Mumbling Into The Void (slight return)

 So. The last Monday lunchtime in January and where do we find ourselves? (I was asking myself exactly this question last night, decided one of my more admin-y jobs for today will be to review the diary and list what I actually *did*. It's going to be either more or less than I thought/think/planned/expected but it's important to know where you're up to. What's the point of having goals if you don't know where you are?) The world outside the front door then. Bit windy but we escaped the worst of the predicted 90mph gales. Sounded a bit wild outside the bedroom window last night but - as with snow - being coastal seems to keep us from the worst of most things. I've no idea if that last sentence is even vaguely meteorically sound. The existence of a massive storm across America's East Coast would suggest that I've no idea what I'm talking about. Which is nothing new. And weather kind of falls within geography doesn't it? I paid very little attentio...

 It was The Eggpod that did it. The 'I Am There Eggpod' podcast to be precise. It's a wonderful thing, a constantly good listen. If you're into The Beatles (as you should be). If you're not then it's possibly less necessary for you. The year began with the idea on The Eggpod that guests would talk their way through Get Back on a daily basis. On the day it happened. 53 years later, obviously; we're in 2022, they're very much in 1969. Though it doesn't necessarily feel that way. The thing we know from Get Back is that 'The Four Lads Who Shook The World' are  ow eternally captured in every detail of their mid to late twenties (none yet turned thirty, George Harrison 25. Which is ridiculous.) Young men, growing up, trying to figure what the next bit is. Hard enough at any time, but when you're the most famous people on the planet. So I decide that I'd join in with this idea. Watch Get Back daily, on the day. Told J I was going to do that....

 It's the two weeks between meeting J and ringing her to ask her out on a date. I'd met her on the Friday; with friends in the Black Bull in Walton Vale, J and Jo walk in, J works with my mate. So we meet. We (the five of us) drink in the Bull, we drink in the Black Horse, we end up in The State. And somewhere in all that, the two of us start a conversation. I tell her I've just quit my job in an insurance office and got a job in a record shop. She tells me I don't want to work in a record shop, I tell her it's too late, I start Monday. I spend two weeks writing master bags: it's the old days, you don't put the record out in the racks, you put the sleeves out in a PVC sleeve, fit a cardboard square where the vinyl would be. The vinyl goes in a 12" cardboard sleeve behind the counter, artist, titled, record label, catalogue number and date last received written on it. Customer brings Robert Cray's Strong Persuader to the counter, you pull the master ...

 Cat update, since I know that's what you're really here for.  I have a pretty nice acoustic guitar built by Simon & Patrick, a Canadian firm of luthiers (all wood sourced from within a fairly tight radius of their factory), it's a lovely sound, a lovely feel, built in a Martin style (for those of you that need reference) but significantly more affordable. It comes in a nice bag. Which the cat has now realised she can climb up. The Strat case? The Ric case? Too smooth. The S&P bag? Yeah you can really get your claws into that. So that's what I'm dealing with/fending off while writing this. I've been in here with her for fifty minutes now, might be another hour. Once J's call has ended she has to write it up. And the cat loves walking across laptop keys. And phones. Almost wiped Spotify from J's iPhone at 9am. So the living room's out of bounds for a while. And I need to move this guitar case. All I really want to do is keep updating twitter t...

 I stopped caring about the views. I can see the stats, I can see the difference between days and there is neither rhyme nor reason for the swings. Though it seems clear that putting up a second photo of Matt Monro wasn't massively popular. Here you go then, here's some Radiohead. Let's see how that goes down: Okay, you could argue that it's not really Radiohead; it's Radiohead doing a cover. But it's Radiohead back when there was a definite sense of playfulness to them. I could be wrong but I couldn't see them doing this as a laugh on live TV now, they seem to have become far too serious. There's a reason to this one. We'll come to it. I've just been over to the square. Which makes Netherton sound far more gentrified than it actually is. I think I may have written about this before so I won't go into detail again. (There are times when I feel then urge to tell people from outside Liverpool that I was born in a small fishing village on the ba...

