Remake / Remodel

 

I would have said architrave but no one seems to know the word, so I’ll just say door trim instead. The point is, when I fit a new door trim or architrave should I take off the difficult-to-completely-remove label with the barcode on it? Or will the future owner of this house be disappointed when they tear off what they thought was a period feature only to find a chain DIY store bar code on the back of a piece of suspiciously new-looking kiln-dried pine? 

How long is this stuff going to last? Will this remodeling outlive me? Will it be discovered by an archeologist, a descendant of the Trumpian Bloodbath survivors: a creature rolling around on castors (five for safety), with a distended scrolling digit sticking out of it’s chest, and one large, myopic eye - a scanner for reading digital information? Will the creature be disappointed? Will it malfunction when it tries to read the barcode. This shit keeps happening - these barcodes they’re fucking dangerous - like the phosphorous we used to find washed up on the beaches, courtesy of the second world war, when I was a kid,. As soon as that stuff dried out it burst into flames. Better not put it in your pocket. Don’t read the barcode, creature! 

A drawer full of rusty drill bits, nuts, bolts and stray screws. What should I do with them? I’m not taking them back to England with me. I swear some of these came over from France over twelve years ago via a rental van, three different storage spaces and a container ship from England. This is some well-travelled junk, its carbon footprint is a disgrace. What should I do? Some of these bits might be useful. 

I’ll give them away…

I’ve got just the thing for you…

Fuck it, I’ll dump them. Are they bio-degradable? How long will they take to re-amalgamate with the planet? How much damage will they do? Is hardened steel an element? This is harder than I thought. 

If I close my eyes as I sling them in the skip it’ll all be okay…

Books. What the fuck do I need books for? To show that I’m an intelligent, educated, and well-rounded person. Oh yeah? Where did all the cool books go? An Ann Cleves Vera mystery keeps jumping out at me. Amy sent it into me when I was in hospital during the pandemic recovering from a heart attack. Just the thing for solitary confinement in an intensive care isolation unit. 

Did all that shit really happen? Yes it did. I built a porch on the front of the house, feeling extremely unwell, and completely unaware that Covid had done so much damage to me that I was about to die from a heart attack. Do we ever know what’s around the corner?

What the fuck am I doing all this for? I could be spending my last hours doing something I might be remembered for, like making another record. Instead I’ll be cursed by future generations of home remodellers, just as I curse the former owners of this house who even had the temerity to sign some of the worst of their handiwork. Skirting boards held in place with four inch nails: 

‘Hah right, that ought to hold it…oh it split…ah well, never mind…’ 

Fuck you, you fucking morons.

Our neighbours, who really are delightful, recommended a plumber. To be fair, Len seemed to know what he was doing when it came to plumbing, but I think it was a mistake to get him to strip the upstairs bathroom down to the studs and do a total refit. His re-hanging of the old bathroom door, complete in its splintered and sharded frame was a classic. He stood back and surveyed his handywork, looked pleased with himself:

‘Yeah, it’s got character’ he said.

I had to re-do it when he’d gone.

I liked Len, even in his Go Brandon! sweat shirt. People believe what they believe and all you can do is try to meet their beliefs with kindness and decency. He showed up and got the work done with a minimum of disruption. He took care of everything, got us the cheapest shower, toilet and vanity. I tiled the splashback - lined everything up and did the straightest tiling job I’ve ever done, but of course it looks crooked because Len had installed the sink and vanity on the piss, one side a quarter of an an inch lower than the other.

A work of utter imperfection all the way to the flimsy plastic toilet seat. It boasts no slam, so it won’t clatter down in the middle of the night and wake the entire household. It doesn’t actually go down at all - unless you force it. All it can manage is a thirty degree angle. It would take it an entire day to come to a horizontal rest, so most of the time it looks as though the toilet is about to say something.

