STOLEN SUN:

On a day like today I don’t mind, catching trains to
East London for tonight’s show – live score performance
to The Outer Edges film & a Kieran Evans DJ mashup till
midnight to enjoy. I get my kicks on channel 6, but sleep
waits for me on the back seat of a home bound car.
Catch you next at sunrise.

(K)

THE ROAD AHEAD:

Rehearsing in Essex with Peter Chilvers & Leo Abrahams
to perform the Outer Edges film score at the East End
Film Festival tomorrow. Laughter & a dog, the hiss & hum
of amps & a pot of coffee – one step at a time.

(K)

JACK & SOUTHERN:

At the end of another night on Jack & Southern Comfort
we would stagger out into the day clutching a reel of
tape filled with fresh songs. Edited down these would be
the next batch bound for the Guru, sent in the hope that
this time he would phone us enthusing,
“These are great, I’ve played them to the label & they
want to sign you – get down to London now!”
Things had changed, the band back home had folded, a night
of awkward conversation about musical differences fuelled
on demijohns of home made wine had finally finished us off.
I moved South to Cardiff, joined a cabaret band for the
Christmas season & having earned enough money to drink my
way through winter, left to join forces with a local
songwriter who turned up one night at my Butetown flat
(the one with mushrooms growing on the kitchen walls)
clutching a 335. I’d never seen one in the flesh & was
impressed enough to let him play me his songs. He had a
beautiful voice, could harmonise like angels & pick guitar
like Appellation moonshine was running through his veins.
Ross introduced me to Neil Young, Little Feat, Dylan &
The Band & got me hooked on the thrill of lock-in’s –
after-hour shopping for basement bootlegs.
“This guys alright, he’s with me” he’d say smiling, slipping
in a joke about the English, “…but this one’s ok.”
At the end of every Jack-n-Comfort session, the spiders would
crawl the walls as we wrapped our demo-tape in tinfoil &
brown paper, slipped between the ruby lips of the corner postbox
(recorded delivery).  

(K) 

BIRDMAN:

The Birdman told us stories about lying face down in winter sunrise,
binoculars up to the eyes watching curves cut the sky into poetry.
We logged on to his page & bathed in grey light when we were hot,
a long way from home, a long way from his Island. He connected us
with the images he posted, our spirits raised to find the things he
posted, a beauty in the real world we were too fast to notice.

(K)

WAKE UP CALL:

Saw the sunrise, gold, pink, a secret Essex landscape, close &
wrapped around us. Lap top in the kitchen with birdsong, writing
to invisible faces on the other side of the world. Some nights,
sleep sees you coming & takes off in the other direction,
we made a brief before it left. The phone rings, I wake up on
the sofa, check the name & smile. Three crows pose on the
grass outside, thick black swipes of ink strutting in white hot
sunlight. A voice describes a similar scene far to the north &
I have to laugh, it’s already a good day.

(K)

BIRD MAGNET:

I follow ‘Bird Magnet’ – on the back of a black satin jack
down into the underground on a hot day. The air is thick
with the smell of city bodies, rampant with looks & glances
as summer clothes give glimpses of the landscape beneath.

(K)

WINDY AT THE WICKET:

On the last day of summer term, the annual Staff/Pupil
cricket match was played on the town pitch in front of
school. To rapturous cheers, Windy strode out to the
crease dressed as his animated alter-ego in full regalia
– Straw hat, Wellies & a Farmers Smock. He raised his
bat & grinned, fully aware of the message he was sending
out to the whole school – he was one of us & we loved him.