Start from nowhere and see where we go again. I've just been listening to the Yard Act album on Apple. People whose views I respect tell me it's fantastic. I'm not seeing it yet, I'm giving it another spin. I like it, like. It's good. It's clearly good. But not earth shaking. It's not doing anything I haven't heard elsewhere in other forms.  But that opinion may change. And not everything needs to be earth shattering. If it did, I wouldn't have been talking about Matt Monro would I?  (There's something in the way I type that surname. It constantly comes out as MOnro and I have to edit. As anyone will attest, I'm not interesting in editing myself, in speech or writing.) I nearly spoke about another Matt MOnro album yesterday (See? It's done it again. Or I've done it again. Blaming the keyboard for my typing is like believing that VAR is a system rather than a bloke in front of a telly who just happens to be about as good at his job as ...

 This could get quite random: I've started writing and I have no idea what I'm going to be writing about. I've currently got a playlist going on Apple Music. It started as Songs From The Cosmos, the pre-show 'tape' that I set up for the first performance of A Brief Conversation About The Inevitability Of Love last July.  As ever, I wanted some mood music round the show. And, as ever, I wanted to hint at the themes of the show within the playlist. Nobody knew what the story was about before entering, nobody would know what the story was 'actually about' until about 50 minutes in. But I wanted to put everything that mattered into the playlist. Some Springsteen, some Tom Waits, Paul Buchanan, Nick Drake, Bowie, Professor Yaffle, Chrissie Hynde. I'm listening to this playlist because I'm having a conversation with a theatre company in London about it later this week. Getting ready for the conversation, needed the mood music to be just right. And when the...

 Back in the late seventies, in the aftermath of punk and the reality of post-punk (we're obviously going to return to this period from time to time, I was a teenager, it's a pretty formative era) Ste Beb and I used to find his mum's taste in music ridiculous and old fashioned. (His mum was Edna, I remember her as being lovely). She listened to Matt Monro. But that's okay, she was old. Let's be honest she was probably significantly younger than I am now ands I'm still occasionally convinced that I remain quite young. But then there are mirrors. And they swiftly disavow you of any delusion of youth. Anyway. Matt Monro. The singing bus conductor they called him (I believe, as ever, could be wrong on that). They also called him the British Sinatra. Which is much kinder. We were listening to Fischer-Z with their single The Worker and its 'wonderful' B-side 'Kitten Curry'. In fairness, they were both pretty damn decent songs. For the time. And I haven...

 So I'm leaving 81 Renshaw after yesterday's afternoon gig (those of you on twitter knew about this at tea time yesterday, if you're on Facebook you'll be under the impression I couldn't be arsed as it was a weekend - simple truth is I hadn't checked whether the post had actually posted, so now I know where the readership comes from. Clue - not Twitter) - - and I have a browse. I can't help it, it's nature, it's how I'm built, how I'm wired. I manage once again to not buy the vinyl copy of John Cale's Music For A New Society with a simple, "You don't really need it, not at the moment, how much did you send on that book yesterday?" It's not a matter of finance, or of perceived value, it's an acknowledgement of obsession and an addiction to getting the next thing. Bought something new and shiny and wonderful? Sound, what's the next thing you think you need? Wonder why I don't do drugs? It's that. It's t...

 I'd kind of decided at the start of this that I wouldn't include any albums made by anybody that I actually knew in the real world, to any extent. For loads of reasons, mostly that you can't be objective about the work of people you know and like. And I'm in this great position where I know and like lots of people who make music. Who make really good music.  I've just got in from an afternoon out. An afternoon gig. Which is a rarity. An afternoon gig with no beer. Which is unheard of. I first came across Steve Roberts in the late eighties. 87 I think, Sixteen Tambourines playing live in a small bar on Cumberland Street called Rudi's; a wonderful place where you could get in late if you were recognised, a place that made you feel exclusive. Sixteen Tambourines played on a small dance floor to a packed audience in a sweaty club and were utterly excellent.  We (me and J) saw them again a few times after that. I have a feeling I saw them play in The Harrington but ...

