Ericland

Show Biz Wonderland

2011-03-15T10:00:00.004Z

I think we're finally living in the sort of house that a bohemian pop star couple should live in. White walls, tasteful pale grey woodwork - a perfect backdrop for all the artworks, trophies and trinkets that we've picked up on our exotic travels though Show Biz Wonderland.

Admittedly we don't have a walk-in wardrobe or dressing room (walk-in wardrobe??!! I sound more like an estate agent than a pop artiste) lined with fantastic stage costume creations, all mirrors and rhinestones, from the zips and leather and safety pins of our humble punk beginnings, the padded shoulders and velvet knickerbockers of our unfortunate eighties New Romantic period, the Nudie suits from our country phase, cuban heels and flat heels and stack heels, wigs and hairpieces and codpieces and mirkins... (Mirkins? Fuck no - I draw the line at pubic wigs).

Anyway, there's none of that - we've got rid of every piece of clothing that we can't fit into, wore out the mirkins weeks ago using them to wipe down paintwork. And the artworks, trophies and trinkets, such as they are, are all stashed away in the attic where they won't put off the queue of perspective buyers who have as yet failed to answer any of our adverts.

We haven't got a hot tub or a jacuzzi either. In fact we haven't even got a bath tub - just one of those weird French hipbath things that are neither bath nor shower, but would probably make an ideal receptacle in which to sponge down an old lady. Or gentleman - I don't want to be accused of sexism here.

The lack of a real bathroom shouldn't worry us too much because I think everyone knows that the godlike status of Pop Icon puts us above all that - hygiene, sanitation, toilet paper - we have no need of these things.

It may be a problem if some lesser mortals decide to buy our house. And this is a thought that has depressed me in the last week. I spent days routing through junk in the studio, coiling leads and sorting through tape reels, finally letting go of things that won't ever get fixed - useful things that are forever completely beyond repair. I had plenty of time to think about what we've achieved in this eighteen foot by ten foot room with its high tongue and groove ceiling and triple glazed window to front affording magnificent views across surrounding countryside. Amy and I have made two albums in this room, plus the forthcoming Rotifer album, the Gil Rose & Les Hydropathes album Haute et Courte, plus various tracks for forty-fives and compilation albums. Amy and I learned to trust each others judgement in this room. We both developed musically and I gained confidence as a recording engineer. All those recordings - Here Comes My Ship, Bobblehead Doll, The Downside Of Being A Fuck-Up, Astrovan, Put A Little Love In Your Heart, A Taste Of The Keys, Walls, Teflon Wok, I Wanna Be Your Happiness, Please Be Nice To Her, Silver Shirt to name a few - they all came out of this room. In a few months time it could be the living room of a glum family. They'll sit in here watching TV, oblivious to the past history of this wonderful room.

Or maybe someone will turn it into an art studio and paint masterpieces in here, or write a book - Amy's written most of a book in the room above, plus all her great diary entries, all the while being vibrated and occasionally deafened by the swirling aural chaos coming up through the floor. That tongue and groove let through more sound than I ever thought it would. It was varnished dark brown woodstain when we moved in, I painted every inch of it several times with a brush until it achieved the grubby white finish it has today. I hope the buying public don't look up too closely...

We put the house on sale yesterday, and today we're going on tour for a couple of weeks. Just as well because we don't want to leave sticky paw prints and coffee mug rings everywhere. We also need to see if we can still play music after three months work in what you might call the arse-crack sector. We'll be finding out tomorrow night in Innsbruck.

Meanwhile if you're looking for a dez rez in glorious South West France at a knockdown price look no further than here:

houseinthehautevienne.weebly.com

We'll pick you up at the airport in a couple of weeks time. Don't forget your cheque book!

Everything must go... somewhere

2011-03-04T12:05:00.011Z

I've just started to dismantle parts of the studio in attempt to make it look more like a family living room and less like a madcap science laboratory crossed with counter espionage and propaganda headquarters from a low grade B movie. I don't know how I've managed to collect and hang on to so much junk over the years, but I've decided it's someone else's turn to own some of it. I'm going to have a sale, and to that end I've been photographing every random piece of electrical equipment ready to advertise it all on my website, put it on ebay, hold an open house yard sale type of event...

Would somebody like to make an offer for a Lamb Laboratories 24 volt power supply? I've had it since 1988 when somebody gave me a four channel Revox mixing desk which I had repaired at great expense only to find that it was even more crappy sounding than the Wem Audiomaster five channel desk which I eventually used to mix Le Beat Group Electrique and The Donovan Of Trash. Those records were in mono because the Audiomaster only had one output and anyway it's a bit difficult to mix four tracks into useful stereo. It all worked out quite well on Le Beat Group - I remember it well, track one for the bass, track two was the guitar and drumkit, track three for the vocals (which I did live along with the guitar, bass and drums), leaving track four for all the overdubs.
The overdub sessions were a great laugh - I can vividly recollect playing the organ with one hand, shaking a rhythmically sketchy maraca with the other and almost headbutting the front of Andre's acoustic guitar held up to the vocal mike as we lunged for a backing vocal... It was desperate but the energy level was good. We lived on cups of tea, chocolate digestives bscuits and nervous energy - dropping in and out, trying for a modicum of perfection without erasing any of the good bits. The horrified shout of "turn it off!!!" just before True Happiness is the real thing - I'd left Andre recording bits of dialogue from a Will Hay film on the TV while I was in the kitchen making yet another pot of tea. I suddenly realised that our attempts to create an interweaved sound collage to introduce the song was about to actually obliterate the song itself.

I didn't know how to edit tape in those days so the final three songs, Fuck By Fuck, Parallel Beds and True Happiness had to be mixed in one go. I think it was eleven minutes in total and I had to work out all the level changes and echo effects and then mix it down to 1/4" two track tape in glorious mono in one go. I got it just about right the first time and decided to live with it because I didn't think my delicate nerves could stand another run through. After all, I'd only been out of the mental hospital for six months.
For the past couple of years we've had a Farfisa home organ in our hallway. Some of the noises that make up the Bobblehead Doll loop came from it, although they were distorted way beyond what they originated as, slowed down, reversed and edited together with I can't even remember what now. Amy just put the organ up for sale on a site for English ex-pats. We've had quite a success selling stuff there - we got rid of the ambulance and a hideous woodburner which was little more than a metal box from Spain with a door on the front. Come to think of it the ambulance was little more than a metal box from Italy masquerading as a Peugeot, not that that's got much to do with anything.

I'm secretly hoping that no one wants the Farfisa home organ - I had to confess to Amy that when I'm home alone I sometimes freak out on it for ten minutes. The thing holds such recording promise if only I could get around to it, harness the moment. It has automation, meaning that when you select bossa nova, disco or rock 1 or rock 2, it plays a sort of bass arpeggio and you can switch on a setting that throws in a vamping off beat.
Amy's just come up the stairs to tell me we've had two replies to the advert. 'Wouldn't it be great,' she said 'if somebody came and picked it up tomorrow.' I tried not to look too crestfallen. I may have to down tools and make a recording tomorrow morning. Surely there'll be a home organ or two in the United States.
The same goes for amplifiers. There are a lot of great amplifiers over there. I hope they haven't all found permanent homes - most of mine are going to be re-homed before we go. But not the Selmer Truvoice 50 that I use on stage, so don't anyone get over-excited.
And if anyone's after the Wem Audiomaster it's presently residing in a house near Chartres where it's been in storage since the last time I left France. I must go and pick it up - would it be too ridiculously sentimental to hang on to it?

Two days have passed while I searched for the battery charger for the camera so that I can upload some of these scintillating photos, and in the meantime the advert has been answered. A nice man called Tim came and took the organ away. I'm sad to think that all those fabulous tracks I had planned are destined to become just a fading memory in the back of my overcrowded mind - I never had time to down tools and make the recording. Now the hallway looks naked to me. But very desirable - naked and desirable, minimal and buyable. Tim used to be a DJ on Radio Caroline, he remembers The Blockheads when they were Loving Awareness. We had a good chat. He told me all his vinyl, three thousand albums in total, is in storage but before he packed it away and moved house he decided to listen to all of them in alphabetical order, one album a day. It took him five years and his wife left him during the Frank Zappa section.

This is a photo of the fireplace in our kitchen. I didn't tear it out of a magazine, it's real. Someone is going to love this house. Please...

