On Tour WIth Amy Rigby And Back Home Undismantled

I was worried. I spent most of the previous day getting ready and feeling vaguely resentful because I’ve got better things to do with my life than take on the US immigration authorities only to wind up shackled and in a detention centre waiting to be deported from a country I was none too fussed about coming to in the first place.

I didn’t sleep well - spent half the night on the sofa reading Mike Campbell’s autobiography - that’s Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. I couldn’t put it down. I particularly liked the part about recording Full Moon Fever, just Mike, Tom and Jeff Lynne in Mike’s garage. A lot like me making one of my records except that theirs sold three million. My sales, if I’m lucky, are more like half that, and with three zeros knocked off.

I sailed through immigration. The young border guard looked bored, resigned, checked-out. He showed no interest in my British passport and barely looked at my green card.  No fingerprint or retina scan. ‘Enjoy your time in America’ was all he said, and I fancied I heard a hint of irony in his voice. We picked up the guitars and suitcases, wheeled our way through the customs hall  and airport arrivals, and out into the great wide open.

The cop pulled us over just as we were reaching our hotel. Seems we’d driven from Sloatsburg, where the New Jersey shopping mall sprawl mutates into I-87, all the way to Kingston, New York, in a large, black rental vehicle with no lights. While Amy was driving I was trying to turn up the heating - - it was bloody cold in upstate New York. I had to use the flashlight on my phone. These modern vehicles, they think of everything - beeps and flashes, and a weird pull on the steering wheel if you dare to veer out of your lane…but the heating controls don’t light up. You’d think they’d sort that out. 

Even when we almost ploughed through a set of road works it didn’t occur to us that our vision was impaired by a lack of headlights.

The cop was nice about it. He ran Amy’s license and found it had been suspended. I said I could drive on my license. He said he’d have to run it. He came back and told us mine was suspended too. He printed out some paperwork and wished us a safe onward journey.

We got rid of our cars when we left but we forgot to return the license plates to the DMV so they suspended our driver’s licenses. Obviously we’re unfit to drive. Considering the headlights fiasco I think they might have a point.

I’ve got jet lag. Amy’s got some sort of problem with her arm that’s been going on for weeks and isn’t getting better. We feel old and clapped out.

We arrived on Sunday night, stayed in a hotel in a massive, and largely redundant shopping mall in Kingston. We were up very early on Monday morning due to the jet lag. America looks shabby and dilapidated. And it’s so fucking cold. No green on the trees up here. Constant drabness. 

We drove up to Hudson to get our equipment out of the storage space. On the way I noticed a marked drop in the number of flags. The Trump flags and banners are all gone and I counted only four US flags between Kingston and Hudson. When I was last here, just before the election, every dowdy, rundown homestead seemed to be proudly waving Old Glory. A lot of people must be feeling badly let down right now.

We have to be thankful for what we’ve got. If we’re lucky enough to have anything.

Though I don’t think anyone on this planet should feel obliged to be thankful for living a peaceful and fulfilled life. It should be everyone’s inestimable right.

We have a dear friend, an US National who grew up in England and still lives there. When we left France to live in the States back in 2011 he said: ‘America has always been a fascist country, they just don’t want you to know it.’

That pronouncement has always haunted me though I always hoped was a far-fetched idea. Today it’s obvious that it isn’t.

We spent the morning rounding up equipment in our storage space in Hudson, picking up mail from the UPS store, and photo copying documents for the DMV in order to get our driver’s licenses reinstated. By early afternoon life was beginning to feel throughly pointless.

We met up with Sam Shepherd, our wonderful drummer and former Catskill neighbour, set ourselves up in the Avalon and started running through the set. Amy and I had run through everything at home, a couple of amps in the kitchen, cups of tea, very casual. Mostly so I could try to remember how the tunes went and what I played. As usual, we meant to do comprehensive daily rehearsals for at least a week before we set off, but as usual there wasn’t time.

