THE DEEP POOL - JULY 2004

At Jockstock, on my brithday, 18th June, a man gave me a Minoan Male Fertility Double-bladed Brass Axe that his friend, one James Bond had made for me, having met met me briefly before a show i'd done the month before in Bristol, with Willard Grant Conspiracy. The axe was in a jute sack, a smell which took me back to childhood days in Dundee, the British capital of 'genuine jute'. 'Genuine jute' we used to say, meaning 'the real thing'. The axe was extremely heavy, and after my performance at Jockstock with Andy White and Michael Weston King, i removed it from its jute sack as a group of friends sat round the dining room table, and placed it carefully on the table. There was a silence as everyone tried to make sense of this unbelievable object - its very strangeness and severe presence curled through peoples' imaginations, recalibrating the cadences of speech and candlelight into a low and superstitious murmer.

A very old friend, Peter Forster Marr, with whom i shared an overcrowded flat in Carlisle in the late 60's had sent me a fig tree in the post. Peter's line drawing of a group of working class Tynesider men saluting a dead crow in the street, and a painting of a woman covering her ears as she passed 2 dogs fighting in the street have been enduring images for me through the long intervening decades, and his getting back in touch with me has really helped me to cheer the fuck up a lot.

I planted the fig tree by a south facing wall in my garden, where in early Summer it will be joined by wisteria, honeysuckle and jasmine, then placed the axe at its foot in the ground. It's a shrine to my father, and having a formal place of worship should help me in my desperate looking around in bars to see if he's returning from the toilet or talking to a strange old cove further up the room. I used to do this before he died, but then it became chronic, bringing to mind the two volumes of autobiography by Nahdezda Mandelstam, widow of Osip mandelstam - Hope Against Hope, and Hope Abandoned...

I played a festival in Swaledale, Yorkshire last month, in the hamlet of Hardraw, in a pub called the Green Dragon Inn. A man called Phillip had heard me on the radio in Sydney, Australia, and had decided to sponsor me to play at the festival - it was a great evening, and i fell completely in love with Swaledale, sitting by the river on Sunday morning, writing the occasional line of song while a black lamb jumped around like a demented rocking horse on the other bank. In the grounds of the pub is Britain's largest continuous waterfall, Hardraw Scar. I walked up in morning sunlight and stood watching the ancient motion before being taken to Garsdale station on the Settle/Carlisle railway line - the most desolate station i have seen since Honey Plateau station in New Zealand.

20th June, and Ian Rankin, Michael Cosgrave and myself gave a performance of Ian's story JACKIE LEVEN SAID at the Beverley Festival, also in Yorkshire. We were worried that the Yorkshire folk would not reallly 'get' some of the Scottishness of the story, but they had no trouble at all, laughing like drains at all the right points as Ian gave forth, on magisterial form. I had the beginnings of a ferocious virus, the first symptoms of which are an increasing inability to judge distances properly. This came to light in a fish and chip afterwards, when i tried to take my fish and chips from the lady in the shop and threw them all over the floor - 'sorry, i don't know what happened there', i said lamely, as the confused woman got down on her knees to pick up the spilled comestibles (is that a correct use of 'comestibles'?).

26th June - at Glastonbury Festival with Michael Weston King and The Decent Men, gave me the chance to play some crunchy Fender Stratocaster guitar as Michael plainted from his elegaic songbook.

I stood in a queue for expresso, and a young man made a silent cheap bacon protest, walking up and down the queue with a piece of fried bacon in each hand which he had just removed from a bacon roll bought at the same stall. He had a look on his face that seemed to say 'look what we've done to the world - terrified pigs have died in hideous circumstances after a short and brutal life of misery and fear, just so we can eat a shitty cheap bacon buttie'. A Scouser bloke appeared by his side with another bacon buttie and said 'if yer finished wi' dat bacon mate, i can put it in this butty here like'. Appalled by this suggestion the bacon protestor threw his bacon at our feet and stormed off silently. The queue breathed a sigh of relief, and the Scouser had a long look at the bacon, considering whether to pick it up and stick it in his buttie. We all looked at the glistening pig slices, lying in the mud and drizzle, then looked at the Scouser, intrigued as to what his decision would be.

'I'll just get grit in me teeth', he said to us, turning away folornly from the bacon. It was a great festival moment which made me glad i wasn't seventeen and out of my head on speedy acid.

