The Endless List

 

As we rolled on down the road towards Suffolk, Amy wondered why an open top car is cool, whereas driving a car with all the windows down marks you out as a loser. Could be the broken air conditioning. It’s on the endless list of stuff I’ve been meaning to get around to.I often feel like my life is an obstacle course of stuff that needs doing. We were rolling towards Suffolk because the Latitude Festival needed doing.

I’ve been busy finishing up a new album - first the recording, then the mixing - day after day of it. I love it all but it moves at a very slow pace. You can’t rush it - that is, you can, but I prefer not to - the simple truth with anything creative is that it takes as long as it takes.

And then there’s the packaging - I always think this time it’s going to be simple but it’s always more complicated than I thought it was going to be. In this case the problem was copious sleeve notes. I got it all together with our very good friend, Karen Hall, an artist, designer and visionary who has even more loose screws than I do.

Karen lives nearby so it’s no problem to drive over with pages and pages of handwritten notes, sketches, diagrams, pieces of wood with stuff painted on them…

And back home to face the chaos ahead of an imminent invasion of builders. The house is suddenly overrun by men who wear shorts all year round. Big men following the progress of electrical cables from fusebox to outhouse, cutting holes through walls for wastepipes and extracter fans. 

It’ll be nice when it’s finished.

And on to Suffolk in an old car with a brand new MOT. It was wet, getting muddy. Amy was incredulous: ‘Do people actually pay money to do this?’

We drove to a far-flung field - the artist’s parking - following a large, red utility vehicle driven by a man called Stuart. The artist’s parking was full of small, sensible cars - Ford Focus, Volkswagen Polo, the odd Yaris or Ka, and the occasional rental van. Once it would have been Rolls Royces and Bentleys, tour buses and Aston Martins. I wondered what Sting showed up in - a Subaru Forester, a Tesla perhaps. The Tesla would have suited him, him being the wanker that he is.

Stuart loaded us and all our equipment into the utility vehicle and we made the long trip to the Trailer Park stage in slow, sardine-like intimacy. We arrived shellshocked and squashed, and stood around ineffectually as big, capable men carried our equipment across the mud through dripping trees, stacked it in a dank storage container and labelled everything with fluorescent gaffa tape.

Mark Kermode and his band the Dodge Brothers were playing before us. It was good to see him - I like his film reviews and I like him, but since I got kicked off Twitter and Twitter became X I’ve missed him.

We all hung out in a portacabin. I made a cup of tea, more for something to do - it was quite a project. The Dodge Brothers played, we carried on hanging out in the portacabin while the rain kept coming and going, and then it was time for us.

The stage was a trailer, a semi-derelict, post-psychedelic, seventies trip. The monitor man was in the living room, the drums were in a dining alcove, and there was an avocado toilet on a plynth between the drums, the kitchen and the bass amp. It was undoubtedly the best toilet on the festival site, but very public and thankfully decommissioned.

Eric at the Latitude Festival with Morris Windsor on drums plus (not pictured) Amy Rigby guitar and Graham (Graham) Beck keyboards and keyboard bass. Thanks to Sue Butler for the photo.

We were quite nervous, it being our first show together. The sound was a bit blurry with the drums in the dining alcove and the bass amp in the corner behind a partition but I could hear the vocals and our amps were loud, and it felt like there was some intention and forward propulsion. We were alloted an hour but we did a succinct thirty five minutes, ten minutes less than what I’d calculated it might be. We finished with Standing Water from the Leisureland album with it’s psychedelic interlude before the end chorus. The interlude went on a bit too long and perhaps didn’t float in the way I would have liked, but it was okay. We should have played another song or two but I was worried we might have outstayed our welcome so we left it at that.

I’d told the promoter I wasn’t sure what everyone was expecting and he said ‘You’re Wreckless Eric, you can do anything you want!’ So I suppose that’s what I did.

As I came off stage and a woman accosted me: ‘Excuse me, I’m Fat Boy Slim’s sister - I knew your mother when I was at Sussex University.’

We’re doing it all again this coming weekend - Saturday night in Hebden Bridge at the Trades Club and then Sunday at the Blackpool Opera House as the final act at the Rebellion Festival. I’ve resisted offers to do Rebellion for years but the offers kept on coming. They need me, I’m one of the last men standing. I’ll probably disappoint - disappointment usually ensues when I intersect with the punk masses, but as one of the few remaining un-bricked-up portals into the heady days of punk, new wave, anarchy, freedom and Stiff Records I have a duty to perform. We’re even working up a version of Take The Cash. And is it too late to mention that I once had my photo taken with Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible and Cat Woman from the Bromley Contingent? 