In amongst and around all this I’ve been recording. I have to do it to keep my sanity and to stay in practice. It’s amazing how quickly I forget how to do things in the studio that were second nature only months earlier, so I like to be working on something. Even when I’m really pressed for time I like to make sonic doodles with whatever’s lying around. When I was in England getting ready for the release of Leisureland and the subsequent touring I had a Tascam M12 permanently ready to go with a Roland JX8P synthesiser, a Watkins Copicat, a few pedals and an old Conn bossa nova beatbox. I’d spend half an hour as often as I could making some kind of mindless musical doodle or sketch. I like my sonic doodles but they’re a bit random.

I’ve been recording tracks with my friend the neighbourhood drummer, Sam Shepherd. I’ve mixed some tracks for him. Sam plays everything and he’s really good at it. With me he plays the drums. He played on Leisureland, and also on Amy’s new album (due out in August On Tapete Records). Here's an out-of-focus shot of him from the last session in the Catskill studio:

I knew I wouldn’t have time to write anything so we’ve been re-recording an album I had out in 1985, A Roomful Of Monkeys. It started out as me doing new versions of a couple of the songs, just to see if I could. That album bugs me - I wasn’t in a good state at the time - I was drinking myself to death. I’ve always felt that the songs were good but the performance and recording are abysmal. The album is rooted in the Medway Towns and features in the last part of A Dysfunctional Success. It was all a bit of a fuck up, so it’s good to revisit.

After a hard day of cleaning, decorating, repairing and despairing, Sam would drop by and we’d record another backing track and maybe mix one of his tunes. I seem to have a basic tracks for whole album which I can finish up it England. Now I’m packing up the studio ready to make the room look like normal people could live here.

The insanity of getting the house into a saleable condition has to come to an end soon - I have to leave for the UK next week to get ready for the re-publication of my autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success. It’s gently improved from the first edition - I think it’s worth buying again though some people have told me they’re sticking with their original copy. That’s up to them, but at the very least they’ll be missing out on the extensive new introduction. I’m doing some shows playing, appropriately enough, in Hull on the day it comes out - May 17th - and at the Community Centre in Holt up in the wilds of North Norfolk on May 18th, which just happens to be my 70th birthday.

Here's a list of tour dates:

May

17 KINGSTON UPON HULL - Wrecking Ball TICKETS

18 HOLT, NORFOLK - Community Centre TICKETS

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club

more to follow

A Dysfunctional Success

 

In the end there was nothing scary about cataract surgery but it was a big inconvenience. I put it off for years - never had time, I always had a record to make or a tour to do. Eventually I capitulated, booked myself in for the 21st December at an eye clinic in Albany. They do one eye at a time with a few days in between. In my case a few days turned into two weeks because Christmas and the New Year got in the way. I spent the holidays with very lopsided vision. I couldn’t see a thing through the operated eye for a couple of days, just extreme brightness.

By Christmas Day the new eye was coming into focus - my distance vision was perfect but I couldn’t read and the old prescription in my glasses was useless. I bought a pair of reading glasses that caused much hilarity - they made me look like a very earnest German person. They seemed to come with their own built in personality that only went away when I forgot I was wearing them.

I was amazed by the clarity - it was quite a revelation - I thought next door had painted their house a lighter, brighter colour. Through one eye anyway. Viewed through the other eye the world looked as though it had had gravy spilled over it.

I was actually looking forward to the second operation - when they did the first one I couldn’t feel a thing, staring into a bright white light, conscious but very pleasantly sedated, and seeing the most cosmic stuff going on as they broke up the defunct lens with a laser, removed it, and installed a new man-made one. It was like the end sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey - not quite on the same cinematic scale , more miniaturised and circular but twice as bright, with the most fantastically pure and luminescent colours.

You check in and sit waiting in a large room full of rows of chairs, each containing a doddery old person, because cataracts is a condition that affect the old and doddery. Anxiety runs high, but everything’s going to be okay. Each patient comes with a designated official person who will be responsible for driving them home, still high from the sedation, blind in one eye, and sporting a large plastic eye patch like a translucent tea strainer secured with strips of tape across the face and forehead. It’s not a great look.

