Biba boy...

The near future....

What can a poor boy do....?

A Woolf in wolf's clothing...

[DRAFT #5: IN CONFIDENCE]
Dear Home Secretary,

I write further to my appointment as Chair of the Inquiry into the institutional response to child sex abuse. I am honoured to be the chairman of the independent panel inquiry into how institutions – both private and state - have failed victims of child abuse in the United Kingdom over many years. This is a major inquiry and I am determined that no organisation will be out of bounds and that no questions will go unasked.

 There has been media speculation that my contacts with Lord and Lady Brittan might affect my impartiality. I do not accept this but I set out below, to the best of my recollection the nature of my contact and relationship with Lord and Lady Brittan so that you may be satisfied that neither my impartiality towards them, nor that of the Inquiry Panel as a whole is compromised.

 I have had a house in London on the same street as the Brittan family since 2004 but, as the houses round our way are all fairly substantial, it’s still a fair walk, which is why I am, in any case, usually driven there by one of my staff. Factoring in the time it takes to reverse the limousine into the Brittan’s secure underground parking unit, you could quite feasibly have got the tube to Pimlico, Elephant & Castle or somewhere equally ghastly just as quickly, so I think that our proximity as neighbours is being somewhat overstated by my critics.

 I was first introduced to Lady Brittan through a third party. I subsequently met Lord Brittan in a personal capacity when I invited Lord and Lady Brittan to a dinner party at my residence on 9 January 2008. From recollection there were six people present and, if memory serves, I’m pretty sure that it was him because the leather mask is fairly distinctive. Leon assures me that it has often come in useful whenever he’s needed – for reasons of national security, presumably – to disguise his true identity from the constabulary.

The Brittans hosted two dinner parties at their residence, which I was invited to and attended on 10 November 2009 and 15 February 2012. From my recollection there were no other guests who attended. But for the blindfold I was wearing for most of the evening, I would be able to give you a more definitive account of those present. I have met Lady Brittan on a small number of occasions for coffee from memory. The last occasion recorded was on 23 April 2013 at Lady Brittan’s residence. We met because Lady Brittan was interested in knowing what was going on in the City of London. Obviously, I was of little help to her on that score, but we had a lovely natter all the same.

In my former capacity as the Senior Alderman below the Chair in the City of London Corporation and also as Lord Mayor, I have sat (sometimes beneath and sometimes actually on the chair) since the autumn of 2012 on an advisory panel called TheCityUK. Lord Brittan is a member of that advisory panel (what *isn’t* he a member of!!), representing UBS as I understand. TheCityUK represents the UK-based financial and related professional services industry. They make representations on its behalf, producing evidence of its importance to the wider national economy, and they seek to, and indeed usually do, influence policy in order to drive competitiveness and to create jobs, lasting economic disparity and social exclusion throughout the UK.

Lady Brittan and I were both judges for the Drag Awards in July 2014 which celebrates Community Transgender programmes. It recognises businesses and public offices that go above and beyond their core work to make a significant and positive impact on the regeneration of their local communities’ wardrobe, hosiery and make up options. The 2014 awards took place on 1 October 2014. Lady Brittan was one of the panel, which I chaired, for judging the awards; the panel met once on 14th July 2014.Lady Brittan did not attend the awards ceremony as she had lent Leon her favourite stole for the occasion – a shame as she had helped to vote herself runner up in the over 50s Diva section and was also highly commended in the dressage.

The Lord Mayor of the day and the City of London Corporation host a number of annual and other banquets and dinners. A significant number of guests from a wide cross-section of paedophile life, often in the hundreds, are invited to these events. Lord and Lady Brittan would have attended some of these dinners. As an Alderman I too have attended some of them but I do not recall engaging with Lord or Lady Brittan at all, or certainly in any substantial way, at these dinners when they have attended – as would be perfectly normal for people who lived in the same street as one another and therefore could (and do) see each other socially all the time.