 Obviously not what I intended to write today and I couldn't claim to be a devotee of the artist but the loss of Meat Loaf is such a sad moment that I've got to talk about it. I don't own much by him - Bat Out Of Hell, Bat Out Of Hell II, the Greatest Hits album from around the turn of the century. That basically gave me all I needed, the two obvious albums, the big hit single from Dead Ringer and the oddly wonderful tune from Lloyd Webber's Whistle Down The Wind that Westlife (or Boyzone, one of the two, they're fairly interchangeable in my mind) had a hit with a vastly inferior version of. Same song but Meat put his personality all over it. And his was always a music that lived on personality. (J on a call in the living room at the moment, I'm playing Bat extremely quietly, which is very very wrong and might actually be a criminal offence. I'm also on cat duty and me and the kitten have just had a conversation about how we definitely don't claw records...

This is the return to Ben Webster that I promised. (Yesterday/ A Couple of days ago?) This is me saying that I'll return to something that I was going to talk about and actually doing it. Treasure this moment, it's quite rare. I am, if you hadn't already noticed, easily distracted. Hence the endless asides. And asides within asides.  This is how writing tends to work. This is how *part of* writing tends to work. For me. Others will have their own rhythms and rituals, I can only talk about mine. It's all about the music. The music has to be right. If the music's not right then nothing's happening.  A couple of days ago I was revisiting the script for The Comeback Special; putting some new lines in, changing and removing some old lines that just don't work as they used to. We live in a different world now. The Trump and Farage gags still work though. Which is an appalling indictment of the world at large and its tendency to tolerate appalling little men as lon...

 Note to self: yesterday was about a single, it played at 45rpm, change the speed. Full on John Peel "this one plays at 33" moment there. Which didn't benefit Michael Stipe in any way at all. "We're REM, from Athens Georgia. This one's new." They were all new, we knew nothing about them other than the whispers that were coming out in the music papers. (Aside: J's on a video call in the living room, Daisy's in with me; she's currently hiding either under the banjo on its stand or behind the Rickenbacker in its case. Both are worrying me. i am, quite ironically, having kittens here. See what I did there? Dad jokes all over the place.) REM were one of the groups that made me want to own a Rickenbacker. These and The Church more than The Jam or The Beatles strangely enough.  Back to the point. The radio wasn't playing REM in 83. Not that I recall. (Another aside, I'm writing this while watching/listening to PMQs - we've just had a Tor...

  It's not often that the record deck gets turned to 45rpm - singles involve work, involve swivelling round in the chair and turning the vinyl over. I'm far too lazy for that and the music doesn't last long enough to get this written in the space of listening to it - which isn't a rule for this thing but it's nice when it happens. This though? I've got about 15 boxes of vinyl in the loft dating back about 47 years in total (plus stuff I've bought later that's from much earlier - if that's not too grammatically awkward) and a crate on the floor next to my guitars at the side of this desk. Obviously the crate is overflowing and there's a small stack of vinyl sat next to it, another handful sitting on top. This was in the crate. It wasn't what I was looking for, it wasn't what I thought I was writing about (a Ben Webster album I'll definitely come to at some point) but my hand rested on it and I thought, "That's today." Fiv...

I was listening to a podcast 'from The Word' earlier. It's the first podcast I ever really listened to, dating back to the days when 'The Word' was the best music magazine on the market (and clearly aimed at a demographic that could best be summed up as... well, me) and its editors David Hepworth and Mark Ellen - late of Q, Smash Hits, The Old Grey Whistle Test and presenting Live Aid thereby being in the room at the moment when Bob Geldof genuinely didn't say, "Give us the fucking money" moved into the then new world of talking about things in a format that could be consumed when the listener fancied it. So it's basically been running a long time. And this week's edition covered the idea of National Anthems and could they possibly be a little more up beat? They posited pieces of music that might possibly be more uplifting than the current dirge and may connect more to the general public than the glorification of a person we'll never encoun...