again

Jimmy, singer of the Radar Brothers, is wearing a dogtooth trilby, ice clinking in his whisky glass, sat at the bar with Steve and me. A quiet, spooky man with a gift for repartee; everyone is trashed, some playing shuffleboard at the back of the bar, drinking Hefferweiss, more members of the underground society of semi-succesful musicians taking some time off to relax, shaving a few more days off their dwindling life expectancies.

The morning is unmentionable

A Phillip Larkin sort of Day

2006-05-09T17:34:00.000+01:00

Afternoons

Summer is fading;
The leaves fall in ones and twos
From trees bordering the new recreation ground.
In the hollows of afternoons
Young mothers assemble
At swing and sandpit
Setting free their children.

Behind them, at intervals,
Stand husbands in skilled trades,
An estateful of washing,
And the albums, lettered
'Our Wedding', lying
Near the television:
Before them, the wind
Is ruining their courting-places

That are still courting-places
(But the lovers are all at school),
And their children, so intent on
Finding more unripe acorns,
Expect to be taken home.
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

Phillip Larkin - Afternoons, from 'The Whitsum Weddings', 1964

the Surrealist voice of Robert Desnos

2006-04-24T20:23:00.000+01:00

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

"I have dreamed of you so much"
Robert Desnos 1900-1945

SF - Oregon

2006-04-23T18:32:00.000+01:00

Leaving SF and on into beautiful, mournfully pale Northern California. Cedars and firs begin to appear, distant mountains of sand give way to another immense, low plain. The moon is hanging to the East as we head up Route 5, as transparent as a circle of tissue paper in the sky. The moon in the daylight is always magical, woven into the rhythms and shadows of the day. You only notice it on really pale days, winter days: I remember a chain of them leading back into my childhood, when, with my feet on the gravel of a cul-de-sac, I dropped my bike and stared, hypnotised for the first time. As I wrote this self-consciously Proustian paragraph, the sun suddenly faded, and the moon disappeared behind sullen rectangular banks of cloud. the light is too dim to carry on writing in the car.

We stop at McGrath's fish restaurant in Medford, Oregon and I order oysters with a glass of wheat beer. Having visited once before, Medford, and McGrath's in particular have taken on a strange quality for me, approached in darkness, an enchanting light in the barren stretches of the 5, the perfect resting point between SF and Portland, a place to get lost in beer and er.. shellfish, it dissolves into strip malls, Subways and Taco Bells in the light of day. Medford reminds me of where I grew up - boredom, bracing mornings, a faint and inexplicable sense of foolishness.

I woke in the night with a fear I had never experienced before - the fear of growing old alone, the fear that one day there would be no one left to listen to me. I slept and dreamt of holding a girls head in my hands, the slight movement of the skin, the hair, the plates of the skull in my supporting fingers. I woke up deep in the territory of cramps and nightmares. Damn oysters.

The redwood forests of Oregon are like a version of the Sutherland I grew up loving, magnified into impossibility. Enormous. I have a crush on Oregon, it seems a special place, my heart flutters when it's mentioned in conversation!

4:18pm: the moon appears again, this time away to the North East, and very low in the Sky. Enormous snowy mountains in the distance which I had initially mistaken for clouds! The late afternoon light is amber, russet. Crimson and burgundy leaves line the 5, with pockets of evergreen and Weeping Willow breaking through in patches. We are very late for soundcheck and I am hungry. The Louvin Brothers' 'Come and Meet Me in the Shadow of the Pines' is playing.