THE DEEP POOL - AUGUST 2004

A humid afternoon, my white cheesecloth shirt from the Greek island of Paxos sticking to my glowing body, as rivulets of sweat trickle down my handsome bronzed chest - when i look down, i can see a single greyish nose hair sticking out at right angles from my left nostril. He's a bit of a renegade, always there, no matter how intense you get with the nose hair scissors imediately after showering, which, for you gents just coming into the arena of nose-hair-as-an-unfortunate-deterrent-to-a-complete-sex-life-unless-one-is-properly-vigilant, is the best time time to deal with this male growth phenomenon. 'Norbert' is the name of this hair, and exactly how he manages to elude my best attentions is a genuine mystery. Please don't write to say it's a problem for women too - i'm sure it is, but i don't want to think about it any more than i want to think about Sven Goran Errikson.

Speaking of which, when we arrived at Corfu airport on the way to the island of Paxos in mid-July, Greece had just won the European football, and i thought it was going to be mayhemic, but everybody was very controlled. If England had won, the streets would have been filled with people shouting and throwing up lager - instead, in Greece, all the men were dancing in lines in the street, and throwing up ouzo - only kidding, but they were dancing. It made me think - our friend Spiros, owner of the world's greatest bar, Taxidi on Paxos, aways distinguishes between dancing and 'disco dancing', because they have and do both - all the men can dance their own ancestral dances, and they also like to 'disco dance'. As has been said - 'never give a sword to man who can't dance', cos if you do, he may decide to go to a foreign country, say, ooh, i don't know - Iraq, and decide to torture innocent people for a laugh - and all because the ancestral dancing part of his soul has been eaten by protestants. And they weren't even hungry - 'because it was there', they would probably say as they proudly stood, flag in dick, on a mountain of bad jokes. Sorry about that- i lost my medication on the ferry, as Tony Bennett might have put it.

Just before going on holiday, Joe Shaw, my good old friend and guitarist from Doll By Doll, called me to say that Nick Whiffen, who was briefly the bass guitarist in Doll By Doll, was very ill in hospital in Dorchester. I sent him Ghost Riders by Richard Grant, mainly because the book has superb colours of the American west throughout - reading it is itself like a brilliant form of colour therapy. Also, the book is about vagabond soul and it just struck me as something Nick would like. Sadly Nick died while i was away, and Joe called me to tell me in most moving terms about the gathering of friends to say goodbye in Weymouth where Nick had latterly lived. He was a fine man with a wonderful sense of humour, by turns cartoonish and childlike, then slyly insightful. He introduced me to the desultory wonders of speedway, and we spent many a happy night with Joe at Poole Pirates speedway track, turning to each other, hot dog in hand, saying 'cor, did you see that!', as we pulled lumps of the cinder track from our eyebrows, and the four bike riders raged away to the farthest corner of the circuit. Nick, you may like to know that as i write, Pirates beat Coventry to go top of the table.

Nick also used to come round to my flat in London in Doll days, specifically to tell me about his sexploits of the night before on the Notting Hill biker scene, Notting Hill being a rather more scary and robust kettle of leather-jacketed fish than it is these days. Men will talk to each other about sex and sex doings, but not as informally and at the drop-of-a-hat as women might think, so it was peculiar to be sitting, drinking whisky with Nick going - 'any way, then 'er sister comes round with even MORE speed while i'm still licking yoghurt out of 'er arse'...etc (if you would like a copy of this story in full, send £20 to Paul at the website).

I remember once he was excited because he had joined a band that had decided to call itself 'Trouble', a name that Nick thought was really brilliant. Punk was just happening, and i felt the name was a little static, the dull end of provocative - like getting pushed about in a bus shelter in Reading - disturbing but not glamourous. He asked me for my honest opinion on the name, as he was really committed to the project. I said - 'hmmm, would 'Fierce' be better?

