AUGUST 2007

THE DEEP POOL    A beautiful evening at DOWN ON THE FARM festival on the Norwegian/Swedish border, but in Norway, near the peaceful town of Halden. Tourquoise skies flairing over the tented backstage village of dressing rooms and canteens. Sitting after dinner with Gillian Welch, David Rawling, Robyn Hitchcock and John Paul Jones, talking about the mysterious nature of songwriting. I suddenly hear myself talking about how, for me, songs tend to form families although i don't really know what makes any group of songs familial. How, because i think in terms of recording songs for albums, i bring together a bunch of likely songs, always too many for the project: this means that some of them won't make it. Some of them continue not to make it album after album - it's sad but what can i do? I only work here (journalists hate it when you say that - they need you to be master of your very own stupid universe). There's interest at the table when i say that sometimes a lesser song makes it onto a record and a better song doesn't, because there is still something 'wrong' with the better song. Earlier that afternoon Gillian and David had stolen the heart of the festival with their performance - even a brutal-but-fair operator like Espen, my record company boss in Norway, in describing their performance, simply put his hand on his heart, bowed his head slightly and became misty-eyed.

from left to right - John Paul Jones, Jackie Leven, Robyn Hitchcock
on the Campfire Stage, Down On The Farm Festival, Norway 2007.

Robyn decides that he's had enough of looking at the paper dinner plates that contain gnawed corn-on-the-cob husks, now looking grey and alien in the otherwise romantically low safari-style lighting, and gathers them up to take then to the canteen collection point. I offer to do this for him as he's in the epicentre of a conversation with one of the guys from Flaming Lips. He's surprised but says thank you and off i go with the plates. There's two ways things go at festivals backstage: nobody speaks to each other and you endure your time there in a dismal ghetto of paranoid self-interest, or, the organisers have conciously decided that this will not be part of the governing ethos and somehow make the event a sudden, cheerful and properly socialised community. The Down On The Farm people are having none of the former shit and there is good feeling all round, just as it should be, with nobody moaning about the quality of the red wine or how far away the toilets are.   

On my way back from the corn removal i meet Dale Reno from Hayseed Dixie. He'd made me laugh in the bus taking us from our hotel to the festival site. Winding along two lane roads by ripe cornfields hugging the side of the fjord, our driver pointed out that on the other side of the fjord was Sweden - an identical landscape to the one through which we were travelling. 'It looks so different'. i said.

Prettier' averred Dale. (perhaps, like so many things on tour, you had to be there).

Dale came up to me and said he'd like to meet John Paul Jones. Me, John and Robyn were there to run a stage called The Campfire Stage for two nights and were therefore sharing a dressing-room-tent. I took Dale in and introduced the two men. For a King Of Infinite Space, John is one of the most real, humble and straightforward people you could meet. I endeavour at all times to listen to cadence, not words, and i'd moved away from the two of them as their conversation was none of my business. A jagged purity of cadence cascaded from their shared words as Danny and Dusty howled a measured lament on the mainstage, and in the backstage tent next door i could hear William Hut bawling a drunken version of Working Class Hero. I suddenly felt at peace with the world - it was going to be a long evening and morning - our stage didn't even start until the main one stopped, and you need to get your warrior going to make this kind of stuff work, but i was having a small unexpected holiday from my control tower, so i went for a series of short happy blethers with my old pal Tom Skjeklesaether who i've know since he put Doll By Doll on in Oslo last century, and Kai Jarre, a rugged heartwarming bastard and the main organiser of the festival.   

The night before at the festival i'd been standing around in my tent, minding my own business after a languid meeting with Robyn as to how we would run the stage - the idea was that we did our own sets and then were joined by anyone else who wanted to play - on their own and/or with us - Chip Taylor proved to be the star as the last man on, taking us through a psychedelic ranting version of his very own 'Wild Thing'.(Talking about this moment back in the UK someone said to me 'oh, you played with the singer fom The Troggs!'). Our tent flap flapped and one of the delightful festival crew girls entered and asked nervously if we could give up our tent heater so she could give it to Bryan Ferry and his ten-piece band who were apparently feeling the cold. It was a slightly cool evening admittedly but we were going to be there for another six hours in a falling temperature whilst Bryan would be warbling some Dylan songs from his new album and bogging off back to the hotel.

'You can tell Bryan that if he wants my heater he can come and ask for it himself'.

This seemed initially to interpret for her as 'I will kill the very next Geordie bastard in a dinner jacket who complains about dying of hypothermia' and the lass retreated slowly backwards whilst finessing her report to Bryan - 'I will tell him come see you'....

I could hear consternation over the tented way as the Ferry camp struggled to deal with this message. Their tour manager, a manic Cockney music biz veteran called Eddie Gizzard was saying 'Facking hell! - just ar luck - facking Jackie Leven's got de heatah - last time i sor him e' woz backstage at Pink Pop Festival in Rotterdam filling Billy Idol's stage shoes wiv Bacardi-soaked cheese samwiches - orlright i'll go an' 'ave a wurd'.    

Then Bryan's voice - 'Noah noah - if tha blerk wants me ta speek tae 'im porsonal like, ah'll gan oavah an' sowat it oot'. My mum was a Geordie (person from English city of Newcastle) so i understood what he was saying here - translation - 'i'll deal with this as requested'.

My tent flap flapped again and Bryan entered with what he hoped was a crinkly engaging smile - all i could think of at this point was how Mick Jagger had said of stealing Jerry Hall from him - 'I couldn't let her go through life with a name like Jerry Ferry'.

