The Clerkenwell Kid

GOING GAGA AT CHRISTMAS

2011-12-06T21:05:00.000Z

It has felt a strange year in many ways. But then it always has and it always will won't it? I have been avoiding the West End (well, apart from Blacks obviously) because they turned the Christmas lights on in October - which I found vaguely depressing. I like the rituals of winter, like brussel sprouts and tangerines, to be kept well within December, don't you? The frenzied combination of commerce, over-sentimentality and genuine nostalgia can drive you quite Christmas crackers.

Speaking of which, The Real Tuesday Weld have made their annual little audio seasonal greetings card as they now do every year. You can get one, or several, here if you like. Making them has become a regular pleasure. They have almost become mini albums and I often think it would be nice to just make mini albums.The artwork is drawn from Alex De Campi's miraculous film "Tear Us Apart".

There is a version of Poker Face by Lady Gaga for whom I have a certain regard after she sent her bodyguard to assist me when I slipped on a half-eaten avocado on 42nd Street in 2007. It's for my friend David Piper who is Gentleman Gaga.

I received an extremely nice early Christmas present myself today from my friend especially talented spillyjane . A knitted version of myself - or rather two knitted versions of myself in wool. It felt like one more fortunate event in a fortunate year. I'm very appreciative of it all.

THE LONDON BOX

2011-11-27T20:05:00.001Z

For the collector of London arcana, esoterica or ephemera there can surely be no greater prize than the box of Joanna Southcott. I've been on several wild goose chases following a lead or alerted by an informant as to its potential whereabouts. It was last definitively seen sometime early last century and although several boxes have subsequently been claimed to be it, most of us who take an interest in such things believe it has long vanished.

Most lately, the strange object shown in the photo oposite was suggested as a possible contendor. It was uncovered recently in Bermondsey - one of Ms Southcott's places of residence during her time in London - and it is indeed a strange thing. But by the time I got down there to check, the contents, if there had ever been any, had been plundered. I recognised a couple of other treasure hunters lurking suspiciously in the vicinity so obviously I wasn't the only one to take an interest in this particular suspect. They are curious bunch these treasure hunters: secretive; competitive; suspicious; devious; pretending to be helpful whilst covertly putting others off the trail and guarding their clues with the paranoia of cold war spies . The only one I can respect, never mind stand to be with, is the unofficial City of London archivist Leonard Wise.

Dr Wise doubts the Bermondsey box was Joanna Southcott's and disputes the claims of The Panacea Society who say that they are in possession of the genuine article. He thinks it either remains hidden or was possibly opened by Churchill shortly before the Battle of Britain in the second world war. He remains reluctant to be drawn on whether it might have influenced the outcome of that particularly decisive incident.

Joanna Southcott, 'the Bride of Christ', was either an outrageous fraud or the holiest of women depending on who you believe. She proclaimed herself the cekestial woman spoken of in Revelations chapter 12 and amassed a huge band of followers including many men of letters and influence such as Byron who believed fervently in her prophecies and powers. Dying shortly after a phantom pregnancy of which she was supposed to give birth to 'Shiloh' the new Messiah, her legacy lived on in the continued faith of her followers and in the box she sealed and left to posterity. She was undoubtedly a very strange, charismatic person and like many such, I believe both a genuine seer and an inveterate imposter:

"While all through thy wondrous days,
Heaven and Earth enraptur'd gaz'd..."

So what is the treasure her box was reputed to contain? Well no one actually knows but it is claimed that amongst the contents were prophecies sufficient to save England in a time of grave peril. From the early twentieth century through to the 1970s, various campaigns have been mounted by Joanna Southcott's followers including The Panacea Society to have it opened, and understandably so, England has probably been in its gravest peril to date during that period. But the box is only supposed to be opened in the presence of 24 bishops: not an easy thing to arrange and the reason often cited by The Panacea Society as to why they have not opened the box in their possession.

Whether you believe in such stuff or not, the genuine box would be a very interesting ad valuable curiosity. I have gathered some fairly reliable descriptive details of it over the last few years and have occasionally felt myself to be fairly close on its trail. I will of course keep you informed should it turn up. And I would request that you would let me know if you ever come across any clues to its whereabouts yourself.

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In the meantime, here apropos of nothing in particular is The Real Tuesday Weld's cover version of Malvina Reynold's Little Boxes

THE JAZZ DETECTIVE

2011-11-21T10:58:00.001Z

I recently discovered that a member of The Real Tuesday Weld has been moonlighting. He is a good friend of mine but I was quite shocked and slightly thrilled to learn that he has been leading a double-life - undercover as it were: conducting investigations; engaging with witnesses and soundtracking the results in the most noirish-way possible

He runs his covert operations from a secret unit in Waterloo but he has opened an online bureau of investigation right here. Step carefully though - he is rather trigger happy and prone to arresting suspects and sympathisers alike on the slightest provocation.

ME AND MR WOLF

2011-11-16T11:46:00.001Z

It gives me very great pleasure and pride to be be able to announce the release into the wild, wild woods of the internet, George and Monica Fort's animated Noir masterpiece "Me and Mr Wolf" . It has been made for The Real Tuesday Weld grown up fairytale song of the same name from the album "The Last Werewolf" and is a duet with the wonderful Ms Piney Gir.

It is the third and final part of the trilogy George and Monica have animated following 'The Show Must Go On' and 'Kix'.

We'll be performing live to it in upcoming shows. If you like it, I'd really appreciate it if you would send it out to as many people as possible or post on Facebook, Twitter and so on.

We think George is a genius and we would like the world know.

CITY OF THE DEAD

2011-10-26T22:01:00.003+01:00

I wandered down to St Pauls the other day to see the protestors camped next to its churchyard. I sympathise with them but it is rather unfortunate that their presence has caused the Cathedral to be closed for the first time since the Second World War.
I do like the fact that the Churchmen and the protestors have been engaged in lively debate - I have often felt the building and the hill upon which it sits to be one of the major psychic centres of London, if not of England. One of the reasons for this and a circumstance that those camping there may not be aware of is the number of dead bodies upon which it sits.

When Christopher Wren started digging after the Great Fire which destroyed the old cathedral, he discovered layer upon layer of corpses - a compete corporeal cross section through the city's history with recent burials placed over mediaeval graves piled upon the chalk coffins of the Saxons heaped on the pinned shrouds of Dark Age Britons stacked over Roman urns. Doubtless if he had been able to keep going he would have found prehistoric remains - Ludgate Hill is after all said to have been the site of a Neolithic stone circle. He may have eventually even come upon the mythical bodies of the giants Gog and Magog long lost in legend.

London is a teetering Necropolis, a veritable honeycomb of the dead. Countless thousands lie here beneath our feet - one reason no doubt that the present city is almost five meters higher than its Roman counterpart. Until inner city burials were banned in the mid nineteenth century, everyone who died here was squashed into often tiny parochial cemeteries adjacent to churches. Even before the horrors of the Black Death and its plague pits, tales abound of body parts being visible just below thin layers of soil in the churchyards, bodies piled upon each other in cellars, left lying in the streets or just thrown into the Thames. Nowadays of course it's quite costly to even get a place in one of 'The Great Gardens of Sleep" the Victorians built in a ring around the city to stop all that. Accomodation has always been a problem here - even for the dead.

At this time of year, they sleep lightly it is said. I trust there will be a few souls floating around at The Real Tuesday Weld's All Hallows show at Westminster library on Saturday . The building has its own ghosts of course - it is Isaac Newton's old house after all. If I won't see you there and as we are speaking of the afterlife, I hope you enjoy this little film made a little while ago for the song "Heaven Can't Wait"

And to quote Orson Welles:

"Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past.

"Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it?

Go on Singing!"
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(The image above is from the wonderful Minotaur exhibition at Waterloo Tunnels)

LOVE ON THE PAVEMENT

2011-10-06T12:48:00.002+01:00

In recent weeks, a message has appeared on the pavements of Vauxhall and Albert Bridges.

It says "I think I am it. If you are too, come to South Quay DLR". One would guess that it has been painted by one who has have fallen in love with another on the way to work and harbours the belief that love is reciprocated. My grasp of graphology is good enough to know the writer is male so we can assume HE followed the beloved (gender unknown) and left a message where he knew they would see it - probably on the way home. It is rather strange because it would seem far more effort to do all that than to just go up to the person in question and start talking to them. But love know no logic does it?

There is of course a noble tradition of romance on bridges - right back to Dante getting his first peek at Beatrice on the Ponte Vecchio in 1300 and dedicating his life to her honour. Their love was never consumated of course - I believe she thought him somewhat of a wimp and there was always a Mrs Dante and some mini Dantes waiting for Dad back at home.

London provides endless scope for the romantic imagination - yet another reason not to live in the country I would have thought. This is particularly true when you are falling into or being pushed out of love. The city is soaked with the stains and traces of love lost and love found: particular districts become associated with a particular person or a particular time; a broken heart can lend significance to the most ordinary of bus stops; an intensity of feeling amplify some dismal corner to the level of that bridge in Florence. Holborn tube reeks with the scent of a million assignations.

Such urban love can make fools of us. For a while I couldn't deal with West Kensington at all and found even buying a ticket for the district line poignant yet Dalston retains a certain romantic air in the imagination in spite of its grubby appearance. Once lost in some amorous madness, I saw a man walk through the wall of Russell Square tube, a sun-lit stream flowing through a concrete car-park behind Grays Inn Road. There is a bench in Soho square I have not been able to sit on since a friend told me he had sex on it ...with my ex. For months, I was absolutely convinced a certain person was about to turn into the street ahead of me and things would be alright. They never did, and now I am glad of it.

I wrote a song about such things a while ago. It was released with Joe Coles singing - but here is the orginal with yours truly.

As for our friends on the bridge above, It is conceivable that they may be together now. Or perhaps the wrong person read the message and turned up and it all worked out anyway. That would be a nice ending to this story - but if they are together or even if they are not, I hope someone remembers to come back and clean the pavement - just in case.

THE GREAT MYTHOGRAPHER

2011-09-09T10:38:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed listening to Peter Ackroyd read and be interviewed last night. He is a neighbour psycho-geographically speaking and an undoubtedly impressive personage, The event was to mark the publication of the first volume of his "History of England". An eccentric workaholic loner, a legendary storyteller, a lover of London and England's cultural heritage, he is a bulky man and is starting to remind me somewhat of Winston Churchill. He is very funny in a dry sort of way and whilst a popular (and populist) writer remains seemingly indifferent to the great affection in which he is held. In contract to his slim and enthusiastic interviewer, his demeanour oscillated between that of an impatient headmaster and a cornered badger about to bolt. Throughout, he appeared keen to leave and get back to his writing - as well he might, having another FIVE volumes of the history to get through before its putative completion in 2024.

He generally responded to questions with an economy bordering on irascibility. One audience member asked one of those long, self important questions which was really a lengthy assertion of their own cleverness followed by the preposterous enquiry "Of the tens of thousands of facts in your book, how many would you stand up for in court and attest were definately true?"

"None." barked Peter and turned to the next questioner.

The interviewer had a bit more luck teasing information out and asked what we were all dying to know: "How on earth do you manage it?". (His output is prodigious and beginning to rival that of his literary hero Dickens: novels; biographies; the histories; poems; essays - he just keeps pouring them out). His response managed to be both simultaneously indignant and poignant:

"I haven't got anything else to do." he said and left it that.

He evidently has a taste for the macabre. His reading had all been about the gruesome crimes and punishments of the mediaeval period and he left us with some very entertaining and insightful thoughts on the recent London riots, slavery and celebrity TV historians. I thought at one point he almost came out as a potential cross-dresser.

A final question from the floor asked what sort of person London would be like if it had a being of its own - as seems to be implied by the title of his seminal work "London: a Biography". Whilst he was mulling this over, I looked around and guessed that a few of audience were probably thinking what I was thinking.

It would be like Peter Ackroyd.

QUEEN MOB

2011-09-01T10:35:00.001+01:00

During the recent London riots, I happened to be far away on the Scottish island of Skye so I cannot recount any personal experiences of the mayhem. However, I couldn't help but notice that in the acres of news coverage and analysis, almost nothing has been said about London's long history of rioting.

We often talk of such events in a shocked 'what is the world coming to?!' sort of way when in fact they are not a new phenomenon at all or even particularly unusual.

There have always been riots here - often politically motivated in response to some injustice - but often just for the hell of it. Boudicca kicked off the former, kind with a very heavy assault on Roman Londinium after the rape of her daughters. She and her followers pretty much burned the town down and massacred the entire population with some pretty gruesome tortures before being finally brought down near KIngs Cross. Amongst the others like the anti-Catholic Gordon riots and the anti-racist Brixton riots several started here in dear old Clerkenwell which, despite today's complacent cappucino drinkers, was once a hotbed of political activism. Check out the Karl Marx memorial library if you fancy a bit more of that.

But the thing which really bothered us this time was the looting, burning and the murders. The bourgeoise are terrified of gangs: when property is your main concern, the mob seem the biggest threat. We generally have the welfare state to keep that at bay of course but it has always broken out now and again. As a fan of West Side Story, I have always had a certain sneaking sympathy for gangs and of course it's worth remembering that many of the seventeenth and eighteenth century London gangs - the Mohocks, the Hawkubites, the Nickers, the Scowerers. the Hectors - were posh, vicious rich boys who loved ripping it up and violating the poor. The Mohocks were a particularly nasty bunch - they used to love catching people, mutilating them and rolling them in a barrel down Snow Hill just south of here. Ouch. I have rolled down Snow Hill myself a couple of times after late nights in Smithfield and I can tell you, that really must have hurt.

Here is John Gay on the subject:

From Mohock and from Hawkubite,

Good Lord deliver me,

Who wander through the streets at nigh

Committing cruelty.

They slash our sons with bloody knives,

And on our daughters fall;

And, if they murder not our wives,

We have good luck withal.

The Gordon rioters graffited the walls of Newgate prison with the slogan "His Majesty King Mob" a name more recently taken up by pre-punk situationist pranksters in West London in the 1970s. One of their slogans would have easily subtitled last months excitement:

"I don't believe in nothing - I feel like they ought to burn down the world - just let it burn down baby"

Boudiccea is a heroine now of course. You can see her in full vengeful flight on the embankment opposite the houses of parliament. She, the original anti-establishment figure, has become the establishment epitome of vigorous Englishness.

GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT

2011-08-24T09:33:00.000+01:00

My old friend and collaborator Alex Budovsky genius author of Bathtime in Clerkenwell, Brazil and many other wild and wonderful creations moved from New York to Bogota a little while back. "What's a Russian doing in Columbia?" you might ask a little suspiciously. Well, amongst other crazy things he directed this delightful little animation by Olga Gonina. They very kindly asked yours truly to contribute both the music and the voice over and yours truly was pleased to accept.

TUNNELS, TELEPORTATION AND THE EXPLODED HEART

2011-08-22T15:45:00.001+01:00

My investigations into the Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi and the London teleportation system seem to have provoked some interest and have been bearing unexpected fruit. Thanks for the messages - especially the one in heiroglyphs.

A recent correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous put me on the trail of Bonomi's sponsor the gambler and occultist Lord Kilmorey (also known as 'Black Jack' Needham). Black Jack became infamous for eloping with Priscilla Hoste who although once his young ward, became the love of his life. Although much younger than he, his love appears to have been reciprocated but the scandal of the affair or the strangeness of his arcane rituals (which had seen his separation from two previous wives) proved too much of a strain on her and she died. Whether she expired during one of their love rituals or not, she certainly passed on prematurely of an 'exploded heart' - cementing the reputation of Black Jack as a demon lover.

Wracked with grief and guilt at his loss, he consulted with his fellow occultist Bonomi in the hope of finding a way to re-animate the dead girl or at least to be able communicate with her. Bonomi instructed the architect Henry Edward Kendall in the construction of an Egyptian mausoleum and covered it with heiroglyphs dedicating it to Osiris concerning the journey of the soul through the afterlife. The mausoleum was initially constructed in Brompton Cemetery near the Courtoy tomb described beneath but extraordinarily, the whole edifice was subsequently 'moved' - first to Chertsey and then to the grounds of Gordon House in Isleworth where it stood hidden for many years. Whether this movement was by means of horse and cart or was a successful example of Bonomi and Warner's teleportation techniques, I leave you to decide.

