THE LONG MARCH HOME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

BONNE ANNIVERSAIRE

My friend Gina reminded me that today would have been Gainsbourg's birthday. Can you imagine what he would have been like had he lived to be 80? No?- "moi non plus" as he might have said. And it's seventeen years since he died in Paris - rather reduced but still pretty stylish - and smoking - almost to the end.

These days with the slightly irritating ubiquity of Jane Birkin, it's easy to forget how forgotten he actually was during his lifetime - well outside France at any rate.

Anyway, I was reminded of an afternoon round at Clive's a few years ago when we sat around and recorded this. It's a bit out of tune and francophone's may quarrel with the translation but it felt right somehow.

Happy Birthday Serge.

LONG LIVE THE DEAD SONGWRITER

I have been much preoccupied of late but I was awoken from my reverie by the arrival of the wonderful film below - another made by George and Monica of Giant Squid Eye. As ever, I'm flattered and quite bowled over by the opportunity to collaborate with such wonderful artists. I'm sure I'm using up all my good Karma but in the meantime I remain astounded and grateful.

Speaking of collaborations, attentive US readers of the credits for the song ('Kix' from The Real Tuesday Weld album 'The London Book of the Dead'*) might notice that it is attributed to myself and a certain deceased star of the Great American Songwriting Tradition. It may not be obvious why to some - but personally it feels as if I have realised a once-thought impossible dream.
Yes, that's right - I have co-written a song with Cole Porter.

I do hope he wouldn't mind..



The year is already tripping on - faster and faster it goes - but there is a lot to tell and I hope to be here more often from this time onward.

*The album, along with 'The Clerkenwell Kid Live at the End of the World', will be released by Six Degrees throughout the rest of the world and in the UK by the new boutique label 'Antique Beat" in Summer.

DEADWEIGHT

I was installed in the grubby faded Georgian walk up guesthouse on Britten St. On the Tuesday I woke late and struggled through the lingering fug of some clammy dream, forcing myself from the narrow bed. I stepped onto the landing at the top of the curving staircase, locked the room behind and stumbled into the shared bathroom. Scalding water, razor, deodorant. The morning ritual of stripping, washing wiping, hair, skin, teeth, holes brought me back to myself. I donned clean underwear and shirt and padded back to the bedroom.


Unlocking the door, I dropped the dirty laundry on the floor and took a suit from the open case. Using the mirror, I dressed, combed and straightened. But then, as I looked to check my hair, I involuntarily stiffened rigid and shrieked - for in the reflection beyond, a figure sat in the armchair by the window staring straight at me. I backed to the door fumbling for the handle and lock in panic. But the figure, a man, did not look at me, did not get up, did not even move. He remained angled away - still staring towards the mirror, unblinking. One terror was suddenly replaced by another. I had been here before. He wasn't staring at me, he wasn't really staring at anything. He was dead.

Although at that time, apart from Sonny and my father, I had seen no corpses in close-up, it was something else that was causing my terror - the sheer fact of his presence in my room. How the fuck had he got in there and then died? Or worse, how had he been brought in and killed? I had been gone for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most and I had heard absolutely nothing. I looked around the room - everything was normal. Nothing was displaced, there was no blood or signs of struggle - just a corpse sitting there.

Hesitantly, I approached. He wore the ordinary cheapish, semi-smart clothes of an average city worker. Tie, bad suit, brogues. He was slightly puffy around the jowls with the beginning of new growth starting to show on coarse, shaved cheeks. Within the penumbra of each nostril I could spy what looked like dried blood as if from a nosebleed. His nails too, though manicured, seemed to have blood under one or two of the fingers of one hand

The other hand dangled at his side. I could see that it held something but I had to inch around him, across his field of vision to see it fully. Ludicrously, I stepped away to do this - afraid he might suddenly re-animate and look up, even seize me. Dread felt heavy in the room, a feeling only increased when I saw that his hanging hand was gripping a small piece of paper between forefinger and thumb. I hesitated - I knew I should not touch him, I knew I should get out of there, call the police, tell somebody - but even as I considered the options, I also knew somehow that I would have to look at the paper first.

Gingerly, I came near, squatted down, lifted the dead weight of his hand and pulled. His grip was strong and the paper began to tear. I had to prize apart finger and thumb to release it and as I did so I could feel the slight warmth remaining in him. The paper slipped free and I jumped back and away to look. It was a page from a book - an old stained book with close curious type - but the reverse was blank or rather it was blank apart from three hand written words.

I looked up at the dead guy, He kind of looked at me. I looked back down at the words:

'You did this'

At that moment, in the Clerkenwell street below a police siren began to howl.