THE DEEP POOL - MAY 2006

'And does God help us?

A crucifix hangs over the bed in every room. Five saintly priests visit our establishment in rotation. Cocksucking is forbidden during waking hours. We take our pills and dwell upon the afterlife. We apply ourselves to all therapies with a diligence that astounds the casual visitor. Who amongst you in that outside world of yours could live as we do? It takes discipline and order not to thwart the devils within. That horned beast of a being has no place on our tennis courts and football fields.'

A small piece from a wonderful book called 'That Old Suburban Angst' by the late Kevin Coyne which i've been re-reading each night before i go to bed (my ba-by). It makes me laugh out loud - bits like that bit quoted above aren't funny ha-ha as such, but as you immerse yourself in his world, the images pile up inside you and give you a fleeting comedic protection from this terrible world - i'm especially fond of his interest in sausages...The book is published by Tony Donaghey Publishing - England For www.kevincoynebooks.com

I correspond with Tony - a clearly sainted man who only wants the world to know more of the genius of Kevin Coyne - buy this book for yourself for Christmas and disturb your loved ones!

I've been thinking about Kevin ever since Michael Cosgrave and i toured in Germany and Austria last month - that suddenly seems like an era ago - (the Pool is late this month because i've been so busy finishing writing a new album which starts recording at the beginning of June - i need staff...). We played in Nuremburg which was the adopted home of Kevin - the venue was very full, possibly too full, but people tolerated the circumstances, and when i name-checked Kevin from onstage, there was a beautiful round of warm affectionate applause for the man - a lovely moment.

After the show, in the heat and noise i met Helmi, Kevin's widow and we talked about Kevin, my respect for him, his loveliness as a person, and the song that i've written and recorded about Kevin called 'Here Come The Urban Ravens'. Helmi is a charismatic woman of total charm, and she made me think about the resilience which you see in people who are prepared to stand by outsider/borderline folk of genius like Kevin, David Thomas, me, Davina McCall, Grant Mitchell, Anne Widecombe, that depressing Jewish bloke in Friends, the Daleks, Osama Bin Laden, Al Gore, the CILLIT BANG! man, Lee Bowyer - the list goes on...

We loved that tour and met loads of great people, including, in the town of Kufstein in Austria, one of my heroes - Johnny Dowd. We were doing a double bill there, and before Michael and me took to the stage, Johnny suggested we might like to put 'a different slant on your performance' by drinking some of his absinthe - the real, homemade-from-wormwood stuff that makes you hallucinate that you're backstage somewhere in the Austrian alps with Johnny Dowd - not the girlie shit you get in British bars that trendy folk drink while nodding thoughtfully. This bottle even had its own homemade label which said 'absinthe' and that's all, in flowery blood-red letters on a mustard background (you get all the details with Jackie). We declined this offer - yes, you read that correctly - well, not declined, just didn't drink too much - we are professionals after all. Johnny and his band were superb (i think) - although my memory of his show has been strangely reduced to a terrifying repeated moment where the band stopped and Johnny shouted at full bore - 'I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!'...i love all his rekirds, but in particular the first one i ever heard - 'Wrong Side Of Memphis' - makes me, Nick Cave and Tom Waits sound like estate agents from Dorking on a karaoke night - 'Nick, Tom - nuvver pint a lager?'

But the tour was strangely exhausting - when me and Michael said goodbye at Bristol airport we were lost men weaving through the west country Sunday afternoon air. When i got home Deborah suggested that next morning that we go to see her horse Jack who was wintering with a sore leg in a remote swampy field on the edge of the Downs. She used to have a cat called Blackjack too - no wonder she's confused. Speaking of which we were taking Jack and the other horses a British liquorice confectionery bar called Blackjacks which are most popular with nearly all horses. As we picked our way through the marsh toward Jack's field next day on a cold lemon-grey morning, through sheer fatigue and for no other reason i started to get the horrors.

When we got to the gate of the field there was an old rusty horseshoe nailed to a tree - not an uncommon occurence in the country, but it threw me into a bad 'Tobe Hooper' moment (the tremendous director of the film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - the opening ten minutes are so stunning, especially the scene where a man at a county fair is lying disabled by alcohol on the ground, mumbling about unspecified danger, to the concern and distaste of the young American bastards who are about to get it). We entered the field - i hadn't told Deborah about my creeping Chainsaw state of mind - it didn't seem fair, and we walked over to the horses. The grass was sparse for the time of year as Spring was decidedly late, and the animals were leaner and hungrier than we expected - as soon as they smelled the Blackjacks they started getting real heavy with each other and us as to who was going to get the most. We left the field as quickly as possible so we could feed them from the other side of the fence. A crittur this big can knock you out or even kill you with just a swing of its head and once you're on the ground - you don't want to know man...

Speaking of Blackjacks, i read an interesting article in one of the British broadsheet newspapers a couple of weeks ago about a supposed phenomenon called 'bluejacking'. My more well-heeled readers will know that there is a function on expensive mobile phones called 'bluetooth'. The journalist of whom i speak was writing about an experience he said he had on a train - he was sitting minding his own business when his phone rang, and when he answered it, he had received a short film clip of a seriously violent nature. He was shocked by the content and did not know who had sent it to him, but he knew he was being 'bluejacked', an action whereby someone else in your close, visible vicinity can send you an unbidden short piece of film without knowing your number, simply because of the proximity of your phone to their phone. He then described his sense of sick fear and anger that someone he could probably see in the train carriage he was in had violated his space and mind in such a way, but how could identify who it was? - he couldn't, which added to his sense of distress. He then went on to discuss what this said about our culture and where it was going. As i say it was interesting - but there is a problem here...

