THE DEEP POOL

   A Saturday morning of blinding cold blue beauty as I returned from the fields with the terriers – I looked into the small bar of the Brewery Bar. It was full of butchers drinking coffee and talking about the goose shortage this Christmas, now that goose has, apparently, become more fashionable as the festive bird of choice. Nick the butcher pulled my leg that he had given my goose to another customer. I quickly pointed out for the benefit of other butchers in attendance who did not know me that I always have goose, and that I'm not just another fashion victim of celebrity-food-porn-sexpot-television-cook-who's-having-goose-this Christmas Nigella Lawson. For non UK readers, this is an amply proportioned ‘domestic goddess' who is always putting her finger into creamy sauces, then looking into the camera, slurping and saying ‘mmmm – just right…'

   The other butchers, drinking pints of strong ale mixed with bottles of light ale eyed me carefully whilst munching free Saturday morning dry roasted peanuts until such time as they were satisfied that Nick reckoned I was ‘all right' and was not just a customer with whom Nick felt obliged to banter.

   I played my last show of the year at the Half Moon in Putney, south west London the other night, with bassist Kevin Foster and singer Deborah Greenwood also on stage. Doon, the veteran Scottish soundman at this venue seemed to decide halfway through the soundcheck that what was needed was the kind of size of sound of which Led Zeppelin would have approved. I was happy about this – it means that tiny guitar detailing really comes to life, and that fiercely struck chords have a mashing concussive power – just what you want for a song like Museum Of Childhood with its centrepiece story about two boxers, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran and the universal yearning need to go home – sooner or later.

   My good pal Phil Oates gave us a lift home to south Hampshire after the show. We took the back road from Winchester to Twyford where something bordering on the macabre took place. As we came round a long slow bend on this starless night, another car driver in his car on our side of the road beckoned to us to slow down and stop. We slowed to a halt and wound down the window – the other male driver was still in his car. He pointed out another car which was on the other side of a mature row of hawthorn hedge, tangled in branches, deserted, but with its lights still on. This car was white, and although it did not appear damaged, or to have crashed or stopped at speed, it was hard to understand how it had come to be in this entangled state. Phil pulled over in front of the other driver, and we all got out and warily walked over to look at the abandoned car. Phil got into a bit of conversation with the other guy as to what it was all about, but I couldn't really hear what was being said. I walked further down the dark country pavement to where there was a space at the end of the field behind where you could have driven into the field from the road. On the road there were tyre marks of the kind you make when you screech to a halt, and these indicated that the car had most likely entered the field from here, but from the other side of the road. The only problem with this was that the car would then have to have driven in quite a wide circle to get round so it was facing the same way as us, then presumably it would have been steered at relatively low speed into its current entangled position. It didn't make sense…

   The guy asked if he could borrow a mobile phone so he could report this event, so Deborah handed over hers and the guy made the call. It became clear from what he was saying that he had not just called 999 to report this, but was already in possession of a more specialised number, and then we could hear him saying that he was a policeman of some sort, or that he worked with the police. He gave us back the phone and said he would stay at the incident until the police arrived. We all sort of said okay and got back in our car and drove off. There was something all wrong about it, but, in conversation, although we agreed on this, we couldn't say what it was, and we were tired by now and nearly home.

   Also at the Half Moon show was an old friend of mine, the writer Paul Du Noyer, who is going to write the sleevenotes for three of the four Doll By Doll albums scheduled for their first ever CD release on Warners next Spring. I was overseeing the mastering of these albums at a London studio called Metropolis the next day, then, over lunch, having a further meeting with Warners about booklet content for all the records, and then Paul was going to interview me for as long as it took about the whole Doll By Doll experience. Neither of us could think of another entire oeuvre of such significance that had never been released in CD form, and we noted with some astonishment that it was quarter of a century since these records had been released on vinyl.