The turnover is fast - dodderers are checking in while other post-op dodderers are trundled out in wheelchairs and transferred into the care of their designated loved one. Eventually my name is called and I’m welcomed in by a bear-like man with a lot of frizzy hair. He’s wearing scrubs and two hairnets: one containing his head hair, the other a large, bushy beard. He’s very nice, takes my coat and scarf and hangs them up.

I’m shown into the prep room where they strap me into a high, comfy armchair that reclines. Everyone is so nice and kind. There’s a slightly forced air of jollity and jocularity among the staff - you don’t have to be mad to work here but if you are - it helps! - that kind of thing. Minds are being put at ease - you’re in safe hands here. There’s music playing, sixties music, the soundtrack to our young lives. Mamas & Papas, California Dreamin’; Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound Of Silence. It’s all going to be okay…

The room is lined with bays, each one equipped with one of these big armchair things occupied by an old person being prepped. A jovial older man - moustache, white coat - puts an IV in my hand. It doesn’t hurt, they’ve already given me a preliminary injection. The IV is hooked up and I’m away on a cloud of contentment. 

Whoa wo listen to the music… Mmmmm…Doobie Brothers - nice...

I know what this is and it’s not cataract surgery - they’re going to off us. We’re the chosen ones, old and useless, selected to help make room on this overcrowded planet. That’s okay, I’m ready.

By the second week of January I had two functioning eyes. Not fully functioning, but I’ve got 20/20 distance vision. I was given the okay to drive without glasses which was weird for me, a bit like going to the supermarket with no trousers on. 

The up and close and everything else vision was a different matter - I couldn’t see a thing. It’s pointless getting an eye test for at least six weeks after the completed surgeries. Apparently it takes up to six months for the eyes to settle down. They don’t tell you this. You can get specially calibrated lenses put in your eys when you get the surgery so that you have perfect vision afterwards and never need to wear glasses again. They tell you all about that. It costs more and I don’t think the extra is covered by most health insurance providers, certainly not by mine. What they don’t tell you is that over a period of time the eyes adjust, and a year later a lot of people need glasses.

I’m stuck with the German readers I mentioned earlier. Apart from looking ridiculous, they pull my eyes in two different directions. And I have to wear dark glasses when I go outside - my eyes have always let in too much light but now it’s worse than ever.

I had some extremely pressing things to do: we had to get rid of all the junk we’ve amassed in twelve years of living in the same place, and make the house into a saleable proposition. Door frames needed replacing, sheet rock walls needed to be taped and plastered, holes in walls required attention, ceilings had to be repaired,. The house is charming - eccentric, warm and fuzzy, a great place to live in and create in. But in the cold light of an impending sale sign it’s a dump. It’s got good bones, they all said that, but nothing was finished. We had two months to edit down our crap and make the place look good in time for the early spring house market boost.

And I had a book to edit. 

My 2003 autobiography is scheduled for re-publication by the Tapete Records publishing division Ventil Verlag. The manuscript needed a few minor tweeks, and I decided I need to write a fairly extensive foreword to bring things up to date - to give some latterday relevence or whatever. On examination the minor tweeks turned into a massive undertaking - I’m surprised I got away with it when it first came out. It was never really proof read, for reasons you’ll find out about in the new foreword (assuming, that is, that you’re going to buy a copy). There were howling spelling mistakes, sentences that blundered into cul de sacs, a few minor half-truths, and one or two things that might have landed me on the receiving end of a legal action. It all needed fixing, and I had six weeks to do it.

So it was on with the paint splattered jeans and the German readers and down to work.

I’m proud of the work we did on the book. I didn’t rewrite it - really it just came down to repairing ambiguous sentence constructions and correcting a lot of spelling mistakes. My long-suffering editor at the publishing company, Oli Schmidt, argued for more punctuation and came up with suggestions. I considered them all, tried them out, but vetoed most of them. When I wrote the book I intended it to sound like I was speaking directly to the reader - in some places correcting the punctuation destroyed the effect, so it stayed as it was. 