It has been speculated that the mausoleum was intended to be a 'master' teleportation chamber which somehow controlled the grid of other chambers located in each of the cemeteries which ring London. Certainly Black Jack had a hidden tunnel built linking it to Gordon House and was said to dress in white, lay in a coffin and be wheeled by his servants through the tunnel to be left with the deceased Priscilla. Whether he did this so he could attempt to communicate with his dead love or to teleport on a discreet journey into town, who now knows?

TEAR US APART

2011-08-10T19:07:00.000+01:00

The Real Tuesday Weld have produced a new film - and again it is by their old friend and collaborator Alex De Campi. This time it is a rather wonderful stop motion fairytale featuring an archetypal hero (the spaceman) and an archetypal heroine (the fairy girl). There is also a strange dream sequence with a wolf and a deer. You will have to talk to Alex if you want to understand more about this but I understand that it is her interpretation of the song "Tear Us Apart" from the "The Last Werewolf" soundtrack.

The song seems to me to be an inversion of the normal romantic lyric which blames love for the pain we feel in love affairs - "love will tear us apart", "only love can break your heart" etc - putting the blame firmly back on the lovers themselves - or the dark secret lover, the evil twin, the monster inside each that cannot resist causing trouble or destruction.

You can see the film here

This for me is the metaphorical message of the werewolf myth.

And you?

A STITCH IN TIME

2011-07-29T17:30:00.000+01:00

Speaking of Egypt and time travel and being rather long lived myself, I have long been fascinated by the notion of time capsules and in particular the one hidden in London's 'Cleopatra's needle' on the Victoria embankment. The needle itself is obvious but few people know about the time capsule. It was placed there by the occultist Joseph Bonomi (see below) just before his death in an early attempt at Cryonics.

Amongst the collection of typically odd time capsule items (including photographs of the good looking English women of the day, a box of hairpins (why?), tobacco pipes, a set of weights, a baby's bottle (why?!!), some toys, a razor, coins, a picture of Queen Victoria, a history of the strange tale of the monument, a translation of its inscriptions, a map of London and various daily newspapers), Bonomi included a vial of his blood and possibly and rather gruesomely, a piece of his flesh in a cigar box together with magical instructions written on vellum. It didn't save him - in fact, the reputed curse of the needle may have precipitated his untimely end almost immediately afterwards but he firmly believed that beings would exist in the future who would be able to re-incarnate him from his tissue. This may seem ludicrous but many people who are not blessed with longevity are still doing this sort of thing. You can visit the Cryonics society here.

I like the needle - it is one of those London features that we pass many times without noticing. I recently visited its twin in New York's Central Park. When people talk about the special relationship between the USA and the UK, they rarely realise that if this exists, it is entirely because of the symbiosis between these two monuments. There is a third - erected in Paris in order to foster further harmony - but in fact it does not match - which perhaps explains the odd, slightly antagonistic relationship between our countries and France. Of course all three were plundered from Alexandria where they had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. The story of their transport is remarkable - the plaque on the London needle records the names of the six men whose lives the curse claimed on its journey here. Bonomi's Clerkenwell colleague the psychic engineer Samuel Warner may also have been involved in the journey and the amazing mysterious means of movement of theses giant objects.

There is no prescribed date for the unlocking of the casket in the London needle. How will we decide when it is time? Perhaps we won't be here at all. I would be interested to know it there is a similar casket in its New York counterpart. Do let me know if you know. And if you too are interested in time capsules, there is an entire society devoted to them at the Crypt of Civilisation.

A WEREWOLF ABROAD

2011-07-06T11:10:00.002+01:00

I am very much looking forward to visiting the US next week with Glen Duncan for little shows in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The shows are listed here. along with various others with The Real Tuesday Weld

Glen will be reading from The Last Werewolf and I will be performing some (stripped down) excerpts from the soundtrack to celebrate the release of the US hardback and the album which will be released digitally everywhere on July 12th.

A very special edition of the album with written pieces by Glen, artwork by Catherine Anyango and exclusive tracks will be released by Crammed discs in Europe in October.

It has been a while since Glen and I did any live stuff together - not since the days of I Lucifer actually - but we do hang out and talk bollocks fairly frequently. He is a very good reader, particularly of his own work, so do I hope you get chance to hear him.

We are also looking forward very much to going to Disneyland with friends in LA. It has been a long held ambition of mine to get a squeeze from Donald Duck.

TIME, SPACE AND THE CITY

2011-06-27T03:02:00.002+01:00

The recent upheavals in the middle East set me thinking of the various curious ways that London has been influenced by the 'cult of Egyptology'. For instance, along the embankment, if you look closely, you will see cast iron camels and sphinxes supporting the benches that line the river. Such architectural influences abound. Hawksmoor's churches are full of them - check out the strange pyramid on St George's Bloomsbury or the sombre elevation of his St Mary Woolnoth. Both of these have the heavy psychedelic gravity of a pharoahs's tomb. The Victorians were nuts about ancient Egypt and of course looted many of the treasures they found on their archaeological forays. Cleopatra's needle on the embankment is probably the most prominent example and the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum are stuffed with such plunder.

From Hawksmoor onward, various English visionaries were not only influenced by the architectural styles of ancient Egypt but also by its occult belief systems. The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the flowering of that peculiar hybrid of science and magic which gave rise to many strange stories and characters. I've written about one of them before - Austin Osman Spare (Phil Baker's excellent biography of the man has now been published by Strange Attractor press). And of course there were the more famous Aleister Crowley, Ouspensky, Blavatsky and the like.

An earlier Egyptologist was Joseph Bonomi - pictured above. He traded as an archaeological artist but is thought to have been a tomb raider. He is also generally considered to have been the designer of the Egyptian styled 'Courtoy' tomb in Brompton cemetery which was ostensibly intendd to be the final resting place of 'three spinsters'. An interesting legend has grown up around this mausoleum because it is the only one in the cemetery for which there is no record of construction. This, together with Bonomi's obsession with the afterlife (reflected in the heiroglyphs on the tomb), have been held by some to be evidence that it is not a tomb at all but a Time Machine and that the three spinsters, if they existed at all, were in fact his time travelling sponsors.

This is a lovely fantastical idea but unfortunately it is incorrect.

In fact the tomb is one of five 'teleportation' chambers designed by Joseph Bonomi and built by his occult partner the Clerkenwell inventor Samuel Alfred Warner. Amongst several other inventions, Warner claimed to have developed a mysterious missile capable of destroying ships from a distance. The Royal Navy were convinced enough by his demonstrations to pay him to develop this new weaponry but proved unable to reproduce his results independently. This was because what Warner had allegedly discovered (with the help of ancient knowledge gained by Bonomi in Egypt) was an occult way of 'teleporting' a bomb a short distance - I suppose you could call it a 'psychic torpedo'.

The Navy withdrew funding. Disappointed but undaunted, Warner and Bonomi found a new sponsor, Lord Kilmorey, who encouraged them to attempt to use the occult method of teleportation in a much grander but still hopefully commercial way. They conceived of the idea of a transportation grid around London to reduce the time taken to travel the large distances of the vast, congested metropolis. To this end they built seven Egyptian teleportation chambers in the most suitable places they could find - in each of the seven new cemeteries that had been built in the capital from 1839. The chamber that people mistake for a time machine in Brompton cemetery is just one of the seven and it is sadly rather dilapidated now (although it did give rise to the idea of the Tardis in the Doctor Who stories). Whether any of them actually worked as intended is now of course a moot point. If you like, you can go to see some of them (and try them out for yourself suppose). The ones at Brompton, Highgate and Kensal Rise are pictured here.

Some of the seven appear to have entirely vanished, as did Samuel Warner himself, although whether this was as a result of the normal processes of time or by becoming lost whilst teleporting who can say? Bonomi took his secrets and his knowledge to his grave - a rather modest one - in Brompton cemetery.

Ironically, of the several ways of now getting quickly around London, one of the ones that has become more popular is 'The Brompton' - a fold-up portable bicycle.

L.A.NOIRE REVISITED

2011-05-31T11:03:00.001+01:00

Quite a few people have been asking how I got involved with writing for L.A. Noire. It seems it's a massive success with advertisements everywhere and amazing reviews, including some substantial pieces in the the more highbrow newspapers.

I have never played computer games and I don't have a television so I had been quite unaware of all the fuss.

This is how it happened: my US publishers Primary Wave got in touch just before last Christmas to ask if I would be interested in writing a song in a 1940s style. Of course I was interested and we had a conference call on Christmas Eve with Ivan the music supervisor at Rockstar Games. We hit it off musically because I loved all his references - Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and so on. The brief was to write a song sung in the nightclub scenes by the character Elsa, a heroin addicted possible arsonist. Lyrically, many songs from that era follow the same pattern - they are either straight out love songs or love songs wrapped in some metaphor - food, gardening, dancing, moonlight or whatever. For L. A Noire, obviously that metaphor would be be 'Crime'. (Actually, there are many songs already like this - 'Murder, she said', 'Pistol Packing Mama' etc.).

Anyway, I ended up writing four songs - three of which were actually used: "Guilty', '"Torched Song", "(I Always Kill) The Things I Love". Writing songs is actually my favourite activity (apart from collecting taxidermy obviously) and these came quite quickly. Actually, 'I Always Kill.." was already in progress. My own version of it is on "The Last Werewolf" soundtrack to be released in July. I demoed the songs with my friend the Scottish singer Pinkie Maclure and we sent them back and forth with Rockstar until we got the musical and lyrical vibe that suited the character best. Here is 'Torched Song':

TORCHED SONG

Well I need something to soothe this pain
To cool the lava you pump through my veins
'Cause I'm burning
I'm burning up for you

And I need someone to quench this fire
Before it becomes a funeral pyre
Yeah I'm burning
With yearning so much for you

You struck the sparks
You fanned the flames in me
And now my heart's a blazing ruin
You say that you were only foolin'

Don't walk away, don't do me wrong
Don't leave me singing this torched song
When I'm burning
I'm burning up for you

You're love's a drug

I have to drop

It hurts me so much
But I can't stop
I can't stop burning
I'm yearning so much for you

You struck the sparks
You fire the flame in me
And now my heart's a blazing ruin
You say that you were only foolin'

Don't walk away, don't do me wrong
Don't leave me this way singing this torched song
Don't leave me burning
Burning up for you

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You can hear it here.

I recorded the songs in London with a traditional jazz production - double bass, brush drums, upright piano, Gretch, sax, trombone or clarinet, no reverb.

Rockstar wanted the vocals sung by Claudia Brucken of Propaganda and Act. I had never met her before - but it was a real pleasure to work with her. In the end we used the takes recorded by Claudia's partner Paul Humphreys of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. They have been working together for years and Paul knows Claudia's voice very well. I sent stems (meaning the mix as seperated parts) to the Rockstar sound guys and they placed them in the game as they needed with a suitably vintage aged sound.

You can buy the songs on the official soundtrack from the usual places. I was a bit surprised to find they just used my basic demos but still, they sound pretty good.

There is also an album on Verve with various remixes of some of the original 1940s songs used in the game. I wasn't involved in that although I have done remixes for Verve before. I have actually been backing off the electro-swing thing a little of late because so many people are doing it but it is always a pleasure to work with such amazing music.

Roll on 'L.A.Noire II' or 'London Noire' - even better.

L.A.NOIRE

2011-05-17T09:46:00.001+01:00

Here is a clip "Elsa sings' from the very stylish Rockstar Games Blockbuster 'L.A. Noire' with "Torched Song' - one of three songs I wrote and recorded for the game sung by Claudia Brucken of Propaganda. The others are 'Guilty' and 'I Always Kill the Things I Love'. I am not a gamer myself but I am a fan of Elmore Leonard and of course the period itself so they were a pleasure to write. All the reviews of the game I have read say it is amazing so I am contemplating getting in a take away burrito and hunching down with a console myself to solve some murder mysteries soon.

TIME OF THE MONTH

2011-04-29T23:31:00.000+01:00

Here is the Canongate trailer for Glen's book. Music by yours truly - although that isn't me singing of course. That's the very lupine Joe Guillotine from Lazarus and the Plane Crash. He gargles with ground glass.

It is a curious idea isn't it - a trailer for a book? I like it. We did this one too a little while ago for a Stephen King book collection. Quite disturbing I thought.

Whatever next - a trailer for an a record? - Oh yes, we did one.

The Last Werewolf album is done. As ever, it grew into something bigger and hairier than will fit on a disc or an overnight bag and like the moon it has a dark side and a light side.

I will share some of it soon. In the meantime, I would appreciate any strange moon related anecdotes or facts from my friends here - or any pointers to beautiful moon imagery.

JAKE THE NIPPER

2011-04-06T22:19:00.000+01:00

Now, I don't know about you but I intend to be wearing one of these guys every full moon from now on. Our dear friend, the very eccentric Ms Za Za made him as a limited edition for Antique Beat to celebrate the publication of Glen's wonderful novel The Last Werewolf.

Handmade with a gold plated fastener, he's gonna grab you by the throat and sink those vicious teeth in. He's not quite the last but he is one of a select and dying breed. He will be joined, or perhaps mourned, by his girlfriend Tallulah in the autumn when the paperback comes out.

You can get him from the antique beat boutique where there are also a limited number of hardback copies of the book signed by Glen himself.

But most importantly there is a preview of the new The Real Tuesday Weld album 'The Last Werewolf - a Soundtrack' It is called 'The Moonrising Suite' and you can hear it and hear more about the whole thing here. The album will be released from July around the world - but more on that soon.

"My, what big teeth you have Grandma. And what big eyes you have.. "

For my friends here, for a limited time there is also a special sneak preview of a wolf song I made with my friend Little Red Piney Gir
at this place. Shhh!

"If you go down in the woods today, you're to sure to get a surprise"

RIVER'S END

2011-03-24T22:13:00.003Z

Early on Saturday morning there was a dead body lying spread-eagled face down in the shallows at low tide by Lambeth Bridge. A suicide or an accident? A drunk perhaps who became lost and got stuck in the mud? Or a victim of foul play?There has been nothing in the news so probably not the last at least. An hour or so later the body was gone - in all likelihood taken to the Wapping River Police Station and then on to the mortuary at Poplar. But then to where?

In the old days it would have been landed at the stone stairs you can still see under Tower Bridge where it meets the north bank. This place was formerly known rather un-subtly as 'Dead Man's Hole"

The corpse was just another of the fifty or so who are found in the Thames each year. Until fairly recently the number was double that - mobile phones have meant that more people, whether jumpers or tumblers, are rescued. Of course in past centuries, the Thames was virtually a liquid cemetery - an unholy Ganges. Bodies were indiscriminately dumped there - the murdered, those who could not afford a funeral, unwanted children and many more suicides.

It has always also been the site of strange and unexplained murders. In 1982 the Italian Roberto Calvi known as 'God's banker' was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge and in 2001 the headless torso of a child 'Adam' was found near Tower Bridge. Investigations revealed it to probably have been a victim in a South african voodoo ceremony.

Rivers and bridges have always been symbols of our journey to the afterlife. Glen and I made this little piece a few years back about the river as final voyage.

I suppose we will never know much about the dead person lost and found last Friday night Saturday morning.

Will they be missed? I hope so - this is for whoever it was and for all the dead the river has taken.

Onwards.

HEAVENS ABOVE

2011-03-19T15:00:00.000Z

It is a cosmic time. Monday is the Spring Equinox and today sees the largest full moon for twenty years. That means it really is the time of The Last Werewolf.

To mark such events I have been attending services on Sunday mornings at St Pauls. I've not been able to believe in the one God for a long time but I do very much believe in the English cultural tradition. The cathedral is a very good place to experience this. Besides, it is built on a Roman temple to Diana the hunter and before that in all probability on the site of a pre-Roman sacred site.