 In October 2005, Lord Brittan spoke at a conference hosted at the Law Society in London at which I was present in my role as vice – (yes, I know - how apt!) president of the Society. Given the passage of time I cannot recollect whether or not I spoke to Lord Brittan at that event. Probably not, as it’s harder than you’d imagine communicating through the carrier bag when you also have an orange in your mouth. I have had no further social contact with Lord and Lady Brittan since 19 May 2013 and have not spoken to or communicated through sign language with either of them in person or by telephone since, apart from the odd ribald exchange of texts, obviously!

 Other matters:

 I should mention one other issue flowing from my role as an Alderman since 2007 in the City of London Corporation. In my capacity as Lord Mayor my steward has been Colin Tucker, a former solicitor from Edinburgh. In 1989 Mr. Tucker was prosecuted for fraud and acquitted. He was later struck off as a solicitor. In 1983 he was involved in an inquiry into an allegation of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in Scotland, conducted by WA Nimmo Smith QC and JD Friel, Regional Procurator Fiscal of North Strathclyde. The inquiry, which concerned allegations that senior figures in the Edinburgh legal fraternity, including judges, were engaged in sexual relations with under age boys, found no evidence of any wrongdoing whatsoever. (The jammy bugger probably got one of his neighbours to conduct the inquiry!!) I can confirm that I have never discussed this issue with Mr. Tucker – who, his fraudulence and propensity to perverting the course of justice notwithstanding, is a thoroughly good egg - and was unaware of his prior history until this matter was brought to my attention at the interview shortlisting stage.

 As you will appreciate, in the course of a long professional career and during my time in various public offices I have inevitably encountered a very wide range of paedophiles, some well-known, who have held senior positions in business, commerce, the arts, the charitable sector, some even attaining the giddy heights of being asked to perform Britain’s entry to the European Song Contest as well as politics. I am clear that to know someone and to meet them occasionally, even on an informal basis, is not the same as being a close friend or sharing their views – even less, their sexual preferences, of which, after all, who am I to be the judge?

As such my limited encounters with Lord and Lady Brittan will not in any way influence the manner in which I approach the work of the panel. I am acutely aware of the scrutiny this inquiry will rightly face and the need for the panel members and me to be utterly beyond reproach. If I had the slightest doubt in my ability to remain fair and even-handed towards Leon at all times I would have said so at the outset and would not have accepted this appointment. This is a deeply serious response to the horrific series of events he is responsible for covering up and the many victims deserve to feel their interests are being served, even whilst we are busy whitewashing his various wrongdoings.

Yours sincerely,

'Urbane' track by track - 08_'Velma'...

Probably the only conventionally structured and definitely the sole pre-written song on this collection, this one has been around for quite some time. It mutated out of a very, very old song called 'My wheelchair' which was an exceptionally callow attempt at dealing with a very difficult and sensitive subject. The first draft of this song was called 'Carry on', which I always thought was the obvious but still a very weak title. The idea of using the 'Velma' conceit as a title came very late on. There are earlier versions with an arrangement very close to Simon & Garfunkel's 'The only living boy in New York' which had a lovely feel but were, in terms of tempo and sound quality, always all over the place. This last version is perhaps the most polished piece of work I've ever done, but hopefully that won't distract too much from the song's wheelchair-using narrator. A very long time ago I read a book - More than human - by a guy called Theodore Sturgeon. It's about a sort of homo superior group who have a gestalt consciousness. One of the characters is unable to communicate externally but is a happy and functional part of the gestalt. It's been fundamental in shaping my view of some disabilities. Just because it can't be made evident to us, we should not assume that there is not a vivid and rich interior life being experienced. This has always seemed self-evident to me as so much of the creative process is an internal summoning up of material that, ultimately, only the iceberg tip of which will become manifest to others. I feel very strongly about our societal hypocrisy toward the disabled. You can probably be put in prison nowadays - or at least nationally shamed by Sky TV, which is perhaps an even worse fate as you won't be guaranteed a steady supply of illegal stimulants to help you through it - for making a joke at their expense. But to know what we really think of them as a society, you just need to look at the London tube map - those sporadic, grudging little wheelchair symbols and imagine trying to plot a journey to your intended destination around those. Or look at footage of the police manhandling them when they protest about having their benefits slashed so that the wealthiest 1 percent can pay even less tax than they already do. Or read people like Richard Dawkins who would without hesitation or quibble of conscience (I'm assuming here that the man does have one) condemn any foetus he considered marginally beneath his self-formulated threshold of 'normality' or 'viability' to be terminated with extreme prejudice. The hegemony of the humourless was never going to be a barrel of laughs, ws it? But sadly we live increasingly in a world in which what you say has far greater heft than what you do. Talk the right talk and you can literally get away with murder. But I'm pleased with this one because I think it makes it's point sensitively and the key line of the song (for me) - 'and what do you care Tony Blair - or whatever your name is' - came quite naturally and its import crept up even on me, rather than feeling like a contrivance. I think it broadens out the song and makes the metaphor of disability as powerlessness a much more trenchant observation on the relationship between all of us and those by whom we are governed. So, basically, it's track 07 rephrased with perhaps a little more subtlety.