I enjoyed writing the foreword - it was strange to be writing about something I wrote over twenty years ago about a time that ended almost fifteen years before that. A double head fuck. I worried that the foreword might be better than the actual book -I realised I’ve become a better writer over the past twenty years, though you might not think so reading this.

I’ve included five lyrics, one to preface each of the five sections of the book: Father To The Man for Sussex By The Sea, Gateway To Europe for Hull, 40 Years for Melody Road, 1983 for The Slippery Slope, and Drag Time for 2 Up Too Down In The Medway Towns. I was thinking of running a competition where you had to match the lyrics to the appropriate section title, but the effort seemed fairly insurmountable, so I didn't bother. Story of my life really.

It wasn’t easy to do the editing in time - because of course there was a deadline - and a deadline for the cover design, and the usual back and forth and arguments over aesthetic concerns versus marketing requirements. I must have read and re-read the book five times, the reading spectacles pulling my eyes in two different directions, but at least making the type vaguely legible. The strain made my eyes sore and eventually I got an infection. I’m not trying to elicit sympathy, or pity or whatever, I just want anyone else who’s going for cataract surgery to be sure to plan on being as computer free as they can in the weeks after the operations. The surgery really isn’t so bad, it’s worth having it done. I can see again! And the book is going to be great.

The front cover is a black and white photo of me with the infamous Rickenbacker, taken by David Corio in the flat I shared with his sister - 1 Melody Road, Wandsworth. It was a Saturday morning in early January 1978. I can feel how cold that flat was. I’m lost inside a large, woolly sweater from a jumble sale. It was freezing but I’m wearing baseball boots as we called them at the time - I never seemed to have proper shoes. David very kindly gave me the photos. He was just starting out as a photographer - he must have been all of seventeen years old. I feel honoured to have been there at the beginning of such a great career.

Everything I do seems trivial - while I’ve been engaged in all this a faction of society has been bombed out of existence. The champions of law, order, public decency, acceptable behaviour and the rest of it take a high moral tone. The defenders of decency are banning books, defunding libraries, and telling us the termination of a pregnancy is an abomination in the sight of God - they talk about the value and sanctity of human life, they preach forgiveness and redemption, and stand back while thirty thousand civilians are killed on the Gaza Strip. 

It’s all out of whack, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Why did that bastard take so long to call for a ceasefire? Don't answer that, the question is merely rhetorical.

Perhaps my life and activities are trivial - I feel bad in part for going on about them, but in this dumb and stupid society we’re living in it’s as well to keep the brain active. Use it or lose it, they say. It seems to me a large part of America has already lost it. I keep seeing a pick-up truck in the neighbourhood with a huge flag flying off the back: God, Guns & Trump. 

Excuse me while I plucketh out mine right eye.

I’m packing up, I’m planning tour dates, I’m keeping on keeping on.

The new edition of A Dysfunctional Success comes out on May 17th, the day before my 70th birthday. You can make an old man very happy by pre-ordering a signed copy from Rough Trade, who will then think I'm an extremely successful and sought-after artist...

Pre-order A Dysfunctional Success from Rough Trade

Leisureland Tour part five

The rain stopped as I arrived in Manchester. I was an hour late because I’d underestimated the traffic. The load in at Gulliver’s is a nightmare - block a narrow one-way street while you get everything out of the car and through the door into a passageway leading to the toilets and the flight of stairs up to the venue. There’s usually no one to help you.

You can’t leave everything cluttering up a very public area of a busy pub while you drive off through the city centre in search of a parking space. You’ve got to get it all upstairs to safety. Guitars first, then the stuff that’s light enough and small enough to be walked away with. And the amplifier, a Fender Deluxe Reverb which seems to get heavier with each passing year. Once everything’s upstairs it’s time to face the honking of horns and the abuse of taxi drivers who thought they were taking a short cut.

Find a legal parking space, pay a lot of money for the privilage, walk back to the venue through the rain. The soundman’s put the amplifier on a box on a far corner of the stage and carefully miked it up. Waste of fucking time. He could have helped with the load-in instead.