I recalled how once we played the Reading Festival at the height of our notoriety and had decided to take some super-strong LSD just to make the day more interesting. We were out of our heads by the time we got on stage. DJ John Peel, who hated our music, stood side stage with Lemmy from Motorhead, both of them watching our set with expressions of transcendental disapproval. It was a cold shit rainy day in August, but the sun came out when we played, I reminded Paul that he had written of this for NME – ‘perversely, when Doll By Doll took the stage the sun decided to shine'. Paul once travelled with us on tour when the Dolls were supporting Hawkwind, just after we had been thrown off a tour with Devo after only three days. Hawkwind hated us as well, perhaps only because that's all their ‘leader' Dave Brock is good at. Hawkwind – what kind of name is that for a band anyway? Chickenfart would be more apt. Recalling some real good laughs on that tour, Paul also reminded me of the deep gloom on the tour bus as we drove from the north to play Hammersmith Odeon with these utter bastards, after which we got thrown of that tour as well, and lost our record deal the week after. Ah yes, the good old days.

   At one point as we talked about all this and more in the restaurant in Chiswick High Road, a damaged youngish woman with a nose picking screaming girl toddler decided to join us for a talk. She went into a long convoluted story about how she was having an affair with a married man, but now it was over and she'd told him to fuck off. We listened politely, nodding at what seemed to be appropriate points in this tale of woe. After about half an hour she suddenly seemed to run out of steam, so she took the grumpy toddler to another part of the restaurant where she simulated beating the living crap out of the kid to show the kid what it would be like if she beat the living crap out of it.

   Me and Paul were also remembering how Doll By Doll acquired a reputation as ‘art terrorists' back in the band's beginnings: one year we assembled a hideous calendar full of images depicting poverty war and cruelty. We then hand-delivered it to the entire London music business. Well, not so much delivered as – we got Colin, a scary road manager of ours who, if you didn't know him you may have considered to be a hitman for a Columbian drugs operation, to enter the appropriate buildings and throw down the calendar with deep savagery. Why we thought this was a good idea I now can't remember, but at the time it gave us a huge satisfaction and we spent long hours in the pub making Colin recount the most extreme reactions to his calendar-hurling exploits – tearful receptionists and trembling outraged executives. We also printed disturbing postcards to send to people – ‘Doll By Doll Request', ‘Regret', Have Moved' etc employing fearsome images – a Japanese girl being hit by a car, a fox with his leg snared, a menacing gypsy tinsmith with a hammer. In another time, this kind of activity might have been viewed as worthy of wi n ning the Turner Prize, but back in those days of punk and political mayhem, it made the band appear to be issuing forth from a place of special and uncompromising malevolence – lovely.

   Then there were the ideas that the record company couldn't handle and would not agree to – like calling our first album ‘Burnt Kiddies' – we called it ‘Remember' instead. Shame.

    It's nearly the darkest day of the year and I'm looking through old notebooks from the last two years. They contain lines that have yet to make it into songs, if they ever will. Sometimes you write stuff to get to where you're going next – it's not that it's no good, nor even that it's not good enough – it's just not joining the internal or worldly cadences that become songs, and this is probably a good thing – a writer needs cold places to which to return alone. Here's a bit from one notebook:

Salt water on your lips

That old familiar taste

Memories leaving the body

Echoes take their place

All the love in the world

Pouring down drains

Into the earth

Like cold Sunday rain

-and here's one I appear to have written to myself:

All the hopes I had for you

Ended up as pay per view

Laughing you in late night bars

Echoes down the wee small hours

 -this is a line or two about the River Ogwen which I cross by way of a scary footbridge on the way to the town of Bethesda every morning when I'm recording in Wales:

Black Ogwen

Tumble down stones

From the snowy heights

To the Menai Straits

In every fevered bone

Deep dark roar

Of a river in spate

Or:

I'm as cold as a fish tank

That's been left unplugged

Now fins ain't what they used to be

Or:

In the early sounds of broken-ness

A dead sparrow in a Birmingham street

Nearby in the market

A Negro woman buys

Fourteen salmon fish heads

- and lastly for this splendid year, I see I have written a quote in one of these notebooks. The quote is from an ancient man in America who finally retired in Summer after something like 72 years of employment during which he only took one day off work, and that was for the funeral of his wife. Bill Clinton called him ‘employee of the century' – I may have mentioned this before.

- Asked what he thought about the changes he had witnessed in his long working life he said: ‘We've moved away from the horse and buggy days to the new improvements.

jl