Padam, Padam, Pa-fucking-dam

2011-02-20T19:48:00.011Z

I looked into the blackness and asked if everything was all right. I didn't really care one way or the other, but I was curious. We'd played six songs so far and the only reaction was a clapping clatter of the sort you might hear at a village cricket match when the away team scores two runs. I could tell that a good time was not being had. During the preceding number it had briefly crossed my mind that I've seen people having more fun at just about every funeral I've ever attended. I thought perhaps a tragedy of some sort had struck the audience and we'd somehow missed it.
I wasn't ready for the response:
Le son est affreux...
Le sono est terrible...
Les instruments sont trop fort - on ne peut pas entendre les paroles...
The sound is awful - the PA is terrible - the instruments are too loud, one can't hear the lyrics.
I wanted to be nice about - that is, I didn't want the evening to end early and on a sour note, and for us to leave without getting paid. I wanted to say "Are you fucking stupid? You're all French, most of you don't understand English which is the language we're singing in, and you wouldn't understand the lyrics if they climbed up the seam of your fleece and bit you on the ear."
But that would never do.
Instead I started to say "Well, you would think that because you see, you're French, and this is rock 'n' roll and you don't really understand it - in fact you're barely qualified to even listen to it".
But I was getting into deep water with that so I changed tack and gently explained that the lyrics don't actually mean anything, they're just a noise that goes along with everything else, the sound of the instruments and so forth, so in fact they weren't actually missing anything at all. Then I pushed the master fader up on the PA so that there was a slight, desperate ring of feedback, and we carried on, louder and slightly more insecure than before.
I think you would have had to have been deaf as a fucking coot and psychologically blocked not to hear the singing. After we'd finished we met up with the remaining members of the audience, the ones that hadn't fled to God knows what personal misery they spend their time wallowing in, the well-balanced ones, the ones that like us. We were assured that the sound was good, perfect even.
It hurts me to see Amy leave the stage depressed and feeling like jacking it all in. But it happens every time we play in France. We perform in front of scowling people, fingers in their earholes, pain and bewilderment on their faces. I can only think they're too stupid to realise that they could actually leave. A cretinous man approached us at one place and asked us to turn down. "You sing very well, and the madamoiselle too" he added, "but the instruments are too loud - we can't hear ourselves talking well enough to hold a conversation."
We've been expected to carry on while moronic French skinheads sing rugby songs and Padam Padam Pa-fucking-dam, while people clatter in and out of the door as though it was a bus station, tossing a glance of total incomprehension (of everything in the whole bloody universe) our way as they pass in front of us. We've even had a four year old yelling at us to stop while his horrible family held a noisy birthday party for him, oblivious to the small but appreciative, and increasingly irritated audience that had come to hear us play.
France doesn't deserve us and I don't know what we've done to deserve France.

But at least France doesn't know, or care who we are. So for a brief while it doesn't matter that I'm not allowed to be me on Facebook any more.

Swollen amplifiers, torrential rain, ethnic cleansing...

2010-09-06T10:13:00.015+01:00

I had a disturbing dream last night: Amy and I were driving up to the coast to catch a ferry in some version of our ambulance. We were off to England for a tour. In the dream I had a nagging worry that we'd forgotten to put the equipment in the van and eventually, in a weird approximation of the suburbs of Paris under torrential rain we stopped and opened up the back of the van to have a look. No equipment, just a folding keyboard stand and the outer casing from a Vortexian four channel mixer.
Tired, late and desperate, someone had to go back to get the equipment. I think it was me though I could have been someone else by this time, everything was uncertain.
The journey home was fraught with shadowy, half-realised adventures, all taking place in the pissing wet, and when I got there we lived in a sort of caravan affair raised up on spindly metal stilts. A flimsy set of steps led up to the door but I didn't go up because in the dream there didn't seem to be any point. And anyway the equipment was all stacked up outside.
The amplifiers had suffered in the rain - the cabinets swollen up into a giant loaves of bread with the speakers protuding like hair lips. Guitars, amplifiers, it was all roughly there, just a question of shovelling it all into the van and getting it to London - dry and warm, everything in perfect working order.
I think I woke up about now but I can't be sure.
I'm feeling insecure. I'm haunted by images of families being marched away from their homes at gunpoint.
It's been coming up for a while. I've long thought that Hitler made a big mistake in not getting the French onside - as a nation they're much more sympathetic to his cause than the majority of Germans ever were, and under occupation a lot of them turned collaborator.
It's been creeping up slowly. In the late eighties and early nineties I lived in a village just outside Dreux, the first town to return a Front National candidate to the French parliament. That was Marie Stirbois. Things change, I learned from literature dropped through the door that Moroccan youths were causing trouble on the streets of Dreux. They hadn't been, it was all quite peaceful until it was said that they were. Then it was different. By Christmas there were armed soldiers, machine guns at the ready, posted around the carousel in the main street. I didn't see any children riding on it that year.
Last year, in a village near where we live, the children of a group of families living in yurts were excluded from the only school in the area - a couple of fields were sold enabling the village bounderies to be moved so as not to include the yurts. The yurt people were not extra-terrestials, dangerous savages from some unpronouncable, far-flung country, breeding feral children - actually they were English, quite civilised by any standards. Their only crime was living in tents.
Now, with the expulsion of the Roma, France is embarking on a programme of ethnic cleansing. I don't really want to stick around to see what happens next.

Eric & Amy at home (and on tour)

2010-05-25T10:22:00.005+01:00

I hope we can do more of this sort of thing, filming that is - we're always playing but this is the first time we've recorded an acoustic rehearsal. We did it because we thought it might be better than the general crappy youtube stuff of us that other people put up.
We're setting off for Paris today and flying to the States tomorrow. Having got the hang of this homemade film equivalent of lo-fi we'll try to do some more if we get time in whatever bizarre locations we might find ourselves in.

Fully-fledged, whatever that means

2010-05-17T18:03:00.010+01:00

It's my birthday tomorrow, I'll be fifty-six. Normally I'd have a day off but I don't think there's time. Not because, as Ronnie Lane said "it's a short film" - I don't think the clock's running (though you never quite know), but we've got a lot to do what with releasing a new album and leaving for America a week from today.
Thirty years ago, on my twenty-sixth birthday, I called my mum from my room at the Tropicana Motel.
"Where are you" she asked.
"Hollywood" I replied
"Ooh! Are you making a film?"
I've yet to star in my first feature film though I'd settle for a characterful cameo in a biopic about one of my increasing number of dead friends.
I'm glad I've made it this far and I'm thinking that all this work I'm doing must surely qualify me at last as a real adult. It's a bit like picking up an honourary degree - fairly useless I'd imagine by the time you get it. I mean, what the fuck does Sir Paul need with a doctorate from Sussex University. I bet it looks good on his CV though.
All I've got to do before we head off for the airport is pre-record five radio shows, finish off a version of a Nolan Strong number for a compilation album, rehearse the stuff on the new album (having figured out how the fuck we're going to do it), pack a bag, change the lock on the front door and get the studio ready to record a Robert Rotifer album as soon as we get home at the beginning of July. Shouldn't be a problem - not for a fully-fledged adult like myself.
I wonder what fully-fledged means. I only used the term because everyone else does. I can't believe I've managed to get this old without knowing the meaning fully-fledged. It's already a cliche and I'm completely ignorant of its true import.
Not that I give a toss.

Do yourself (and us) a favour and order a signed copy of our new album now, before they're all snapped up.