I’m really annoyed by sound engineers who make assumptions. There are no assumptions to be made. There’s a tech spec, a pencil and ballpoint plan of the stage set up, and several paragraphs of clear instructions on every aspect of the sound. The drawing may not be one of those dry, corporate diagrams that supposedly professional outfits send out, but it has humanity, it’s real. Good engineers read it, understand, appreciate it, and act on it. The bad ones don’t bother. The mediocre ones glance at it and make assumptions.

It wasn’t actually that hard to do the load in if I’m honest because my friend Marc Valentine was opening so him and his friend Geoff who helps him out hiked everything up the stairs for me. I was glad of that because mid-tour fatigue was beginning to set in.

After the soundcheck I met up with Marc Riley and some friends for Indian food. He’d brought Will Sargeant from Echo & The Bunnymen along with him. I was kind of in awe but I played it cool and he was great, really nice, interested in stuff and engaged.

The Manchester showed was totally sold out, but sadly I don’t think it was one of my best. It was up to standard, but not stellar. The stage sound was very uninspiring - underpowered monitors - and the lighting was utterly abysmal. The promoter was away and the sound engineer who appeared to be in charge was young and insipid. I played half the show with the house lights on.

The following night in Hull was a totally different matter. The Wrecking Ball wasn’t easy to find - I had to drive the wrong way down a one way street and along a pedestianised street to get there, but it was worth it. The Wrecking Ball sells books, records and probably CDs too. It  has a cafe and they host book readings. Upstairs there’s a fully functioning venue: PA, lights, stage with red velvet curtain behind… And a young and enthusiastic sound engineer. I loved it.

Having finally reached the Spoilt Diva stage of my career I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t sell out - Bristol didn’t either - the two place where I went to art college…

I had a day off the following day so I met with my friend Kathie who years ago used to be my art history tutor at the art college in Hull. We decided to go on a quest to find the bench up near the university where I sat to scribble down the lyrics for Whole Wide World back in April or early May 1974. I realise it’s a slim chance that the bench would still be there but it was worth a look. It was raining and the night was coming down.but we drove around and had a look. It's changed in the intervening fifty years, I didn’t recognise anything. 

My feeling is that Hull should start to own that song - they’ve got Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey - David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars (formerly the Rats) ; they’ve got Roland Gift of The Fine Young Cannibals, Henry Priestman of The Yachts and The Christians; they’ve got The Housemartins, The Beautiful South, Throbbing Gristle, The Red Guitars. It’s impressive. They could have me too.

I don’t come from Hull - I wasn’t born there, but I started my development as an artist there, and I wrote Whole Wide World there. The song is not insignificant - I’d like some recognition from the city of Kingston Upon Hull. I figured that if we could find the bench we could at least put a brass plaque on it, but I want more - I want official recognition from the city.

I hope that doesn’t sound hopelessly arrogant, egotistical or unrealistic.

I made a detour on my way to Barnoldswick in Lancashire. I took up an open invitation to visit the East Lancashire Railway. A good few years ago I became aware of a woman called Emma Seddon on Instagram. Her posts were all photos of old trains. I love trains and she was posting a photo of one every day so of course I started to follow her. I wondered what the story was - trains have always been a bit of a boy thing - when it comes to steam locomotives most of the women I know are fairly ambivalent.

Eventually I met Emma and her partner, Andrew, at one of my shows. It seems she used to walk her dog alongside the railway line so she she started to take photos, and that led to jotting down numbers of diesel locomotives. Eventually the East Lancs Railway and Emma got together, and she went from curious dogwalker to volunteer to engine driver.