Christopher Wren and Hawksmoor knew this when they conceived the epic design of the new cathedral after the great fire destroyed the old one. A great psychic axis climbs from within the depths of the earth up through Ludgate Hill into the sky. It is this which attracted the Romans to the place. The pagan temple was open to the heavens - merely circling this axis but Wren successfully capped it - creating the conditions for London's development as a great international city. It is the reason the building was able to survive the nazi blitz when all around it was laid waste.

I recommend a visit on Sunday - you don't have to pay and you will hear some wonderful music. If you do go, try opening up to the ancient forces around you. They may have some surprising effects.

The central intersection of the nave and the wings is effectively a giant roofed Stonehenge. This became apparent to me in what I can only describe as a psychic revelation - one of a series I have experienced around the Clerkenwell environs. There is a twin psychic pole through that other centre of English culture, Westminster abbey and, as I have noted before, a corresponding horizontal axis along the line of the subterranean river Fleet. The Fleet forms the boundary between the city of Westminster and the city of London. These have always had different gods - power and money respectively - and, together with the spiritual axes through the cathedrals, form the forces around which the physical and psychic city spins.

Long may it continue to do so.

THE LAST WEREWOLF

2011-02-28T20:47:00.004Z

I have been working on the next The Real Tuesday Weld album. It is a soundtrack to Glen Duncan's new novel 'The Last Werewolf'. The book will be published in April by Canongate in the UK, in July by Knopf in the US and around the world during the rest of the year.

Glen and I are old friends - the album 'I Lucifer' was a soundtrack to his book of the same name. They sort of grew up together in my place in Clerkenwell, as did we I suppose.

I read the manuscript to the new book at the beginning of last year. He didn't have a publisher then but I knew right away it was going to be a success. You see I think it may be his best yet. He has published seven previous novels and I recommend them all but this one combines his remarkable literary flair with a genuinely moving and page turning tale in a way people rarely manage these days.

The album is timed to come out in July with the US version but we will be making a musical suite drawn from it available to mark the UK publication in April. We are intending various live events and all sorts of funny business too. And as ever, there are some very special guests including Glen himself, Marcella Puppini, Pinkie Maclure, Piney Gir and Joe Guillotine from the very lupine Lazarus and the Plane Crash.

So, more soon - only two more full moons to go..
In the meantime find out more about the book here

A DREAM OF THE CITY

2011-02-17T20:54:00.000Z

The ongoing upheaval in the middle East reminds me that London was once considered to be 'The New Jerusalem"

According to legend, the ancient founders of the city came from Palestine about 2500 years ago, a lost tribe fleeing a cataclysm. This was a convenient belief in mediaeval times - it made the city older and more significant than Rome upon whom Henry VIII had viciously turned.

And it explains the meaning of the lines in William Blake's poem Milton:

"I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land"

After the great fire in 1667, Christopher Wren with Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibb planned to rebuild the city actually as the New Jerusalem with St Pauls at the cosmic centre. They didn't manage to realise their dreams - their cosmically inspired geometric plan got lost in the labyrinthine archaic alleys and twisting patchwork of ancient ownership but they did manage to embed some of their occult ideas in the city fabric and, in Hawksmoor's case, in the buildings themselves. Hawksmoor was a freemason, a sinister, secretive and strange man. His churches are my favourites in the city. Some, like St Mary Woolnoth, are deeply weird and Iain Sinclair believes Christchurch in Spitalfields actually exerts a malevolent force on the neighbourhood.

But, when it comes to imaginary versions of the city, my favourite of course is the one depicted in Mary Poppins. Walking up Ludgate Hill, I am always half expecting to see her bustling along with her umberella.

If you are a fan of St Pauls by the way, you may be delighted to know that there is a tiny version of it held in the hand of one of the strange statues on Vauxhall bridge.

It is pretty difficult to see without falling into the river so mind how you go.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR

2011-02-07T11:35:00.001Z

I was in Moscow the other week for the Cardboardia festival which is organised by friends and which we are hoping to bring to London. It is quite bonkers in a very creative utopian way. A kind of cross between origami and Woodstock.

I really like going to Russia because of the wonderful people although this time, given the ensuing terrible events at Moscow airport, I was rather relieved to get out alive.

Ironically, I was there to DJ at a "Love Party" - a task I will be happily repeating this weekend for three Valentine's events in a row in the romantic grandeur of the ruins of Battersea Power Station. I will be accompanied by those glamorous honey-traps The Bees Knees.
It is called The Lost Lovers' Ball

Antique Beat will be sending out a little Valentines present to friends on the list this week. You can join here if you haven't already.
.
Then it's back to work on the next The Real Tuesday Weld album - a soundtrack to my good friend Glen Duncan's next novel "The Last Werewolf" which will be published in a few months by Canongate / Knopf and subsequently by various houses around the world. Books haven't gone the way of albums - yet - but we will be defying convention as ever and making something you can actually hold in your hands and give to people you like.

I've always felt a little like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz with his paper heart although of course mine is now made from Cardboard.

Happy Valentines to us all!

MUDLARKING

2011-01-24T08:46:00.000Z

Here is the mouth of the river Walbrook where it exits into the Thames. I have written elsewhere about the ghost rivers of London but the Walbrook is one of the smallest - and strangest. It is also one of the more difficult to trace. This was the river around which the Romans built Londinium, the first incarnation of the city in what is now the old financial district. It seems to have been sacred to them. On its banks they built the temple of Mithras, the remains of which you can still see squeezed between two grim office buildings near Mansion House. Some very beautiful treasures, such as the head of Mithras shown here, were found deliberately placed in its channel.

Speaking of treasure, I was down on the river bank early yesterday for one of the lowest tides of the year and I came across several 'mudlarks'. Now the original mudlarks were written about by John Stow in his epic seventeenth century Survey of London. They were scavengers who patrolled the banks of the river up to their waists in mud seeking a living by collecting almost anything they could use, sell or eat. An unpleasant, cold and smelly job no doubt. Mind you, however unpleasant, it couldn't have been worse or more dangerous than that of the 'Toshers' who entered into the sewage system from the river bank to search it for whatever valuables could be found fallen from above. The hard won knowledge necessary for both occupations was a closely guarded secret and seems to remain so today.

You see you can still find many old things on the river bank. Fragment of clay pipes from the 17th and 18h century are common. Prior to cigarettes, these were the cheapest way to smoke. You would buy a bundle of five, pre-packed with tobacco, smoke them and throw the pipe away. Decorated and carved ones are rare and very collectable. Coins, pots, and other more substantial finds are found fairly regularly. Such was the case a few years ago with the gorgeous Battersea Shield. So on very low tides a new breed of scavengers descend and start digging and sifting and searching. There are have been a few high profile treasure finds in England in the last couple of years - usually by guys like these operating on the fringe of legality.

The contemporary mudlarks, equipped with metal detectors, spades and rubber waders, are a tight-lipped bunch. Yesterday, I tried to engage several in conversation without much success. They are not genial, academic or enthusiastic collector types but hard-bitten, secretive grumps. At least one tried to waft me away from where they were digging (the mouth of the Walbrook) to somewhere where he suggested the more easy pickings were. They claimed to be looking for ceramics (finds of which have a different legal status than gold or silver) but that seemed unlikely given the vicious spade he was vigorously wielding and the metal detectors being waved by the others. I didn't really mind. I was glad to find that such an old London occupation was still being practised.

Besides, there has to be an upside to spending Sunday morning up to your neck in sh**.

STEP INTO CHRISTMAS

2010-12-22T21:54:00.000Z

The Christmas lights on Oxford and Regent Street were lit back in November but that was just to try and push us consumers to get spending. Christmas only really felt like it had arrived this week when the snow started to fall on the city. Lovely.

Thanks as ever for reading and responding - I see there are nearly a hundred of us and more looking quietly looking on - I like that.

There will be much more about Myth, Music, London, Love, Birth, Death, Dreams and Blood here next year. Various personal circumstances prevented some of the releases we intended for this year but thank you for your patience. 2011 should see the release of the soundtrack to Glen Duncan's new novel 'The Last Werewolf', an album of story and music "Tales of the Lost City" and an album by Lazarus Plane Crash I made with Joe Guillotine. Phew.

In the meantime, best wishes to all.

Here is one more present from me and The Puppini Sisters. Should get things kicking a bit

DECEMBER'S HERE AGAIN

2010-12-01T00:01:00.001Z

The Song of December
I know the world has changed
And mainly for the Better
But I feel strange
Wishing that weren't true
For I cannot recall
When I last wrote a letter -
I'm gonna write one now
To say "I Love You"

Now everything is free:
The love, the songs, the pornography
And we're drowning in a sea
Of stuff we'll never need,
I hope that we
Still value things that matter
I'm gonna text you now
To say that "I still love you!"

The Song of December and five other seasonal songs with our friends, Martyn Tiger Lilly, Marcella Puppini Sister, Joe Guillotine and Mara Carlyle is available on this year's audio christmas card from Antique Beat

These cards have become a little institution around here - I think this is number seven or eight. The artwork as ever is by the wonderfully talented Catherine Anyango. You may not be able to see but the little city in the image to the left is made from the words of the song.

It has been a crazy year in some ways - a lot of time spent looking out of the windows of various hospitals but it all worked out. I am so lucky.

LOVE 2010

2010-11-25T17:38:00.000Z

Here is Edison and those wonderful women re-made over the lead track from the new seasonal mini album 'Seasons Songs' by The Real Tuesday Weld. With that old Churchillian rascal Martyn Jacques from The Tiger Lilles, a sampling of the divine Marcella from The Puppini Sisters, dream diva Mara Carlyle, and that inveterate mischief maker Joe Coles, the six song cd comes as a beautiful limited edition greetings card.

You can send it to someone special (or even to yourself)

Find it here at Antique Beat

THE SOUTHWARK SAGE II

2010-11-15T22:48:00.000Z

Prompted by Zurich's observation, here are more images from the Austin Osman Spare exhibition at the Cuming Museum. - these perhaps showing a little more of his strangeness.

THE SOUTHWARK SAGE

2010-11-09T22:56:00.000Z

In addition to the subterrannean lost rivers, there has always been a deep psychedelic stream flowing beneath London. I know it, I can feel it. I used to think it ran south from Regents Park down through west Soho to the river via St James - after all it is no co-incidence that William Blake grew up but a few yards from Carnaby street, the epicentre of swinging London. But these days I think it is in fact the fracture between the two cities - the City of London proper in the east and the City of Westminster in the west. They have different Gods and different religions (money and power respectively). This fracture is at least as significant as the San Andreas fault under San Francisco - if not as destructive.

But the stream of images and ideas that has flown upwards from it has permeated and powered the dreams and work of many Londoners - Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Lord Leighton, Beardsely, Eliot. I count some temporary residents amongst that lineage too - Carlyle, Walter Crane, Robert Calvert - even perhaps Syd Barrett for a couple of years before he fell. Unaccountably, one of the almost forgotten is Austin Osman Spare, the Kennington Blake. Like Blake, he was prolific, oscillated between grandiosity and despair and died in penurious obscurity. Why? Unfashionable, difficult, untruthful, yes. Mysterious, obsessive, inspired, definately. A friend for a while of Aleister Crowley, an inventor of his own religious system, a master draughtsman, a mystic, a loner, a fabulist, a war artist, social chronicler. One of the greatest mysteries about him is that he is has been so neglected.

It seems something is changing though - there is an exhibition of his work at The Cuming Museum not far from where he worked in Southwark. And in January, our friends the Strange Attractor Press are publishing "Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London's Lost Artist" by Phil Baker with a special limited edition. I imagine Spare would be glad of a growing posthumous fame - like Blake he seemed to fear and desire public acceptance. If you have the money and taste for art dealing, it is a good time to buy I think. If you haven't the money but have taste for dreaming,the book and the work is enough.

He was born in Clerkenwell on Snow Hill next to the river Fleet - the physical correalate of London's pyschedelic undercurrent.

F***ING LONDON!

2010-10-23T17:52:00.000+01:00

The tower seen between the railings in the top picture is the priapic lump of open-plan office space called 'The Shard" which is jack-booting its way across an historic part of the city. Already it has partially destroyed the wonderful Victorian Vaults below London Bridge station and evicted the Shunt arts collective that had been occupying them. For several years, Shunt presented an amazing range of work and events to the delight of many Londoners. I played there several times myself. But the grey men came with a piece of paper which said it had all got to stop. After just having been taken brutally from behind by the banking sector to the tune of several billion, it seems strange we're now letting their property developer friends do it again in Borough. Mind you this part of the city has never been averse to vice. The railings in the picture and the 'offerings' seen in the lower photo are in the "Crossbones Graveyard" in Redcross Street

This is the site of the burial place of 'The Outcast Dead' - persons who were not considered fit to be buried within the boundary of the historical city of London. So basically this is where all the prostitutes, suicides and pagans went.

The prostitutes were known as 'Winchester Geese' because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester who owned and officiated the land hearabouts. He did this so that the pious burghers north of the river could legally hop over and get their leg over. They got laid, he got paid. Yes, it's completely true I am afraid. After an often short and painful life of servicing the good citizens, the 'single women' could be buried here as the ground was unconsecrated. And up to 15000 of them were by the mid eighteenth century.

Thanks largely to writer John Constable and others, the site, at present a scruffy piece of concrete waste-ground, is commemorated with regular events. The next is at Halloween. It is hoped that a permanent memorial garden will be created there - well, if the greedy hands of the property developers can be kept off it that is.

THE CITY RE-CYCLED

2010-10-19T21:08:00.000+01:00

There are bikes everywhere in London now. If you are not from here, it is because there is a new amazing scheme of thousands of public cycles for anyone to use. It's really wonderful.

Speaking of which, back in March last year, I posted about this kid's bike we saw leaning against the river wall down on the foreshore at very low tide. The other day I was surprised to see it still there. I don't know why I should be - it looks like it is from the seventies and may have stood there since in spite of a hundred thousand tides. I like the polite way it is parked against the wall - almost as if its young owner has just popped off to do something - a wee perhaps - and will be back in a minute.

Well, they never did come back - or haven't yet.

For absolutely no apparent reason, apart from general musing on time passing, this reminded me of one of my favourite quotes. It is by Orson Welles from 'F for Fake' (surely one of the greatest of his forgotten films). It always cheers me up:

"Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes.

A fact of life: we're going to die.

"Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past.

"Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it?

"Go on singing!""

UNQUIET SLUMBERS

2010-10-11T23:38:00.002+01:00

I started this blog over five years ago with an account of a visit I paid to the lost River Fleet. London's subterranean waterways have remained an obsession. I don't know why.

Here is a picture of the gate which guards one of the mouths of another river, the Tyburn, under Westminster. It's very difficult to get in there now - it flows beneath Buckingham Palace so I suppose they are very concerned about terrorists getting access to the Queen's loo.

Seeing it yesterday reminded me of the sewermen I met when I visited the Fleet. A couple of them were quite old then and must have retired now I am sure. They had spent all their working life roaming the vast underground labyrinths of London and had a knowledge of the system which had been passed down verbally for over a hundred years by those who preceded them. This knowledge could not be written down and will be lost when they are gone - the privatised Thames Water company have stopped recruiting the necessary apprentices for the usual cost and profit reasons.

It must have been a strange and difficult job - and one with a kind of lineage back to the 'mudlarks' and 'toshers' described by Stow in his 'Survey of London'. These were the hereditary 'guilds' of professional scavengers who trawled the Thames foreshore and the city sewers for valuable items (including dead bodies which could be sold to surgeons for dissection).

I asked the oldest sewerman what was the spookiest thing he had found underground - expecting some horror story of vicious rats or mangled bones. He told me that he seen many strange things but the one that haunted him still was the memory of the time he turned a corner into some subterranean chamber far below the Strand and discovered a perfect Victorian cast iron double bed-stead standing there in the darkness. This otherwise innocuous domestic object was made so strange by the fact that there was no hole anywhere big enough for it to have fallen in.