We sketched everything out as best we could and joked how muscle memory would kick in. Amy was always a great believer in the power of muscle memory, but her confidence was shaken one night a few years back when we played my song Joe Meek together for the first time in years: 

‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘the middle eight’s a bit complicated.’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem’ she replied, ‘muscle memory’ll kick in.’

She stared at me like a deer in headlights as I negotiated the musical miasma of the middle part on my own. Unusual for Amy - it’s usually me who blunders through a tricky bridge hoping to accidentally hit a right note.

There was plenty of that on the first night at the Old Schoolhouse in Metuchen, New Jersey. I don’t think anyone noticed. The trick with the bass is to keep it rumbling and look confident. Sometimes it helps to stay on the same note until the rest of the band comes back around to it and then it sounds quite deliberate.

I enjoyed the show - it was great to be onstage with Sam again. Barbara from Girls On Grass opened - she has a great new song called Sex Is Great So Fuck The System. All her songs are great, and her guitar playing is stellar. She joined us later for All I Want which was quite a thrill. She’s left-handed so we we able to sing the backing vocals into one microphone with the guitar and bass facing each other, just like Paul and George - in my deluded mind at least.

The following day we drove to Pittsburgh which was wet and miserable. Get Hip Records is an enormous warehouse building,. There’s a smart bit at the front which has a look of chaotic organization, and behind that a labyrinth of redundant record collections and dusty hi-fi equipment. Somewhere in the middle is a room they use for concerts. The owner, Gregg Kostolich, told me this room has the exact same dimensions as the Chess Records studio in Chicago. They intended to install a studio in there, but a whacking great transformer on the roof was causing interference in the recording equipment so they turned it into a venue instead.

There was way too much PA and no one to do the sound so I did it, which was strenuous because we were on a high stage and the mixing desk was at the other end of the room. I had to keep jumping off the stage to go and make adjustments. There we two monitor wedges at the front of the stage, each linked to a Peavey vocal PA cabinet on either side of the stage at the back. They were causing a lot of problems but the only way I could turn them off was to disconnect them but this also disconnected the front monitors. The cables appeared to have been built into the carpentry, and I didn’t have time to sort out a knot of electrical spaghetti, so I bypassed the Peaveys with the aid of a couple of guitar effect pedals. I don’t think anyone understood what I was doing. It’ll probably stay that way until someone notices that the Peaveys aren’t working, or someone misses their effect pedals.

I got us balanced up, marked the settings on the mixer, and told the various n’er-do-wells who were hanging around the DJ and beer supply not to touch anything.

I should get a Boy Scout badge for operating dodgy PA systems. We had something similar last time Amy played in Pittsburgh, at the Banfa Tea Rooms. I had to work with what there was - two plastic speaker cabinets and a very dusty six channel amplifier which was very possibly built from a kit sometime in the early seventies. I told Amy I’d done the best I could. She spoke into the microphone. ‘There’s no way I’m singing through that’ she said. But she did, and it sounded great in a charming and lo fi manner.

Lou and Conni Koury’s house concert has to be the best small venue in Philadelphia. I’ve played there three times with Amy and once on my own. They have a vocal PA made by Fender. We were the first band to ever use it. I can set it up in minutes. There was a knock at the door after the soundcheck. I opened the door as I was closest and there was our friend Mike Fickel. He flown in from Texas specially for the show it was a wonderful surprise. He stayed the night and set off back to the airport at some ungodly hour, like nine o’clock in the morning.

That's one of Mike's photo at the top of the page. I've used it entirely without permission. Thanks Mike!

We set off for the final show - a triumphant return to the Spotty Dog in Hudson. We got there early and had our first sitting at a table dining experience of the tour. Dinners and playing shows don’t always go hand in hand. There isn’t time, you don’t know where to go, or the promoter has very kindly made some soup - delicious, but it isn’t dinner. We often end up feeling hungry after the show, and sometimes I’ve even been known to endure the hotel breakfast the following morning.

