Show Biz Wonderland

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

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

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...

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)

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

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

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!