THE DEEP POOL - May 2005

i' THE DEEP POOL Great sadness here - Deborah's fabulous horse Rupert died. He was a great character, a true comedian, and had a heart the size of Liverpool. When the end came, Gunner, the stable cat wouldn't leave his side, and thirty two years of loyalty, courage and the most wise of eyes came to a final calm green sleepy peace, with bluebells beginning to wave in the dark beloved forest nearby in the west.   

I of course was away from home, working in Norway, working with good people, and working hard to leave something small but worthwhile in this godallmighty world - or so i like to think...Oh, and i apologise for the lateness of the POOL, but before i left was too early, and now it's better late than never.   

In Norway i first played in the city of Drammen, to the south west of Oslo - this was at a festival called Working Class Hero, and i was honoured on Mayday to be invited for lunch in the company of a fiery red-headed woman national trade union leader who gave a great speech to a crowd outside in a square on the north bank of the Drammen river. Her words had a steely understated bite to them - i can't speak Norwegian, but listening to her made me feel more sure than ever that words themselves rarely matter - it's the cadence and ebb and flow of pressure in speech that delivers the message, or rather, delivers the punch to the body and heart that leaves a good resonance to work away inside long after the moment of impact. This woman was opening chakras in a careful sequence, not too quickly and not too slowly - there is a snake who lives in the bottom chakra, and if the set is opened too quickly he will rise through them to the top and turn the human being he inhabits into a killer. Great speakers are intuitively aware of this true and deadly energetic principle and work a crowd according to their secret predeliction - the calm but fierce joy of seeing a bunch of folk twisting and seething by the weight of your wordage.   

But enough of that - 3 men in particular - Jon Gjerde, Johnny Andreasson and Frank Nes made my visit to Norway a beautiful visit - hard as hell as normal - these Norge bastards expect a lot from you - more than you expect from yourself (that's possibly not too difficult) and to make it work you have to sit on the end of your hotel bed with the TV sound turned down, early sunset glinting outside on cold water, and decide to be a real person for a few hours. This is made more difficult by the unexpected appearance(s) of young talented beautiful bastards when you least expect it. Like, for instance, i was minding my own business on stage in Drammen, playing a brand new song called ANOTHER MAN'S RAIN - (sample verse)

'every man has his flower
though he knows it or not
from the mighty old english rose
to the humble forget-me-not'

 - when suddenly a Norwegian kid called Ivan gets onstage and starts playing an array of hand percussion over this song and all the other songs for the rest of my set - not only that, he was brilliant, and i had to WORK HARD to do justice to his fabulous display. Well, the crowd loved it and so did i - some days later in Bergen, my spiritual home city, i did a show with David Thomas and Michael Cosgrave as UBUDOLL - David was being a riot onstage, the audience kept their nerve, and the next day my good friend Frank Nes described the show as 'very strong'.

I had an interesting experience in my favourite bar, The Bors Cafe in Bergen - this is a pub that opens at 8 in the morning and is full of old fishermen crackers and many other unlikely characters (like myself). An old drunk man and woman sitting at a table were pretending to be deaf and dumb, making horrible grunts and using disturbing fake hand sign language - a bit like watching Tony Blair describing a Spanish hard porn film in a charade fashion, with noises thrown in. One of the barmen came over to watch this for a while in a manner that clearly said 'if you keep this up you'll be sitting on the bench outside in the hail by the waterfront'.

The crackers did keep it up, gurning, poking each other, nodding, shaking heads, and saying 'GNEOUFFFFF GRARNUMPTTTT!'. The barman signalled to his colleague and they came over and manhandled the couple out of the door to an appreciative cheer from the totally wrecked clientele. This cheered me up immensely - it's what your paying for after all - well, it's what i'm paying for anyway.

The night before i had bought me and David Thomas a reindeer hotdog with chilli sauce during our soundcheck. When i've been in David's house, i've noted his formidable array of cognacs and chilli sauces, but even he had to concede that this was a motherfucker of a chilli sauce - you couldn't really savour the reindeer aspect - the next day i nearly bought some whale steaks from the fish market (for scientific purposes you understand), but refrained at the last moment: i knew they would cause havoc when cooked back in the UK and that nobody would see the funny side except me. (Anorak aside - great 70's forgotten album by Jim Capaldi called WHALE MEAT AGAIN). In fact i saw Jim down at the fishmarket in Bergen, now in a motorised chair, fondling large pieces of whale and shouting 'NOT ENOUGH BLUBBER you Swedish bastards'!!). Life's a bitch and then you cry...   

A poor experience in Edinburgh - Ian Rankin took me to a record shop (did i talk about this last month? - can't be bothered checking): i had chronic motion sickness from a giddying flight from Southampton to Embra earlier in the day - so much so that if i didn't keep my head strictly horizontal i knew i would be sick. The record shop was brilliant and had old Spirit albums that i wanted - unfortunately i put my head to one side to look at the spines of old records, and i was suddenly aware that i  was about to throw up all over The Greatful Dead. I made my excuses and bustled out of the shop and leaned, panting in an alley as old Jerry Garcia licks conspired with an earlier bacon sandwich to put me in the grip of a savage technicolour yawn. I survived, but just when i thought it was all over, Ian bounced out of the shop and announced we were going to another one 'just round the corner'. Even the words 'just round the corner' set me off again, and a concerning metallic swirling taste in my mouth threatened to cancel my entire day. Once again i survived, to the point that a while later i was able to sit with Ian and carefully eat a bowl of cauliflower soup. We did a photo-shoot that day when my nausea was at its worst - in the photos i look like a gay Russian gangster with food poisoning that is so bad that he is happy to hear that he will be dead in 20 minutes - 'HAHAHAHA! - zet iz good newz!!!'   

I must go to bed - tomorrow Ian and me are on The Green Room with Mariella Frostrup, then i fly to Oporto, Portugal to be in David Thomas' opera MIRRORMAN - then on Sunday Ian and me are at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.   

The lilac and honeysuckle are clambering everywhere in the garden - but although they have just come into bloom i already miss them - i don't know why. My favourite is the May flower - a strange but lovely off- white smell whch always reminds me of coming home from school and running up to the single track railway line on the edge of town to sit by the bridge and wait for the steam freight train to come by slowly. The driver always gave me a faint smile and a slight wave - this was the most treasured moment possible at that time.     

Years later, as a cub reporter on the local newspaper, i interviewed this man at the end of his life, and he talked at length about his life as a train driver and his memories of coal. I didn't tell him about how he used to wave back to me at the old bridge, but his hand moving through the air as he described encounters with friends in long abandoned shunting yards was like that of an ancient saint patiently explaining that there would be no real peace in life until you were nearly too afraid to feel it.

jl