We were constantly revising our stance regarding soup. We were pro-soup at the Franklin Schoolhouse, but after the show, on the way to the hotel, we resumed our rallying cry: SOUP IS NOT A MEAL! In Pittsburgh, faced with a revolting Thai curry which arrived ten minutes before we were due to play (and cost a small fortune) we were ardently pro-soup again. We were definitely pro-soup at Lou and Conni’s - theirs came with gnocchi and all kinds of extras. I think the official line now is that we’re pro-soup with conditions. A non-fulfilling soup experience could easily change this.

The Spotty Dog is a tough gig. You have to wait until the bar staff push the book shelves together to the back of the room, and then you’ve got about half an hour to set upp. We use our own PA in there - it’s the old Spotty Dog PA - I bought it off them when they put in a new system which doesn’t really work so well for bands.

Sam was shocked by the lack of space - I kept telling him to move his kit closer to the bass amp or there wouldn’t be room for Amy. He was also a bit surprised by the lack of a soundcheck. The place was already packed. Running through a couple of tunes isn’t a good look in that situation. You set up in semi-darkness and hope for the best. Fortunately we’ve played there so often I pretty much know the settings that are going to work. I checked the vocal mics, the level of Amy’s acoustic guitar, we made sure the amplifiers were working and that was it. We went upstairs and hid out until it was time to play.

I’ve never seen the Spotty Dog so crowded - people were spilling out of the door and onto the street. Amy worked there for twelve years - their longest serving employee. It was an important part of her life. She sometimes has nightmares that they’ve moved the bar or changed the place into a takeaway. A year after her last shift she still has to fight the urge to correctly organize the books or help out behind the bar. She was relieved to find everything just as she’d left it - she was doubtful that they’d even swept the floor…

We played well- I think we always do, or at the very least we maintain a standard. But four shows in is often about as good as it gets - you’re in the swing of it but there’s no room for complacency, it’s still all on the edge. It was a real pleasure playing with Sam again - every hit’s a good one, loud, purposeful, but never bombastic, a real team player, quietly neurotic and great fun to hang out with. Amy was on fire - a cliché I know, but how do you say these things? She’s notched up her delivery by a couple of levels. She always had the moves but now she backs it up with the guitar playing. She’s become quite a guitar slinger. Of course I attribute this this in part to the Vox distortion pedal I got her - she used to borrow my spare Guyatone Zoom Box but I thought it was time she had her own. The Vox pedal is actually a Guyatone Zoom Box in a snazzy V shaped casing finished in subtle tones of blue and grey. I’m jealous beyond belief!

Amy went to California to do some solo shows and spend time with her daughter, and my stepdaughter, Hazel. I went home and carried on working on the new album I have planned for release later this year. This one’s a bit of an oddity, something I got started with Sam while we were preparing to sell the house in Catskill. He’d come around in the late afternoon and I’d answer the door covered in paint or plaster. ‘I hate my life’ I’d say, and then we record another backing track, just drums and a guitar. I started to dismantle the studio literally moments after we finished recording the basics of the final track.

And here I am, undismantled - if such a word or condition exists. I’ve been working very hard on this - there’s a deadline. Sometimes the work seems insurmountable. I’ve just found out I’ve got more time than I thought because the short UK tour I was about to do opening for the Fixx which was supposed to start next week, has been quite unceremoniously cancelled due apparently to unforeseen circumstances. At this stage I don’t know anything more. They’re making an announcement tomorrow. I’m a bit pissed off for myself personally because I’ve already booked and paid for my hotels. I could also do with the income. But I’m glad about the extra time it affords me to work on the album.

It’s good in these terrible times to have something to do.  The one positive thing I noticed in America is that decent Americans seem to be even kinder and more caring towards each other than ever before. I’ll hold on to that for now.

I’m doing a few shows this summer with a band - my friend Graham Beck on keyboards and keyboard bass, Amy on electric and acoustic guitars and percussion, and Will Moore on drums. I haven’t done anything with a band since about 2015. 

