THE DEEP POOL - JUNE 2006

Here in the UK, from a wet and windy cold May, we have suddenly been convulsed into a dreamy warm Summer - it's as if Spring didn't really happen, or at least the imprint of this past Spring in memory has a haunted, faded quality. But there were some great warm days earlier in the year. On the morning of one of them i was sitting on my favourite broken stile (a kind of gate you walk over to get from one field to another) by the railway line with the two white dogs, Basil and Harry, when a group of six ramblers (decent old people who wander around the countryside in search of the lost perfect pub of Avalon) came along. I had to get off the stile so that they could pass, and we all said hello and had a smile while they patted the dogs and tried to work me out.

'It's an unusual, simple sort of stile, is it not?' one of the rambling elderly chaps said to me lightheartedly. The broken part of the stile had been removed by the farmer, and what was left amounted to little more than a long bench.

'Yes, it's a bit Le Corbusier, although i don't think it's an original'. i replied.

This delighted everyone - a burly Scottish geezer with long hair and two funny white dogs in a field making reference to the ghastly French architect who found happiness in ruining people's lives by building awful 'modern' homes into which you could not fit a piano, which Le Corbusier said did not matter as the poor wouldn't be playing pianos.
'Ah yes - less is more!' said one of the womenfolk looking at the stile. 'Less is more' is an expression which is often wrongly attributed to the Corb.

'Actually, it was the architect Mies Van Der Roe who coined that phrase' i said, then moved on to tell them how in the recording studio environment, producers often said 'less is more' to young bands in an effort to make them stop putting too much musical information into every album track. I remember a young drummer, an intelligent lad but not fleet-of-mind being told this by the legendary producer John Sinclair (Gypsy Blood/Doll By Doll) and, later in the pub in Whitechapel, London, doubting that John had got this right - 'surely he meant MORE is more?'.

One of the lasses, a handsome pensioner with a head like an amused white crow was now giving me a very keen look - 'don't i KNOW you from somewhere?' For some reason i have a permanent kentucky-fried-headless-chicken-style dread of this question - probably because i fear the follow-up line will be something like - 'i've got it! - you're the bastard who put mustard up my dog's arse in the Warwick Castle pub in Little Venice twenty years ago, causing it to run out of the pub screeching, never to be seen again' - or something along those lines...

'Err - don't know' i countered, the slow beginnings of a major flinch forming in my heart.

'The Ladbroke Arms! - opposite the police station in Notting Hill! - yes, that's right, you used to drink with old Ben, god rest his soul - the last time i saw you, we were having a drink with Ben, and it was the day that that young drunk policeman was rude to John Birt'. (awful man, used to be Director General of the BBC, went on to achieve nothing as a 'blue skies thinker' for Tony Blair, the Christian mentally ill leader of UK PLC.) .

'Ah, yes, it's coming back to me slowly' i said - 'my name's Jackie'.

'Yes, that's right - i'm Christine - Tony, this is Jackie - he used to drink red wine with Ben in the Ladbroke'...Christine's hubby Tony shook hands with me doubtfully but with a weary smile of acceptance.

'Tony doesn't drink, that's why you don't know him' - Christine offered by way of explanation.

After this we talked of Notting Hill (London) matters to warm down - 'wasn't Trellick Tower (hideous high-rise block in Notting Hill) designed by Van Der Roe?' Tony asked, getting the conversation back on track.

'No, it was designed by Erno Goldfinger, the third in this trio of absolute bastards of Goldfinger, Corbusier and Van Der Roe, so beloved of young Londoners who wear black'.

If i may say so, this was a clever sentence of mine - it confirmed that we all hated the young for their mindless reverence of modernity, but 'bastards' just isn't a rambler's word, so they all started to shuffle, indicating they were moving off. I gave them the perfect opportunity to depart by quickly describing the various pubs in the village and their strengths and weakness as places to consider having lunch.

'And will we be seeing you in the Ladbroke again at any stage?' asked Christine.

'On no, London's a foreign city to me now - when i go there i'm like a tourist - i eat in Garfunkels and go to the Planetarium'.
Silver tinkling laughter and blokey guffaws and they were on their way, tramping in line with walking sticks and coats tied round their middle.