Bryan nodded to me - 'Wy aye man' he said (hello).

'It's a' reet man - ahm a half Geordie masel',  soa ah ken whit ya sayin like' i replied. 'Woah, that's grand man - well, ya see, a've got a cuppla blackboards oavah the weay and theh's reahlly feelin' the cald what wi' beein' fae sunniah climes, sooaah is tha' ony chance a' all a borrowin' yah heatah, you being' a reet tough erld Geordie blerk like who oanly needs a T -short even when it's snowin' like?'

'Blackboards?' i queried.

'Aye, Blackboards - singahs like'.

Suddenly i understood - Bryan didn't mean blackboards that you write on with chalk - i had had this mad vision of him illustrating Gates Of Eden onstage with chalk diagrams, but he was saying 'black bords', like black birds as in women of colour, who were his backing singers - it's all black and white in Newcatle i hasten to explain - even the football strip of the football team, Newcastle United, is black and white. On tour in Germany when the Indonesian tsunami had hit, i thought the German TV newsreader was saying that the destruction had been caused by the 'Toon Army' - the name for the most rabid of the Newcastle fooball supporters. 

'What the fuck were they doing in Indonesia? And how could even they have made that amount of mess? Looks liked they pissed everywhere for a start. Must have been there for the little known Indo-Geordie Cup' i had thought to myself, lying in bed with a well-thumbed copy of the Spectator. We all have our moments.

I eyed the Ferryman. 'Bryan man, ya can have tha heatah as long as ya agree ta come and do a cuppla songs on the Campfire Stage later on - ah suggest 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall' and 'Smerk gets in Ya Eyes'.

Bryan - 'Well man, ah wuz lookin forward to gettin' tae ma bed like, but ahll reet - wull do it your way - canna tak tha heatah noo?'

I unplugged the heater and gave it to him - he gave a wry grateful smile and disappeared into the Northern Lights. Bryan was true to his word and did come down to the Campfire Stage, but unfortunately he fell headfirst into a serious Norwegian puddle, came up for gasping for air, and disappeared back into the night with Eddie Gizzard saying 'Facking Leven, every facking time - 'e probably put that puddle there 'imself - i remember once when i was washing Mariah Carey's knickers in a basin at Wembley Arena, 'e comes in like an' sez' - his voice trailed off as he guided the Ferryman to his coach, Bryan by now no more than a sodden lichen-covered tuxedo mess of little-known ancient Northumbrian profanities.   

Robyn Hitchcock and me have been aquainted for a long time, since our early bands did shows together in London - The Soft Boys and Doll By Doll. Later, Robyn came and played for nothing during a week of benefit shows for my charity The CORE Trust - a week which included contributions from Townes Van Zandt, The Pretty Things and Ian MacNabb. But now we had to get to know each other properly to make our Campfire Stage run well and be - organic.On the way from Oslo airport in the bus with John Paul Jones, Robyn and their wives. Robyn and his wife Michele had been talking about someone i didn't know.

'Where's he from?' Michele had asked.

'He's from the Sixties' Robyn had replied. The start of a few days of easy laughter and rolling good humour. Our stages were a riot of great playing, intensity and superb banter with a very relaxed audience from all over the known world. Robyn and John Paul Jones joined me onstage for a renditon of Van Morrison's 'Madame George' and my song 'The Garden', John playing exquisite mandolin, Robyn playing Archetypal English Jangle Accoustic Guitar, as Seasick Steve might have called it in another existence. On both nights, apart from his own songs, Robyn gave Beatles songs, from 'Dear Prudence' to 'Tomorrow Never Knows' the sort of full welly that totally refreshed your respect for English pop at its most driving - great gaps appeared in the collective psyche of an audience who probably felt they had been innoculated against the shiversome sly ferocity of such songs - we all got caught up in it, but eventually we tried to play 'The Weight' and it turned out we didn't know the vocal stagger of the chorus - 'Aaaaaand, he put the weight' etc. After three attempts Robyn had had enough and said 'Ah to hell with it - here's Chip Taylor'. Chip had a blonde American singer/violinist with him whose name might have been - no, i don't know. She seemed to be fourteen years old and had a solemnity of delivery which was like a child refusing to testify against her parents in a Soviet court. I played next to her later on in the set when Chip had entered a form of transcendental rockitation, only occasionally returning to earth to signal earth-churning song changes to a band who oozed wisdom in nothing like the way that Israeli government spokespersons ooze lies about dead Palestinian children on churned beaches.   

The back of the Campfire stage was lit by orange lights trained onto an endless waving wheatfield. It was like a scene from Ray Bradbury's 'The October Country' - you wanted to wade into it and live there forever but somehow you knew that a mirroring horror would arise and kill your future lives, such as they may be.   

I caught the second last bus back to the hotel at maybe four in the morning. The young driver knew the road well and had been driving for a long long time that day. He drove with calm danger and we were too tired to find a way to say 'we're finding this a bit calmly dangerous'. You had to get used to it - quickly. He slackened his pace as we crossed the plain leading towards town. A mist crept though endarkened pine trees and skirted round blood-red wooden houses at the water's edge. We passed a house where, the evening before, i had seen an old farmer refusing to get into an old American car, despite being cajoled by two exasperated young guys in tight blue jeans and red bandanas.  We rode through these scenes fatigued to the bone, and everyone on the bus knew that we were experiencing a natural explanation of the true meaning of death.

jl