A Chandelier In Hebden Bridge

We were in Hebden Bridge the other weekend, about to play in the Trades Club.

I first played there in 1986 with the Len Bright Combo - we played there twice that year in fact - once, I remember, in high summer - we camped afterwards in a Hebden Bridge adjacent field.

The concert was extremely loud. I remember the night sky twinkling with a thousand silver stars, and a silence so deafening I can still hear it thirty-nine years later. I crawled into my tent feeling utterly bewildered. Was this the coolest thing ever? Or just a new low in my ever plummeting career?

I wrapped myself up in a blanket and read a book about PG Wodehouse by the light of a torch until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and woke up at dawn with an aching back.

The gig had been a great success - the place was packed and everybody loved us, but when it came time to settle up the organisers said they couldn’t pay, they hadn’t got any money. We could sympathise with that because neither had we. The Hebden Bridge Trades Club was a socialist collective run by disgruntled ex-miners, scary women and men with facial tattoos so there wasn’t much arguing with them.

A week later our agent had a call from them - they wanted to book us again. The agent told them they could have us back once they’d paid our fee. They sent a cheque and a month or two later off we went back to the Trades Club. It was another great night, a carbon copy of the first one - the place was packed, we played a great show, everyone loved us, and at the end they pleaded poverty and we left without our fee.

So we took a large bass cabinet hostage. We discreetly manoeuvred it out onto the fire escape, and once  our equipment was out and the place was locked up we hiked it down the fire escape and into the van.

Our agent negotiated with them and it was agreed that one of their people would come down to the Medway Towns and an exchange would be made, bass cabinet for cheque. I drew the short straw so, on a balmy Saturday evening I met up with a brick-faced lady outside the Nags Head in Rochester. I took the cheque from her and helped load the cabinet into the back seat of an old Morris Minor.

I was charming about it - I couldn’t understand how the cabinet had ended up in our van. My charm offensive worked so well that she suggested we have a drink together. I felt quite intimidated. The situation was made worse by there being people I knew in the pub who obviously thought I was two-timing my partner with this brick-faced lady. I excused myself, headed for the gents and never came back.

I felt bad about that. I felt like a cad.

I didn’t play at the Trades Club again until maybe 2010 when Amy and I played there for about thirty people. The place had changed - it was no longer a desperate social collective - there was a large, well-appointed stage, a lighting rig, state of the art PA system, a young and enthusiastic sound engineer - the place had had a huge makeover that spoke of expert management and arts funding.

I tried for years to get another gig there but no one answered my emails. And then along came a booking at the Rebellion Festival with an agent attached to it, an incompetent and haphazard agent as it turns out, but an agent nonetheless. Venues answer emails from agents so here I was on another Saturday night, lounging on a sofa in a luxury flat next door to the venue. The flat belonged, so I understand, to someone who used to manage the Happy Mondays, and was used by the Trades Club as a green room for the kind of acts that headline there on a Saturday night.

I gazed up at a chandelier in some sort of pre-show trance. I took a photo of it - I felt obliged to take a photo of something. I’ve taken lots of photos in the past - old buildings, iron bridges, crazy people, cars, trees, steam trains, helicopters, magnificent panoramas - you name it and I’ve probably taken a photo of it. I don’t often feel the need to do this anymore, just the obligation to post something on Instagram or Facebook to boost the lamentable seventy-one advance ticket sales that results from failing to create a Facebook event page.

I can’t see the point of Facebook event pages. I imagine someone in Andover, Swansea or Aberdeen saying ‘Ooh look - that Erectile Eddie, the one that did Do The Big Wide World - he’s playing in Hebden Bridge! We could go to that if only it wasn’t so far…’

I don’t feel good about posting flyers for my shows on social platforms where other people are imploring governments to stop obliterating homes, lives and countries. It feels inappropriate: Hey guys! I know the worlds gone to shit and military powers are perpetrating unspeakable acts of mass-murder even as I write this, but look at this cool and groovy thing I’m doing here…

I struggle with it, even though I’ve finally come to understand that the creative arts have an important part to play in a functioning society.