Bands often frustrated me - I often found playing live with a collection of other musicians could be a limiting for me, but I love all the playing Amy and I have done together. I’ve known Graham since 1973 - we met at art college in Hull and played together in bands and on and off since then. I've always enjoyed playing and hanging out with Graham. Amy says he’s a natural choice for me - she says we’ve got chemistry. It’s going to be a beautiful freeform racket with songs. I’m excited about it - I’m going to include my tour dates so that the five or so people who read my blog all the way to the end can also get excited:

JUNE

28 MALVERN West Malvern Social Club (solo show) ticket link

JULY

26 LATITUDE FESTIVAL Trailer Park Stage

AUGUST

10 BLACKPOOL Rebellion Festival, Blackpool Opera House

16 BEDFORD Esquires ticket link  

30 SUFFIELD SUMMER FIESTA Suffield, North Norfolk  

 

SEPTEMBER 

11-14 KUFSTEIN, AUSTRIA Sprachslaz Festival (solo appearance)

 

 

 

RIP Scott Cornish

I was driving to Birmingham - that’s Birmingham in the middle of England, not in Alabama. I stopped for a rest, got some bad coffee, clicked up Facebook on my phone. A post from Lindsay Hutton: RIP Scott Cornish. My first thought was that this was not possible, but that was wrong, because with Scott anything was possible. I was swept up in a jumble of thoughts and emotions. One clear thought shone through: Scott would not be showing up at the gig tonight.

I can’t remember when or where I first met Scott. It was at a show, probably one that Amy and I were playing. He just slowly became a part of our scene. He came to our house concerts in Catskill, the legendary Homemade Aeroplane. After we played, and people were leaving, someone said this guy was asking for walking directions to the Thruway entrance where he was going to catch a Trailways bus. We couldn’t let this happen  - it was midnight on a Saturday night and it it was a three and a half mile walk. Someone found him and we organised a ride. He was grateful, though he would have been happy to walk - he’d walked to our house from he Trailways bus stop earlier that evening after an afternoon show in Troy - and he was quite happy to walk back because the bus wasn’t scheduled until sometime after two in the morning.

We found out that Scott did this kind of thing all the time. He knew all the bus and train timetables, all the bus and railroad stations. We’d drop him off in the middle of the night at some far-flung terminus.

‘Will you be okay here Scott?’

‘Oh don’t worry about me, it’s a fine night - and I’ve got a sandwich from your rider.’

His planning was meticulous: he’d catch a bus to catch a train and enjoy breakfast in an all-night cafe while he waited for the first bus of the day that would take him the rest of the way home.

He was like a cartoon character come to life, square-built with chunky spectacles, stolid, with something intrepid in his demeanour. I don’t know if it was years of taking public transport on a grand scale that had made Scott into the calm presence that he was, or if he’d always been that way, and that’s how he managed to endure the rigours of the public transport system.

Calm, philosophical, with a hint of stoicism. I worried about him out there in the night, but really no need. Thugs, psychopaths, dangerous nutters, they’d be no match for that measured calm. I’m sure Scott could talk someone down off a ledge just by being there.

Going to see bands was what Scott did. He had a girlfriend for a short while but it didn’t last. He once brought her to a show I did in London. He spoke about the relationship with no bitterness - it just didn’t work out. Scott had a lot of friends but he was a loner He used to be the manager of a hardware store but the place went out of business. He fell into depression and suffered that the drugs that are foisted on to people who suffer that illness. I know these things because I enjoyed a number of long drives with him. He was easy-going, and had good stories. A great traveling companion. He amazed me with the bands he’d seen, his understanding of rock n roll music and its peripheries. 

On one drive he related his experiences as an official merchandise sales vendor at the disastrous Woodstock II Festival which happened around the corner from his house in Rome, New York. He jumped ship just before the dance tent was pumped full of raw sewage during Fat Boy Slim’s set. He said the organisers wanted to make it appear to be as much like the original Woodstock as possible so they’d even arranged a mudslide. He looked thoughtful, shook his head:

‘That mudslide - it wasn’t mud…’

He never got paid for the final day.