'Urbane' track by track - 07_ Dead babies...

This was a late one that came together very quickly and works, I think, surprisingly well. Musical and titular influences respectively from Talking Heads and Martin Amis - abiding favourites both. This is a rare occasional piece, provoked by the undercover police who took the names of dead children and insinuated themselves into the hearts and beds of women involved with environmental and animal rights groups. We already know the contempt with which our governors hold the environment and animals. We will soon, hopefully with the supposedly imminent inquiry into child abuse, realise the extent to which they have historically despised our children (and I'm sure still do). This shameful episode lets us know pretty squarely how contemptuous they are of us, the citizens they're supposed to represent. So this song is just a gentle reminder to them that the feeling is mutual. (Parental advisory on this one: there's quite a bit of swearing on it, so for heaven's sake don't play it in front of your parents....)

'Urbane' track by track - 06 Madonna @ 80...

A song about getting older - and who more poignant an example of the rigours of the ageing process than Ms. Ciccone, here imagined getting it on down at Studio 54 well into past her meals on wheels delivery. Cracked skin, fading memory but she can still squeeze herself into a Gaultier eye-popper whimple brassiere and a pair of 12 inch heels. Well, we need a bit of light relief before the themes on 'side two' - the corrupt nature of the ruling elite, disability, child abuse and global nuclear extinction - kick in. The normal wisdom is that you bung all the 'hits' at the beginning and then the rest of the album can get on with it. Hopefully, if there's enough good material left over, the remainder won't be too disappointing an experience for the listener. I'm not sure that I don't prefer the second half of this one - but that may be as much through the weakness of the first five songs. Maybe depth and accessibility don't make good bedfellows. Anyway, it's out of my hands now and down to you, the listener. And time.

'Urbane' track by track - 05_ Brits in exile...

This song was inspired by last year's holiday in Greece. We go to a place called Fiscardo which is a (now) rather poncified fishing village right at the top of the island of Cephalonia. It's a beautiful place - lots of orginal Venetian houses massed around a stunning natural harbour, loads of pine forests spreading over the surrounding hills. The place we stay at is a lovely old three storey house with about 8 rooms, right on the waterfront. There's a big terrace at the rear (from the street) of the building so if you're lucky enough to have one of the middle floor rooms, you can just stroll out through your french doors, glide past a few sozzled bathers crashed out on their sun loungers and dive into the harbour and watch the squadrons of swallows flitting and soaring about above you. We've been there many times and it feels rather like a second home, so I can understand people feeling somewhat proprietorial about the place. But last year there were a group of three senior British folk - two ladies and one gent - there who really did seem to think that they owned the place. They were perfectly nice, but there's just something about some British people when they're on holiday - as if they bring some of our normal weather induced gloom to even the sunniest spots. They'd venture out occasionally but would spend most days getting quietly sozzled on the terrace, a little slice of rainy old home amongst the majesty of the rugged haze of the Ionian Islands. Musically I'm indebted to last year's Marbella Sessions compilation. I don't usually listen to a lot of dance music but this stuff is perfect sun/sea/sand holiday listening - quite transcendental in fact, when consumed with light flickering on water in the daszzling sunshine. There's a cultural debt too - to TOWIE, which is where I probably heard the Marbella stuff in the first place. I love the show - no idea why, I just do. So I suppose lurking behind those old gits on the terrace are the bright young things of Essex, bronzed and eternal, also banging 'em back in the brilliant summer sun.