Badly lit in front of someone else's crappy painting for all eternity

2010-04-02T12:43:00.006+01:00

Last week I spoke to a friend from where we live. 'Hurry back' he said, 'the weather's marvellous - it's like summer here.'
We hurried back as best we could, taking in a visit to my mother and enduring two nights on the infamous bedsettee, followed by a night in the van in a service area on an auto route in the middle of France where I started to feel a little strange.
In the morning we stopped off for coffee in a town called Argenton. The air was soft with spring sunshine. By the time we got home, just after midday, it was raining.
The house was cold. We turned up the thermostat and listened for the heating to kick in. Nothing happened. I went out to the barn, clambered over the devestation brought about by the explosion of last January or whenever it was, and pushed the manual start button on the boiler. It fired up and died away as I was leaving the barn. We were out of oil again. It's becoming a tradition with us - it's happened every time we've come home from a tour this winter.
I mentioned feeling a little strange. Now I felt more than a little strange, it was as though the will to live, or the ability to keep being alive was stealing away. The last useful thing I did before giving up was to order five hundred litres of heating oil at an inflated price.
At four o'clock on Tuesday morning I came to on the bathroom floor. The thought weaved across my mind, between dizziness, confusion and utter nausea, that given the choice I would have chosen a more dignified manner of clocking out.
Since then I've been feeling mildly better in that I haven't felt as though I was either about to die or that dying would be welcome relief. My friends are all telling me I need to have a rest - they're always saying that but for once I think they're right. For the past three days I've been alternating between lying on the sofa and going back to bed, unable to bring myself to do the slightest thing, but bored out of my mind.
I started planning my final tour. The diagnosis of something catastrophically fatal, me being dignified, undramatic and philosophical about it - I'd just like to do one final tour, play some good places with my good friends, say goodbye in style (though I see it not so much as goodbye, more adieu)... The triumphant tour with a highly successful new breakthrough album, the biggest of my career (though God knows how I thought I was going to record that in the state I was in). Then the inevitable announcement that I'd passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by family and friends, followed by all that turgid Facebook rockin' in heaven with an all-star band tonite shit.
I had it all mapped out, but then I thought of those dreadful Youtube clips of me and Amy playing in places with bad lighting, bad sound, crappy paintings all over the wall behind us, or worse, gardening implements. Why do audiences flock to these events armed with little movie cameras - is there some other agenda that I don't know about?
We should be really flattered that people want to take our photos and make little film clips of us, but we're beyond flattery - we're getting seriously pissed-off about it. We love playing for people in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, but most often the magic of the event doesn't translate through the medium of the mobile phone camera.
We'd like to ask respectfully that in future people keep their treasured memories of us to themselves, and not plaster them all over the internet.Otherwise their crappy photos and sub-standard film clips will be what the rest of the world will judge us by for the rest of time. And we don't think that's fair.
It would be different if someone came up with decent footage of us at Southpaw in Brooklyn or playing with Yo La Tengo in Dusseldorf, but they never do, perhaps because the audiences at those concert are there for the concert, not partly just to record the event. There's an inane egocentricity about recording all this stuff and putting it where everyone can see it. I wish people would learn to live in the moment and leave their fucking gadgets at home.
There - I've gone from maudlin to ranting, I think I'm starting to feel better!

The Overnight Emerald Sensation

2010-03-26T09:07:00.012Z

It wasn't all bad. I drove for two days after a monumentally depressing gig in Limoges. The driving was almost theraputic - there I was sitting staring out of the front window, holding onto the steering wheel and watching Limoges-distancing countryside flicker on by.
I sat on the Holyhead to Dublin ferry and wrote a piece entitled "The Gift Of Stupidity" which I haven't posted because I think now isn't the time to be quite so negative. It'll have to wait until after this piece which I'm sure you know will be gloriously uplifting.
But to get back to the negativity - why is the French music scene in the hands of the greedy, ignorant and, at best, deluded? I know that's a sweeping generalisation but I don't care because it's making me feel good to say it. Especially in the face of Les Matins Celadon where we played in Limoges on the Friday night before I set off for Ireland. Friday night? It was more like a glum Tuesday during a general strike in that place. Dumb people who think that music comes in slices - you don't have to listen to it - it'll get to you by osmosis, you know - like in the lift when a Brazilian version of Michelle My Belle comes oozing out of the ceiling. They stared at us, they talked amongst themselves and once they had enough de la musique, they left.
A couple of local punk scenesters popped along and lent their support by sitting at the back and talking with the promoter all through our second set. They just had to be there - well, I'm one of the original punks after all, or, at least, I was there, though a little disappointingly poppy and I never did get round to dying my hair jet black. Last time those silly fuckers came to see us they told a friend of ours that they preferred the faster songs.
What kind of stupid twit has a square stage built in the corner of the room and then tries to sell the place as a music venue? The floor of the stage was made of laminated "wood" flooring. It was new and already falling to bits, a small corner of a foreign bar that is temporarily Ikea.
If I was running a venue the stage wouldn't be an apologetic inconvenience in the corner, a place for moribund old gits with hands like sausages to trill away at meaningless jazz stylings while the punters chatter away and kid themselves that they're attending a cultural event. To start with there wouldn't be any jazz, or at least not the phony dross that passes for jazz where we live. The stage would stand proud across the centre of one wall and form the focal point of the place. I'd spend more on lighting than on the PA, for the simple reason that if it looks good people's eyes will be drawn to it. They'll look at it, and once they're looking at it there's a chance they might listen too. But if it looks as dowdy as the rest of the place they'll just look at their dowdy friends and talk. Or stay at home and enjoy their own personal dowdiness.
You might not think I'm being very positive but I think my negativity is quite constructive. I grew up on Dada and Nihilism you know. Sometimes it's best to tear things down and start again. But that just brings me back to those dim Limoges elderpunks - they think tearing tings down and starting again involves wearing twenty hole Doc Martens and a leather jacket, playing big guitar chords through cheap distortion pedals, inciting the faithful to riot (or at least go crazy and jostle one another) in shrill voices until it's time to go home. Very subversive.
But on the positive side there was a table of people who were really pleased to hear us play and stayed from beginning to end, plus our friend Emmanual and some of his enlightened friends. And the lady from our local library came - turns out she's a fan.
I don't want to play at Les Matins Celadon again.
There you are - a decision made! Something positive.

The Irish dates were an anti-climax after the press build up. In the weeks leading up to the tour we seemed to be forever giving in-depth phone interviews to adoring journalists from the Irish national press. I almost convinced myself that we were going to be an overnight emerald sensation.
I knew it was going to be the same old thing when we heard the promoter talking on the phone to a club owner in his car on the way to a radio station:
"I can't say now..."
"Er... the same as before..."
Ticket sales. I've been in this business too long.
I don't know what went wrong and the promoter doesn't want us to try and catalogue the possible faults. But I have to say that in Cork it would have helped if the club owner had put the heating on. I can imagine it wasn't the first time an audience had shivered through a show. It tends to put people off coming again.
Dublin has changed since I was last there, four years ago with The Damned. Friday night was bedlam, but this time the streets were full of empty cabs cruising for non-existant business. Nobody's got any money. I'm sure there never really was any money, just unendingly easy to get credit. We should have charged a fiver admission.
Belfast got on my nerves because my voice had walked out on me. My biggest fans, burly men with loud voices, barely tolerated Amy and kept up a constant mumbled commentary in thick Belfast accents all through my songs. During the songs Amy sang they merely organised the ordering of more drinks.
"...and another pint of Murphy's over here, and a pint of lager for Pat there and a packet of pork scratchings... hold on, he's back on..."
"Play The Foynal Taxi Eric!"
"Fockin' playre Veronica"
I could barely whisper the words to the songs and when I did play The Final Taxi they jabbered all through it until I pleaded with them in a barely audible whisper, with tears in my eyes, to shut up. A miniature man in a funny felt hat came up to the stage and mumbled to me that are Americans are full of something inaudible. I translated this to the rest of the audience as America is full of B&Bs. I half regretted not booting him in the face but you can't argue with ignorance and you can't always tell people what they don't want to know. Afterwards they all shook my hand and told me just how much it meant to them that I'd come to play in Belfast. "And yer missus ain't half bad too".
At one of the English shows some blokes started shouting for my old songs while Amy was introducing something. I told them off, explained that Amy is a genius and that they were to hear her if only they knew it. The applause from the rest of the audience must have convinced them because we didn't hear another squeak out of them. That was in Brighton, the hands down, all round best show of the tour. A real family show with my mum, my pregnant daughter and her boyfriend there, and as a special surprise my long lost cousin Dave the taxi driver and his wife Michelle. I didn't recognise them until the end of the show even though they were sitting right in front of me. Dave sent me a photo taken by Michelle of the two of us. You can tell we're cousins, the same mad look. It's nice to know I'm not alone.

Amy mentioned in her blog the ill-health and medication that went along with being in Ireland so I'm not going to talk about it, except to say that I cannot abide the term manflu. After a radio show in Belfast which I got through without either coughing, throwing up or fainting, and without complaining. Amy told the female presenter, who introduced Amy, not as an artist in her own right, but as my wife, that I wasn't well. "Oh," she said, "he's just got a case of manflu." The inference being presumably that men aren't as strong as their poor, martyred woman, who aren't allowed to be as ill as men because they aren't equal and so have to constantly promote the notion that they aren't the weaker sex. If the presenter had been unwell and I'd suggested, with a dismissive shrug, that she was suffering from PMS, rolled my eyes to the ceiling and said "huh, woman," there would have been an outcry.