I have a huge affinity with trains - I was born next to the railway line in Newhaven, East Sussex. My earliest memories are the sound of shunting in the freight yard in the middle of the night. As a youth I spent hours hanging around railway lines. I used to make drawings of signal boxes, signals, those big old telephone and telegraph wires…

I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to walk around the sidings and through the engine sheds with Emma and Andrew. I even got a ride on a steam locomotive! I felt a bit guilty about that - my nine year old grandson should have been there. I recently offered to take him to the Aviation Museum in Norwich - you can climb into the cockpit of big old aeroplanes - they’ve even got a simulator. He declined the offer: ‘Thanks Grandad but I’m more of a train guy…’ He’s a lot more enthusiastic about the possibility of a trip to the East Lancs Railway.

The Music & Arts Centre in Barnoldswick was a lot of fun. It’s an awkwardly shaped basement under a pub, not ideal as a venue, but nonetheless quite wonderful, and it was packed.

I had a few days off after Barnoldswick. It was a relief, and much needed as it turned out because the next section of the tour was quite unrelenting.

Leisureland Tour part four

I remember feeling overwhelmed. The Prince Albert in Brighton was fuller than I’d ever seen it, even for other artists who aren’t me. I’m more used to a respectable forty-two people (or less). 

Then London. The Lexington. Again, sold out. Robert Rotifer opened for me. Acoustic guitar, snappy thirty-five minute set. He went down alarmingly well and came back into the band room glowing - ‘I LOVE your audience!’ he said. ‘I love them too,’ I said. I felt proud of all of us. 

Amy was there for Hastings, Brighton and London. I would have liked to have got her up on stage but it’s a very solo set I’ve been doing, a certain thing, not easy to bring another person into. Some of the point of it is its utter aloneness.

The audience in Hastings were rowdy and vocal, just along the coast in Brighton the audience were cooler - I began to worry that I was disappointing them, but afterwards the promoter, my old friend Will Moore, told me ‘those people weren’t ready for how good that was’.

The London audience is the London audience - there’s nothing like it anywhere else. I look out at the crowd and see people I know everywhere. They shout stuff in between songs. They’re willing me on even though they’re not going to give me an easy ride, not if they can help it. But they can’t help themselves, and neither can I. So much love, so much barracking and backchat. And pride. I’ve been playing for some of these people for so long, I’m theirs, and they’re mine, all mine. I don’t want to sound like an old show business fruit but I never seem to finish a London show entirely dry eyed.

I broke a string right near the end of the set - The Half Of It with it’s almighty freeform instrumental, the interlude between the first two halves and the the third half. It was touch and go with the fifth string broken and the sixth detuned to D. I have to wind the sixth back up to an E note while I’m singing, which is actually easier than you might imagine, as long as I’m singing in tune. I felt that everyone in the place wanted it to end well - we harnessed our combined powers and landed the thing together.

No encore - 

but if you think that what you see is what you get, you haven’t heard the half of it yet

And gone.

Except that there was an encore in Hastings - at least I think it was Hastings - I played Reconnez Cherie and Several Shades Of Green. So I’m not a complete curmudgeon. I just spoke to Amy and she said there wasn’t an encore in Hastings, she said I should have done one but I didn’t. I don’t mean to be churlish but it just seems like so much traditional bullshit to me. I’m trying to get to somewhere. When I arrive I land the thing, climb out of the cockpit, wave goodbye, and I’m gone.

Amy and I stayed in a Premier Inn near Gatwick Airport in Crawley. This one was tucked away in the grounds behind a desperate pub. It was hard to find because there were no lights - apparently Premier Inns don’t own the land and whoever does doesn’t like them. I don’t much like them either some days but I wouldn’t stoop to turning off the lights. The car park was a cross between a disused ornamental lake and a lorry park. This Premier Inn was no Shopfitters Paradise, more a Weary Traveller in The Land Of Rolling Suitcases. A large part of the reception was taken up by a flight departures board.

I think we checked out before check out time which always puts me out a bit. Amy had to fly to New York and I had to drive to Cardiff. But first an urgent mission to buy guitar picks. I’d almost run out - I was scrabbling around in the bottom of cases for unused picks. I discovered years ago that the major cause of string breakages is the serated edges of worn out picks, and also, that in order to achieve any measure of accuracy (hard for me at the best of times) it helps if the pick has a point to it rather than something resembling an aerial view of a coastally eroded headland. I use a new pick for every show and sometimes change it halfway through.