'Urbane' track by track - 04_Hipster on skidrow...

Great thanks and accreditation are due to Mr. Caspar William Charles Sewell on this one. He took what was basically an amorphous whine of atonal strings and a vocal and gave musical flesh to the song's otherwise disembodied narrative. Without his contribution, the song would still be as badly in need of help as its narrator. Thank you.

'Urbane' track by track - 03_ Buddha on the bus...

This is pretty much a companion piece to 'Welcome to the world of spirits'; another flashback to the days of slumming it on the bus. My coping mechanism for the rigours of the hour and fifteen to two hour bus journey (each way) I did most days was to meditate. So this is the glory that is TfL's 222 bus route as experienced by the would-be zen master. I was reading with interest the views of a prominent TfL bod recently. He basically said that due to the Coalition's policy of cleansing the inner city of its poor (so that the rich have less far to travel to make themselves richer still, presumably?) we are storing up potential riots and future social disorder (is there any other option?) as those who've been banished to the furthest reaches of the metropolis - Tolworth, West Drayton et al - find they can no longer travel back towards the centre where any notional work might be. Like most so-called public policy (i.e. the public is its last consideration, if we're even considered at all) this is insane. If the song has a 'message' at all I suppose it's that even the Buddha would struggle to maintain His equanimity amidst all the social decomposition he'd be exposed to on the average London bus journey. The TfL bod went on to outline the need for even more infra-structure projects such as a massive underground dual carriageway network for public transport and goods vehicles only, of course - we can't be encouraging people to drive their own cars, can we? Of course, all this infrastructure doesn't come cheap, so the end result? Higher public transport fares, Morlock commuters hidden from the darling Eloii, packed like sardines underground, and no doubt just as much gridlock and pollution up above. Who'd be poor in London?

'Urbane' track by track - 02_Shirley Trampled...

This song was sparked by one of those rare and odd moments where you whizz pass someone you don't know while you're on a bus and their whole life flashes in front of you. The Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow mentions are less cultural reference points than suitably hurried attempts at description. I had, for reasons beyond my ken, pinned her as a travel agent, and that was the (presumably complete) misapprehension out of which the song developed. From there, it's a short imaginative leap to the rest of her life conditions - she spends most of her waking hours immersed in the minutiate of other people's happiness. So what better mindset from which to speculate upon the philosophical nuances of the annual British holiday?

I had in mind an update of the Pistols' 'Holidays in the Sun', but the musical palette - despite tantalizing whiffs of mid-90s Brit Pop (Pulp's 'Have You Seen Her Lately?' and Blur's 'Girls and Boys' - or was it 'Boys and Girls'?) it ends up sounding more like Pistols contemporaries Magazine - doesn't move it on all that far I suppose. But then it's almost an ancient (in pop terms at least) trope - from Cliff's 'Summer Holiday' to Weller's 'thinking 'bout your holidays', it's another to add to the above and the song's main contention - that the great British getaway is less of an escape and more another form of incarceration is equally hackneyed. The vacation as not so much relief from as reinforcment of the workaday horrors of the rat race is probably just about redeemed by genuine concern for Shirley's need for a holiday: we've all, to varying degrees, felt that same desperation at some point I should imagine.

I'm assuming that it's her own 'two weeks in a dancefloor hell' that she's imagining - perhaps not; maybe Shirley's is just a general meditation on consciousness? A teeny suspicion of class consciousness peeps through towards the end and I think perhaps Shirley shares my disdain for all those 'Keep calm and...' t-shirts/baby grows/topiary effects etc. My favourite is suitably subversive: a poster put up by a fiery Roman work colleague - 'I can't keep calm, I'm Italian....'

'Urbane' track by track - 01_Welcome to the world of spirits...