Pole Emploi

2010-03-01T22:10:00.012Z

In the continuing quest to become Intermittants de Spectacles the wife and I had to register ourselves as unemployed. We went to a new place they've set up for the purpose. It's called the Pole Emploi. It's housed in a new building, a building that's been open for about a year, and in that time I don't think anyone's ever opened a window. It smelled like a zoo in there and the heating was turned up too high.
Everything was colour coded and divided into areas - zone de rencontres, zone informatique... It looked a complete mess with it's notice boards framed in carefully co-ordinated lime green and bright red tin, scattered between islands of laminated wood flooring. Just the place to enjoy being unemployed - meeting up with other unemployed people, swapping contacts, tipping one another off about likely employement possibilities, some of the more intelligent of us - the computer literate - perhaps trying our hand at un peu d'informatique on the specially installed, mismatched collection of old desktop jobs in the zone informatique section of this hell hole Pole Emploi.
We queued up with our toes on a painted line bearing the legend zone de discretion, and listened to the receptionist, a middle-aged man who probably once held down a responsible position in a municipal library, instructing a youth on preparing a dossier.
That's always the first thing you have to do in France, preparez un dossier. Then you go and attend a Stage de Formation in some dump like Dijon or Metz. This puts you under the mistaken impression that you're an important person, and once you've learned to strut, preen, pontificate and feign incredulity at anything or anybody who isn't like or doesn't do like you, then you're ready to take up gainful employment.
You can work in the post office, take annual paid holidays, get up for work at five thirty a.m. every morning with the stolid forebearance of a big brown Limousin cow standing in the pissing rain in a field full of shit, and charge a different postage price every day for indentical packets and parcels that might well not ever reach their destinations.
The municipal librarian asked us if we wanted to photocopy our dossiers, invited us to avail ourselves of the facilities in the zone photocopieur, but we hadn't prepared our dossiers so we sat on chairs covered in stained purple hessien in the zone attente, and waited to be called for our interview.
I thought the interview went well. Amy said afterwards that five minutes into it she wanted to kill herself, but I really enjoyed myself, cataloguing the changes that I would make when I became manager of the Pole Emploi. I started off with a little trick designed to put the trainer/interview person and the trainee (couldn't tell which was which) at their dis-ease. I didn't let them kick off, I got in first:
'Doesn't anyone ever open the windows in here? It smells like a zoo.'
They seemed quite surprised, as if they hadn't notice the fetid stench, a heady mix of stagnant water, stale air, bodies and hot-air-borne disease.
'You should open all the doors and windows for five minutes every morning, this place is a health hazard,' I continued.
The woman part of the sketch, trainer or trainee, I know not which, said it would let all the heat out. I made a mental note to sack her and then we got down to the tedious business of enrolling as unemployed, or possibly in my case unemployable.
It was very boring. I didn't listen to most of what was said, concentrating instead on figuring out which of the plastic clad stud walls I'd dismantle first. I struggled with the dilemma of my stance on posters and paperwork sellotaped to glass panels - they're depressing to look at but they do shield the gaze from the infinitely more depressing sight of other members of the equippe here at the Pole Emploi.
The was a problem with the computer at one point and a technician arrived, a bespectacled youngster of thirty something in designer jeans and a smart shirt. He had the stance - the leaning over and pointing, weight evenly distributed twixt hand on desk and brogue on carpet tile - but he didn't know what he was doing. I put him on window opening duty.
Eventually they showed us a hidden corner of the Pole Emploi website, which we can access with our confidential pin numbers and secret codes. Here there are lists of vacancies for female saxophonists and men who can sing Spanish Eyes and My Kind Of Town Chicago Is... in exotic places like Lille and Besancon. They were planning to split us up and make Amy learn the saxophone.
We left depressed, but thankful for being back in God's or Nicolas Sarkozy's or whoever's fresh air.
Vive La France!
Now open the fucking window.

A Candy Coloured Clown They Call The Soundman

2010-02-19T12:10:00.025Z

I've finally figured out why the terms competant sound engineer and French are generally a contradiction. This might seem harsh but having had the displeasure of playing in a few officially sanctioned French rock clubs I've met some of the most arrogant, pompous and basically inept technicians of any country I've ever played in. Indeed, the French themselves have an expression for these twerps, and the expression is tete a claque, literally a head for hitting. (Excuse the lack of accents - the blog thing was having trouble with them.)
These people have the status of intermittent de spectacle. An intermittent de spectacle is someone who works on a self-employed or intermittent basis in any branch of show business - musician, TV technician, sound engineer...
If you can weave your way through the complex maze of idiotic and mind-numbing bureaucracy that goes into achieving this hallowed status the state pays you a sum equivalent to sixty percent of your earnings for the the days when you're being er... intermittent.
What a fantastic fucking opportunity! Amy and I have been trying for it but we're lacking the fascistic mind set that might help us to wade through the apparently baffling steps. Other people who have managed this have been helping us along and who knows, we might actually get there with it. But last night, blundering through yet another crassly put together French website, I turned to Amy with tears in my eyes.
'This is going to put me in a cancer ward,' I said.
I don't mean to say that you have to be a fascist to sort it all out, I certainly don't think the people who have been guiding us through this are anything of the sort, but I can see how it might help. The French authorities obviously make it as difficult as they can because they've sort of boxed themselves into a corner that they can't get out of. They can't really pull the plug on paying old Johnny Hallyday sixty percent of the already grossly inflated income he makes for being crap singer and all round retard. Neither could they cut the income of everyone who works in the TV and radio because they'd have another revolution on their hands - and the opposition would be in control of the media.
France used to be a socialist country - socialist in the best sense. The vestiges manifest themselves in every part of daily life. The overwhelming bureaucracy came as a result of making a society for everyone - actors, poets, factory workers, cheese makers, musicians... No one was going to slip through the net. But the socialism is long gone, eaten away by the cancer of bureaucracy and corruption.
It's all a matter of job creation. There's this Societies or that Association - Asso for short which is so comfortably near to asshole as to make me wonder. They have cute names like Allo Jazz and Le Guso and they s'occupe or occupy themselves with the processing of the necessary documentation pursuant in the work of the intermittent de spectacle. Looking at these websites has me convinced, in an unfortunately fascistic moment, that the French should never have been allowed to have the internet, they should have stuck to growing vegetables. At least they were good at that. Now they import vegetables from countries with polytunnels and clutter up the interweb with their rubbish.
I don't need to have every tedious point illustrated by a coquettish little mime artist arseclown doing an I've got a good idea pose.
If you don't believe me here's a link: http://www.guso.com.fr/
They call it informatique - that's their word for all things to do with computers and the internet. Their mania for information gets in the way of giving out information. I'm drowning in a mire of useless information here.
And reading this I expect you are too.
It's like an architect designed house that's been added on to, piece meal by a crazed DIY enthusiast. It doesn't make any sense and it's close to uninhabitable. It should be condemned, it should be pulled down. It seems to me at the moment that a good half of this country has a job on the back of other people having jobs.

But back to those sound engineer intermittents - in future, when I meet one of those smug, swaggering, pony-tailed, fuckwits in their para-military apparel - combats tucked into twenty-one hole Doc Martens, bomber jacket, walkie talkie, maglite, access all areas pass on lanyard... I'll understand why he's like he is. He's no sound engineer, he just has a knack for dealing with bureaucracy.

Mardi Gras in Cleveland

2010-02-17T08:48:00.006Z

Amy's daughter Hazel called us from New Orleans last night where Mardi Gras was in full swing. They don't have Mardi Gras here which is a shame because we could do with cheering up, but we remembered a Mardi Gras experience from four or five years ago in Cleveland, Ohio. I've lifted the whole thing out of some damp corner of my website. Hope you enjoy it.

