THE DEEP POOL - AUGUST 2003

And so it's that time of festivals, summer heat, and pub food exchanging - yesterday i swapped more of my gooseberries and blackcurrants for a huge sea trout and some locally grown corn on the cob - baked sea trout and corn on the cob for dinner then, followed by trout mayonaisse and - corn on the cob - an interesting if slightly overpowering breakfast, followed by stewed gooseberries with honey and cream.

Disappointment of the Month is easy - at the Larmer Tree Festival - most beautiful of the small English festivals, for the first time ever, there was NO SCRUMPY (that's rough farmhouse cider, for my Finnish readers). Just a bloody scandal - no Space Donkey, no Hattersley's Underpants, no Asylum Rat Patrol. The booze tents were run by a local beer maker called Badger - the beer that is, not the owner, and although these are good beers, it's not acceptable that they've obviously thrown out the scrumpy tent so they can sell more beer - especially as they then ran out and sold us warm lager...I remonstrated with a Badger representative -

'Why is there no scrumpy this year? - there always has been in the past.'

Shifty look - 'There's no call for it - people would rather drink a decent ale'.

'That's a complete lie you bastard - you're a greedy bunch of fuckers who have impoverished the cultural and gastonomic base of a genuine festival just so you can squeeze every last penny out of us, knowing full well you've actually pissed off about a thousand people'.

'Well if you know the answer, why did you ask the question?'

'To see if you would tell a stupid lie like - 'there's no call for it'. (Shrugs) -

'Well, next year bring your own, although you won't be allowed on the festival site with it...'

This aside, Larmer Tree was the best i've ever known - i played well of course, and then we retired to the Accoustic Cafe Tent with old Dorset friends and watched great honest guitar cloggers playing things like San Francisco Bay Blues. This is an open mic kind of tent, and in many ways, one of the best features of the festival - even if performers are bad, they're good, it's wonderfully relaxing, and old aquaintances are being renewed all around you as the evening shadows wear on and people come and go (shame about the scrumpy though...).

Driving home through one the most mystical and witchcrafty parts of England, with the sun setting almost in the north, thinking about how maybe Stonehenge was a temple to the moon, not the sun, and thinking how beautiful Salisbury Plain looks in snow as well, i suddenly felt truly alive, as the ancient world became larger all around our little red Saab...

I also played well at the Guildford Festival the week before - see review in current Uncut - and then we went to watch The Stranglers on the main stage. They were playing great, but we couldn't help noticing that there were no original Stranglers in the Stranglers - as did a small but noisy contingent of the crowd, who kep chanting 'you're not the Stranglers, you're not the Stranglers' to the clear discomfort of the men in black (well charcoal actually). Also at Guilfest, and on stage after me, was Linda Lewis, one of my favourite singers of all time, sounding better than ever: if she's in your area, i can't recommend her too highly - much better than you would dare to think.

Yesterday I went to buy a train ticket to get to the Edinburgh Festival from Southampton. There were no seats left in either direction on any train, so that's £110 to stand for 14 hours on a Virgin Train - it's my own fault - i should have given them the money a month ago - then it would have only been £80 plus, MAYBE a seat - i'm moaning - please excuse me, it's all part of growing old...

We have friends coming to stay this month - the wonderful Richard and Janet MacFarlane who run my gigs in Otley, Yorkshire. They've been letting me sit in the corner of their house talking crap for a decade, so it will be lovely to have them watching me talk crap in my own home for a change - and also a great old friend of mine called Marianne Ebertowski from Bruxelles is coming to sit in the garden drinking scrumpy with me. Once, when i was in Doll By Doll, in the '70's, i was sitting on the sidewalk next to a pub with no money, and Marianne stopped to give me some money from the goodness of her heart, said goodbye and walked on. I was very touched - so was Jo Shaw, the Doll's guitarist - he was beside me. We said thank you and ran in the pub to drink loads of Guinness (for the vitamins), and we had a pie and chips afterwards, sitting by the canal in Little Venice, remarking on what a wonderful world it was really - or, as Jo put it at the time - 'if only we had more Belgian friends...'

jl