It's actually HOT here today. I've been down at the fruit garden where i'm about to tape Tif my big realistic plastic owl (as featured in many publicity shots, usually with an old east European motor bike as well) to the cherry tree so that the real birds don't eat all the cherries like they did last year. There was only one left - i gave it to James (14) to eat. He ate it and then said - 'i don't really like cherries'. I THINK Tif will scare them - if he doesn't,then i've got an old recording Sony Walkman which plays incessantly if you set it to do so, so i'm going to tape a 120 minute tape of me going 'fuck AFF ye bastards - go on - git tae fuck' and then tape this to Tif. A big sweary Scottish owl should do the trick.

I've just had a charming few days recording for my next studio album up at Bryn Derwen studio in Snowdonia, Wales. The weather was outstanding, there was still my favourite smell, mayflower, in the lanes of slate walls and silver birch as i walked into the town of Bethesda in the mornings. There was even a new cafe next to the Spar supermarket which sells decent coffee, so every morning i had a capuccino on my own, read the Independent and watched everybody going to work with the mountains of Snowdonia to the east of the town as a purple backdrop.

From the front of the mansion at Bryn Derwen, overlooked by the same mountains, the scenery has the same drama as the north of Italy round Lake Como - i kid you not. There is a little bench in the gardens where i sit when i need a break from being a genius. I take round a cup of peppermint tea and sit quietly with Tess the black labradour, thinking about my next move... 'like a spider on acid when he's weaving his webor the words of the priest when you're dying in bed'. This is the sort of charming couplet that enters my head when sitting on the bench - i always have a few spaces in lyrics not yet filled by the time i'm recording - i like it that way - it makes you really tense, especially as the clock runs down, but i've never yet written something substandard simply because i had to go and sing the bastard - unlike some artists i could mention.

But i also love how things change about the way you perceive your songs, sometimes almost immediately, in the studio. I have a long bloodcurdling medium-paced bluesy number for the next album, and i've been hearing the basic drum pattern for it as being very stark, almost non-existent although dramatic nonetheless. I left the studio to check that my sweet potato which i was baking for lunch had not turned into cinder and when i returned, David Wrench, my engineer and co-producer had created a complex Malian syncopation of percussion under the guitar i'd just recorded.

He turned to me wordlessly to see what i thought - i gave him a 'that's not really what i had in mind' look, but, always in the studio, think before you speak. After listening a while longer it sounded just great, but changed everything else that i had planned for the track - or did it?

'Probably just do everything as you were going to' opined David, 'otherwise you won't get the benefit of the unexpected change, plus it'll sound like an incompetent African blues instead of your own sound'. This is what you're paying for by golly.

It's a privilege to spend time with Laurie and Gabrielle Gane, owners of Bryn Derwen, their two sons Francis and Nick, and Tess the dog, not to mention David.These people 'know stuff' as they say in California. A dinner of tagine and home-made garlic bread in their baronial-but-beatnick kitchen after a day's recording, a glass of fine Lebanese red wine in hand and the sun setting handsomely over the Menai Strait to the west, talk of obscure Bob Dylan songs and the meaning of a repeated pattern of tapping by a branch on a window one Winter's night in the last century - you can't always live in or for the moment, nor would you want to in truth, but it can be lovely to suddenly NOTICE yourself in the moment when your soul has been ranging far and wide in time and space. I used to have a magical primary school teacher way back in 1957 in Scotland who would let us, as a class, veer off into the wildest conversations, then eventually say 'how did we get onto this subject - can anyone remember?' - then we'd spend the rest of the time plotting backwards to see how we'd got there, with Mrs Proctor emphasising the value and import of every twist and turn on the long magical moonlit road, with blood and honey running into ditches where our true love did lie.

Which reminds me - i must book a taxi to take me to the airport next Monday on my way to Kiel and elsewhere in Germany - see you out there, or in Leicester on Saturday June 17 for The Big Session. It's my birthday on the 18th, also the day my father was buried, also Father's day. I will have to get my feet in the sea or die myself.