In other words, somebody had taken it in gradually in pieces and for heaven-alone-knows-what-reason re-erected it there on purpose.

FACE LIFT

2010-09-24T10:27:00.000+01:00

The Temple church is one of the oldest - and oddest - in London. It used to also be one of the quietest until Dan Brown featured it in The Da Vinci Code. It is now often besieged by groups of slightly baffled looking visitors clutching his book. It is easy to be snobby about such things but in actual fact the environs of the church - the courtyards and alleys of the Middle Temple are wonderful for everyone. I particularly like the sombre message on the sundial in Pump Court:

"Like shadows we are and like shadows depart!"

Very appropriate in a country where you can only use a sun dial about ten days a year.

Sitting by the pool in Fountain court as the Autumn leaves are falling is a happy thing. It is the spot in Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit where John Westlock declares his love for Ruth Pinch:

"Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and, peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came towards it."

One thing that the Da Vinci tourists and Dan Brown (though not Dickens) miss of course is that the ancients had a rather well defined sense of humour. These images are some of the caricatures and grotesque gargoyles sprinkled amongst the saints and general worthies within the church.

STRANGE FRUIT

2010-09-21T10:21:00.007+01:00

Last week marked the 70th anniversary of the night the Luftwaffe began to firebomb London into the dust. Clerkenwell remained generally unscathed but St Pauls was left like an ocean liner sailing a sea of ruin. Despite the preposterousness of the War on Terror, for this reason if no other it's difficult to be a complete pacifist. So on Sunday we went to the tiny but magnificent St Clement Danes, the Christopher Wren Royal Air Force church on Fleet Street, itself a restored victim of the Blitz.

In fact the church is actually probably most famous for having the bells mentioned at the beginning of the children's nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". Like Cock Robin, this poem always struck me as a rather haunted thing with those two sinister closing lines - a feeling only re-inforced by its presence throughout Orwell's 1984. That book was of course written in the aftermath of the London's near destruction and with St Clements just a little way from the BBC's Bush House where Orwell was once a radio announcer.

The Blitz was one of the times when the battle for the London Stone was nearly lost. Which event provoked which I wonder? Anyway, here is the rhyme and the bells ringing at midday on Sunday for the fallen fighters of the air who saved the day and what remains to us of the lost city.

ART OF DARKNESS

2010-09-17T00:22:00.003+01:00

My friend Catherine Anyango who you may know as the designer of The Real Tuesday Weld artwork and maker of wonderful films such as this has just had her first book published. It is a graphic novel version of Conrad's Heart of darkness and it is very, very good.

I confess I haven't read the original novel myself - just couldn't make headway up that awful river but I feel as if I know it through repute and because of Apocalypse Now. So, it has been a pleasure - albeit a dark one - to read it now in this way.

I really recommend it - as do several other people. Antique Beat has a limited number of first edition copies signed and dedicated by Catherine.

TIGERS IN ST PETERSBURG

2010-08-31T14:32:00.001+01:00

It feels like I have known The Tiger Lillies for a very long time.

I first met Martyn and Sophie in London not long before they were burned out of their Soho flat by an unscrupulous landlord. He was bent on getting rid of them and claiming the insurance. We had been together in the country for the weekend and returned to the city on the Sunday evening. I said goodbye to them but heard by phone-call later that they had lost everything - clothes, photographs, instruments and all the music they had recorded for years. All gone up in smoke. The weekend had been a Buddhist retreat so I suppose it was a brutal practical lesson in permanence

It actually kind of turned out all right in the end and the band have gone from strength to strength since despite being largely ignored by the music press and industry (well, in the UK at least) - a fact I feel a certain resonance with.

Strangely, we have never shared a bill until this weekend in

St Petersburg. That was very nice and I do hope we can do so again someday. Oh and that reminds me, here is the original of the song 'Someday' that Martyn recorded for me a few years ago.

Quite wonderful and I hope you enjoy it.

They are a very stylish band and very nicely turned out indeed so it was an aesthetic pleasure too. And it was also wonderful to be back in Russia with our old friends there and to make some new ones. St Petersburg is such a beautiful city. It is built on a marsh and I heard that the gas that is still released from beneath the surface is addictive and so people keep returning. I can believe it.

If you were at the show and witnessed the ritual massacre of the great pink elephant, I salute you.

CHILD ROWLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME

2010-08-21T16:42:00.001+01:00

This sinister object is a Victorian water tower in the back streets of Kennington. It is one of the few remains of The Lambeth Workhouse where children were "taught to read but not write" and where Charlie Chaplin spent part of his childhood. The childen would have seen it from a window in their dormitory.

It also appeared in the strange short film "The Black Tower' where a tower seems to follow the narrator around London.

I think I know that feeling.

AN ENGLISH ASSASSIN

2010-08-12T10:32:00.000+01:00

Only one British prime minister has been assassinated (although, perhaps understandably, there have been several attempts on the lives of others). In 1812 John Bellingham shot Spencer Perceval through the heart in Westminster. I am not particularly political by nature but Bellingham was a local. He lived in Millman Street and had his best coat adapted by another local - Mr Taylor of Guildford Street - with a special pocket to conceal a pistol.

At first thought to be a radical, it turned out that he was apparently just disgruntled. I say 'apparently' because there is a third more sinister version of this story but at his trial he was said to have held the prime minister responsible for a series of collective wrongs, neglect and abuses by the government which had ruined many lives. (The continued heavy police presence around teflon Tony Blair's luxury London lair might suggest that people could still feel that way).

He languished just south of Clerkenwell in Newgate prison briefly before being hung there at the gates on 18 May. He was cleanly shaved, impeccably turned out and, as Samuel Pepys had said of another condemned prisoner:

'As cheerful as a man could be under such circumstances'.

Newgate was probably the most feared building in the British Empire. It stood in various incarnations for almost a thousand years and was a terrifying temporary home to a vast range of characters - saints, sinners, heros and villains, real and imagined. Countless innocents died there in addition to the guilty - disease taking many before the executioner could. It finally was brought down at the beginning of the twentieth century. All that survives of it now apart from folk memory and some inherited language is a stretch of wall in a very private garden. I managed to make it a visit courtesy of my new friend the wife of the Dean of St Pauls. It is so tranquil there now it is almost impossible to imagine the horrors that went before or to realise what may still lie beneath the flowers.

The clothes of the executed were by ancient perogative awarded to the hangman and could be sold on for considerable sums due to their curiosity and alleged curative value. I saw a 'Bellingham's Cravat' for sale a couple of years ago in an old shop on Lambs Conduit street. The shop is now gone but if you ever come across the cravat do let me know.

MAYBE THIS TIME

2010-08-08T14:40:00.004+01:00

I am slightly ashamed to confess that I only saw the film Cabaret for the first time about three years ago. I had always been put off by the theme song 'Life is a Cabaret' - a staple of of bad end-of-the-evening karaoke sessions and sad end-of-the-pier crooners. Once seen however, never forgotten. The music, the lyrics, the routines, the acting and the clothes are all genius of course but also there is the sadness and the sense of impending doom. Plus there is monkey song scene "If you could see her through my eyes" which simultaneously manages to articulate a very poignant expression of true love - and be one of the funniest routines ever committed to film.

It was a great pleasure to DJ before the showing of the film on Thursday at the beautiful Somerset House. How often is it possible to play Kurt Veil, Tom Waits, Berthold Brecht and Lotte Lenya and get away with it never mind be egged on?

I am now looking for a knitted pattern tanktop so I can be as elegant as Michael York. In an ideal universe I suppose I would be a combination of him and Joel Grey whose turn as the MC of the Kit Kat club is simply jaw dropping.
This film beat The Godfather to the Oscar.

Respect.

LIFE IS A ..

2010-08-02T12:32:00.000+01:00

Cabaret and Cabaret is one of my favourite films so I am pleased to be DJ ing before the outdoor showing at the very wonderful Somerset House on the north bank of the Thames this Thursday evening from 7.30pm

Glad rags and cushions (but hopefully not umberellas) advised..

THE TOWERS OF LONDON

2010-07-23T09:55:00.004+01:00

Last night to Battersea Power Station again. A swish party in a beautiful ruin. But for how much longer? If you are not from these parts you may recognise the building, left, (with The Real Tuesday Weld tour bus bottom right) from a Pink Floyd album cover.

It sails majestically above the Thames opposite Chelsea - a vast derelict cathedral of power. Unfortunately, unlike its sister down river at Bankside (now the Tate Modern) it is destined to be developed for mainly commercial use. That is the way of things of course.

The dearly beloved and equally unique Shunt Lounge under London Bridge Station has finally closed its doors to be replaced by the toilets for the priapic glass tower being built above destroying the Victorian vaults. I was there when one of the grey men from the developers was arguing with a friend who is one of Shunt's founders. A sad occasion.

In a way it was an archetypal clash of worlds repeated through the history of this town - someone who contributes almost nothing to society (but with power) against somebody who contributes a lot (but who is pretty powerless). Shunt was very popular, innovative and self funding. The vaults and Borough Market are a piece of history. The big glass penis will be what? Open plan office space in a London overloaded with such.

Of course the city always changes and we will soon forget. When Poppy, who is four years old, is all grown up, there will be no ruins at all in central London (barring some future man made catastrophe). Kings Cross, Elephant and Castle, Nine Elms and Shoreditch will all have been made over for many years by then. And you will be able to buy a cappuchino (well, the English version) almost everywhere.

A strange and rather melancholy thought.

AMONGST THE STONES AND FLOWERS

2010-07-16T13:31:00.012+01:00

A little while back we held an art and music show called 'The London Book of the Dead' in the ancient vaults under St Pancras Church in Bloomsbury.

We played surrounded by the tombs and gravestones of the departed. It is quite a remarkable place and I had a very strange experience once when I was there alone during the set up.

If you visit the church, probably the most striking thing to see is the portico held up by four classical female figures based on caryatids at the Acropolis . Once, there was more to them than now meets the eye. You see when the builder - an Italian called Charles Rossi - who had them made at considerable expense, brought them to the church for installation, it was discovered that they were slightly too tall to fit. Oh Lord!

Under the pressure of the schadenfreude of his workers, the jeering of a gathering group of onlookers and the foot-tapping impatience of the church officials, Mr Rossi had to think fast. He made a heroic decision - or, one might say, a heroic incision - and removed a twelve inch slice of each lady's midriff. This, an early example of the gastric band operation, saved the day but is no doubt what gives them that characteristic and rather dumpy slouch. I have no strong feelings either way about cosmetic surgery but I quite like these girls the way they are and it is rather peaceful to sit in the shade in the churchyard under their watchful gaze on a hot, busy day.

This old song was written in the very same churchyard looking out at the busy city a few years back whilst waiting to take a train from Euston. I was thinking of it and St Pancras this last week on the fifth anniversary of the London bombings. They happened in the neighbourhood and that sad day was marked when the church was very movingly covered with flowers.

I will be back performing in a kind of vault this Sunday as part of Battersea Arts Centre's One on One show from 8-9 pm. Apparently, I will be in a large box with one audience member at a time playing a selection of such old and new songs.

If you come and have the stomach for it, do say hello.

MURDER BALLAD

2010-06-17T14:10:00.007+01:00

Who killed Cock Robin?

I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.

Who caught his blood?

I, said the Fish,
with my little dish,
I caught his blood.

Who'll make the shroud?
I, said the Beetle,
with my thread and needle,
I'll make the shroud.

Who'll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl,
with my pick and shovel,
I'll dig his grave.

Who'll be the parson?
I, said the Rook,
with my little book,
I'll be the parson.

Who'll be the clerk?
I, said the Lark,
if it's not in the dark,
I'll be the clerk.

Who'll carry the link?
I, said the Linnet,
I'll fetch it in a minute,
I'll carry the link.

Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove,
I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.

Who'll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite,
if it's not through the night,
I'll carry the coffin.

Who'll bear the pall?
We, said the Wren,
both the cock and the hen,
We'll bear the pall.

Who'll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush,
as she sat on a bush,
I'll sing a psalm.

Who'll toll the bell?
I said the bull,
because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.

All the birds of the air
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll
for poor Cock Robin

TRADITIONAL

ADVENTURES IN CORPOREALITY

2010-06-15T14:05:00.006+01:00

One of the themes that link Clerkenwell EC1 and Borough SE1 is suffering. Both areas were historically home to London's terrifying prisons - Newgate, Bridewell, The Fleet, The House of Correction in Clerkenwell and The Marshallsea, The Clink, and The King's bench in Southwark. There are bits of these left: the gate of the Bridewell on New Bridge Street; the wall of Newgate at the end of Adam Court; the cellars of the House of Correction below Hugh Myddleton School and a fragment of the Marshallsea in St George's graveyard. (This where Dicken's father and Mr Dorrit the character he inspired were imprisoned for debt).

Even a brief time spent detained at His or Her Majesty's pleasure in any of these establishments was quite likely to lead to the much longer punishment of a chronic illness and coincidentally both districts housed (and still house) many of those other arenas of suffering: the city's hospitals. The oldest of these, St Bartholomew's is in Clerkenwell and Kings, Guys and St Thomas's are in Southwark.

I've spent a fair bit of time around hospitals myself over the last year so the other day, after a visit to the vaults beneath London Bridge, I went to see what has to be one of the most curious museums in London. It is certainly the nicest smelling. The Old Operating Theatre is in an ancient attic reached by a skinny old spiral stair on St Thomas street. Once part of Guy's hospital, it houses a herb garret (hence the aroma) and a collection of medical curiosities. The various surgical instruments on display are beautifully made but gruesome in purpose - two handed amputation saws, long handled devices for removing kidney stones, pliers for taking out organs and so on. One of the oddest is the operating theatre itself - literally a tiny theatre where the patient / victim / entertainment would be held prone on the stage-bed whilst the learned professors and surgeons would go about their business in front of an admiring and presumably strong-stomached audience.

I recommend it - particularly to anyone inclined to complain about the current state of the National Health Service.

LOST FOR WORDS

2010-06-05T11:52:00.009+01:00

I occasionally get asked about illegal downloading. It's a complex area and I never quite know what to say so I'm always interested to hear other people's opinions. I do feel rather sympathetic to this piece by Jack of the White Stripes.

But it is a good time for the listener - and we're all listeners. And the same technology and changes that have made all the file sharing possible has made so many wonderful things happen too - especially being able to connect and interact with people all over the world. People can give so much back. For instance, we've played several times in the Russian Federation and whilst I don't believe I have ever had any royalties from there, it has been wonderful to see a crowded venue enthusiastically singing along to the words of a song - especially as I often have difficulty recalling them correctly myself..

And that brings me to Maria Delice from St Petersburg who sent us this:

Lovely stuff and much appreciated Maria.

Maybe I should get an autocue.

DEFYING GRAVITY

2010-06-01T10:36:00.000+01:00

The other week, I spent a day with friends at a beautiful house in Topango Canyon - a kind of wonderful wilderness area within the city of Los Angeles. The girl who owns it is inexplicably never there but we made good use of her trampoline. Now I defy anybody - even the most down-hearted or cynical - to start bouncing on such a trampoline and to not feel happy or at least to not grin broadly. It becomes absolutely impossible to take oneself seriously anymore - and trust me, I've had a lot of practice. If things don't work out, I am considering starting a bounce-yourself-better therapy business or political reconciliation service. I am sure if you had put Bin Laden and Bush together on a trampoline they would have worked something out.

Last week I visited Lambeth Palace gardens - another beautiful oasis in a busy city - on one of the very rare days it was open to anyone but the Archbishop of Canterbury and the chosen few. There are twelve acres of gorgeous, secret, mediaeval gardens said to be home to amongst other creatures a tall blue fairy who has been in residence longer than any christian (I will tell you the story of her counterpart The Lambeth troll one day). As I wandered amongst the topiary and beehives, I rounded a leafy corner to find ... ah! .. a trampoline. I couldn't resist having a bounce. I realised it was possible, given enough vigorous and well-timed rythmic oscillation, if not to reach Heaven, then to at least see over the old boundary wall and catch a glimpse of a nurse in St Thomas's Hospital opposite. Now I don't know how the Archbishop spends his time off from what must have been a very trying job of late, but this seemed a possibility - especially given the exhilarating updraft one would experience under one's robes.

