LAST LOVES

I walk through the ruins one last time to the house in the little alleyway behind the church in Clerkenwell. Everybody is gone now and I know that I will not survive another winter here. I believe that you're still out in the ether somewhere but there has been no blip on the radar, no distant ship smoke on the horizon for so long.

The house is silent. In an upper room, I take a spool of tape (the last one) from my case and cut and splice enough to make a loop. I thread the loop into the Studer - one minute, no more, is all it will need. I connect the radio microphone into the old amplifier and the amplifier into the Studer. I climb the spiral stairs to the roof and step out onto the parapet. Outside, the smoke has cleared for once and through the darkness, stars shine down brighter than they have seemed for years. I thought this house might survive but it still feels a miracle to stand here. I make some adjustments to the solars and connect them to the batteries powering the transmitter and the equipment below. There is not much direct light anymore but then not much will be needed. I rotate the transmitter like a giant gramophone horn toward the direction from where I last heard your voice. Other transmitters and receivers teeter on nearby remaining rooftops calling and listening for signals that will never now come. I look around for one last time at the broken horizon and the shadowy fragments of city that remain and climb back inside.

In the lamplit room, I make final preparations. I take the microphone, press the record on the Studer and speak. A single take and it is done - but then I have rehearsed this moment for so long. I stop the tape, connect the Studer to the transmitter and switch it to play. I gather my things, shoulder my bag, blow out the lamp. I step into the corridor and descend the staircase to the ground floor. For a moment, I pause, remembering the rooms as they were, full of lights and beautiful things, books, maps, dancing guests, the sound of laughter, voices.
All gone.

I step into the night and close the door behind me. There is no need to lock. I look up to the roof where I can see the transmitter silhouetted against the stars. One day the tape will break, the panels fail, the roof fall - but not yet. One day, this will not matter anymore, there will be no one to care - but not yet. For now, I can almost hear the voice broadcasting out in an infinite loop across the distance and the years between us:

"I loved you, I loved you, I loved you, I lo..."

LAST WORDS

I dreamt that the city was dying and yet that did not seem an entirely unhappy thing. As with any fading conciousness, the barriers between past, present and future, between dream and reality became blurred and indistinct. Walls of concrete and stone seemed permeable and insubstantial. The ground beneath me throbbed and hummed like a giant machine breathing in and out. helicopters and black birds criss-crossed the darkening sky as huge lights pulsed slowly on and off. On Fleet Street, an old woman in a bonnet approached me with out stretched hand. I stopped but she walked up and passed right through me. I felt a brief sensation of warmth and on turning, saw a young man in a tall hat walking away.

I passed down through the inns of court. Throngs of people appeared and disappeared. I could hear seabirds and smell a tart reek from the river. In a corner I saw a child lying but when I approached, it was only a dead hare garlanded by wild flowers. The blare of horns blended with the barking of dogs and the noises of horses, laughter, and wild singing. Suddenly, I was alone standing on a boggy moorland sloping gently down to a wide river. The sun was setting and in the middle distance campfires glowed and flickered as dark figures passed between them and me. A mother called to her children but with words which sounded foreign to my hearing. The background changed again and I stood in Covent garden. The world was spinning, holes opened in the sky through which I could see other places, other cities...

LAST DAYS

These were the last days.
I wasn't sure whether it was the war and if we were dead or just that the city had entered a different, final phase. In some ways it seemed to be going about its business as usual, in others it seemed more like a ghetto in Warsaw in the 40s. Law and order were breaking down, bartering and black markets had sprung up, privation and confusion had taken hold. A door had opened and something had changed. Perhaps the strength of the explosions had ripped something apart, disrupted the fabric or the collective psyche, the complex interaction between matter and conciousness.

I myself seemed relatively unharmed, free from pain and able to wander at will without suffering hunger or thirst. Occasionally I ate or drank when the opportunity arose but more out of a sense of duty and habit - or even just out of curiosity. My body seemed, like the city, to have become transparent in some way - not that you could see through it, more that it was made of energy or just the idea of solidity, opacity, colour, size, weight and form - like a collection of properties stored in some digital file.