Amy and I took a drive round downtown Cleveland the other night, looking for something to eat. A bit of a mistake at 11 o’clock at night because Cleveland just isn’t that sort of place. There wasn’t anything, or if there was it had already closed.
We drove round a corner and heard music coming from a large, glass-fronted bar. There was a band set up in the window - a boogie band - old school r‘n’b at its very worst. We were powerless to resist.
Once we got inside I knew exactly what had happened – we’d obviously been hit by a runaway truck as we came round the corner, and now we were dead. And as dead musicians this was where we had to go while the celestial authorities sorted out what to do with us.
It was the final day of Mardi Gras – Mardi Gras in Cleveland?? – so there was much drunkenness. Drinking had been going on all day, since 11 o’clock in the morning, and the staff were busy sluicing the floor in between the dancers. I had the impression that they were trying to wash away a lot of vomit.
People were festooned with cheap plastic Mardi Gras paraphernalia and due perhaps to a trick of the light, their faces had a subtle green tinge.
But that was no trick of the light – the green tinge was because they were dead, they were zombies. I looked at Amy and she was the same colour as I hoped I was but I knew this was probably about to change.
The band had been dead for longer than anybody else. That must have been how they got the job. They presented a terrifying spectacle. They were fronted by a woman in her fifties with wild blonde-from-a-bottle hair, a would-be Janis Joplin from the trailer park in a grubby black T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans. The guitar player was nondescript, grey with an unhealthy suntan, blanding out on a Fender Strat with custom pick-ups. The King of the Zombies was on bass - pastel green face and protruding chin, set off with a little white moustache.
And here I’ve noticed a phenomenon – the simplicity of the musical form offends the sensibilities of bass players in bands like this so they compensate by adding another string – it’s the truly dreadful cult of the five string bass. It’s just what The Blues needs, an extra low note here and there.
But the keyboard player was the star of the show - a blonde woman in her sixties, wearing a black stretch trouser suit. Tall and bony with extremely long legs, she perched on a bar stool, one leg launched into the air at an alarmingly acute angle, knee at chin height. The other leg stretched out in front and over to one side in a long, straight line. Her feet were encased in huge black platform trainers. She had a pronounced chin. A lantern jaw. They all had lantern jaws (except the singer – she didn’t really have a chin). They must have all been related. Or maybe it was just a side effect of being dead for a long time.
The first number bumped and ground to a finish and the singer burbled some semi-intelligible stuff into the hubbub – something about a busy schedule and checking out their website. Amy and I looked at each other open-mouthed –they’ve got a busy schedule and we’re hanging around trying to get our kicks in Cleveland.
Then they launched into a slow blues. The keyboard lady sang while the singer wailed on a thankfully almost inaudible harmonica. It was a masterpiece of the genre in that it seemed to encompass a snatch of every famous blues song ever written without actually have any form of its own. When everyone in the band except the drummer had taken a solo or two and we’d woken up this morning, walked all the way to Chicago and gambled our existence away in a whorehouse in New Orleans, the first lady of the keyboard brought the number to a halt by thrusting a bony fist into the air. The band stopped, she pulled her arm sharply downwards and the tune went into a swirling, gurgling finish. I was thrilled to bits – she’d flushed the song down an imaginary toilet.
They couldn’t possibly have topped that, or if they could we didn’t need to know about it, so we left.

Plank life

2010-02-16T12:01:00.009Z

Amy's finished with the cold and passed it on to me. So I'm sitting in bed staring out of the window at the rapidly disappearing blue in an increasingly grey sky, trying to summon up the will to live, or at least to carry on existing.

I woke up this morning with the gradual realisation that I had leprosy in both feet. They were sticking out of the covers, not cold, though the room was freezing, but with no discernable feeling in them apart from a vague uncoveredness. It was as though they'd given up the ghost (whatever that means) ahead of the rest of me.

I became aware of a distant thumping and the sound of an idling diesel motor. The heating oil delivery! I jumped out of bed and clattered down the stairs, flinging on any garment I could find. I looked a bit strange when I opened the door on the early morning grey, joyfully illuminated by pale gold reflections of the delivery tanker's headlights on grubby snow. The driver didn't seem to notice my odd appearance. He shook my hand, a sure sign that I was fitting right in with the general early morning, rural French ambience.

I opened the barn and fled inside to the comparative warmth of the house. Comparative warmth is a laugh - I thought of opening the fridge to warm the place up.

I waited shivering inside the house while he trailed a hundred feet of metal hose through the barn and pumped five hundred litres of the cheapest fuel oil into our ancient two thousand litre tank. Then I gave him almost all the cash we earned for playing the other night and scurried back to bed, intent on dying in a warm house.

It's lunch time now and I'm still alive so I think I'll get up. I'm worried that Amy and I are like the man and woman in the Swiss chalet - she comes out in the sunshine but at the first sign of crappy weather she swings into the balsa wood recesses of the little house, and I come pivotting out on the other end of our shared plank to stand outside until the sun comes back.

The sunshine that replaced the grey, oil-delivery dawn is all gone now. If I get up Amy might have a relapse. I think I'll stay put.

Out There...

2010-02-14T13:14:00.008Z

We played in this cave in a bar in a town called Le Dorat last night. The acoustics were a bit difficult but the owners were great, a Scottish couple with good sensibilities. Most of the audience were English and a lot of them were what you might call old, meaning about our own age. There was a woman psychologist turned copywriter who' d seen me in Portrush, Northern Ireland in 1978. There was a man from Lincolnshire who saw me at The Village Bowl in Bournemouth on the second Stiff tour - he told me how he got lost in the suburbs of Southampton on his way home and I was able to console him by pointing out that at least he wasn't in Lincolnshire.
I met the eighteen year old son of an avid fan who last saw me in 1979 at the Limit Club in Sheffield and a girl called Liberty wearing spiked cuffs and bondage trousers - she's been here for twelve years or so, a good deal more than half her young life. She told me that fluent French was a poor exchange for the tedium of being a teenager in the Limousin. Words to that effect anyway.
There isn't much to do here. French kids get little mopeds at fifteen so they they can ride to neighbouring villages and sit with other kids in different far-flung bus shelters for what Amy likes to call a change of pace.
It was a lovely evening - I almost completely forgot my dyed in the wool loathing of retired English ex-pats. Even when a septegenarian asked me during the intermission if we'd had a technical before we started. You need to turn down your instruments by a third and raise the level of the singing. I thanked him for his advice almost as diplomatically as I could and explained that our amplifiers weren't designed to turn down any further. It transpired that this man's claim to fame was shooting the cover of a Rolling Stones album - the one with the broken glass on the front cover... I'm none the wiser either. I pointed out that the Stones were never as good as The Who (because I always do) but he told me he was unable to offer any comment because he had no musical ear.
I met a woman who went to school in Seaford in Sussex where my daughter, Luci, lives and where I formed my first band at the age of fifteen or so. I heard tales and complaints about the weather conditions - I'll probably have to leave before you finish, it's like an ice rink out there... And I came through it all in a great mood.
I wish there was a bar like La Petie Fontaine in Le Dorat in our village.
This morning I went to the supermarket and put some posters up here and there for next weekend's concert at the Lawrence d'Arabie. Then I went to a bar in a neighbouring village. The street was empty except for a monstrously weather beaten man struggling with a satellite dish. A group of middle-aged people with a scattering of young children, probably grandchildren, sat round a table in the middle of the cafe. Apart from that there was no one.
The middle-aged people were English. It was obvious. One of them had a craggy, pioneering face - fifteen years ago, had I met him in England, he would have asked me how I find it out there. Now if I talked to him (which I didn't) I'm sure he would have told me how long ago he moved out here. You see the shift?
The English are obsessed with a place called out there. If there's anybody out there who... You here it all the time on the radio. I'm perversely thrilled every time I hear it, that and people who say quite frankly I've had it up to here. You can't see the neck level gesture on the radio so it doesn't make sense.
We've been out here for four years now...
For God's sake, we're not on fucking safari.
There's no going back - we're in deepest, darkest rural Fraarnce and don't I fucking know it.
...bald head, grey ring of hair culminating in a half-hearted grey pony tail. Approaches the bar - lar mim shows (la même chose) meaning the same again.
At least he made the effort but I hate how he makes me feel - smug about my superior ability to speak the language. He has no right to make me feel like that. I wished he'd just spoken in English. The barman would have understood perfectly, his wife's English.
Outside the street is still almost empty. The satellite dish mutant's been joined by a couple of others. They're discussing the weather. Not much to discuss really - it's grey, it's cold, it's probably going to snow again.
I head home intent on making the house saleable. I'm going to spend the afternoon stripping wallpaper. There's got to be more to life than this. When I get home the heating's broken down again, for the fifth time this winter. I light the woodburner and write this instead.