This corner of central London is interesting for many reasons - it has for instance: the bus stop with the most beautiful view of the city; a strange monument to William Blake (a local) and the museum of garden history which is without doubt the most peaceful place to lunch before renewing an assault on Westminster and the West end. The gardens won't be open to pagans again 'til next year unfortunately but there is a new and very good exhibition in the palace itself.

If you see the archbishop while you are there, do bounce gently up and down to see if he responds with any recognition.

JUST BELOW THE SURFACE

2010-05-25T22:41:00.002+01:00

Clerkenwell get its name from a spring (one of many in the area on either side of what was the valley of the lost river Fleet). The spring formed a well which was regarded as sacred - or at least efficacious for good health. It became the site of an annual pilgrimage of clerks from the old walled city of London who would perform mystery plays there.

Now it looks like a large quite nice loo. I visited the other week - for old times sake. It is nice that it is still there - albeit in the corner of a very ordinary building

Here's a secret - if you ring Finsbury library, they have a key and will arrange access by appointment - you may even be met there by a very pleasant and learned historian.

I believe the water retains some of its old, fabled properties but drinking it is not recommended for mortals.

A THAMES MENAGERIE

2010-05-14T09:32:00.000+01:00

On returning from Los Angeles, I took a walk down the Thames - to re-aquaint myself as it were with home. Passing the Houses of Parliament where there has recently been so much upheaval, and heading towards EC1, there is a strip of embankment once called Alsatia which I have been finding of interest of late.

This is because it is populated by a veritable bestiary of fabulous and strange creatures (and not just the politicians). Here you can find camels, sphinxes, dragons, strange sea creatures, a golden phoenix, psychedelic elephants and of course their head zoo keeper - Father Thames.

Oh, and politicians too.

HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE

2010-05-09T11:11:00.010+01:00

Just south of Clerkenwell are two places with gruesome pasts. Smithfields, still a meat market, was once the abattoir of London and also the site for the slaughter of various human animals - including William Wallace / Braveheart / Mel Gibson. Further on, and now under the watchful eye of the central criminal court's Recording Angel, was another execution ground at the entrance of what was Newgate Prison.

For hundreds of years Newgate would have made Abu Ghraib seem like Disneyland. Tales of its horrors are legion. In its day hangings were saved for public holidays and although intended by the city's fathers to be a warning to wrongdoers, in fact turned into something like the Notting Hill Carnival. It is said that 200,000 citizens, half the city's population, turned out to see their hero Jack Shepherd finally get his comeuppance. (The bounty hunter who turned him never got chance to enjoy his reward, meeting his own end at the hands of Jack's many friends.)

The 'Drop' and the broken neck it caused was a later mercy granted to the condemned to finish them off quickly. In those days, hanging was a slow and intentionally tortuous affair of slow suffocation. Death could only be hastened by human intervention - by paid members of the crowd or by determined family and friends who would rush forward to pull on the hanged person's legs.

Dickens was one of those so appalled by such sights that he became instrumental in them being carried out in private behind the walls of the prison and eventually stopped altogether. But not before they had cause to pass into the phraseology and slang of the English language. So, if you know any celebrities, you could remind them of the origins of their words, when they complain about 'hangers on'..

But be warned, they may think you are just 'pulling their leg'.

IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

2010-04-19T20:50:00.003+01:00

... is a smallish area, packed solid with the tiny graves and loving memorials of countless canine 'dearly beloved'. It goes a long way to prove to foreign visitors that everything they've heard about the English and their dogs is quite true.

Meanwhile, a friend tells me that more than half of the population of the Great Britain's cats are alive here in London.

THE GHOST HOUSE

2010-04-05T10:23:00.009+01:00

When I first met Theodore Tyburn and asked his address, he gave it me - 23 to 24 Leinster Square, London W10. When he didn't respond to my letters, I stopped by one day to see if he was in. The house, an elegant period mid-terrace home, was the sort perhaps once lived in by a merchant family and probably now sub-divided into little expensive apartments like its neighbours.

There was no response to my knock - and the windows were screened so it was impossible to peer within. Curious, I went around to the street behind to see if I could see anything more. I was startled, shocked even, to discover that from the back the house was revealed to be nothing more than paper thin - a mere facade disguising a huge ventilation shaft over the Hammersmith and city line.

How many letter have been posted there
Only to fall, like mine,
Into London dead air?

SPRING DREAMING

2010-03-27T17:37:00.012Z

Spring has come to London, mad as March hares. This one, an albino, is over a hundred years old and fell asleep for ever somewhere on Dartmoor in the nineteenth century. But after a fashion, he lives on here with us in a house in a city in a way never dreamed of back then. He has company - blue birds, an owl, a squirrel, a parrot, a blackbird (who flew into the window one day), a whole family of grebes, a hawk and a miscellany of others. Some find them spooky but for me they are magical - creatures from dreams, frozen in flight or caught for ever in the light.

Speaking of such things reminds me that my old friend, that peculiar animal Cibelle Blackbird has a new single "Man from Mars" coming out followed by an album "Las Venus resort palace Hotel" in May. I have had heard them both and I can confirm they are marvellous. The album is set in a club at 'the end of the world' which sounds a little familiar - maybe there is something apocalyptic in the air of Clerkenwell and Dalston.

Cibelle is one of the stars of the "Dreams That Money Can Buy" live score by The Real Tuesday Weld which I am looking forward to seeing performed again later this year. Here she is singing, the final sequence: A kiss like a knife:

One day we will never wake up.

IT WAS A WONDERFUL LIFE

2010-03-10T09:53:00.004Z

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Mark from Sparklehorse. A gentle giant and a modest man. In London a few years back, he seemed a fish out of water - a rural creature blinking awkwardly in the light. I loved the little world he managed to create from words and pictures and funny sounds.

Some of his songs with their references to frogs and owls and myrtle felt like a magical pagan americana.

Here is a Song for Mark - originally meant for someone else - but, under the circumstances, this time for him.

NO GREATER LOVE HAS A (WO)MAN

2010-02-22T21:58:00.002Z

We often bemoan Celebrity Culture - especially now when anyone can become famous for not much in particular but the fame fixation isn't particularly new. London is full of monuments to celebrities - mainly from the nineteeenth century or earlier. True, they were made to people who actually did something socially significant at the time - for instance, for exploiting and massacring lots of indigenous people for financial gain in the case of 'Clive of India' - oops, sorry, I meant for bringing the benefits of Empire to the natives!

Now I love the London statues - some of them are very camp (Hello James II!) and many have interesting stories behind them. For example, the reason Charles I was placed seated on a horse in his monument in Trafalgar Square is not because he was particularly equestrian but because he was very, very short - virtually a midget. Once you know this it's very apparent.

My favourite of the lot is in fact an early and noble example of the Democratisation of Celebrity - G.F Watts's late nineteenth century 'Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice' in the little churchyard now called 'Postman's Park' just to the south of Clerkenwell. The churchyard is overlooked by a rather Orwellian building - previously the Royal Mail sorting office - hence the 'Postman' moniker but it's a rather tranquil place to escape from the hustle of the mid-week city. The monument is most unusual - a wall of tiles protected by a sort of lean-to stable roof. Each tile commemorates the heroic self-sacrifice of an ordinary person resulting in them saving someone else's life at the cost of their own. Mostly they seem to have been working class (another big distinction between this and other nineteenth century monuments).

The various mortal situations described tell something about the society of the time - there are a lot of burning houses, run-away horses, drownings, poisonings and so on and the inscriptions on some of the tiles, whilst occasionally melodramatic, are often very moving. My personal favourite is that to a certain 'Solomon Galaman aged 11' who died of injuries incurred from saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street:

"Mother I saved him but I could not save myself"

There is also a statue to Watts himself who died leaving the wall incomplete. Further tiles were sporadically added until the 1930s and very recently a new one has been placed. Anyway, it's a lovely off-the-tourist-map place to visit to get a sense of the city, our mortality and the wonderful potential of the human soul.

I can't really compete with that but here is something from a little while ago - a version of a song sung by my friend Cibelle which came out on some compilation or other but was a bit neglected.

CATCHING THE LAST TRAIN HOME

2010-01-24T21:39:00.004Z

If you look closely at this picture, you will see a vertical-ish line of green curving to the right of the two trains (just lower-left of centre). This is what remains of the platform of the station from which coffins and mourners set out for Brookwood cemetery in Surrey where there was a corresponding station to receive them. It was bombed in the second world war and never rebuilt but the station building still stands on Westminster Bridge Road as you can see in the photograph below.

On Saturday, I sneaked around the back of it, climbed up a flight of steps, found a gate left providentially open and managed to get out onto the area adjacent to the line. It is strange up there - a wide brick tundra three storeys above street level with trains and signals clanking and flashing and nobody to see them.

The train was operated by The Necropolis Railway Company (really) and first, second and third class carriages were available although I have never been able to find out whether this was implemented on a purely financial basis or enforced according to the social standing of the mourners - or corpse.

Way to go.

When I am in charge, I shall I re-instate it.

UNREAL CITY

2010-01-13T11:32:00.007Z

Here are post-it note prayers of propitiation in St Mary's Woolnoth a city church. One of them just says "Dear God, please help me today" - a simple sentiment I can sympathise with. Like many converts to atheism, I sometimes wish I still had faith.

St Mary Woolnoth is my favourite London church. Designed by the mysterious Nicholas Hawksmoor, it is an expert lesson in how to make a small thing seem grand and of course looms large in T S Eliot's Wasteland:

"And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine."

I followed this route on Sunday with David after we saw a wonderful recitation of the poem by Fiona Shaw at the equally remarkable Wilton's music hall in Limehouse. If you ever have chance to visit either of these buildings, do - they pin the two ends of English culture down rather well I think.

And on the subject of wastelands, yesterday to see 'The Road' with Glen. I've rarely been affected by a film so much but then I have rarely been so affected by a book as when I read it a couple of years ago. Very reassuring that such a subtle take on what morality and humanity actually mean in a godless world has managed to make the mainstream - but a very sad way to learn it of course.

Bless us all.

RIVER CROSSING

2010-01-06T13:59:00.009Z

The Thames has seen many, many strange things in its long journey - even in recent times, we have had headless bodies, a giant statue of Michael Jackson and a whale. Whenever I am at Vauxhall cross - a large busy intersection of railway lines, an underground station, a bus terminus and the home of the English secret service - I always remember that this is a place of some prehistoric significance. Take the ramp next to MI5 down to the relative peace of the river foreshore at low tide and you may see why.

In 1999, following the discovery of neolithic axe heads, the remains of a bronze age timber structure were revealed by the eroding river bank. It is considered to either be an early bridge across the river or possibly a jetty intended to connect the shore with an island which is now lost. Bronze spears were also discovered - apparently intentionally placed into the river bed.

This location is significant - it is the point where the tidal Thames turns - where salt water meets fresh and the place where the rivers Effra, on the south bank and Tyburn, on the north, (both now subterranean) empty into the greater river. These outfalls can also be seen at low tide.

As these rivers were once navigable, it is likely that the area was a focus of some activity and it appears that several ancient routes converged upon it - as their contemporary equivalents still do. A southern projection of the Roman Watling street reaches the river on the north bank and Kennington Lane, thought to be the route of a raised pre-roman trackwa, joins on the south bank. The timber bridge / jetty would be a continuation of this route - linking the Kennington settlement either with the 'holy' island or the north bank of the Thames.

There are two rows of about twenty stumps - leaning inwards and giving an estimated jetty width of about four meters. They may soon be gone because now exposed,they are subject to erosion. The mystery to me is how they survived for thousands of years at all - particularly in a situation like this.

It is a new year and that reminds me, I must soon write about a very odd thing - the time machine hidden in a secret location in a very posh part of town..

CHRISTMAS IN CLERKENWELL

2009-12-30T22:03:00.011Z

You may not have known it but the Christmas Cracker was invented in Clerkenwell. A certain Thomas Smith, confectioner, based in Goswell Road developed it in the 1840s from a Parisian paper-wrapped bon-bon by adding a written message, a toy, a mild explosive and eventually a paper crown.

I had a very religious upbringing so sadly, I am less inclined towards belief these days but it was lovely to walk to Westminster on Christmas Eve for the carols in the abbey. As we stood and the choir sang, I noticed some of my fellow genius loci (and sometime antagonists) but, in honour of the occasion, and the place - elected to set aside centuries old rivalries - well, temporarily at least.

The abbey is always wonderful, not least because it contains 'Poets Corner' - a chapel or chamber which is the very epicentre of English Culture with its extraordinary array of tributes to the literary, musical, political and spiritual heroes of these islands.

Afterwards to Trafalgar Square to inspect the Christmas tree - an annual gift from our Norwegian friends in recognition of British efforts on their behalf in the war against "Hister of the crooked cross'. Very nice - but I thought the crib opposite to be rather feeble - perhaps it is a victim of the credit crunch. The bells of St Martin's-in-the-Field were pealing as we walked backwards home through the frost. Lovely

Anyway, here is that other tune I mentioned and briefly posted. It is rather perky - so watch out. Oh, and a very happy new year to you too.

A DREAM AT THE END OF THE YEAR

2009-12-05T12:04:00.018Z

What's in a number? Not much it seems. I hear the word 'trillion' almost every day now and as this decade draws to a close there seems doesn't seem to be much fuss being made about it at all. Perhaps that's because the last time - the millennium - seemed such a grand numerical event. Even though another day is just another day, it did feel then as though passing from December 31st 1999 into January 1st 2000 was a big deal. I seem to remember I was high that evening - sitting with friends somewhere up on a hillside above the San Francisco rooftops, watching fireworks explode into gigantic red hearts over the bay. On reflection, they may have just been inside my head.

Almost ten years later, sitting here looking out over the London rooftops, I'm thinking that on a personal level, the noughties were rather a momentus decade. Ten years of The Real Tuesday Weld for a start (the first ten years if they let me). As I am sure for most people, there were personal tragedies, deaths, births, lost and found loves, revelations, travel, unexpected meetings, a lot of surprises, adventures and new friends. I miss my father, I find myself generally feeling slightly stunned but perhaps more than anything, as ever, I feel very fortunate. I'm blessed with amazing family and friends. Thanks so much to all who have supported us and to all the people we work and play music with.

After 'I Lucifer' I thought: "I'll write about Love because there's not much worth saying about anything else". After 'The Return of the Clerkenwell Kid' I thought: 'I'll write about death because there's not much left to say about Love'. After 'The London Book of the Dead', I thought: 'I'll just say nothing for a while' and so, for the last year couple of years, as well as the touring and all that I've really been making instrumental music for films, producing other people and writing songs for others to sing.

As ever at this time, we make our little audio christmas card to send out. It's expanded in content over the years and now become quite something in itself - a proper greetings card by Catherine that you can send to a loved one and an entire mini album of new music. Some of this is from recent projects and collaborations and there is a sneak preview of what is next. I'm very pleased that it features our friends The Puppini Sisters, Louis Franck and Joe Coles.

If you like you can get it from this place

For you, there is also a little something else. Enjoy, and I hope that this decade has been just the forerunner, the entree, the opening act for all the wonders that are to come.

With very best wishes

TEA OVER THE BOSPHORUS

2009-11-16T09:31:00.004Z

A couple of years back I had a dream about being in Constantinople - or rather in a version of the city that had survived into some strange alternate version of the future. The next day I tried to capture it in a song which later metamorphosized into something else but today I looked up the original rather rough demo which is here if you like.

In waking life, I have never been to Istanbul so it was a great pleasure to be invited there this weekend and indeed to see so many people dancing at the show. I was surprised to hear from our friends there that this is quite unusual in Turkey. But apart from the odd dream, I only really know the place from rumour, imagination, occasional news reports and the memory of reading the story of Belisarius as a child. Thanks to Elif, Kerin and Hakan at Tamirane for having us.