This one dates from my time on the buses. I drive now, so there's a lot less inspiration on the way to work. Maybe there's a 'cars and girls' LP in me somewhere though - we'll see. Probably more 'Autobahn' than 'Highway 61 revisited', but you never know... I like the spooked, husky-blue-eyed-soul-voice-put-through-a-fuzzbox, auto-out-of-tuned effect on the vocal. It's the noisiest vocal on the LP but I think any quality issues are worth it to get the effect I was after - a dirty, grizzled tramp with a drunken jazz saxophone, fizzing away in the corner of the underground - playing a song that no one knows anymore, nor cares about. It's typical me really. This is one of the first things I recorded with the lovely new Audio-Technica microphone my other half had got me for my birthday. The first thing I do with the lovely clean ne vocal sopund? Drown it in effects! It catches the desolate mood of the narrator though, I think. He's just come back, perhaps, from a tour of duty somewhere and doesn't recognise the London he sees. There's an echo of 'The Wasteland' - 'a crowd swarmed over London Bridge...death, death, I never knew death had undone so many...' Yes, we've all come undone, post 9-11 I suppose. And now the soldiers from both sides are returning, spooked, shell-shocked, bitter and disconsolate. We're in for a few more years of disorientation it would seem. There's a video of this one too that I'll post up soon. It's a visual counterpart to this song's musical debt to Byrne and Eno's 'My life in the bush of ghosts' - still a touchstone, still breathtakingly fresh nearly 35 years on. 01 - Welcome to the world of spirits

Open Mic Night, Thursday 18th September 2014, The Rifleman, Fourth Cross Road, Twickenham...

Yes folks, it’s that time of the week again (….well, it will be on Thursday…)

That’s right – Thursday night is Open Mic Night at The Rifleman Pub Twickenham and this week, as Scotland decides whether or not to vote for independence, we’ll be bringing you an extended Referendum special, drinking and singing long into the wee small hours of Friday morning celebrating the plucky Scots’ lucky escape from the horrors of Coalition Britain/commiserating with the bleary eyed, urine-soaked Yes Campaigners as they face up to their continued sufferance under the yoke of English imperialism, in particular the annual torture that is Jools Holland’s Hogmanay Hootenanny Hoe-down. In honour of the potentially nation changing events that will be unfolding on the night, we’ll be getting our host of regulars to customise some of your favourite old Scottish ballads in order to present a topical set list inspired by the auspicious events taking place north of the border. Lost John and Julia will duet on a specially rewritten version of the old Bob Dylan/ Johnny Cash number – ‘Girl from the north country’. We’re so lucky to have such a great Johnny Cash sound-alike in our midst. It’s just such a shame that Lost John sounds nothing at all like Bob Dylan. Then again, on second thoughts, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing… Peter London will be symbolically changing his name to Peter Edinburgh just for the night – although he still refuses to give up his jump on/jump off route-master bus or to take off the Boris Johnson wig for that matter. Someone really needs to buy that man a new pair of long johns. Wee Mandolin Jock says he will ‘Walk 5,000 miles’ to keep Scotland in the UK if he has to – a feat in itself, never mind that he’ll be wearing a specially constructed pair of tartan platform espadrilles at the time. (We’ve no idea what he’ll be singing by the way, but we’re hoping he’ll at least be able to give the ceiling a quick wipe while he’s up there…) Finally Caspar ‘och aye, the noo’ Sewell and John ‘see you, Jimmy’ West will be resurrecting their old Andy Stewart and Moira Anderson tribute act. ‘Andy’ has been readying his diamante sporran especially for the evening whilst ‘Moira’ will be unveiling a gravity defying new plunge neckline with matching haggis stole. So join your hosts to Say hello/Wave goodbye to the 5 ½ million. 8.30 for 9ish, on the dot….

'Everything popular is wrong'...