2010-02-12T12:54:00.008Z

It's been a long and hideous winter so far and I can't see it getting any better for a while. Not that I want to bring anyone down, including myself. Or not actually including myself, just myself because I can't imagine many other people reading this.
There's so much crap on the interweb these days - stuff used to go away, you got a bad review and you could console yourself with the yesterday's papers adage, and someone might say that they'll be eating fish and chips off that review. Or it would become one of a wad of six inch newspaper squares hanging on a hook in the outhouse...
There's a lot to look at on that there internet - the entire history of the world in minute detail. In our eco-aware society nothing is bio-degradeable anymore. I wish bands were, though it's a shooting myself in the foot sort of a wish. But it occurred to me that that's the problem with the music business. In any other business people retire, die off and get replaced, but in music no one ever goes away, not even when they're dead. In fact dying is often the smartest career option. Indifference turns to adulation. I can hardly wait!
I spent yesterday sorting through a roomful of old paperwork. I actually threw out some old tax returns and bank statements, and this made me feel like a real upstanding member of the community - I 've been filing tax returns for so long now that some of them are way past the statutory limit. What a waste of time all that was.
I seem to have kept every publishing and PRS statement I ever received. I don't know why, fear of throwing out something important I suppose. Sometimes I daydream about adding up all the payments, see if I've made a million yet. That might be depressing though - what if I have? I'd be wondering where it all went, torturing myself with thoughts of savings I could have made, costly financial mistakes I could have avoided. It's a fucking ridiculous idea.
I always wind up broke and I'm beginning to think I must like it. In the full flush of my early success I felt guilty, it was all too easy. So I went on the road in a seemingly endless downhill spiral until there wasn't a venue small or crappy enough to fit me. I paid my dues.
I always wondered about that dues paying business. What are they? Is there a window with an opening at the bottom to slide the money through? Do you get a receipt and if so are they tax deductable? I don't think I want any dues unless you can use them to heat the house. I'm avoiding going into the barn at the moment because the needle on the oil guage is way past the red line, heading towards empty again. It has to last until the first week of March and then it won't matter because we'll be on tour.
We could always burn my old paperwork to keep warm. I found all the press for my Bungalow Hi album. Reams of it - paragraph after paragraph of complaint about my bitterness, negativity, lack of singing ability - one reviewer even said that the album adds to the thought that people over a certain age should be banned from making music. He went on to add that there are of course certain notable exceptions, which was big of him. It's the stuff of fascism surely. I wonder who's going to decide on who's still allowed. And how's the reviewer (who didn't put his name on the piece) going to feel in thirty years time. It's all right to knock being old until you actually get there. I'm sure Pete Townshend has had a few uneasy moments with hope I die before I get old.
I'm going to be a grandfather in July. And there I was unable to imagine life after the age of thirty. Twenty years ago I thought about planting a tree in the garden where I lived but the idea of not seeing it grow to maturity bothered me so I didn't. I went passed that house last summer and the garden was so grown up that you couldn't see the house anymore. When I lived there you could see for miles across ploughed fields. Now my tree would fit right in - it'd look like it'd been there for years.
I just googled (since when did that become a verb?) the online magazine with the fascistic review and they don't exist anymore. So some things do go away. And underneath the sheaves of indifferent reviews I found a load of mail from fans who'd bought the album directly from me, telling me how much they were enjoying it.
I'm almost feeling strong enough to go and have a look at the oil guage.

New radio show, keyboard rescue, Framus Star bass...

2009-12-08T23:45:00.004Z

I'm so busy that I think the only way I could possibly get everything done is by cloning myself only I haven't got time. But I have managed to put another radio show up - here's a link: http://bit.ly/wrecklessradio
I've also built our touring keyboard, a delapidated Roland JX8P that Amy plays, into a smart new casing - not, you must understand, to make it look smart, merely to stop it dropping to pieces.
And in between that and convalescing after the Yo La Tengo tour we've been desperately learning twenty or so Kevin Coyne songs for the tribute shows which start in Brussels this Friday. We're setting off for a secret location in Gent where we're going to rehearse with Jon Langford, Robert Coyne, Brendan Croker and the drummer from Kevin's last band. Amy's playing keyboards and and guitar, I'm playing bass.
I'm going to use my Framus Star bass which should cause a stir because it only just resembles a musical instrument of any description. It dates from a time before the role of the bass guitar was clearly defined - no one was quite sure what it was supposed to do, and that's what the Framus Star bass looks like. It has a very long, thin neck, massive tuning pegs and a damper contraption that flips up under the strings pushing a wad of industrial rubber against them so that when plucked they give out a short sound that might most accurately be explained as bluck. The neck is so long that to tune the top string I literally have to walk from one end of the neck to the other. My back is killing me thanks to practicing for a week on this beast of an instrument but I'm hoping to cut quite a dash with it strung around my neck under the stage lights this weekend.

2009-11-29T22:26:00.002Z

Yes, that's right - the Polish police are particularly underworked, crime being a relatively new phonomenom in the former eastern block. So they think nothing of returning belongings to strangers who were ambushed and robbed two countries and two weeks previously. Oh, those Polish police, they're a veritable Mary fucking Poppins...
Keep the messages of support rolling in!
See you in Paris x

2009-11-24T23:35:00.003Z

The most incredible thing happened tonight in Poland. We'd just traversed fifty or so kilometers of the worst road in Europe, a collection of potholes and ridges held together with a sporadic scattering of concrete and rubble. Just as we hit - and hit is absolutely the word because there was a ramp and the van almost took off - the highway, the smooth, newly built part that is, we were flagged down by a policeman. He asked to see my papers so I gave him my passport to keep him going while I found the carte grise for the van, but then he wasn't sure and asked to see my driving licence and I wasn't sure because my French one was stolen in Amsterdam last week and I didn't want to show my UK one because the address doesn't match up with the van, so I gave him the insurance document to be going on with. He seemed to quite like that but then he wanted my passport so I gave him my UK driving licence (the paper bit because I couldn't find the plastic card), but he obviously couldn't understand that because I saw him trying to read it upsidedown (the licence that is - you wouldn't get a policeman, not even a Polish one, standing on his head on the side of a motorway), so he got quite stroppy and almost shouted at me, demanding my passport, which is what I think he should have done in the first place.
He scuttled off back to his car with my paperwork and was gone long enough for me to convince myself that I was going to be hiked off to prison for some innocently perpertrated misdemeanour. I was just about to launch into an embarrassing we've had a good marriage... speech when I caught sight of him in the wing mirror. He was marching towards the car with a winter coat over his arm and carrying my bag, the small red purse which Amy speaks so fondly of.
And then he called some colleagues and they gave us a high speed police escort for the next four hundred and fifty six kilometers all the way to Katowice. And when we arrived at the hotel the mayor of Katowice, who was waiting for us in the reception, presented us with the keys to the city.
Watch this space for more exciting on tour escapades.

The Ginger Man Group

2009-09-28T11:01:00.006+01:00

We have our very own Blue Man Group - more likely The Ginger Man Group. They come from Stirling and yesterday they travelled down to Newcastle to see us do an afternoon show in the upstairs room of a city centre pub. They're lead by a man called George who I suspect is extremely intelligent though he's always drunk when I meet him. The other Ginger Men are his brother (terrifyingly drunk) and a dark haired one who's not ginger at all and wears a contrasting black Wreckless Eric t shirt to go with his Scottish/Italian look.
George is a leader of men, he has charisma. His hapless followers will go wherever he leads them. George is fairly obsessed with me and that's why he leads them to our shows where they terrify bewildered audiences with strange tribal chanting and spastic stop/go dance floor manouvres.
They may be a bit of a pain in the arse for the rest of the audience, but in these increasingly po-faced times I sometimes look back with affection at the days when beer was served in real glasses and audiences spat at us and chucked bottles. That period didn't last for very long which is just as well because if it had someone would have died. I enjoyed the adrenalin rush though, and for a brief moment yesterday afternoon The Ginger Man Group bought it all back to me.
Here's a link to Lindsay Hutton's review of the show\- http://nextbigthing.blogspot.com/

2 REVIEWS FROM THE BRISTOL THUNDERBOLT SHOW

2009-09-23T02:35:00.004+01:00

http://www.crackerjack.co.uk
www.wordmagazine.co.uk
And no mention of my excruciating toothache - I've been off my head on painkillers for four days now but I don't think anyone's noticed.
Now I'm off my head on antibiotics, they always seem to put me into a weird headspace.