And of course, he didn’t show up last night in Birmingham, though perhaps he was there in spirit. I know I was thinking about him while I was playing. I’m unclear about how he died - complications of Covid apparently. I hope it was easy and painless, and he wasn’t alone. 

And I hope he got the bus alright.

Seventy

Apparently it’s a milestone. Or should that be a millstone? I can’t remember which because I’m seventy so my brain doesn’t work. My brain didn’t work before, but then it was down to crazy living. Now it’s down to living long enough to be crazy. It’s expected. 

Soon I’ll be pissing in my trousers and there’ll have a gentle word with me about my driving, and I’ll give the car away to a distant neice and catch the bus instead, and sometimes a kindly neighbour might give me a lift, and I’ll repay their kindness by ripping the display out of the dashboard as I haul myself out of their car thinking the display is a grab handle - because everything’s a grab handle when you get to this age, or that age.

Hell - I remember my mother grabbing hold of passers-by, floral displays, broom handles, anything to stop the FALL, steadying herself against the back of a stationary taxi which drove off and left her sprawled and concussed in the middle of Shoreham High Street, whizzed off in ambulances, and eventually losing her mind in a corner of the geriatric ward of some far-flung hospital.

Oh, I’ll handle it with aplomb:

‘Don’t worry about that’ I’ll say, indicating the passenger seat, ‘that’ll soon dry off.’

And off I’ll go to cause mayhem in the post office, or the supermarket.

Millstone or milestone…either way it’s a bloody nuisance. This wasn’t in the plan, The Grand Masterplan Of My Life which I’ve never got around to planning because I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other.

One

Foot

In front of the other

One

Foot

Another foot

In front of the other foot

Feet, inches, miles, minutes, days, hours, milestones, months and years. 

And finally this fucking millstone: 

Seventy.

It was supposed to be glorious. It was supposed to reach a crescendo, but this is the way the life ends: not with a resounding chord, but with a whimper.

They say seventy is the new forty-seven or some such nonsense. And it is nonsense because I remember being forty-seven and this is nothing like that. I was a boy, I had my life in front of me with plenty of time to fritter my life away doing stupid things, and doing nothing, and not getting around to things, and pontificating, and putting things on hold, and thinking about things rather than doing them, because I had all my silly life stretching out in front of me like an endless school summer holiday.

I know how all this ends. I lay on a gurney with a team of doctors and nurses working around me, saving my life. It wasn’t scary but it was definitely final. The will to live is what makes dying scary. Once that falls away i think it’s very easy.

I’ve woken up in the middle of the night stricken with some imagined cancer (who hasn’t?) and felt, not fear, but fury, because I’ve got shit to do and I’m not finished, and I still haven’t found out everything there is to know. It’s no good denying it, and resistance is useless. This is a finite thing and the end is coming into view. I’m not giving up, but there’s a definite slowing down. I’m not Mick Jagger and I certainly don’t want to be Mick Jagger. I’m seventy, I’m no spring chicken, and if I look in a mirror and see a fifty year old staring back at me I’m smart enough to know that I’m deluding myself.

Here's a list of tour dates:

May

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club TICKETS

Story Of A House

A house can take it out of you. When we got it, almost thirteen years ago, it was in a horrible state - a foreclosure, abandoned by the previous owners who apparently fled to South Carolina leaving behind debts and mountains of junk. We never knew how many of them there were - it’s a slow process of casual detective work. We've been able to tell a lot from the mail that still sometimes arrives for them. 

A neighbour told us he sent his kids to daycare at the house - another neighbour used to drop them off and bring them home. One day he picked them up himself, saw inside the house, and never sent them here again. He said the place was filthy. We knew that already - it took us years to clean it up.