Over the next few days, reading as i do ALL the broadsheets from Friday through to Sunday, i noticed three other near-identical stories by different writers in different papers - they were all on a train, same thing happened, same kind of film, same angry and afraid reaction, same sense of violation, same analysis and sense of foreboding for us as a society. Well, you don't have to be Einstein to work out that if this could happen to four journalists on trains over the same four or five days, then by the law of averages it must have been happening to a hell of a lot of people all over the country, but has anyone told you about this experience lately? - no, thought not. It's an urban legend, like those who say that 80% of all banknotes in London have traces of cocaine on them - do they understand how many banknotes that would be? - how many people do they think take cocaine in London? - it may be a lot, but it couldn't possibly be more than 9% of all people - if you think it's more it's because you yourself take it and know others who do too. And this 9% have had access to 80% of all banknotes? - yeah, right (teenage moment there).

Getting back to our upset journos on trains, i'm not saying the bluejacking isn't possible or hasn't happened, but it's clearly a copycat story - it means that not one editor said 'Patricia, this bluejacking story- it's good, but i couldn't help noticing that Ken at the Times had exactly the same experience on Friday...'

I learned some years ago from my mentor, the wonderful Australian Jane Vucovic, the value of reading cadence before content in order to ascertain the veracity of any piece of information - she also taught me about 'visual discrepancy' - is something that is being described being viewed the right way round - if not, why not?

An example - a long time ago a celebrated author asked me to read a poem by someone else which had impressed him, but he felt there was something - wrong. I read the poem - in it the poet was describing a terrible experience from childhood in which he was dangled over a cliff by his father as an exercise in 'trust'. The problem was that, when you read the poem you saw the action as it were, viewed from the father's eyes, not the child's. When you tried to see it from the child's eyes, nothing happened - why would that be? The author said 'Ah, i see' and we went to a Chinese restaurant where i had braised beef hotpot and Singapore style noodles.

I was thinking about this kind of thing the other day, and slowly something came from the back of my mind to the front, and i decided to re-read an autobiographical fragment called 'Safe Conduct' by the Russian writer the late Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago - book a million times better than film). There is a moment in this book where the young Pasternak is on a train in Russia (bluetooth on - only kidding) with his father Leonid Pasternak, a celebrated painter in his day. A man Boris doesn't know suddenly comes into their compartment and the stranger and his father embrace and talk fondly to each other in German, of which Boris knows but a little at this point in his life. The two adults continue to talk until the train finally stops in deep snowy countryside in the middle of nowhere. The stranger says his goodbyes and alights from the train to be met by a man waiting with a horse and trap.

Years later, as an adult himself, Boris is reading a book of poetry when he suddenly realises from the poems' cadences and speech patterns that they must have been written by the man on the train - he recognises the strong similarities between speech and printed word. He asks his father if he is correct and his father says, yes that's right - the stranger was the invincible German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the man who met Rilke in the snow was Count Tolstoy. If this is true it's just staggering, and i was re-reading it to see if i could divine from Boris's own cadences if it could be false. I certainly couldn't read it as untrue, so now i believe it -- but as an act of faith. (Note to self - remember black bin day has changed from Tuesday to Thursday).

So, there i was, playing at the Famous Bein Inn in Glen Farg, Perthshire, and suddenly Winter was gone. David the Inn owner gave me a lift into Perth on Saturday, and i strolled around this ancient grid city on the banks of the River Tay, magnolias sprawled across magnificent silver-grey stone buildings, every bar and cafe full of Perth types sitting outside discussing the matters of the day in that unique agitated Scots way in warm morning sunshine. In doorways, old men with red-rimmed eyes and beaten-up tweed jackets stood waiting for something, but i didn't know what. i know there are woman like this too, but they were waiting somewhere else, also with red-rimmed eyes. i bought an organic wild boar haggis (a kind of Scots savoury pudding made from pig's hearts and cigarette papers) and a bottle of sparkling elderflower wine at the organic farmers' market next to the cathedral.

I forgot to put the haggis in the fridge at the Bein Inn, and two days later in the bar at Edinburgh airport on the way home, the haggis was smelling real bad in my hand luggage.
'Whit the fuck iz zat reek, ken like' a Scots guy said to me from the next table.

'Must be bastards gawn oan the Heathrow flight' i speculated, thereby implying the stench was of Londoners. This satisfied the Scots guys who were already enjoying themselves by not allowing all the English guys at the airport to switch over the bar television so that they could see the last-day-of-season English football results. The Scots guys were watching an important Shinty game (a kind of brutal Scots hockey played in kilts, a little like the Irish game of Hurling, except you're allowed to kill your opponent as long as you're prepared to bring up his children - this ensures nobody actually dies).

'Fucksake - men in skirts playing fuckin hockey' the English geezers said in stage whispers.
'GOAN RORY - FUCKIN KILL'UM! - the Scots shouted at the screen, as guys with long red hair fell to the green ground, writhing in agony in pouring rain, the referee sprinting through the billowing mist to order assailants to retreat down the pitch which was carved out of a small bracken-bordered clearing under the sea cliff with the waves pounding in from the Isle of Mull across the sound.

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Reading:

Stewart Imlach - My Father And Other Working Class Heroes.
Boris Pasternak - Safe Conduct.
Nicey And Wifey - Nice Cup Of Tea And A Sit Down.

Listening:
Bobby Gaylor - Fuzzatonic Scream
Johnny Dowd -- Welcome Jesus
Richard Thompson - My Soul My Soul
The Fugs - It Crawled Onto My Hand - Honest.
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