Did I really say weird headspace? I'm sorry about that, it's the result of a morning spent shuttling around Southsea High Street. We managed to avoid The Magick Cafe (full of witches who say reeeely nice and a-maaazing...) and stumbled instead into a Christian sect cafe - do you live locally...?
We had to get out of there pretty sharpish or we might have been sucked in. I saw a bible on the table - a bespectacled young misfit swiped it up, apologised and carried it off up the stairs to a Christian rock rehearsal space which I later discovered on my way to the toilet.

andreas blogg

2009-09-14T10:52:00.002+01:00

I was slightly concerned by a comment on the last entry - someone said that they clicked on the next blog thing and it took them to a blog about tying fishing flies. So now I'm wondering if there's a Central Blog Control that look at me, decides I'm hopelessly middle-aged, and chooses some appropriate follow-on blogs that it thinks might appeal to my similarly fuddy duddy blogster following.
I was cheered up when someone else posted a comment about the blog that they got when they clicked on next blog: Andreas lives in Sweden, he's thirty one years old, he lists his occupation as IT Technical Support and hobbies are BMW, billiards, music, Xbox. (I don't know what Xbox is but looking at Andreas I'm guessing that you can use it to access some good porn sites).
Andreas' blog cheered me up because it confirmed what I've thought for a long time - that some people reach middle age in the full flush of youth. And this makes me think I'm not doing so badly - I'm probably more crotchety than ever, my hair's turned grey, I've got the beginnings of a bald spot, there seems to be half as much of me again as there used to be, and the twenty seven inch waist of my younger days has gone forever. But at least I haven't got a blog that makes a big deal of the garage, the carwash and a hoover.
If you want to feel better about yourself here's the address to go to: http://bmw-andreas.blogspot.com/
I'm a heartless cynical bastard but life's made me that way.

Anyone who follows Amy's diary will probably already know that she had a stall at a local vide grenier yesterday. (A vide grenier is much like a car boot sale by the way). She didn't do too badly though it wasn't the greatest success. She had to be there at seven in the morning. By the time I arrived in the mid-afternoon she'd packed up and left. It took me some time to find the stalls because some idiot had put the little A boards advertising the thing on the wrong side of the road so that the this way to the vide grenier arrows were all pointing away from the event.
Typically French you might say, but what was more typically French, contemporary French, is that they'd booked this horrible local duo to play - not us - this lot are called Vis-a-Vis and they single-handedly prove that the eighties marked the beginnings of the cultural trough that we now find ourselves wallowing in.
Vis-a-Vis were playing when I got there. Apparently they'd been playing all day with no let up. The site was a dusty car park. There was a bar and sandwich concession serving a few rapidly reddening English people who sat carousing on municipal plastic chairs under the hot sun. Scattered round about were a few stalls selling this and that junk - I was too depressed to look, and left as Vis-a-Vis launched into Me And Julio Down By The School Yard complete with chorus effect on the acoustic bass guitar.
It occured to me as I scurried away that if someone had handed me a gun at that moment I would have turned, shot them both in the head and laughed as blood and brains spattered the equipment and the jollity blundered to a halt. Later on Amy told me that they'd done a Who medley and I changed my mind about the shooting - I would have had them taken away and tortured. Which reminds me, we're doing a local Amnesty International benefit on November 7th.
The reason I feel so badly about Vis-a-Vis is they doubtless hold the status in France of Artist/Musician, Intermittant de Spectacle as it's called. We can't have that status here with all the benefits that go with it - health care and dole for the days we don't work, because in order to qualify you have to do forty three concert in a ten month period. Unfortunately the forty three concert have to be in France or they don't count. So none of our American, German or British tour dates count, none of our recordings, the international reputation that we've both spent years building, none of that counts for anything here. The fact that we earn money from touring and selling records in other countries, bring it back to France and pump it into the French economy, that counts for nothing. Amy's going for the official status of market trader and I'm looking at either music consultant or odd job man.
We're not artists or musicians, but Vis-a-Vis with there tawdry slaughterings of Knocking On Heaven's Door and No Woman No Cry, they are. And that's why I feel so badly about them.

I'm going to have another look at what Andreas has been up to: http://bmw-andreas.blogspot.com/

A Site That Currently Contains A Lot Of Spam

2009-09-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

Myspace has a problem with the google blog thing, which I imagine is much like the brief war between Betamax and VHS back in the glory days of video cassettes. They refuse to be compatable, probably because young Tom Freckles at Myspace is feeling insecure.

The march of progress would seem to have taught the world precious little.

If they were car manufacturers rather than web hosts they probably wouldn't be able to decide which side of the car to put the steering wheel or which side of the road to drive on. On Myspace the link to the radio show leads to a box informing the intrepid but foolhardy clicker that they've been prevented from venturing further because they may have been about to enter A Site That Currently Contains A Lot Of Spam, and at the very least they could be prey to a phishing scam.

For phishing scam read head-on collision.

Click on this seemingly innocuous link (if you dare):

The Wreckless Eric Radio Show

I'm not a phishing scam or a piece of malicious software but Myspace won't let me put a link to the ungodly google or directly to the radio show. So I've been forced to provide an unlinked link if you see what I mean. I've suggested that those with copying and pasting skills the, ahem... tech savvy (pass the bucket) can copy and paste the unlinked link and leave the tightly controlled, tight-arsed world of myspace behind for a short while.

And I've promised that I won't crawl up the wire into anyone's computer and fuck about with their personal details.

Here's a preview of the latest radio show:

Hang on to your testicles (or someone else's) and prepare to freak out. Music from Silver Apples, Alan Vega, Bert Kempfeart & His Orchestra, Plummet Airlines, Jacques Dutronc, McGinty & White, Nick Lowe, The Honeycombs, Jimmy Reed and not forgetting Little Boy Blue & His Blue Boys.

And here's the link (it's all "in-house" here so we should be OK):

The Wreckless Eric Radio Show

And just for the sake of going link crazy here's a link to our tour dates:

Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby UK September dates

And a link to a list of hospital trust sites in the UK which I'm sure you'll find deeply disinteresting:

http://www.nhs.uk/ServiceDirectories/Pages/AcuteTrustListing.aspx

Eric Is Not Up To Much

2009-09-03T16:03:00.000+01:00

I accidentally clicked on something in Hotmail and found myself in the midst of my Windows Live Messenger account, a lot of nonsense that could enable me to keep in touch with my entire universe 24/7, and, at the flicker of an eyelid, tell the waiting world what I'm up to. Well, in lieu of me telling the eagerly bated World At Large what I'm up to (is that baited as in a fish hook or is there a condition known as bated that applies to breathing?), Windows Messenger seems to have taken it upon itself to carry the news in big letters that Eric Is Not Up To Anything.
I felt that I was being chastised for not joining in - my first reaction was to change it, but that would involve joining in and my choice is not to. I choose not to because I'm not having peer pressure applied by some virtual big brother bully boy.

Eric is far from Idle (ha ha ha) - I'm busy with Alan Clayson's album. It's been taking a long time. I've created most of the backing tracks myself with guidance from demo cassettes recorded at The Clayson Laboratory of Lo-fi Intergalactica. A bit difficult because he uses two or three different cassette recorders, transferring stuff between them, and none of them run at the correct (or should we say accepted) speed. So it's fairly tricky trying to determine the key signature. And as for the timing, there's a time signature somewhere between 2/4 and 3/4 which is peculier only to Alan. It's quite a job but the results are fabulous. I've played most of the instruments myself with piano contributions from Amy and our friend Graham Beck, and a couple of appearances from Ian Button on the drums , and of course Alan on piano and harmonium ('I shall have legs like whipcord').
We're nearing completion now, I'm looking forward to another visit from Alan to finish the remaining vocal overdubs and then I'll be mixing it.
When we started, a couple of years ago, Alan said he'd like to make an album like Bungalow Hi. 'That might take some time' I said. And I was right - it has. I hope the finished album shows at least a few people what a great talent Alan Clayson really is.
That's what I've been up to for the past couple of days. And apart from that, if anyone can be bothered, just tell that nosey parker Messenger thing that the Trident desk is improving daily and looking forward to a complete new set of faders. Here's another photo:

hello... hello... can anyone hear me?