This is the new mantra. It replaces the previous one: 'the only point in building an audience is so that you can lose it'. I came across the new one here in a piece by Berlin DJ and Macro record label-meister Stefan Goldmann. I don't know his work or that of the label, but I agree with every word in his article. It's nice to see such intelligence and considered writing applied to something (pop music) that used to be so important to so many of us. Stefan's contention is that rather than liberating musician and audience alike, the computer revolution in music making has been far more problemmatic for both: it's given audiences a glut of mediocre music and simultaneously made it virtually impossible for any but those already established artists to make any money out of the game. His proposed solution is music to the ears of someone like me: stand out from the wall of samey noise; go against the grain; go to the margins and you will find an audience. I hope he's right. I certainly feel more energised than I think I ever have about the possibilities of making exciting music and moving into interesting new imaginative areas through making noises. But then, I have no expectation anyway of ever making any money from it, so it won't exactly be a sacrifice if I were to not only fail to do that but still never find an audience (or, ho ho ho, lose what little of one I may already have.)

I guess I'm a good illustration of Stefan's thesis. It's taken me about 7 years of not particularly dilligent application to learn enough about modern music production to get - admittedly with quite a bit of help from some far more talented colleagues - pretty close to mainstream release quality. With the freedom and energy of youth, you could, I suppose - with a little judicious web-surfing and a copy of the 'Sound on Sound' special issue on music production techniques and a few late nights and early mornings - be up and running in six months. All the bands I was in were ultimately stymied by the inaccessibility of (to coin a phrase) the means of production. In those days, you had to have either a lot of your own time and money or be signed to a record label if you were serious about a career in music. Nowadays, you need a laptop. But the downside is that just as on every corner the factory gates swing open for the on-rushing revolutionaries, the market stalls collapse under the sheer weight of useless and unwanted tat that they are churning out. 'We never got it off on that revolution stuff....'

I suppose the biggest problem for artists nowadays is the extreme fragmentation of one's potential audience. When I was growing up, there were two music shows on TV - TOTP and the Old Grey Whistle Test. John Peel's radio show was pretty much the only place you'd be lucky enough to hear stuff that was what you could call 'under the radar' of the chart-obsessed record industry. Nowadays, that state of affairs has been pretty much inverted; even the BBC has had to divvy up what was once a stand alone pop station into at least three distinct offshoots, that's before you even start on the internet radio. Then there's Spotify, i-Tunes.... The old binary system - you either had a record deal, or you didn't - has been replacedby the classic Marxian pyramid: you have a small 'ruling elite' of globally renowned superstars. Jostling below them is a 'bourgeoisie' of well-meaning and hard working bands who with gigs and a heck of a lot t-shirt sales and a couple of plays on 'Made in Chelsea' can just about scratch a living. And then there's the rest of us: the lumpen proletariat of mini-midi keyboarders, farting about on our laptops, making bleeping modern symphonies of warp and decay that no one will ever hear. We're the billion droplets in the SoundCloud. We're not so much under the radar. It's just that there are so many of us, the grey-green screen turns white.

Trying to master the 'Urbane' mixes last night, putting the final touches to the finished songs, I find that on one track I can hear all the breathing between the words, only now exaggerated to sound like a bison grunting and smacking its lips together. It's the compression - you use it to make the overall sound a little bigger by reducing the loudest parts - and it can sometimes expose stuff you thought you could get away without tidying up. It's no biggy - you just need to go back to the multi track and time consumingly remove the gaps so that only the singing parts you want to be heard get treated with the effect. The ironies. My stuff has probably never sounded so good since we used to use proper recording facilities, but here I am, quite literally, cutting the life out of it.

L.U.V. on y'all,

xxx

Yoko Ono...

A lot of people who like the Beatles have a problem with Yoko Ono. A lot of people like the Beatles, so that's a big constituency of people to be having a problem with you. But at least these days, they're not quite so vociferously racist and misogynistic about it as they once were. So I'm sure Yoko will be taking whatever problems people have with her in her stride as she always has. She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

Perhaps her early work was preparing her for her forthcoming role as a Beatle wife. 'Cut piece' (1965) seems now to be little more than an abstraction of the kind of thing she was soon to be subjected to by the British press and public for real.



She's 'a cool chick, baby'. And a brave one.