On June 30th I flew from Southampton to Edinburgh to join my record company boss Martin Goldschmidt of Cooking Vinyl, and Ian Rankin at Ian's house to talk about our forthcoming double album - set for release in January. Ian offered us some strong Australian chardonnay which i accepted and Martin declined. Martin then changed his mind and we were all drinking chardonnay. As it was finishing i managed to remember that i'd brought Ian a bottle of new wave chianti, as recommended by Pete of 'Bottles of Botley' off licence in my village. Pete is a fan of Italian reds, and if he says you'll like it, you will. Ian felt it would be a good idea if we opened this as well - i didn't have the power of personality at that moment in time to disagree, and so the chianti joined us.
Not long after this i noticed that we had agreed to do three shows in Vladivostok, and how about a small lapel badge, like ones from the punk era for release only in South Africa? The meeting had obviously gone better than expected, and back at Edinburgh Airport Food Court, Martin decided to celebrate by ordering the 'vegetarian all-day Scottish breakfast'. However, halfway through the compiling of this meal by a hostile though polite young man, Martin decided to augment the meal with some non-vegetarian options, like for instance pork sausages (at this moment a silent cheap bacon protestor appeared - only kidding). In no time at all Martin had created an unlikely and formidable 'combo' of all-day breakfast delights, including potato scone. As the kid fretted as to what to charge for it, Martin took the opportunity to knock over a huge perspex bucket full of sachets of tartare sauce. This was a spectacular moment, with sachets pinging across the dining room,and showering round the feet of other folk in the queue. As we all scambled to pick up the sachets, some kids further back in the queue clearly thought it was a deliberate moment of cabaret provided by the management and starting laughing with gusto and applauding. Their more savvy parents recognised it as an instance of Sozzled Southerner Syndrome, and shrank back behind the tureen of 'all-day Summer Stovies (no gristle)'.

There was a mistake on the latest Haunted Valley CD so we had to send it back, but it arrived a minute ago by special delivery - a handsome album of a doll by doll performance at Sheffield Limit Club in 1980, in which we play the whole of the album 'Remember'. I put it on in the kitchen and dived around playing air guitar,while the three guinea fowls that have come to live with us from god knows where, sat on the lawn, their heads bobbing around as if to say 'fuck man, listen to that - they could really play -- did you hear that bassline?'

What am i listening to? Duncan, the soundman at the New Roscoe in Leeds which i played recently, was playing an album that i think is the best thing i've heard for a long time. It's by a band called The Bad Plus,and the record is called 'These Are The Vistas'. Piano, bass and drums, it's jazz i suppose, but you won't worry about categories when you hear what they do to 'Heart Of Glass' - a stunning record that makes the rest of us look like the pretentious sentimentalist buffoons we wish we weren't.

I really must clean up my language, speaking of pretentious buffoonery. The other day i was talking to a woman called Deborah who works with the Netherlands film company who are making my forthcoming DVD 'The Meeting Of Remarkable Men', which is me with Ian Rankin, David Thomas, and Ciaran Carson at Crossing Border Festival in The Hague last November. I couldn't quite catch what Deborah was talking about at one point in the conversation, and later i was discussing this moment of confusion with Rob Collins, who works at Cooking Vinyl.

I said to Rob - 'yes, i couldn't quite get to the centrality of what was exercising her'. Rob said 'eh?' I said that what i meant was i didn't know what she was on about. I could feel Rob thinking, well why didn't you say that? I just don't know what comes over me when i use this convoluted wordage - thank god it doesn't infect my songs...
Other aspects of my language are going very well - the swearing is in good form, and my scatological references are beyond reproach - why, only the other night on stage i came out with a brilliant passage in which i was explaining that a turd i had done in Hamburg earlier in the year reminded me of a silver buckle, as in 'Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea, silver buckles on his knee, when he comes back he'll marry me, bonnie Bobby Shaftoe - but you had to be there for this to have true narrative resonance.
I'm going to leave you with some lines just written for a new song called Moscow Train:

'and in a grand show of power
the rockets roll by
and the marching soldiers
catch your eye
with their bayonets fixed
and a tight chinstrap
sychronized feet
and all that crap
and a yellow newspaper sailing in the sky
like an ancient sail in a fisherman's eye
and a lingering hand on the salted wood
carved in grace on the little fish boat
that waits alone in the starlit mud
varnished black by the saviour's blood'...

jl