I could see this really struck an immediate chord with Nick - he just looked at me, looked at his small can of Whitbread Pale Ale, threw it into the log fire i had battering away, and shouted 'fuckin' HELL - we haven't even rehearsed and there's gonna be a big argument about the fuckin' NAME!'

I said i was sorry to cause, er, trouble - he said 'no no no, you're just bloody right, as usual - i shouldn't 'ave come round 'ere, but i suppose we would just have worked out the name was wrong much later - too much later - FUCK!'

So we took some mandrax and went to a pub called (by us - named by Joe) The Happy Mutant - so called because there was a Dorset bloke who drank in there, who'd been in the navy and reckoned he'd seen 'mutants' somewhere in the world - 'MUTANTS!' he'd shout as the evening wore on...

Once we were touring in Austria, and the woman promoter had decided to travel with us from Vienna to Innsbruck. She was going to travel in the front with me, and at the time we were impressed by the supposed music biz power of this person in that part of the world. At this time Doll By Doll has a reliable genius for seriously pissing off all the wrong people that we encountered - if they were any use to us in our career, we'd leave them shaking their head in disbelief and disgust in no time at all - not everyone can do this.

I was concerned about this factor on the trip, so at the hotel in the morning over breakfast i said something like - now listen lads, it's really important that we are not rude to this person, or pull any stupid stunts that mean we can't play Austria ever again, or until she dies - do you know what i'm saying? There was not a glimmer of hurt protest - what i was saying was so well documented that it was pointless to demur. Silent nodding heads.

After an hour and a half of driving peacably towards Innsbruck, there was a sound of sniggering and stifled laughter from the back seats where the rest of the band were sitting. I turned to see what it was all about, as did the woman promoter. Nick had opened her overnight bag, pulled her knickers out, then rolled up a poster, stuck one end in his nose, the other end into the knickers and was simulating sniffing cocaine from the underwear. We never played Austria again. I couldn't even be bothered to remonstrate with Nick when we got to next hotel - he just said 'sorry about that - i don't know what came over me - do you think she'll be all right about it?' Next day, the heating broke down in the tourbus and we had a 1000 mile drive back to London in a snowstorm to find out our record company had dumped us. Those were the days....god bless you Nick.

I went through a raging surge of writing in Paxos - the first week we were in a villa high in the olive groves (olive forest really) with a view over the Ionian Sea - on a clear day you could see the mainland, Corfu, and Albania. I would rise early each morning, as the cicadas began their whirring, have a small cup of sage tea, then fall into the swimming pool and dream around watching butterflies and dark blue bees the size of small hamsters. I also saw a five-foot grey-brown snake swishing along in front me one morning - it felt like a blessing...

I'm finishing songs for my double album with Ian Rankin which comes out in late January - songs about the lives and childhoods of me, Ian and John Rebus, who is also from Fife. They're very good songs, and i'm writing in a way that is quite different - the persona has changed - it's liberating.

At one point i stared at the same piece of paper for 2 days by the sea. There was half an image on the page, and i couldn't see the other half - i realised i was trying to force it through by being Mr Jackie Leven - image-smith to the cognoscenti, the wrong person for the job.

The next night i was playing outside with magnificent Greek musicians at Taxidi bar - there was a lightning storm at the same time, and earlier that evening i had fallen into an anger of near-evil proportions that had upset a lot people (including myself, for being so unhinged). The music drove on - there is a snake that can rise from the base of the spine through chakras which are opened in a too-quick succession - a snake to be feared by mere mortals, and i could feel something of similar reptilian purpose slithering through the chords and salt intensities of violin, bouzouki, guitars and voice - but my musician comrades were strong, and as minor key passages of wine dark lava finally hissed into the surrounding sea, and people applauded, i felt something had changed, perhaps forever, somewhere inside of me. Then Princess Caroline of Monaco came over and thanked me for the music before returning to her mysterious ship in the black bay.

The next day, instead of finishing the image i abandoned it, and just closed the song around the space where it had been.

jl