There had been an above ground swimming pool but another neighbour took that when the house was empty. He also took the patio bricks. He came round shortly after we moved in to explain himself. He stood at the front door with a cigarette in a cupped hand, the burning end facing inwards - a jailbird smoke - and explained that he had worked for the previous owners, maintaining the property while it stood empty. As payment they had given him the patio bricks and the swimming pool. I said I wasn’t aware the banks paid neighbours to maintain their foreclosed properties, but he hardly noticed. He waxed lyrical for a moment: 

‘When we got that pool home and set up lil Danny’s eyes were shinin’…’ 

He broke off, took a clandestine drag of his cigarette, his eyes darted around, he lowered his voice: 

‘I don’t know what the neighbours around here have been telling you, but none of it’s true.’ 

‘Oh’ I said with a magnanimous gesture, ‘they’ve had nothing but good to say about you.’

We never were friends. He died a year or so ago. We sent a consolation card but we never heard back. We’d see Neighbour Dan, as we called him, busy cleaning his gleaming white pick up truck in the autumn sunlight when we were raking leaves. ‘Just imagine every one of them’s a hundred dollar bill’ he’d yell, and we'd reply with a sort of ahh whaddya gonna do? gesture that one of Amy’s brothers, who has lived for years in a suburb of Pittsburgh and knows how to handle these things, taught us. 

I sometimes thought the only reason for having such a large back yard was to keep the neighbours at bay. We could see them - keep an eye on things - but they were way off in the distance.

Neighbour Dan’s neighbour, an Italian American called Denise, ran a daycare next door to them. Seems like everyone ran a daycare. From our bedroom window we could see processions of cars in the early morning, pulling up, discharging children, driving off. Denise would sit on her front step and conduct telephone conversations that rang through the neighbourhood. She sold up and moved away last year. No more daycare. There are new people now, we haven’t met them but they’re having their basement done - you know these things when you’re a neighbour. We’ve seen a truck in their driveway with All Things Basementy on the side.

We absolutely loved our next door neighbours, Al and Tammy and their son Alex, who used to cut our grass. Tammy grew up in the house. Her mother, who was in her late eighties, lived with them. We’d see her on the back deck smoking a joint. Tammy told me her father had been a pharmacist. He distilled gin in the basement. In one of our earliest encounters she told me how on her eighteenth birthday he had presented her with a phial of grade A pharmacutical cocaine and told her to go and enjoy herself. She grabbed my sleeve: ‘Eric, I nearly shit my fucking pants!’ And to underline the point she reiterated: ‘I…nearly…shit…myself’. All this in a loud voice in the street. She was my first experience on an American neighbour. I was thrilled to bits.

One day during our first summer there I asked Tammy if we made too much noise. She said not at all - she really liked hearing us play music - they loved having us as neighbours. She said it was the first summer in years that they’d been able to open the windows on that side of the house. The previous owners kept dogs in a kind of dog pound in the back yard. Apparently they hardly ever let them out and they never cleaned the cage. Then there was the swimming pool - Al told me it was full of stagnant, green water with frog spawn in it, but the kids still jumped and splashed around in it. I thought perhaps they were trying to get clean having spent too long in the house. He agreed that that was very likely.

A wily old lady called Roberta lived on the other side. The kids were all scared of her. She knew everything that went on, and on the occasions that we talked to her she told us every detail, right down to her friend in the next street, the one with the prolapsed rectum.

Roberta had a clear view of our driveway from her back deck. When the hillbillies, as she called them, moved out the junk they left behind was hauled away by the truckload. A twenty foot dumpster was parked in the driveway, and when that was filled up another took its place and that was filled up too. They were hoarders. The basement, which they’d tried at some point to turn into a party venue, was filled with their crap. They’d built stud walls down their, insulated with fibreglass roof insulation, and lined with with plasterboard. The house had no gutters so the rain water drained into the basement and turned the walls of the party basement into a rotting, rancid mess.

In the first month we lived there I cleared out the basement as best I could, tore down the sheet rock and removed the soggy insulation. I dismantled a hideous structure that was intended to be a bar - it was built out of left over two by fours and offcuts, held together with four inch nails. It was probably meant to look charming and rustic, but it was just a filthy mass of nailed wood. We dealt with the basement most of the time by keeping the door shut and only going down there when the heating furnace broke down and had to be coaxed back to life.