I started taking a closer interest in Yoko when I kept seeing her 'Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band' LP nuzzling up next to her husband's similarly eponymous counterpart in a lot of these '4 zillion LPs you have to hear before you snuff it...'-type books. So I gave YO/POB  a listen. It is, to say the very least, erm....challenging. The first track, which goes on for a fair bit, is a cacophony of banshee wailing, discordant overdriven guitar (Lennon) and a rhythm section that doesn't seem to be able to keep up with either husband or wife in the avant garde stakes (Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman). But by track two, it's clear that Ono is streets ahead of all three of them. 'Greenfield morning' is like nothing you've ever heard - or would have been back then in 1970.



Lennon said in the 1970s that Yoko was making 1980s music and it was only in that decade that people began to recognise it in larger numbers. Indeed, contemporary reviews of the couple's 'Double Fantasy' LP I recall were grudgingly accepting of the now evident fact that, in terms of cutting edge and relevance, Yoko was leaving her bread-baking hubby quite some distance behind. A few cool ones like Viv Albertine and John Lydon were in on Yoko from the start, but it was only when that generation started to make its own music that her own influence and importance began to emerge from the shadow of 'him indoors'.

They were, their very publicly aired fallings out and difficulties notwithsatanding, a pretty solid and admirable couple I think. Testament to John's self-proclaimed A&R abilities is his decision to stand aside and allow Ono to carry on her career - helped, no doubt, by her uncanny abilities with the investment portfolio. Not many artists would make that sacrifice for their partners - even fewer great ones. But it was (and probably still is) so easy to laugh at them. Lennon's notorious biographer, Albert Goldman who, incidentally, should really have callled that book 'The Lives of Yoko Ono', such a hurry is he in to get his claws into her much easier to pillory contribution to the sixties counter-culture that he's so determined to piss all over - notes with glee how she was working on 'Walking on Thin Ice' with unseemly haste in the wake of her husband's assasination. Her steely-eyed resolve to be a pop star (how dare she!) over-riding any sense of decency. No mention of the fact that, back in Sussex, Paul McCartney was doing precisely the same thing. Lennon would have expected nothing less of either of them. Anyway, have a listen:




And take note Mr. Goldman's ghost: the woman watched the man she loved being gunned down in the street.

I'm thinking of ways to write a song about her - maybe John singing to her from beyond the grave? Vague idea for the title: 'Woman is the nijab of the world'. Playing on the ironies of the veil - the elimination of the superficial as a path to inner freedom. She and Lennon explored similar ideas when they (yes, it is as hard to type it without laughing as it probably is to read it) conducted interviews whilst sitting inside a bag. We'll see - there's enough there for several songs.

So yes, she deserves a song, I think. She's a cool chick, baby. And a brave one.

L.U.V. on y'all

xx

Shirley Trampled (another bloody pavement)...

This song was sparked by one of those rare and odd moments where you whizz pass someone you don't know while you're on a bus and their whole life flashes in front of you. The Lady Gaga and Gwyneth Paltrow mentions are less cultural reference points than suitably hurried attempts at description. I had, for reasons beyond my ken, pinned her as a travel agent, and that was the (presumably complete) misapprehension out of which the song developed. From there, it's a short imaginative leap to the rest of her life conditions - she spends most of her waking hours immersed in the minutiate of other people's happiness. So what better mindset from which to speculate upon the philosophical nuances of the annual British holiday?

I had in mind an update of the Pistols' 'Holidays in the Sun', but the musical palette - despite tantalizing whiffs of mid-90s Brit Pop (Pulp's 'Have You Seen Her Lately?' and Blur's 'Girls and Boys' - or was it 'Boys and Girls'?) it ends up sounding more like Pistols contemporaries Magazine - doesn't move it on all that far I suppose. But then it's almost an ancient (in pop terms at least) trope - from Cliff's 'Summer Holiday' to Weller's 'thinking 'bout your holidays', it's another to add to the above and the song's main contention - that the great British getaway is less of an escape and more another form of incarceration is equally hackneyed. The vacation as not so much relief from as reinforcment of the workaday horrors of the rat race is probably just about redeemed by genuine concern for Shirley's need for a holiday: we've all, to varying degrees, felt that same desperation at some point I should imagine.