Suddenly normality would take hold again, reassert itself as if the city had shaken its head free of some confusion. Taxis pulled up to the pavement, families on day-outs nonchalantly shopped. An effiminate, Italianate young man stepped from a cafe to smoke a cigarette and good naturedly eye a passerby. An old man sat nodding at a table by another cafe. A young mother pushed a pram whilst another child ran alongside tugging at her arm. Lovers touched, Shopkeepers chatted. In the distance I could see a funeral procession of mourners headed by a priest. I was filled simultaneously with sadness and admiration at this normality. The very ordinariness of existence - something I had always feared - seemed beautiful after the strangeness I had witnessed.

The old man suddenly woke and looked up. My heart skipped a beat. He looked exactly like my grandfather, dead these ten years. Then the skipping child stopped and gazed at me too - it was my neice lost to us two winters back! How could this be? What was this place? I looked around - more and more faces seemed familiar. The old man held out his arms. It was my grandfather! I rushed toward him laughing with my own arms outstretched to meet his embrace.

"STOP!"

I obeyed the command but spun to see the speaker. There was no one moving near me. In fact, there was no one moving whatsoever. The street was frozen. A bird hung in the air, forever about to swoop on some scrap of food. The traffic lights were stuck between amber and red. The ordinary street folk I had admired were stiff - caught between postures - my grandfather awkwardly so with eyes partly closed, a foot raised. The smoke from the waiter's cigarette was fixed in a plume of exhalation as if caught in the freeze frame of a film. There was complete silence.

Then again:

"Stop!"

The voice, though quieter now, was increasingly familiar. But still I could see no one speaking.

"This is not yet the time!"

Suddenly, I DID recognise the voice. Amongst all this confusion of images and experiences, this was perhaps the strangest of all - for in fact, l knew the speaker well

In the stillness, it was my own lips that were moving...

UP, UP AND AWAY

It seems that there are birds all around these days. There's all this stuff with Alex and Big Bird going on (and you really should see what he's working on now..). Then, a couple of weeks ago, we picked up a new blackbird from the Taxidermist. My friend Lou found him dead in her garden and now he is sitting in a little glass case in the library looking very happy. On top of that, I just came back from the Orkneys in the far North where I briefly joined the ranks of those strange folk called 'Twitchers'. I had the great pleasure, amongst other things, to see several unusual and beautiful winged things and the absolutely extraordinary sight of an Arctic Skua flying backwards. I kid you not.

When we were children, there used to be little fat men in Trafalgar square selling packets of seed. Tourists would buy them to feed to the pigeons who would flock around in grey thousands much to their mutual delight. Of course the grey would soon turn to white - to the great chagrin of Westminster Council and the more long term residents - and so the Mayor banned them (the little fat men, not the pigeons). Rather a shame I've always thought.

Anyway it's a great pleasure to bring you this twist on the theme of man feeds bird by our new friend Tina Roland. Lovely!

As I write, there is someone looking over my shoulder. An old friend who I thought long gone has unexpectedly re-entered my life and I have a foreboding that things are about to change..

OUT THERE IN THE BLUE

Alex Budovsky, an all round good egg and the the man who, if he could, would cool Global Warming with the flapping of many birds' wings, has been hanging out with Big Bird himself and hatched this flight of fancy. I accompanied them although my musical contribution is, er, rather featherweight.

I remember being a child and watching the birds collect on the telephone wires, gathering themselves before they just mysteriously decided one day it was time to leave. I'm off to the Orkneys now. I finished one record (and also, a second with a certain Mr Valentine Rose). It was an intense couple of years - birth and death and all sorts of things between and I am happy to have been here. I feel like I'm done with something but I don't know what it was and I don't yet know what's next.

FROM A WINDOW

This is from a friend's apartment in an old, tall, granite mansion block on a hill in Edinburgh. Last night we played with the Berlin Cabaret goddess Ute Lemper in the beautiful Usher Hall. Proper grown up stuff. Perhaps not our best show but Ute was extremely nice when I burst into her dressing room and fell over by accident. A romantic friend from the past turned up too - reviving certain memories and causing some interesting reflections - that was nice, if rather strange.

Another friend found and sent this funny thing from somewhere on the web. It features an half old forgotten track used without permission - I suppose I should have been outraged and complained or something but I liked it so much I couldn't be bothered. Nice one Nev.

More films, music and a new website soon.

