22.1.22 There Are Books

 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 I could be wrong. We watched as their first album came out and made it the soundtrack to yeti early days of our marriage. I watched as the band slimmed down to a four piece and became just The Tambourines in the very early 90s. They were equally excellent.

Then there was Steve's solo album It Just Is with the sublime From Speke To Waterloo which described a journey I made home from work a thousand times. 

Facebook gave me the chance to speak to him online, a gig in a Waterloo bookshop the chance to speak in person. Social media really does have its highpoint, doesn't it? There was a Tambourines reunion gig in the Arts Club then a Sixteen Tambourines reunion in 81 Renshaw, the same room that he played this afternoon.

81 Renshaw was a cafe, then a cafe bar, then a cafe/bar/record shop. With a performance space in the back. It's now a record shop in its entirety. An excellent record shop. The performance space fell victim to the fact that Covid took away performances and became a second hand section. That's where today's gig situated itself; a show in support of Steve's new album (picture above) which is released on Nine x Nine Records. Because the shop and the venue grew to be a record label. 

81 Renshaw is the first place that my first play ever played. It's important to me. Neil, who owns both shop and label, put our band on in a venue in the eighties, I still have the contract on that one. And the room above the shop itself used to house the offices of Bill Harry's Mersey Beat.

Connections all over the place.

Steve works in a bookshop now, a second hand bookshop in Glossop and this is where the new album comes from; it's an album that started as an Arts Council supported project - a suite of songs about books, about bookshops, about what they mean to people.

Today was six songs from the album (the ones that work on an acoustic guitar) preceded by an appropriate reading of Elvis Costello's Every Day I Write The Book (I'm sure there should be parentheses in that title by I can't be bothered checking) and followed by older material including the above mentioned Speke To Waterloo and songs from both the earliest days of Sixteen Tambourines and their forthcoming album, the first in three decades. 

There's Kinks-ian pop, Beatle-esque pop, sixties inflected, eighties inflected and it's all bloody lovely. The two that got me today? Got me on the edge of tears on a sober Saturday afternoon?

An Old Bookshop which summarises the importance of old books to people; the joy of picking up a bargain, the beauty of owning something that had owners before you, that was special to somebody else, that was loved. 

I have on my bookshelf 'The Oxford Companion To Music. It's from 1950, I bought it in a charity shop in Formby, cost me a fiver. I'll never read it. On the first page is signed the name Anthony Connolly. I don't know who he is or was, don't know anything about him but we're currently connected. There's a book  received a couple of days ago via eBay, a biography. It's for something I may be working on and it cost more than your usual paperback. It's important for what it may become, and important for the fact that the inside page is inscribed, in small letters in the top right corner 'To David, With Luv, Joy x'

That's beautiful. Simple and unknown.

The other song? 'Books That Break Your Heart'. Because there are books that break your heart due to the connections they give you. At noon I was in my mum's, looking at the bookshelf with my dad's books on it: books on LFC, on Ali, on boxing, on football. I know exactly what this song meant.

Songs about books in a record shop that's a record label, that holds gigs, that I've had theatre performed in, that had a direct link to the music of the past when it was the music of the present.

These are time machines.