I think it probably is.

August
09 HEBDEN BRIDGE Trades Club
10 BLACKPOOL Rebellion Festival, Opera House
16 BEDFORD Esquires
30 SUFFIELD, NORFOLK Suffield Summer Fiesta

September
11-14 KUFSTEIN, AUSTRIA Sprachslaz Literary Festival

October
19 CHELMSFORD Hot Box

November
23 CHICHESTER The Havana

more dates being added - new album November 21st - details to follow

You can also read these posts on Substack where you have the choice of reading them yourself (skill level fairly difficult), or listening to an AI generated robot reading what I've written. I'm working on replacing the robot with actual recordings of me reading, which may or may not be even worse...

Broccoli - my first greenhouse, adventures outside the recording studio...

I grew some purple sprouting brocolli. I’ve never grown anything you could eat, apart from a pot of supermarket basil once that sat on the window sill and yielded a rather dismal second crop. Other people do this stuff all the time but growing vegetables is new to me.

There was a fifteen by ten foot patch of weeds with a rotting wooden border, and there was a greenhouse. The dour Protestant in me felt obliged to to put it all to use, the frivolous Catholic in me thought it might be fun, and inherent Catholic and Protestant guilt combined to get me to the garden centre.

I love garden centres - I could spend hours wandering around looking at shrubs and marigolds and geraniums - the sight of terracotta flowerpots and that earthy smell of geraniums awakens something in me, memories of Bill & Ben the Flowerpot Men - my favourite TV programme when I was four or five. I get quite stirred up, but doing anything about it, well, that’s for other people, along with steady jobs, pension plans, central heating, car finance… I can look, I can dream, but when it comes to doing I’m afraid I’m the perennial deer in the headlights.

The ladies who man the local garden centre are very kind and patient. I’d lined a wall in my studio with recycled scaffolding planks and used the offcuts to make raised beds. I needed earth to fill them and something to plant in them. The garden centre woman who helped me gave me a deal. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the compost but the labels have been faded by the sun,’ she explained, ‘so I can give you a third off.’

scaffolding plank panelling and trashy equipment

She keeps giving me deals - I thought it was because I looked down at heel in my gardening outfit, but it doesn’t matter how well dressed I am, there’s always a deal. A watering can, a hose attachment, bags for growing potatoes and other root vegetables… ‘I’ve got a couple of these out the back with weather-damaged packaging - you can have them for twenty-five percent of the original price - there’s nothing wrong with them, and they’re going to be outside anyway, but the boxes are a bit soggy.’

I brought on my parsnips and courgettes in there, nurtured pots of basil until the heat became too much for them and I had to plant them outside. There’s twine and canes and anti-aphid spray - stuff that perhaps I’ll grow into over time.

my first greenhouse…

And outside there’s purple sprouting broccoli. The seedlings looked pretty pathetic for a while, sitting there in the raised bed forty centimetres apart as per the instructions. They started out yellowy and vaguely wilted but I persevered, watered them every day and gave them the occasion silent pep talk. I did some research, bought a frame and some netting to keep birds, butterflies and other broccoli predators off them. (My city born and raised stepdaughter, Amy’s daughter Hazel, thought it was security netting.) I went out there one sunny morning after a heavy rain storm and they’d grown to prehistoric size and lifted their cage off the ground.

And then there were purple flowers. I harvested a few. Amy lightly steamed them and drizzled them with olive oil. A revelation. Brocolli can be disgusting - I could never imagine how it first occurred to anyone to eat it, sour-tasting as it often is and smelling like rotting swamp vegetation. But that’s the supermarket stuff, sprayed with who knows what chemicals, handled by strangers on very low wages, hermetically sealed in shrinkwrap plastic, slowly passing its best on it’s way from polytunnel to container lorry to supermarket shelf.

My broccoli was sweet, tender and fragrant. And there’s a load more out there. I’ve also got potatoes, parsnips, courgettes and onions. I’m busy mixing a new album at the moment but it’s an absolute joy, in between fretting about snare drums, bass guitars and vocal levels, to pop down the garden with a watering can and tend to the vegetables.

I can’t help but think I’ve been missing out for the past seventy years.

summer tour dates