FOR ROTHKO WITH LOVE

The music for the Rothko room is in place at the Tate Modern. It can now also be heard on line - song for mark

It was a pleasure to do - those paintings have long been a favourite but it was a curious thing too - his intentions seem to have been quite mixed. He started off wanting to intimidate the wealthy diners at the Four Seasons restaraunt in New York's Seagram building (the original commission) but changed his mind. Now they are generally seen as being contemplative, peaceful - even sacred.

Anyway, he ended up doing himself in like so many other artists, and so, partly, this was also meant as an elegy.

FOR RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I just returned from Moscow again. We were playing at the Golden Mask Theatre Festival - a very wonderful thing and a great pleasure to attend. It was probably one of our best shows - with Jacques back in the saddle and Eyal creating a magical dream world around us. The Berlin artist Jim Avignon joined us on stage for some live action painting and a whole posse of Alex's friends from the animaiton studio came to hang out.

On Saturday, our friends Marina and Serezha had asked us to play an acoustic show at a hospice for the terminally ill. So we arrived at a very peaceful little building on a quiet street somewhere as the snow started falling. It was an unusual event - no samplers, no projections, no electricity. There was a small audience of patients and staff from the hospice and some little birds in a couple of cages. Some of the patients were in beds and barely concious - one man in particular sounded as if he was about to go at any moment. When Jacques started to play 'La Bete et La Belle', the birds joined in too. I felt moved - just to be there at all and have the opportunity to do this sort of thing - although I confess felt some awkwardness at singing these songs, many of which refer to death, in a situation where mortality is very present. There were a couple of kids there and that really tore me up. Afterwards, just before we had tea and biscuits, I completely lost it for a few minutes in the loo. How do you tell children they are dying? - how do they understand that and how can they still smile and be so pleased to see you?

Back on the street, with the city noises and the snow falling more thickly, we wandered back into our lives and that stupid feeling that it couldn't happen to us - death is for other people right?! Despite everything that has happened, I find it really hard to not imagine I will somehow go on for ever. Anyway it makes you think doesn't it? - and one of the things I always think is how connections with people matter more than almost anything.

So, hello to all friends - but particularly this time to my Russian ones - old, new and however brief..

FISH

Now mad Al Budovsky and I have recently been doing our bit for the welfare of the world by working with Lillipip - a Seattle based educational company producing animated teaching aids for small beings. Here is an example. Very sweet I think you'll agree. The rest of the original text of this post has been CENSORED..

Hope all is going swimmingly for you...

THE GHOST HOUSE

I went to the Tate Modern last night. They asked me to contribute music for a 'Tate Track' - a piece written to accompany an artwork in the collection. (The Chemical Brothers have done Epstein's 'Rock Drill' and the Klaxons are doing Cy Twombly's 'Quattro Staggione' and there are various other peculiar combinations).

Whilst there we watched the Christian Marclay videopiece which is absolutely extraordinary. If you haven't seen it and get the chance, try to check it out - they are about to remove it I think. It's very, very clever and beautiful if you love music.

Whilst wondering home, I remembered the little house which used to stand at the edge of the western entrance forecourt and the time a few years ago when I lived there briefly. When I first came to London, I lost my innocence for a while in substances and I started to go rather down hill. One morning I got a bit bored of it all and signed up for some classes at the CIty Lit Institute in Holborn. There I met Martyn from the Tiger Lillies and Sophie his muse and manager and we became firm friends. They lived in a flat in Berwick Street in Soho but one Sunday evening on returning from a trip we all took to the country, they discovered that their landlord had burnt the whole building down. (We found out later that he did it to force them out and to get the insurance). They lost all they had - clothes, instruments, years of recordings, photos and letters. Everything. Anyway, a friend who was squatting in this little house in Bankside let them go to stay and they ended up being there for a few years.

It was a peculiar place which contained six little flats for workers from the time when the Tate was still a power station. It was very curious with a central iron staircase and one bathroom for every two flats. There was just Martyn and Sophie and a little old man who lived down below. It was spooky and felt rather out of time. I believe I once saw a ghost on the stair - although maybe that was just the wine. I can't remember how many times I walked down to the river from St Pauls and over Blackfriar's Bridge to see them. I do remember there were rats by the river then.

And I don't know why they knocked it down - there is nothing there now but an unused area of ground.