I just don’t feel the old compulsion to take photos and put them on Instagram. The charm faded when it changed from the somewhat non-aesthetic square to the more sensible vertical format. I don’t want to sound like an old person who can’t keep up, but I’ve never got the hang of reels - I just liked taking photos and treating them slightly with contrast, brightness and filters. I liked to write a little piece to go with them, and I've loved seeing photos taken by friends and people who became friends because I looked at their Instagram photos and the things they had to say about them.

But the humanity has been overtaken by inhumanity and crassness. I don’t want a revolutionary new woodworking tool, or a gadget that will allow me to plug in six synthesisers at the same time, or even a brand new gloopy liquid that guarantees radiant beauty, doubtlessly via an unstated attack of violent diarrhoea… And I can do without yet another chair workout for elderly men.

Here’s my photo of a chandelier in Hebden Bridge:

August
30 SUFFIELD, NORFOLK Suffield Summer Fiesta (SOLD OUT)

September
11-14 KUFSTEIN, AUSTRIA Sprachslaz Literary Festival

October
04 NORWICH house concert: grapevinesteve@gmail.com for details
19 CHELMSFORD Hot Box

November
21 LONDON The Lexington (details to be announced)
23 CHICHESTER The Havana

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

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

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

A Dysfunctional Success

 

In the end there was nothing scary about cataract surgery but it was a big inconvenience. I put it off for years - never had time, I always had a record to make or a tour to do. Eventually I capitulated, booked myself in for the 21st December at an eye clinic in Albany. They do one eye at a time with a few days in between. In my case a few days turned into two weeks because Christmas and the New Year got in the way. I spent the holidays with very lopsided vision. I couldn’t see a thing through the operated eye for a couple of days, just extreme brightness.

By Christmas Day the new eye was coming into focus - my distance vision was perfect but I couldn’t read and the old prescription in my glasses was useless. I bought a pair of reading glasses that caused much hilarity - they made me look like a very earnest German person. They seemed to come with their own built in personality that only went away when I forgot I was wearing them.

I was amazed by the clarity - it was quite a revelation - I thought next door had painted their house a lighter, brighter colour. Through one eye anyway. Viewed through the other eye the world looked as though it had had gravy spilled over it.

I was actually looking forward to the second operation - when they did the first one I couldn’t feel a thing, staring into a bright white light, conscious but very pleasantly sedated, and seeing the most cosmic stuff going on as they broke up the defunct lens with a laser, removed it, and installed a new man-made one. It was like the end sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey - not quite on the same cinematic scale , more miniaturised and circular but twice as bright, with the most fantastically pure and luminescent colours.

You check in and sit waiting in a large room full of rows of chairs, each containing a doddery old person, because cataracts is a condition that affect the old and doddery. Anxiety runs high, but everything’s going to be okay. Each patient comes with a designated official person who will be responsible for driving them home, still high from the sedation, blind in one eye, and sporting a large plastic eye patch like a translucent tea strainer secured with strips of tape across the face and forehead. It’s not a great look.

The turnover is fast - dodderers are checking in while other post-op dodderers are trundled out in wheelchairs and transferred into the care of their designated loved one. Eventually my name is called and I’m welcomed in by a bear-like man with a lot of frizzy hair. He’s wearing scrubs and two hairnets: one containing his head hair, the other a large, bushy beard. He’s very nice, takes my coat and scarf and hangs them up.

I’m shown into the prep room where they strap me into a high, comfy armchair that reclines. Everyone is so nice and kind. There’s a slightly forced air of jollity and jocularity among the staff - you don’t have to be mad to work here but if you are - it helps! - that kind of thing. Minds are being put at ease - you’re in safe hands here. There’s music playing, sixties music, the soundtrack to our young lives. Mamas & Papas, California Dreamin’; Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound Of Silence. It’s all going to be okay…

The room is lined with bays, each one equipped with one of these big armchair things occupied by an old person being prepped. A jovial older man - moustache, white coat - puts an IV in my hand. It doesn’t hurt, they’ve already given me a preliminary injection. The IV is hooked up and I’m away on a cloud of contentment. 

Whoa wo listen to the music… Mmmmm…Doobie Brothers - nice...

I know what this is and it’s not cataract surgery - they’re going to off us. We’re the chosen ones, old and useless, selected to help make room on this overcrowded planet. That’s okay, I’m ready.