The city is soaked in so much blood and history that it almost makes London feel shallow. Thankfully it seems to have managed to somehow retain a degree of mystique through this internet age (where the abundance of information and the sense of mystery appear to be in direct conflict) and yet, like Rome, it has avoided becoming merely a museum or consumable heritage experience for visiting tourists. The very warm and hospitable people, the wonderful spice market, the stone and the sea, the sound and the scent - and of course, that Queen of drinks, Tea.

Sitting up there on the Golden Horn, on the border of Europe and Asia where the Orient Express once came and thinking of Agatha Christie. it was easy to dream of the past.

THE END OF THE WORLD

2009-10-30T10:54:00.015Z

The recording of the final Valentime's eve pre-apocalypse concert at The End of the World Club is finally released in Europe today through Antique Beat. As ever, it comes with beautiful artwork made by your friend Catherine Anyango - including a free Last Will and Testament form for you to fill in to mark the end of your own world (or that of a loved one) should you choose to do so.

It all comes wrapped up in a special black box containing other ephemera from my own collection so each one is different.

LYME REGIS

2009-10-28T12:52:00.010Z

Defying the season
Pink English tongues flick out to lasso
Yellow ice cream
In low slanting sunlight

The Jurassic Coast shrugs
At the ebb and flow of this year's troubles
The autumn tide comes in
And we head home for tea

RESURRECTING AN OLD SPIRIT

2009-10-02T12:35:00.021+01:00

A few years ago, The Real Tuesday Weld were touring Europe with The Magnetic Fields. Being rather partial to exotic spirits, I asked for a bottle of Absinthe to be put on the rider in Copenhagen. It was duly delivered but unfortunately, it was the cheapest, greenest, most vicious looking version imaginable. It went straight into the fridge on the tour bus and remained there, virtually untasted as we criss-crossed Scandinavia and Germany.

A few months later, I received a letter from Toon the driver of the bus who told me that after our tour finished, the next band on was Michael Schenker - a famous heavy metal guitarist from a German band called The Scorpions. After his first show, Michael found himself alone on the bus without anything to drink as Toon drove him through the night. On investigating the bus fridge, he discovered - and downed - our bottle of Absinthe in its entirety.

Mistake. Apparently, he turned completely green himself and had to be hospitalised for alcohol poisoning - thus missing the rest of his tour. So imagine the headline: "Monster of Rock unhorsed by fey English dreamers." Apologies to all the Michael Schenker fans.

Anyway, these circumstances have never put me off the drink itself and I was pleased to work with maverick director Ronni Raygun Thomas on his new spot for Le Tourment Vert absinthe - a very classy film for a classier drink altogether.

Bottoms up.

ON THE SCENT OF SOMETHING OR OTHER

2009-09-23T10:54:00.020+01:00

Whilst on the subject of body parts, I thought it might be worth drawing attention to one of London's lesser known features. I am sure most people are aware of the London Eye - the giant ferris wheel on the South Bank of the Thames in Westminster. But did you ever hear of another of the capital's facial features - The London Nose? No I thought not. Well, here it is - high up on a wall within Admirality Arch - so high in fact that it could only really be reached by a man on horseback. A man in the cavalry say who may pass it on his way to war with Napoleon and touch it as a good luck totem.

Interesting right? But I am very pleased to be able to announce that this isn't the only London Nose. There are in fact six other much lesser known noses whose purpose is entirely obscure. I did read the other day that London is the 'cocaine capital of Europe', so perhaps this nose is a monument to the practice of ingesting that illegal substance- Stiff upper lip powder as we used to call it. They are certainly in the right part of town.

Or perhaps they are there in recognition of the fact that until fairly recently one of the most significant things a visitor or new arrival to the city would have noticed was the smell. Talking with Catherine Arnold, it became clear to me that until the first world war, the place would have absolutely stank - of death, disease, rotting food, raw sewage and unwashed bodies. Nice.

Sniff.

FURTHER ADDITION 11 OCTOBER 2009..
I thought I would add three further noses. (one courtesy of David Wright - thanks). I intended to sniff out the other two soon.

Yesterday at Cafe Koha with Joe, I found myself sitting next to someone with a very fine nose indeed - Ms Jerry Hall. Nice to see an American Actor / model / whatever smoking Camels. I have given up myself but it's become so unpopular and un-PC that I have been reconsidering - especially when seeing smoke exhaled from such elegant lips. We did however then bump into the actor who played Dot Cotton in East-Enders and my resolution was strengthened.

Another fellow with a fine figure of a nose is the English musician Stephen Duffy. At the Raindance Festival on Friday, we saw the film 'Memory and Desire' a documentary about his career. Much of it was filmed in hand held close up - in fact, I thought the camera may be about to actually go up one of his nostrils at one point. Despite that, he has a wonderful and extraordinary time of it and had written some of my favourite tunes so it was a pleasure to see him so lauded.

I"M READY FOR MY CLOSE UP MR DE MILLE

2009-09-16T10:50:00.011+01:00

I've been zipping around the freeways of Los Angeles in a hire car. This was a fairly terrifying experience - mainly for the citizens of Los Angeles. I know that Americans use the right side of the road (the wrong side we would say) but on all previous visits, my driving has been of the back seat variety.

The geography of the city became somewhat clearer to me as a result of my time on the roads - at least in that I understood much more clearly how radically different it is than European cities - first of all it is seemingly limitless and secondly, there is no centre. I liked it much more this time than previously - not difficult I suppose when you are sipping a cold drink by the pool of a house in the Hollywood hills or of a sea-front hotel in Santa Monica. I was of course there to work - but still.

Now on the other hand the psychogeography of the the place remains quite novel to someone used to the Dickensian labyrinths of London life. It's easy to assume that absolutely everyone is involved in the film business in some way or to fall back on easy cliches regarding superficiality, low carb diets and cosmetic surgery.

However, regarding the latter, I must point you at this delightfully spiteful piece of moving imagery by our old friend and colleague Alex De Campi for the Marcella and The Forget Me Nots song "What have you done to your Face?" produced by yours truly..

Quite put me off having any work done myself - even if I will be spending more time near the camera and musing on the words 'cut', 'score' and 'feature'.

EEL HEART LOVE

2009-08-31T20:59:00.006+01:00

Yesterday to Broadway market to drink cocktails for Joe's birthday. He has reached the ancient age of 30 and therefore will not be able to drink there much longer as it now seems to be entirely the preserve of young hipsters.

I was reflecting on how much this part of the city has changed although as you will see below, a few fragments of the past still remain:

I am not particularly interested in Eels (hot or jellied) myself as I don't eat meat and they cannot be easily used for taxidermy purposes but I was glad to see that enough people - and possibly even some of the hipsters - still care enough to keep this shop in business

On the way home, we gave Rosie Cooper a lift to London Bridge. She is working on a very interesting project about The Dead - or what happens to us after we die - not in a metaphysical sense but in a mortuary sense. As we had earlier been to visit the wonderful but gruesome show Exquisite Bodies at the Wellcome Trust and what with the birthday and the eels and all, it felt rather a visceral day somehow.

For no obvious reason apart from the fact that this all made me think of it, here is the mash up of Blood Sugar Love and the Feist song 'How my Heart Behaves' all set to another of the amazing Catherine Anyango's lovely and mysterious films..

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TUESDAY

2009-08-27T18:51:00.013+01:00

It was 66 years ago today.

I watched 'Once Upon a Time in America' the other night. How wonderful.
And each time I see the Cinncinati Kid, I just..
Anyway, I hope she's having a wonderful day.

Image by Peter Blake.

Tate Gallery London

CRAZY IN (AND OUT OF) LOVE

2009-08-11T21:51:00.005+01:00

'Be careful what you wish for because it might just come true' - as someone or other said and indeed things have been so crazy of late, I barely know what to say.

Still, that has never stopped me before. Amongst other things, I have been working with the crazy Ms Puppini on her project 'The Forget Me Nots' - more on that and on the lure of Hollywood soon - but in the meatime I thought I would leave this - Eyal's crazy mash up for that crazy remix for The Puppini Sisters - and the last thing that crazy cat did before he left us for Berlin.

OUT OF THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK

2009-07-08T09:59:00.008+01:00

I turned the corner and there before my eyes was a vast chamber with four massive cast iron valves high up on the wall. There was the constant sound of rushing water and the air was hot and damp with a heavy metallic odour.

I felt as though the walls were beginning to close in, my breath clogged in bloodied lungs, a white hot fear pierced into freezing black coldness within me.

He sat lounging in a giant chair with lavishly dressed men and girls on either side, a lizard on hs shoulder. Moths flew about - or were they butterflies? He was smiling, almost to himself, with a slightly puzzled look - not concerned, but interested in a cruel uncaring way like a cat with prey. The people around him were all looking at me.

I felt myself led forward. There was laughter and whispering but as he straightened a silence fell and his companions looked toward him.

Hello pilgrim

I'm in hell

Not yet

Who are you?

Don't you know?

I don't know anything. I know that I'm done with this - I'm out of it. All of it - I'm going to tell the world about you

He raised an eyebrow.

And who would listen Pilgrim?

The police, priests, the authorities?

Another smile.

It's no good old sport - you know it's really no good

How can you be like this? It's me, me you're talking to. Me

And this is Me my dear

And in that moment, I suddenly saw him as he truly was: completely other, almost alien, capricious as they say the Olympians were - not evil, just entirely amoral.

I'm leaving

Oh?

I'm getting out of here - I'm going home

And where would that be then old sport?

I turned and walked back towards the entrance - but there was no entrance.

Let me go

But there's nowhere to go my dear. Don't you know?

Know what?

His companions were sniggering again, all looking at me and each other with exaggerated caricatured sympathetic expressions. He silenced them with a wave.

It's no good my dear. You really have to give it up

Give up what?

All this ... disbelief. It just won't do any more

What?

Do I really have to spell it out?

Laughter broke out again.

Spell what out?

He stopped smiling. Looked directly at me.

You're dead

The heat and coldness in me intensified to an unbearable pitch.

I'm not dead, I'm not dead

He was smiling again, shaking his head, mocking but almost gentle once more.

I'm afraid you are old sport

You've been dead for years..

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

2009-06-30T10:42:00.011+01:00

My friend Pete Sollet sent me this photograph. Big deal right? But this isn't the central east side of London, it's the lower east side of Manhattan. I do look forward to eating there soon - but if you get chance to check it out, do let us know whether it's worthy of the name won't you?

Unfortunately due to circumstances rather beyond my control, I may not be in New York this summer as planned. Having been there every year for so long now, it will seem strange to miss it this time around. Until last year, I nearly always stayed with Pete and Eva and their dog Rae in their lower east side apartment (I shared with Rae). Their films: 'Five feet high and Rising' and 'Raising Victor Vargas' are kind of hymns to that particular part of the city - as of course in a way, is 'Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist' for which they moved to LA for Pete to direct.

I was pleased to be able to contribute some music to that film which I thoroughly enjoyed. Here is the instrumental of Last Words. I don't think it's available any where else and, despite having being written about walking around London in a daze wondering where it all went wrong, it will now always remind me of driving around New York in a yellow taxi wondering where it all went right.

WILD GOOSE CHASE

2009-06-04T23:37:00.014+01:00

I started this blog four years ago with an account of a visit I made to see the buried river Fleet far beneath the pavements of Clerkenwell. A lot has happened in the time since but I've remained fascinated by the city - both above and below ground. Here is a picture of the mouth of the river Effra which rises below St Marks church in Brixton and exits into the Thames on either side of Vauxhall bridge. It was taken at low tide when you can also see the mouth of the river Tyburn opposite and that of the river Westbourne farther up stream. There are various other out-falls along the northern bank reminding us that Westminster was once an island. The mouth of the Fleet is very difficult to see but it can be glimpsed from a westbound boat under Blackfriars bridge at low tide. The definitive work on the subject is Nicholas Barton's 'The Lost Rivers of London' and the incredible and intrepid guys at sub-urban have photographed many of the most dramatic underground waterways.

A friend asked me the other day what I would do if I were to be elected Mayor. I had no hesitation in telling her I would cancel the 2012 Olympics (does anyone really want them?) and spend the money on alienating a load of property owners by opening up the rivers again. Oh yes and by making the city vegetarian and it obligatory for everyone who lives here to record their dreams everyday. Ok, so my friend was a wild goose on the Thames foreshore but personally I think this would have a very remarkable and positive effect on us all.

I have been seeing Valentine again. Like Philemon, he has seemed at times to be a somewhat imaginary friend but nevertheless, like the rivers, constant.

To all friends - real or imagined - who have read this blog and listened, watched or commented over the years, much appreciation.

Here's to another four..

I LOOKED AROUND AND HE WAS GONE

2009-05-25T22:31:00.008+01:00

We played at the Last Tuesday Society's Walpurgis Night on Friday. To my slight embarrassment, and possibly because of the German connection, until I saw Punchdrunk's extraordinary 'Faust' a couple of years back, I always thought Walpurgis Night was something to do with sausages.

Now we don't normally do club shows but we like Wynd and Suzette who run the society because they do interesting things. I suppose Walpurgis Night (which is actually at the end of April) is a kind of Norse Day of the Dead or Halloween and before the show I had the pleasure to meet and run the slides for Catherine Arnold who gave a talk on her: 'Necropolis: London and its Dead' (one of my favourite books about the city of recent times). Michael Nyman DJ-ed (yes, really) and Giles Abbott delivered a characteristically witty and potent story about Walpurgis. After the show a rather flamboyant Bacchanalia kicked in. My six months of sobriety have sometimes made such things a trifle difficult but these days they seem to lend an interesting, almost anthropological, perspective to the proceedings.

I liked the death-themed activities - particularly in a vault under London Bridge which always reminds me of the T S Eliot piece from 'the Wasteland":

"Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many"

I find it at least, if not more, appropriate to try to write about death as to write about love these days. I always thought it was a rather strangely neglected subject in modern music - apart from the Goth and Metal stuff - which is often just a bit silly. My favourite example is probably 'Abraham, Martin & John' by Marvin Gaye. That's absolutely glorious and generally gets eyes moist in these parts. Do let me know your own favourites.

In the meantime here is a little thing from a private little show I did in the vault of St Pancras church last summer. We've done a few things in vaults of late and a friend secretly recorded it and sent it to me. I generally don't approve of men over twenty five with acoustic guitars - but I'll make an exception in my own case.

ANYTHING BUT LOVE

2009-05-07T20:29:00.009+01:00

I used to share an apartment with my friend the writer Glen Duncan in Notting Hill before we moved to Clerkenwell. At that time he had written three novels almost entirely concerned with the ins and outs of Love, Life and Relationships and he became regarded as rather an expert on the subject. We used to be visited by various friends or members of our circle (and sometimes by relative strangers) who were suffering from the punctures left by Cupid's arrows or from scars inflicted by other gods and who were seeking what psychotherapists would call 'the talking cure'. Now I claim no particular expertise in these areas (as, to be fair, neither did Glen) because in fact, we ourselves been rather bruised and both had a quite shoddy record in the field.

Anyway, come they did to our sky-high flat far above the city and Glen, or the 'Doctor of Love' as I referred to him, would listen carefully to the details of the various predicaments presented. My role primarily involved being sympathetic in the background and providing tea - and occasionally tissues - as required. After any particular situation had been described, discussed and deliberated, he would pause to consider then lean forward from his armchair with steepled fingers and confidently give his prognosis:

"I think you need to get laid"

His interlocutor would always leave with a definite slight spring in their step - albeit also with a slightly puzzled air at having had the complexities of their dilemma reduced to such a simple solution. On being subsequently questioned regarding the universal application of his panacea, The Doctor would assert, not unreasonably, that there were few human condiitons such medicine couldn't improve. I suppose he was right.

Anyway, here is the original version of a song from that period.

Hope it works for you.