(K)

THE FIRST RECORDING STUDIO IN THE WORLD:

Budgie was the youngest of three brothers who lived at
the garage in the valley below our house. It was the last garage
out of town on the road that carried steel trucks across the boarder
into North Wales. The old wooden workshops had been cleared to build
an modern brick box with huge wooden doors that could accommodate
everything from motorcycles to Lorries.The two brothers were chief
mechanics, they drove me to school in draughty LandRovers & huge
American station wagons whose footwells were strewn with car batteries
& old receipts. Budgie was two years above me in school & my best mate
during the intermediate years.
We watched silent films on an 8mm projector in his attic –
Tugboat Willie, the Keystone Cops, Laurel & Hardy, doing our own
voice-overs, always hoping that the next time we ran them the
characters would speak. We played with his racing car track, flogged
apples off his dad’s trees to passing motorists & every thursday
plotted up in front of the Tele with a bag of Iced-Gems for the weekly
ritual of ‘The Monkeys Show’.
Budgie had a 7 inch of ‘The Last Train To Clarksville’
(or maybe it was his brothers?),It opened with a great hook, the
melody was catchy with an infectious vocal style but I preferred the
other side because it ran backwards – the drums sucked instead of
pounded. We rode our bikes, messed around in the workshop addicted to
the sweet aroma of oil & rubber & annoyed his brothers, but best of
all, Budgie had ‘a reel-to-reel tape recorder’, a fabulous treasure,
dropped into our world from another dimension. Every week we would lock
ourselves in his room & record plays, comedy sketches, anything to make
us laugh & we roared until it hurt or his Mom banged the door for us to
shut up. We filled reels with the stuff, no ‘music’ that I can recall,
but hours of improvised dialogue & noises. I especially remember one of
those ‘life changers’ when we discovered it could run at different
speeds, opening up a jungle of wonders as we experimented with the
sounds everything in his Mom’s kitchen could make. We played these
noises back slowed right down to reveal concealed reverb worlds,
animal voices, creature howls & grunts, all made out of the most
mundane objects.
That little fat grey box with the Phillips logo, an object way beyond
my family’s pocket, looked at me & winked.

(K)

WINDY MILLER:

We were fourteen when the maths teacher got the boot.
He was our favourite, the one who got us hooked on
a subject that had always been a drag – he made it
cool & we took to it like friday night fish n chips.
The Guru had already set us on course & now the Maths
teacher was about to nail it in place forever.
Hi name was Miller, but we called him ‘Windy’ after
that little animated fella in Camberwick Green.
He was small, vibrant, younger than the rest & we
welcomed him like one of our own.
It all started in year one when he took a bunch of us
eleven year olds camping, pitched up on the grass
at the back of school, a week of miserable rain, soaked to
the skin. He got keys to school & let us watch tv
on the permanently padlocked industrial until concealed
behind the theatre curtain – he bent the rules for us,
made us feel like his mates, he had our loyalty for ever.
We played table tennis & scared each other with ghost stories
late at night, huddled in our sleeping bags up on stage.
Then he took to the cinema – how cool was that for maths?
2001 A Space Odyssey – Kidderminster ABC – a dream come true,
I’d seen the poster & tried impressing girls with my fake
knowledge of the plot. Nothing prepared me for the life changing
experience of seeing that film from the back row of the flea pit.
Did my mates see what I saw? – maybe not. They went on to be,
farmers, mechanics, engineers, designers, bikers, drinkers
& Salvation Army Officers, but that night I heard things
I’d never heard before the choral works of’Gyorgy Ligeti’.

I made my Mom take me back again in the week, bored her to
death with the longest film on Earth, just to sit in the dark,
life forever changed by the sound of those beautiful discordant
angels.

At the end of year three, we heard Windy was gone, booted out
or asked to leave for some undisclosed indiscretion – a storm
of whispers. He stood at his classroom door as we lined up to
leave, shook every one of us by the hand, looked us straight
in the eye & passed on a quiet personalised message to us all.
I couldn’t bare it, wanted to run, throw a desk through the window
& cut off across the fields, but then, he had my hand, looked me
in the eye, smiled & whispered,
“Don’t give up the music”

(K)     

STEPPIN 1,2,3,:

One foot down in front the other, movin’.

(K)