Eventually we got hooked up to gas and waved a less than fond goodbye to the old fuel tank. We ran out of fuel on a regular basis, dug our way through to the tank through three foot high snowdrifts, and poured in red diesel from the gas station, five gallons at a time, in blizzard conditions. The mains gas hook up was absolute paradise after a few years of that.

We had the roof replaced, and when we’d got over the shock of that we had work done in the basement to make it dry and watertight. We finally made the effort and got rid of the remaining junk that was left down there, most of which was a large, rotting sound system left over from when the previous idiots tried to make it into Catskill’s most happening nitespot. While I panelled, painted and finished things that we’d left half done Amy painted the basement walls with special basement paint in fresh shiny white, and having done that she painted the entire basement floor with utilitarian grey floor paint.

I used to find the house quite daunting, but only if I thought about it too much. For ten years I would lay in bed, morning and night, and plan how I would replace the bedroom door with something that wasn’t the horrible, brown-varnished hardboard slab that wouldn’t close properly because there was no door frame for it to close into. I’d do the job twice a day in my head. It became an immense undertaking, a constant irritation, a niggling daily depression, a testament to my failure as a homeowner and as a human being.

One morning I could stand it no longer. I took the door off it’s hinges, carried it downstairs to the garage and came back up with the panelled door I’d been saving for all those years. It only took three hours to build a door frame and hang the door.

Now I lie in bed staring at a slight imperfection, a gap between the top of the door frame where it doesn’t quite run parallel with the low attic ceiling, and dream of pieces of trim that might somehow even it up. I shouldn't be hard on myself. I built everything in the place - walls, shelves, the front porch, the entire kitchen, and even the dining table. The house has worn us out and could quite possibly drive us insane if we stayed there.

But now it’s official - we’re leaving - we’re gone. We have a realtor, or estate agent if you’re in the UK. We’ve spent the better part of three months making the place into a saleable proposition - mending, finishing, cleaning, painting, decluttering… 

The other week I took the definitive step of I dismantling and packing up the studio ready to roll it into a shipping container. It took four days and I found it emotionally draining. It was a great sounding room. I made a lot of records in then - A Working Museum with Amy; my last four albums: 'amERICa', Construction Time & Demolition, Transience and Leisureland; The Old Guys for Amy; her latest album Hang In There With Me due out of Tapete Records in August; an unfinished reworking of my 1985 album A Roomful Of Monkeys; plus a whole load of tracks for compilation albums and tracks and albums for other artists. 

The room looks wonderful now, with only a Wurlitzer electric piano, a celluloid bikini mannequin, and a couple of armchairs and a coffee table added by the realtor, but it sounds like the acoustic disaster it was when I first tried to record in there. I remember driving hooks into the ceiling and tying an old quilt above the drumkit with string meant for wrapping Christmas presents. It sounded a lot better but it looked dreadful. It stayed that way for three years until I took the matter in hand and built some nice looking acoustic panels. It took years to get that room sounding right.

The sale listing went live just yesterday. We love the place but it’s time to start a new chapter. We couldn’t stay any longer - everything we needed was in storage and quite honestly the place was beginning to intimidate us - every smudge, every speck of dust… I’d love to live in such a beautiful place, but it’s up to someone else now. Here's a link for the listing in case you're interested in buying the place, or if you're like us and enjoy looking at houses for sale:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1-Orchard-Ave-Catskill-NY-12414/30494760_zpid/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0b57ReSUpw7qFFUtntCWfHkIeWAnY2slxmHCFYs9qkPg-i1w9g22xQH7w_aem_AfnKfWXgKABOZ8KkcwB1KbD_XbKkEO6oIxskTEvxaHEkzwt-B0_iQg31bH9P6nI1u-gn41Xqv8MPxiZ5muhlZVuo

And here's a list of tour dates:

May

17 KINGSTON UPON HULL - Wrecking Ball TICKETS

18 HOLT, NORFOLK - Community Centre TICKETS

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club TICKETS