WILLIAM IT WAS REALLY NOTHING

2009-04-15T08:46:00.009+01:00

Last week with Louis on part one of a Blake walk through London. We began at St Mary' church in Battersea - one of the older and surely most beautifully sited churches in the city and the one where, in 1782 William Blake married Catherine Boucher. It floats in a little garden just above the Thames facing Westward up-river and at low tide on a sunny day is a stunningly romantic (and relatively unknown) rendezvous. I can publish the full itinerary of this walk if anybody fancies it. It begins in this churchyard and ends in the grave yard where William and Catherine were buried. It takes up much of a leisurely day and although most of the buildings associated with the Blakes are gone (sadly, some fairly recently) it is a wonderful way to see the city and takes in much of interest.

Blake only left London once in his life - for a short period at Felpham - and the city figures greatly and mythologically in his work. A little exhibition is just beginning at Tate Britain to recreate his failed exhibition of works of 1809. I think a lot of people who like his work, particularly artists, resonate with the fact that he had little commercial success or recognition but doggedly kept on at it year after year. He seemed to generally have been regarded as loveable but mad, even by his friends, and he was supported by a few devoted followers, by his marriage and by working sporadically as an engraver.

With regard to his 'madness', it's very difficult to know what to think. God at the window of his childhood bedroom, an angel in Peckham, the ghost of a flea. What does one make of such apparitions now? A contemporary reading would perhaps put them down to some sort of mild psychosis and his eccentric temperament to one of manic depression governed by some bi-polar cycle, but who cares when the work is so luminous and passionate? I've often thought that being of rather a melancholic, even awkward, disposition is no disadvantage if it can be somehow turned to creative means - one reason why I have never favoured legal pharmacology in that area.

Blake is said to have died singing jubilantly, fired up with a vision of what was to come.

If that's madness, I'll have a bit.

EASTER PARADE

2009-04-13T16:23:00.007+01:00

You wore your Sunday best
I wore my summer dress
At the Easter bank holiday parade

You said: 'It seems like a still
From some Nineteen Sixties foreign film"
I said: " I hope I always feel this way"
Easter parade
Easter parade

The ferry boat came into land
As we lay there upon the sand
And the carnival crowd wandered away

The afternoon began to fade
My make up smudged across your face
You said: "I wish that I could stay"

Easter parade
Easter parade

-Time passes-

At the station I came to wait
We said good-bye, you caught the train
I walked back home along the bay

I remember that summer dress
Though these days I wear something less
Provincial at the

Easter parade
Easter parade

DID IT FEEL GOOD?

2009-03-24T10:23:00.001Z

Last night to the premiere of the new Richard Curtis feel-good, comedy 'The Boat that Rocked" in Leicester Square. Now I've never been to a red carpet affair before so I found it quite interesting - with Sixties Go Go dancers, popping flashbulbs and all that - and it was absolutely rammed with English Actors and celebrities - apparently. Unfortunately due to a combinations of factors - not having a TV, not reading the papers and being short sighted - I rarely recognise anyone and I embarrassed myself by mistaking Paul McCartney's new girlfriend for Carlo Bruni. My eyesight is good enough however to notice that Kenneth Brannagh is rather short.

I am not alone in this deficiency. Sipping yet another non alcoholic drink, I had become aware of the interested gaze of a young chap for sometime before he came over, introduced himself and engaged me in a conversation which implied a familiarity with me and my work. I managed a small period of self delusion before we both realised that he had mistaken me for one of the cast and he hurried off. I was left alone rather hoping he wasn't thinking of Rhys Ifans before changing my mind and hoping that he WAS thinking of Rhys Ifans - as the only plausible (ie blondish) alternatives being Philip Seymour Hoffman or, ahem, Bill Nighy.

It's probably the longest comedy I have seen - almost two and a half hours - and so full of feel good moments that I'm afraid to say I began to feel rather bad. Some funny things but I left with a rather confused feeling of really not knowing what to make of it. N. said to me "That's because you're not the target audience." Do let me know if you are the target audience, what that means and what you think of it.

THE WALK OF LOVE

2009-03-12T12:39:00.004Z

To Kings College to chaperone Mr Duncan through a drug comedown after his operation. Now Camberwell is a district I know not at all but I was very pleased to discover this little street:
My phone rang and it was Toynbee Studios. Just when I had resigned myself to either having to purchase a new velocipede or to undertake future journeys on foot, I was delighted to learn they had discovered my stolen bicycle in some bushes near the theatre. True the delight was somewhat mitigated by the reflection that the bike was so uncool that the person who stole it couldn't be bothered keeping it, but it saved me the painful process of having to make a decision about a new one.

Did The Walk of Love home and vowed to reconsider my newly learned dislike of Shoreditch.

LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE CITY

2009-03-07T09:50:00.006Z

One of the nicest, although slightly embarrassing, things about tourists (and about being a tourist) is the eagerness and ready wonder found in the experience of a new city. You see this in London all the time and of course you experience it yourself when abroad. It never quite extends with me to say wanting to actually buy the cd of that South American busker playing delay-pedalled pan pipes to a synthesised backing tape, but it does engender a remarkably childlike enthusiasm for sites and sounds which may well be seen and not noticed at home or to which the locals have long become blunted by over familiarity and repetition. "Sure, but you can't eat the view" as a denizen of Rome said to me once when I complimented him on living in one of the world's most beautiful cities.

I generally like the open mouthed bonhomie and genuinely innocent pleasure of the newly arrived, but there are whole stretches of London where I now feel reluctant to venture: Covent Garden, the South Bank and so on - only because they are so touristed - and yet when I do visit or should stumble there out of hours, of course I see, or re-see, the attraction.
There are other areas of the city which I feel less inclined to visit for different and possibly 'psycho-geographic' reasons. The flatlands of Battersea for instance make me feel slightly gloomy and those of Fulham rather irritable (although that may be the preponderance of B list bankers secretly longing to live in Notting Hill) and I have never been keen on the Edgware Road.

But, for world weary citizens of this and probably any other city, it has often struck me that London is most intensely experienced or re-experienced when one is a recently arrived visitor from the State of Love - whether it be in the intoxication of love's beginning or in the heartbreak of its end. Familiar sites that are taken for granted by all but geographical tourists suddenly become re-suffused with meaning. The concrete and stone ooze significance, soulfulness and the pleasure of anticipation or the poignancy of memory. Particular corners, tube stations, a bench here, a cafe there interlace in a network of symbolic association and emotion that reveals the soul beneath and between the streets and squares. This of course is the city as walked or imagined in the company of another person - whether they be with us in our past, present or future, in actuality or in our imagination or memory

If you are not in such a state, for better or for worse, then the process of intentional discovery seems to help keep things alive - a process I see as a kind of creation of a personal city. Apart from wandering around and finding new places, a favourite pastime of mine has been beach-combing on the foreshore of the Thames at low tide. This is an ancient practice formerly known as 'Mudlarking' when carried out professionally by a particular caste of London's poor. With less pressing reason, we have found many amazing things there - seventeenth century clay pipes, Georgian belt buckles, a Roman coin, an Iron age arrow head, fragments of lovely blue ceramic, and, the other week, an i pod. Today, in one of the lesser known stretches I found a child's bicycle from the sixties. How did it come there - and when? Why has it emerged from the mud just now? Where is its young owner these days? Did he or she weep to see it fall?

On the morning after an evening in Shoreditch (now, crossed off my list of places to like) when my own bike was stolen, this discovery presented a synchronistic reminder of the, ahem, cyclical nature of the urban environment - particularly as last night's crime occourred as we sat watching a performance by Paper Cinema involving projected images of the city, dreaming and bicycling.

These lost cycles remind me that as well as defining one's own London, it seems like an important thing too to mourn and mark the passing of loved things here. Sure, the city has always been in flux but if we don't notice - or don't care as it changes - then what does that say about our relationship with it? This year the amazing, unique Shunt vaults under London Bridge will be smashed to bits and a piece of Borough Market will get chewed up so that a priapic glass tower can be raised above. (London really needs more open plan office space for financial institutions at the moment right?). I noticed the other day that the funny little Battersea Barge where we used to play peculiar shows and where we had an amazing midsummer's party a few years back has quietly and mysteriously vanished - victim no doubt to the encroaching strip of ticky-tacky apartment buildings marching west up the southern river bank. I am sure the people who do these things really don't love the city - or if they do it's in the way of a one night stand rather than a passionate ongoing affair.

But, like all love affairs, even if you do love London, it is a romance that will end someday. Even if it should survive and flourish despite the over familiarity and the stresses and fights and the ongoing habitual routines, in the end you will eventually perhaps just grow weary and move away or, if not that, you will certainly die. Oh and that reminds me: up until the 1940s there was a dedicated rail service and train line from Waterloo to Brooklands cemetery in Surrey run by 'The Necropolis Railway Company' upon which the carefully casketed citizen could gracefully embark upon their final journey accompanied for a little while by their mourners.

What a lovely way to leave.

WALTZ FOR ONE

2009-03-02T09:53:00.004Z

Eva Vives a Spanish film writer and director made this film in Manhattan with our friend Aurelia Thierree last year (or perhaps the one before). It has rarely been seen but was shown prior to The Real Tuesday Weld performance at the National Film Theatre last week and several people asked about it. It is intended as a section from a longer narrative set to a track which was not released in the UK.

Aurelia is the the protagonist, subject and main performer of the wonderful 'Aurelia's Oratario' - probably one of the most magical and mysterious shows I have ever seen.

ONE MORE GHOST BEFORE BREAKFAST

2009-02-18T15:55:00.008Z

Here is Hans Richter's 1927 Short Surrealist masterpiece: "Ghosts Before Breakfast" re-scored.

The film initially had a soundtrack which was lost when the original print was destroyed by the Nazi's as 'degenerate art'.

This music - with Jacques Van Rhijn on clarinet, Don Brosnan on bass, Jed Woodhouse on drums, Clive Painter on guitar - was recorded at Clive's studio prior to the sessions for our re-score of Richter's full length magnum opus: "Dream That Money Can Buy" with which this amazing little film shares much. We later used some of it in the Nightingales in the Wasteland podcast but it has never had a proper airing.

The sun was streaming through the big windows and Jacques was on red hot form - quite blissed out I think.
A happy time.

Thanks to Bryan for finding the footage.

THE ALCHEMY OF INK AND BOOZE

2009-02-06T12:53:00.014Z

The very talented Clive Painter made this beautiful montaged collage for the song 'Dorothy Parker Blue' (on which he also plays the guitar) as part of the project "Propaganda from the State of Love' we created last year for the Victoria and Albert museum.

It reminds me somewhat of the time we did a radio show with Jane Birkin in Paris. We were discussing Dorothy Parker and dreams and the way that literature can really wake you up when you are young. I grew up in a funny house in a strange little place at a peculiar time and the worlds described by DP seemed impossibly glamorous and far away - yet inspiring enough to be worth reaching for nevertheless.

Even though she became quite a tragic character, washed up and beached on a sea of martini and bad love, she seemed to remain insightful and self aware to the end. Now and again, I still enjoy reading her stories - even though, sadly, I've had to give up the martinis myself.

FEBRUARY IS HERE

2009-02-02T22:05:00.008Z

The snow came today and London is transformed.

Builders and bankers having a snowball fight on Waterloo Bridge. A sort of hush. No buses and a curious camaraderie.

Heaven for let-off-for-the-day school kids.

DEAD ENDS

2009-01-31T17:18:00.000Z

Suddenly, there is a creaking, a heavy clunk and a sound as if old gears are grinding. The door in the wall behind me is slowly opening and a thin column of light is cast on the wet cobblestones. The column widens into a golden parabola. Perfectly framed within it is the shadow of a tall man.

Out of the light, a voice speaks:

"Well well my dears. What have we here then? Three against one? Now that's not very sporting is it?"

The voice is cultivated, mocking - almost arch. I look up. The dog is snarling, lips pulled back against scarlet gums. It crouches flat to the floor, bristles on end. My assailants have backed away to the edge of the light and I can see my own fear and hatred now mirrored on their faces.

The voice above me tuts a question:
"And aren't we a bit far from home boys?"

The dog's snarls gain in pitch. There is a sudden movement - a hand stabbing outwards in a whip-crack gesture and the dog yelps and is catapulted backwards. It drags itself up whining and limping and in a moment is gone. The men shift defensively, half crouched and peer nervously upwards toward the figure.

Losing patience, the voice suddenly snaps and hisses:

"Get away!"

It is a threat, not a warning and suddenly there is even more terror in the air. Both men stagger as if rocked by some force. One covers his eyes. They recover, turn and flee after the dog into the night.

We are alone.

I look up to see a pale aquiline face staring out into the darkness with an expression of fury which of a sudden is replaced by one of curiosity - and then solicitousness. The figure looks down and stoops to offer an arm. I take it and pull myself up. I can faintly smell good tobacco, a beautiful and strange cologne and something other, something undefinable. We look at each other in the light. He smiles.

"Well! You look like you need a drink "

Relief floods me. His gaze flits to the stain spreading across my trousers.
"Er.. and perhaps a change of clothes?"

Fear is replaced with embarrassment. Awkwardly, I try to tug my arm away from his but he holds it easily with a steely grip which is not to be resisted. I stand.
"Do come in won't you?"

The invitation is pitched like an order. He steps back into the doorway. Hesitating, I look behind me - back into the darkness beyond the alley almost as if I am looking back into my life before this moment. I pause a little longer and then I turn again. My rescuer's silhouette is shrinking into the golden light.

Very carefully, I step through the door and the world is changed for ever.

AT THE HOUSE OF THE CLERKENWELL KID

2009-01-31T11:07:00.000Z

Inside the house, the golden light surrounding us gradually dims. We are standing in a short passageway which leads to one room and then to another. We walk on through doorways into a hall with panels and paintings and a large and very strange chandelier. We stop, a bell is rung and in a moment a middle aged man in black jacket appears.
"Rudge, my young friend here seems to have got into a spot of bother. Have we such a thing as a spare pair of trousers?"

The man in the black jacket looks me quizzically with one eyebrow raised, grins and says
"Of course sir. I'll bring a pair"

My companion looks to me and points towards another door.
"Maybe you can pop in there old sport and Rudge will sort it all out for you in an instant"

The room he indicates is a cloakroom with heavy Edwardian sanitaryware and a large red leather chair. I run hot water in the sink, get out of my clothes and proceed to clean myself up. After a few minutes, there is a soft tap on the door. It opens slightly and a black clothed arm appears holding shorts and a pair of black evening trousers.
"Ahem."

It is Rudge. I take the proffered clothes.
"Er, Thanks"

The arm withdraws
"Drinks are served in the red drawing room when you are ready. First door on the right."

I pull the trousers on and step back into my own socks and shoes. In the mirror, my face is bleach white with dark and dilated pupils. I look in a state of shock and indeed I am - not just from my flight and pursuit or from the averted terror of expected violence, but from the circumstances of my rescue and my presence in this strange house. There is something very peculiar here and I feel a sensation which is like fear but is not fear - a state of acute heightened awareness combined with a dizzy disorientation.

In the red drawing room I find my host standing with his back to a large fireplace. The room is beautiful - filled with books and old maps, a piano, taxidermy, curiosities. In the corner stands a large decorated globe in an oak stand. The deep blue of its seas sparkle against the deep red curtains behind. On a table are what look like antique navigational devices - an astrolabe, a sextant and a pair of compasses.
"Feeling better old sport?"

He is a smiling youngish man in a dark cut lounge suit. He is impeccable in dress, hair and stance. He is tall and has the poised look of a dancer. I nod.

"Yes - thank you"

"Well you have been having some adventures haven't you! Must have given you quite a turn?"

"Yes - thank you again for helping"

"Not at all old sport - pleased to be of service. I won't tolerate that sort round my neighbourhood"

"You know them?"

He pauses
"Well, you could say we are, er, aquainted"

"We should report them to the police"

He smiles and waves a hand airily
"Well I suppose we could do - although I don't think that would help much do you? You know the police these days - awfully busy with financial scandals and terrorists and the like. But let's hear all about it - what on earth were you doing with a couple of brutes like that on your tail?"