Once I'd got the picks and we'd had coffee at a surpisingly good place in Crawley I took Amy to the airport, said goodbye, and felt quite cast adrift as I headed up the M23 to the M25. The drive to Cardiff wasn’t so bad.

The Moon is in the heart of Cardiff Clubland. It’s run by a very capable woman called Liz Hunt. As a venue the place has challenges - the back of the stage is almost the entrance to the place, there’s no backstage or dressing room, a stone lump rises up out of the floor in front of the stage, and the soundcheck sound, through no fault of the engineer, teetered on the edge of catastrophic. Once the people were in it sounded great. I fell in love with the place. I like venues that rise above their shortcomings.

Simon Love opened the show. Simon is also on Tapete Records. He comes from Cardiff. It was all very relaxed after London. I watched Simon play from the shadows and thoroughly enjoyed his set. My own set had a wild roughness about it, probably a reaction after the focus, the eyes of the world effect of Brighton and London. At the end I walked off the back of the stage and didn’t know where to go so I kept on walking, straight out of the venue and onto the street. It was a balmy night and Clubland was just coming to life. It reminded me of Brighton in the late nineties. I walked around for a while taking it all in, then realised I should really head back and try to do some merchandising.

I stayed in a very upmarket Premier Inn. It catered for weddings and conferences. Imagine a Premier Inn themed wedding - all that purple…

The Bush Inn was as always an experience - I used an acoustic guitar amplifier with a microphone input as a PA. I think it sounded good. It’s a small place, an ancient and draughty country pub just along the cliffs from GCHQ. After the show TV Smith appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Turns out he lives in Devon. A bit strange because on Friday night I ran into Gaye Advert at my Lexington show.

I drove on to Bristol the following day - a Monday. It was back to Shopfitters Paradise - the Hengrove Premier Inn. A real home away from home. You may not like where you live but at least it’s familiar. No settling in, no nervous pacing, no moving of furniture. There’s a double bed made up like a tight envelope, a blackout curtain, a yellow sign in the bathroom - Caution Very Hot Water - a brown divan on which you can lay out your things. The divan often has a stain or two that would suggest its use as an auxiliary sex bench, but you can’t let these things put you off - it’s nice to see these indications of other peoples happiness. Sort of. (Better than a stain that looks like someone died and lay undiscovered on the floor next to the bed in a haunted boutique hotel that was formerly a lunatic asylum in Staunton, Virginia.) 

There’s a desk with tea making facilities on it, and two extra pillows in a case on the top shelf of the wardrobe thing. All you have to do is put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, loosen up the bed do you don’t have to sleep with you feet in a ballerina pose, break out the two extra pillows to give an illusion of homeliness, switch the light off and tell yourself it’ll be alright. And hopefully the next thing you know it’ll be eleven in the morning. 

Bristol was strange. The audience didn’t like it being seated, and I have to say, neither did I. Some places work seated, others don’t. Bristol is one of my standing up towns. The show went well though, and I loved having a real dressing room for a change.

The drive to Poole on Tuesday afternoon was a very wet affair. I broke with tradition and stayed in a Holiday Inn Express. I had to pay to park. They sent me a parking fine for being illegally parked in the time it took me to check in, register the car and pay for the parking. Very efficient.

La Boheme in Poole is my friend Sufin’ Dave’s local coffee place. It’s almost entirely unsuitable as a venue but it was great fun. I did two sets so as to give everyone a chance to move around a bit - the proximity was very close - there was almost no division between performer and audience. 

A woman sitting right in front had to keep moving her foot so I could switch my pedals on and off. I asked her in the intermission if she was okay with being so close and everthing, because at the Bush Inn I could sense the discomfort of a woman in the front row who wasn’t there for the second set, but this woman said she was very okay with it. Some people love the up close and personal thing, others can’t handle the intensity. 

And Poole was where I did the encore.

A strange and wonderful night in Poole