2009-08-29T11:06:00.000+01:00

The radio show business is a bit of a tragedy - the listnership appears to be falling off in direct proportion to the effort I put in to making the programmes. Amy reckons it's nothing to worry about, just the last week of August, the last of the summer holidays filling up people's time. I tend to take a quietly pessimistic view - it's my musical career in a microcosm - a gradual falling off of interest until one day there'll be none. Playing to an empty room, but still doing the show, fullfilling the engagement because standards must not be allowed to slip.
I can imagine us like a couple of old dodderers who still dress and sit down to dinner in a large, gloomy, unheated dining room, with plaster falling from the ceiling because Jerry's dropping bombs. There's a war on but we're not going to let it affect our routine. Except that there won't be any falling plaster, hopefully no falling bombs, just an empty dance floor and a club owner twiddling his thumbs, waiting for us to get finished.
I'm still going to carry on with the radio shows. I'll carry on even if there are no listeners whatsoever. The shows will be there, wherever there is, suspended in virtual reality, as pristine as the day they were created, waiting for someone to discover them. Along with just about everything else.
It's disturbing to me to think that nothing's difficult to find anymore - you just google it. I also find it disturbing that a stupid word like google has been allowed to creep in and become a verb - I google, you google, he, she or it googles... For fuck's sake.
Most people don't have the wherewithall to search out and collect Ming vases, Dresden china, Stradavarious violins and all that sort of stuff. I wouldn't want to even if I could so perhaps it doesn't make for a very good example, but I could always search out records, 33s and 45s. Affordable and every bit as collectable, treasurable as a Ming vase. And more fun too - you can't dance to a Ming vase. Or a Stradavarious, unless you're got Yehudi Menuin in a good mood strapped to the other end of it.
The pleasure I got from say finding a copy of Five Live Yardbirds in the back of a junk shop a couple of years after Columbia deleted it, snapping up Honey I Need by The Pretty Things in perfect condition for ten pence having looked for a copy for years... that's all gone. I took these records home, week after week, one at a time, and listened to them until I knew every nuance, every ping, creak and scratch. I listened to the fade outs with my ear pressed to the speaker to catch every last second of pleasure that these things had to offer. Now I could just google whatever it is, download it and probably never really listen to it because there's always too much at one go and less time to listen.
I sound like a grumbling old codger don't I? It's a funny thing - if you rail on about the way the world is when you're young you're a rebel, an angry young man, and that's cool. Do the the same when you're over fifty and you're a curmudgeon, an old git. Well fuck 'em.
The radio shows will be there alongside all the daft crap, dumb You-Tube shit and the like until the cockroaches take over the hard drives.
And so will this blog post thing.

Click this link and tune in - The Wreckless Eric Radio Show - make an old man very happy!!

2009-08-27T12:22:00.000+01:00

I can hardly believe the abject stupidity that I'm forced to endure every day. The mairie of our village are about to spend a collosal amount of money, create a great deal of upheaval and subject us to God knows what inconvenience in the way of noise, dust, temporary one way systems and parking restrictions, because they're going to make the streets look nicer.

They've already done one street, and apart from digging a big trench along the length of the road all they seem to have done is replace the street lights with twice as many street lights on poles of a different colour to the original ones. The new street lights are glossy maroon affairs that don't match the street lights in the adjacent street which are a sort of dull municipal green. It's anyone's guess what colour ours are going to be.

It seems to me that every maire in every town and village in France has a deal with a street furniture company. Since the early nineties French streets have been increasingly cluttered up with benches, bollards, barriers, troughs and decorative cast iron globes. The pavement of the main shopping street of one town near here is so full of this crap that there isn't room for more than one pedestrian at a time, so most people squeeze between the barriers (designed to save lives) and risk death or injury by walking in the road.

When I first moved here back in the eighties the street lights went off at ten or ten thirty and the entire countryside was plunged into darkness. I never knew there were so many stars in the night sky. Moonlight was silver and thunder storms were dramatic - my neighbours had a weeping willow and when we had a good thunderstorm the branches thrashed and flailed around,occasionally jumping out of the blackness, brilliantly and instantaneously lit by flashes of lightning. Later on the mairie had new streetlights installed which put out a pervasive orange glare. They were kept on all night. But by that time the neighbours had got rid of the willow tree and I'd got curtains.

I don't understand this aversion to darkness. It's not as if people are walking the streets round here at night - there's no point because there's nothing going on anyway. There's nothing to be scared of in the dark in the countryside round here. I'm much more scared of whatever design horror of streetlights we're going to get. And worst of all, according to the plan, they're intending to fix one to the wall of our house. Not that they've asked us or anything. We went up to the mairie yesterday afternoon to look at the plan. It didn't tell us much except that they're going to get rid of all the street lamps and replace them with twice as many new ones. It's going to be like Las Vegas round here. I may be forced into buying an air rifle to ensure a bit of healthy blackness.

I can imagine that the mairies are getting backhanders from the electricity company. There's a village round here, just a village you drive through on the N21, that's lit up like Heathrow Airport. It hasn't just got street lights hanging over the road, there are auxillary lamps sprouting from the backs of the posts, providing a golden archway of light along the full length of the pavement, about two miles in all. It rivals Blackpool in it's splendour. You can see it from outer space but I've yet to see a nocturnal pedestrian.

I'm repairing and painting our window frames at the moment. By French law I'm supposed to get permission from the mairie if I want to paint them a different colour. You can't buy dirty white paint so I'm going to have to, but I'm not going to ask permission. Not until they tell me what colour street lamps they've got in store for us. And not until they ask me very nicely if they can fix one of them to our house. The answer is going to be no but I'm sure that won't stop them, they've got might on their side - they've got a big framed photo of Europe's top fascist, Nicolas Sarkozy hanging up at the mairie. When they left us alone in the room with it and the plan I had to restrain myself from ripping it from the wall and vandalizing it

Nicolas Sarkozy - he's a human fucking dildo. You can flick his little pecker and activate the batteries that make his sticky-out mouse ears waggle and cause extra stimulation... if only - he'd be some use to the world like that.

I'd better stop before I get worked up and get myself in trouble.

2009-08-25T09:19:00.000+01:00

This is a radical new departure for me, not Ericland - I had that going back when this internet thing was in its infancy - it's blogging that's a departure. I still have trouble using such an intrinsically unattractive word for an activity that I always thought was wonderful, inspirirng, life-affirming... communication that is, poetry and prose, stream of conciousness, real life stories and ridiculous adventures out in the world and skittering across a computer keyboard.

Amy has been doing very well with hers and people are always asking when I'm going to start writing this kind of stuff again and on a regular basis, but the truth is I did it for a good few years towards the end of the nineties and into whatever this decade calls itself (and I refuse to call it the naughties), and it must have worn me out.

The radio show have been something of a success - I've been forced into coping with the business of blogspotism, and it's been surprising easy and non-labour intensive. Updating the diary/news page on my site is terribly laborious. I use an out of date version of Dreamweaver. I've never really got the hang of it, just learned enough to do what I have to. It involves opening and updating files and dragging and dropping links and uploading - apart frrom the lack of physical exercise it's not unlike working in a factory. It's time consuming, tedious, and I can only do it on my own computer.

Sometimes I think life's too short, and it seems to be getting shorter. Twenty years ago I was a mad young thing of thirty five with a mental age of twenty five. Now I'm just a few years off being presented with a bus pass and the unthinkable, unspeakable idea of not dying before I get old is looking more and more inevitable. In another twenty years I'll be older than my dad was when he expired from old age.

I don't think I'll be ready to die, though God knows, a lot of the time this world gets on my nerves. I've got too much to do. And it doesn't matter how much I get done, it doesn't look like I'll ever be finished.

I've gone and shunted us into a morbid cul-de-sac here so that's a great start. We've got to brave the tedious city of Limoges today. We've got to get posters done for our UK tour next month and I've got to get some switch cleaner and various components for the beautiful late seventies Trident desk that's now installed, and almost fully functioning in the studio.

I want to spend a lot more time in the studio in future and less time touring. So if anyone wants to come over and record an album here I'm open for business. And you'll even get bass playing and harmonies thrown in.

This has all been a bit of a success so far - I even uploaded a photo, not the most inspiring photo I've ever taken but all I did was press the shutter. It, my new friend blogger, did all the uploading while I made a cup of tea.