I'm assuming that it's her own 'two weeks in a dancefloor hell' that she's imagining - perhaps not; maybe Shirley's is just a general meditation on consciousness? A teeny suspicion of class consciousness peeps through towards the end and I think perhaps Shirley shares my disdain for all those 'Keep calm and...' t-shirts/baby grows/topiary effects etc. My favourite is suitably subversive: a poster put up by a fiery Roman work colleague - 'I can't keep calm, I'm Italian....'

The video: I originally foresaw two seperate bits of footage running against one another. I wanted air hostesses marching towards the Red Army but I couldn't get the lovely footage I found of Aeroflot stewardesses doing a tacky 70s style floorshow to play on youtube. But I think the footage of female Red Army soldiers (wo)manning anti-aircraft guns kind of works. Don't ask me how I got the animation effect. I just overload the footage with as many gizmos as I can, slow it down so it fits the length of the song and hope that the copyright commissars never get wind of it and so can't get the KGB onto me. I've been pretty lucky so far...

Anyway, I think it takes the song somewhere quite abstract and interesting. Hope you agree. I'll be posting more on the new one soon and hopefully be able to clear the decks once Urbane is mastered and out of the way.

L.U.V. on y'all

xx

Mista Feminista...

That's about all I have at the moment. A title. Vague inklings: an inchoate sense of working in a different, less bullish, more sensitive way and an idea for a unisex cover image that will probably be typically embarrassing. So I may well go back to plan A on that one. The cover artwork I originally wanted to use was based on a photo of my maternal grandmother (i.e. my grandmother on my mother's side - she doesn't look very maternal in the picture, I can assure you!) She's 17, flaxen haired, indomitable and wielding a rifle. It's a great photo, but I can't find it anywhere. I'm starting to wonder if I ever had a copy of it in the first place or whether it's just such an entrenched piece of family history that I've assumed I have the thing in my keeping. I may never even have seen it, just been so entranced by the description that I've convinced myself that I have. The mind, it starts doing funny things to you as you get older. Anyway, I like the perversity of starting where most people finish - with the cover design - so I'll keep doing that. Maybe things will come into sharper relief once I have an image or two to bounce off.

But yes, I digress in typically Ronnie Corbett style. I have the title - or maybe it will morph into a 'brand name' or whatever. Mista Feminista sounds about right. And I know I want this to be a very stridently feminist piece - because that's the overarching thing I feel at the moment; stridently feminist. Yes, there are loads of other things to rile and perplex one, but there seems to be a disturbingly deep misogyny threaded through all of these contemporary news stories. In Gaza, it's the terrible numbers of women and children who are being hurt and killed and - how could we have forgotten this? - violence against women is *always* violence against children; the present and the future. UK gangs now target the girlfriends and sisters of their rivals - sexual violence dished out with the same senseless disregard as rival gangs just a few days ago blasted away a poor young woman who had the temerity to be out celebrating her birthday while they were out imposing their mutual deathwishes upon the streets of Kilburn. This is what men do; they kill each other; they wreck the present; they destroy their own futures.

So, there's the theme - nice easy one this time.

But how to go about it? I'm clueless right now, but that's nothing new and can be a good place to start. Mista Feminista - I think that's what's needed. Because men need to change - (that will probably become a song as it's my mantra at the moment. Might even be a better title in the end. We'll see). So the plan is to try to document the creative process on this one - jot down the inspirations, the mechanics, the twists and turns of the strange mental incarceration and lunacy that descends upon me when I try to get some music together. I think (I hope!) that this one will be easier to follow than some of the others. But there's been so much misunderstanding of motive and execution with previous efforts that I wanted to guide you through this one a bit more. It will probably be more interesting than the finished work - I always found that with the others; the journey was always more exciting than the destination. So hopefully you will find these accompanying notes valuable, if only in relation to 'end product'.

OK, just so we're all starting on the same page, here are some almost finished versions of most of the songs on the last one. I haven't kept any notes on that one, so I'm afraid you're on your own. But it's sort of urban - ey..:

Urbane