I shiver.
"I have absolutely no idea. They followed me from the pub - from the Jerusalem. I didn't realise what was going on until I came up into the square and and they made a move on me. I ran into the back streets and got cornered in your alley"

He is listening intently but I have the strangest impression it is not only to my words. He says quietly:
"How strange you should find yourself there of all places"

"Well, I just ran randomly - I know the streets round here but I've never noticed that turning before. It was bloody good luck."

He seems oddly unsatisfied with this but offers me a drink. I take the whisky in a heavy cut glass tumbler and sip.
"And you've never seen them before?"

"No, I..."

I am about to continue but have a peculiar feeling that there was in fact something familiar about one of them, There is some memory on the edge of my conciousness but I can't quite grasp it.
".. I don't think so. I guess they were chancers out to rob me"

Even as I said this I knew it didn't ring true. Not here. Not in Clerkenwell. Something much more sinister had been going on but I had no idea what.
"And do you know what they hoped to steal?"

"Phone, wallet, my watch perhaps?"

Suddenly, he reaches out, seizes my hand, pushes up my sleeve and looks at my watch for a moment.
"Not much of a prize - it doesn't appear to be working!"

It is true. The watch has stopped - but it has stopped forty minutes ago when I would have still been in the Jerusalem. Suddenly I feel nervous again - and this time nervous of my new companion and his abilities. He, however, seems more at ease and lets my arm go. I look at him
"What happened out there? What did you do to frighten them off?"

"Oh, I know how to handle that type old sport. Just a bit of assertiveness is all it usually takes. But don't you worry about that - why don't you take a chair and relax?"

He seems to want to change the subject and goes over to ring a bell by the side of the fire. I sit and look around the room. On one side the books, which are from many periods, seem geographically related - atlases, travelogues, itineraries and so on . On the other, there are historical publications - textbooks, periodicals and a leather bound archive relating to London.

After a few minutes, there is a tap on the door and my host goes to open it. It is Rudge and there is a brief quiet conversation. The servant nods and leaves. My companion comes back, stands over me, proffers his hand and says:
"How rude, I don't even know your name!"

I introduce myself. He sits and leans back in the chair opposite, sips his drink and looks at me curiously:
"Well, I shall call you 'Pilgrim' in honour of the way we met - what with you on your knees and all that!"

This seems to cause him some considerable degree of private amusement.

"Pilgrim, it's a pleasure to meet you. My name is Valentine.

I'm the Clerkenwell Kid"

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY?

2009-01-30T13:29:00.005Z

There have been quite a few commercials on the TV over the last few years with music which people have thought was by The Real Tuesday Weld. Unfortunately they were usually not-very-good in-the-style-of things which is a double blow - you don't get the money AND people think you'll knock out any old crap. I never normally bother about these things as I haven't got a TV and after all, who actually is original these days anyway? But, I couldn't resist a sigh and a chuckle when a friend showed me the new album by that funny Scottish band Franz Ferdinand.

Look familiar?

I don't mind at all but I did rather feel for my friend Paul Heartfield who I've been working with for years and who I think has quietly become one of the best photographers in London. he is always having his ideas pinched and not being credited properly and I am sure he would have helped FF if they'd asked him. Still, if you want to see the real thing head over to his place. It's far better

SEASONS DREAMINGS

2008-12-05T21:51:00.000Z

Time goes so quickly now doesn't it? - And it's almost already that time of year again. Every winter for almost a decade now The Real Tuesday Weld have sent out a little audio christmas card with exclusive tracks and funny things and now they've finally made it available to all friends.

It has artwork by Catherine Anyango and contains some real surprises. It will fit most stocking sizes.

I believe they have also remixed Count Basie for the Verve Christmas album. Very nice too.

Best wishes to all. Thanks for listening, reading, watching, commenting. I appreciate that very much. See you next year I hope..

ANGELS OVER LONDON

2008-11-04T14:44:00.005Z

At the end of this month, it's 251 years since William Blake was born. We usually go to see his grave in Bunhill Fields every year and I noticed that The Real Tuesday Weld cheekily pinched some of his work on their album 'The London Book of the Dead'. I always thought that he was buried in a mass grave with up to thirty other people, but the recent discovery of a secret coded grid on the graveyard wall may change that. Last time we visited, we found a small piece of nineteenth century oak coffin with two copper nails in it and wondered whether it was a bit of his.

When he was a child he was reputed to see angels in the trees and he became rather angelic himself as he grew older - but not in a cute way - more in the manner of the giant figure said to be guarding the gates of Eden with blazing sword and loud trumpet. I was reminded of this when I saw Alex De Campi's video for The Real Tuesday Weld song 'Last Words' - oh, and of course, of that wonderful film: Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders.

I understand she had a hellish time making it and performed several miracles to pull it off but she has a place in video heaven we know.

HORSING AROUND?

2008-10-23T22:22:00.008+01:00

After doing a few Baby Food ads, it's been nice to even up THE SCORE, shake off a bit of my Catholic past and for once do something to make the world a safer (and possibly smaller) place. The opportunty was provided me by Brooklyn cult filmmaker Ronni Raygun Thomas. Cheers Ronni.

And remember kids, do do this at home.

US AND THEM

2008-09-30T12:29:00.009+01:00

In conjunction with 'Cold War Modern' show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Radio Clerkenwell will be broadcasting a series of shows for Resonance 104.4FM the London Arts Radio Station. The series is a trip through 'Sounds of Propaganda and the Cold War' featuring some of the absolutely extraordinary music, broadcasts and spoken word recordings of the time. I will have some very special guests along the way to keep me company too.

The shows go out from Sunday October 5th at 6.30pm GMT and will be repeated the following Tuesdays at 11.00pm GMT. There are a schedule of the programs and I will be posting playlists here each week (and a list of sources at the end of the series.). Outside the capital, the station can be listened to on-line at www.resonancefm.com

MEETUP?

2008-09-21T21:02:00.009+01:00

Well you know, we probably all spend too much time in front of our computers and for many of us it seems the hours spent on the de rigeur on-line virtual networking sites has even overtaken the time we spend actually meeting people in the flesh. I'm really not sure about it all to tell you the truth. Yet, when asked by Curious Pictures to contribute music to their new promo for yet another such site, I accepted. Why? Well, because the film was made by Ro Rao the director who directed 'Bringing the Body Back Home' and of course, as you might expect, it's wonderful.

But anyway, what does this particular on-line social networking site promote that all the others out there don't already? Yes, you guessed it, it's aimed at getting you away from your computer and on-line social networking sites...

And so it goes, round and round and round -

but here's the film anyway.

Kind of makes me wish I had a tail..

DEEP BLUE SOMETHING

2008-09-12T09:01:00.003+01:00

Speaking of Catherine, she recently asked me to re-score her wonderful film 'Deep Blue Something'. She is rather reclusive and seems reluctant to ever step into the footlights, so I am forced to do it for her.

Many people have asked about the imagery The Real Tuesday Weld use at live shows - most of it is by Catherine too. If you are in London and would like to see it - come and join them at Corsica Studios on the 25th - I shall be there myself.

Anyway, here is the film with new music and voice: dive in to the deep blue

THE LONDON BOOK OF THE DEAD

2008-08-11T12:05:00.008+01:00

This album by The Real Tuesday Weld came out in the US late last year and there is a terrible tale of skulduggery, betrayal and infidelity behind why it is only now available in Europe. But, praise the Lord, it is now being released through Cargo / Six Degrees in all the usual places and by the new label Antique Beat as a special collectors' edition forty page hardback book. This is made with wonderful illustrations by the very magical and mysterious Ms Catherine Anyango (a fellow denizen of East Central London) who tells the album's story in a series of gorgeous linked montaged tableaux.

They also kindly included some of my writings and future reminiscences together with a special piece by London literary luminary Glen Duncan and I believe there is a special gift for those who look hard enough.

Above is an image from Catherine's wonderful film for the first track: 'Blood Sugar Love'. It was made around my house in Clerkenwell. Click here to watch it. Quite beautiful I think you will agree.

MAD MAN MOON

2008-08-01T15:58:00.006+01:00

Alex has been at it again.

A couple of years ago he came over to the UK an visited Callanish at my suggestion. Now Callanish is a place on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides off the North West coast of Scotland where there is an extraordinary and massive prehistoric stone site to rival Stonehenge.

It's pretty remote and a long and complicated trip is necessary to get there. He made the journey all the way from Brooklyn, arrived and then left again after five minutes. Why? Because it completely freaked him out. He loved Stonehenge but then Stonehenge is a Solar temple.. Callanish is a Lunar temple. Now, I know he doesn't take drugs so I am assuming he has that condition that means you get affected by the movements of the moon.

Why am I telling you all this? Because he has just posted 'Last time in Clerkenwell' - a kind of sequel to 'Bathtime in Clerkenwell' - on Youtube and it's completely stark raving bonkers. Youtube have featured it on the front page, so his lunacy - and considerable genius - will hopefully be appreciated by a great deal of people. Hurray.

THE LONG MARCH HOME

2008-07-24T12:52:00.002+01:00

Back to Blighty after visiting the New World. Meeting new friends and old, meeting celebrities, a Siegfried and Roy moment, a Spinal Tap moment, getting sunburned, getting stoned. Experiencing a lot of generosity, appreciation and passion. And that was just on the way to Heathrow..

In New York I met up with Ro Rao - who has made a wonderful animation / film / puppet show for the song 'Bringing the Body Back Home. Here is a quick preview before we launch it in the Autumn.

Blew me away.

US and THEM

2008-07-03T11:51:00.011+01:00

Well, well, well- after all this time The Real Tuesday Weld are going back to play in Canada and the USA and I will be accompanying them. About time too. The world has changed and governments do their thing - incomprehensible to most of us I suspect - so it's all become much more complicated and long winded and paranoic but I'm really looking forward to seeing friends, meeting strangers and travelling across that amazing landscape. I've hopped over the channel to work / collaborate / hang out quite a bit these last few years and it's always such a pleasure.

I don't know if you will be able to be there but it would be an honour to say hello if you were. All the dates are on that myspace thing.

In the meantime, or if we won't see you, for a little something (a little cheeky something) to whet the appetite and to show that that famous 'special relationship' is still firmly in place, click here

NOTICING

2008-06-13T11:06:00.012+01:00

Now, when you notice things, there’s someone else there.

Crows lope away from us with a look that knows our atrocities.
The back garden in Wednesday rain heaves out godlessness.
Sunlight shines through the rim of a baby’s nostril.
Airports murmur the secret all governments fear: there aren’t nations, only people.

Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.

Noticing used to happen without you noticing it:
A girl’s nude armpit like an opal,
The sea’s look of marbled meat,
A bare winter tree like a cross-sectioned lung.
You woke up, noticed, went to bed dumbly enriched.

Now, when you notice these things, there’s someone else there with you.

In the kitchen, after an evening in separate conversations,
You put your hands on your wife’s midriff – and there she is again,
All that you’d forgotten.
Desire learns cunning or dies.

Now, when you notice her, there’s someone else there with you.

Awake before suburban dawn you master self-ridicule and step
Barefoot onto the lawn’s frost, because after all you can.
And there’s frost revealed: an old patient god
Fragilely attempting an impossible reclamation.

You notice this, but there’s someone else there with you.

You can’t, quite, meet his eye, this companion who showed-up sometime after wisdom teeth or original sin.
But you begin to see your mistake:
Noticing isn’t a gift, a grace, a dispensation, but
Comes at a price, demands exchange,
And as his peripheral smile reminds,

We’ve only the one thing to give.

text - Glen Duncan
image - Catherine Anyango

A DAY AND A NIGHT AND A DAY

2008-05-27T19:56:00.007+01:00

I've been reading the manuscript of Glen Duncan's latest novel "A Day and a Night and a Day".

What has struck me, apart from the distillation of his style down to its essence, is his ability to unflinchingly describe the darkest and most tragic situations in a way that is often positively thought provoking and sometimes inspiring. He shares that quality with Cormac McCarthy I think. I've made my compromises and generally regret them so I'm always impressed by artistic integrity - and Glen's never gone for the easy option, even when it's there begging on a plate. I remember with 'I, Lucifer', that it was intended to be knocked off in three months as a commercial ruse to get him 'out of a hole' - but he just couldn't help himself and it became a thoughtful, literary work (perhaps to the chagrin of his publisher) as well as a rather cracking yarn.

This book is political - or at least, topical. I was initially concerned about that when he told me - I mean it's easy to get that sort of thing very wrong - but reading it has revealed it as not only a brave move but a masterly one. I think it will do very well - possibly not commercially (although who knows?) but hopefully in terms of a prize. It's that good. And, despite all the darkness, honesty and intensity, a very enjoyable read.

But I've known Glen most of my life. We became friends in a provincial town early on - not least because it never really felt like home. We were in-situ cultural refugees so to speak and we've been egging each other on ever since. By the way, in case this all sounds horribly back-slapping and self-congratulatory, you should know that l could tell you the most terrible things about him and he's definately seen me at my shameful worst.

Anyway, the book will be published in the new year - first in the US and then in England. I don't really read fiction and of course I'm partisan, so make up your own mind. But don't say I didn't tell you..

LUNA PARK

2008-05-13T12:09:00.008+01:00

Last year Yuliya - another ex-patriat Russian friend living in Brooklyn -asked me if I would write something for her graduation animation about the old theme park at Brighton Beach. I did and here it is - a wonderfully strange creation don't you think?

I heard that the theme park is gone or going or being re-developed into blandness. Inevitable I guess- but it still seems a shame.

HALF HORSE - HALF DREAM

2008-04-28T12:15:00.003+01:00

A couple of years ago I had a very strong dream about being on the South Bank of the River Thames in a kind of glade of trees - a landscape as it probably would have been before the city existed. Across the water came floating a kind of barge and on it were a family of half human - half horse-like creatures. They disembarked and I watched them for a while before we engaged in some sort of communication. They told me something important or imparted some kind of wisdom which of course on waking I couldn't quite recall. The dream itself continued in a strange and fairy tale sort of way and it inspired some music I later wrote called 'Epitaph for a Dream'.

Then I kind of forgot all about it until, with the strangeness of things, during some research, I recently came across a wonderful animation from 1921 by the American Winsor McCay in an archive. Surprise, surprise I thought I recognised the dream there.

Did I see it as a child and just forget?
Is it is a well-known myth?
Is it an unconcious archetype?
"What does it all mean Steerpike?"

I've no idea - but anyway, here are both.

Mad Hair

2008-04-20T12:29:00.008+01:00

I often consider myself to have been rather fortunate and to have been the beneficiary of many happy accidents. A nocturnal meeting with Valentine Rose in Clerkenwell, reading about Dreamy records in London Time Out ten years ago, discovering a copy of Jung's "Memories, Dream and Reflections' in the carriage of a deserted train somewhere in West Wales and so on.

Another of these serendipitous events was receiving a letter one day from an animator called Alex Budovsky which sparked a friendship and a collaboration that has now gone on for several years and has produced some wonderful work. Alex also introduced us to Russia and to various extraordinary people there who we now work with too and some of whom have also become friends.

Amongst them are the amazing folk from the late, great Alexander Tatarsky's animation studio 'Pilot'. They have been engaged in an epic work to create two animated fairy stories for each of the ex states of the USSR - some of which I saw in progress and was duly blown away by. So, it was with great pleasure that i was invited to work on their latest project "Mad Hair'. This is a kind of trailer for a feature based on drawings and ideas left by Tatarsky before his untimely death last year and it truly is a gorgeous, eye-poppingly surreal tale of espionage, lunacy, baldness and sausages set in a re-imagined wartime London. You will rarely have seen anything like it and I look forward to being able to show more soon.

At a time when a kind of cultural (or at least Bureaucratic) Cold War has arisen between this country and Russia again, it feels rather happy to be engaged in such a cross-border collaboration.