By the second week of January I had two functioning eyes. Not fully functioning, but I’ve got 20/20 distance vision. I was given the okay to drive without glasses which was weird for me, a bit like going to the supermarket with no trousers on. 

The up and close and everything else vision was a different matter - I couldn’t see a thing. It’s pointless getting an eye test for at least six weeks after the completed surgeries. Apparently it takes up to six months for the eyes to settle down. They don’t tell you this. You can get specially calibrated lenses put in your eys when you get the surgery so that you have perfect vision afterwards and never need to wear glasses again. They tell you all about that. It costs more and I don’t think the extra is covered by most health insurance providers, certainly not by mine. What they don’t tell you is that over a period of time the eyes adjust, and a year later a lot of people need glasses.

I’m stuck with the German readers I mentioned earlier. Apart from looking ridiculous, they pull my eyes in two different directions. And I have to wear dark glasses when I go outside - my eyes have always let in too much light but now it’s worse than ever.

I had some extremely pressing things to do: we had to get rid of all the junk we’ve amassed in twelve years of living in the same place, and make the house into a saleable proposition. Door frames needed replacing, sheet rock walls needed to be taped and plastered, holes in walls required attention, ceilings had to be repaired,. The house is charming - eccentric, warm and fuzzy, a great place to live in and create in. But in the cold light of an impending sale sign it’s a dump. It’s got good bones, they all said that, but nothing was finished. We had two months to edit down our crap and make the place look good in time for the early spring house market boost.

And I had a book to edit. 

My 2003 autobiography is scheduled for re-publication by the Tapete Records publishing division Ventil Verlag. The manuscript needed a few minor tweeks, and I decided I need to write a fairly extensive foreword to bring things up to date - to give some latterday relevence or whatever. On examination the minor tweeks turned into a massive undertaking - I’m surprised I got away with it when it first came out. It was never really proof read, for reasons you’ll find out about in the new foreword (assuming, that is, that you’re going to buy a copy). There were howling spelling mistakes, sentences that blundered into cul de sacs, a few minor half-truths, and one or two things that might have landed me on the receiving end of a legal action. It all needed fixing, and I had six weeks to do it.

So it was on with the paint splattered jeans and the German readers and down to work.

I’m proud of the work we did on the book. I didn’t rewrite it - really it just came down to repairing ambiguous sentence constructions and correcting a lot of spelling mistakes. My long-suffering editor at the publishing company, Oli Schmidt, argued for more punctuation and came up with suggestions. I considered them all, tried them out, but vetoed most of them. When I wrote the book I intended it to sound like I was speaking directly to the reader - in some places correcting the punctuation destroyed the effect, so it stayed as it was. 

I enjoyed writing the foreword - it was strange to be writing about something I wrote over twenty years ago about a time that ended almost fifteen years before that. A double head fuck. I worried that the foreword might be better than the actual book -I realised I’ve become a better writer over the past twenty years, though you might not think so reading this.

I’ve included five lyrics, one to preface each of the five sections of the book: Father To The Man for Sussex By The Sea, Gateway To Europe for Hull, 40 Years for Melody Road, 1983 for The Slippery Slope, and Drag Time for 2 Up Too Down In The Medway Towns. I was thinking of running a competition where you had to match the lyrics to the appropriate section title, but the effort seemed fairly insurmountable, so I didn't bother. Story of my life really.

It wasn’t easy to do the editing in time - because of course there was a deadline - and a deadline for the cover design, and the usual back and forth and arguments over aesthetic concerns versus marketing requirements. I must have read and re-read the book five times, the reading spectacles pulling my eyes in two different directions, but at least making the type vaguely legible. The strain made my eyes sore and eventually I got an infection. I’m not trying to elicit sympathy, or pity or whatever, I just want anyone else who’s going for cataract surgery to be sure to plan on being as computer free as they can in the weeks after the operations. The surgery really isn’t so bad, it’s worth having it done. I can see again! And the book is going to be great.

The front cover is a black and white photo of me with the infamous Rickenbacker, taken by David Corio in the flat I shared with his sister - 1 Melody Road, Wandsworth. It was a Saturday morning in early January 1978. I can feel how cold that flat was. I’m lost inside a large, woolly sweater from a jumble sale. It was freezing but I’m wearing baseball boots as we called them at the time - I never seemed to have proper shoes. David very kindly gave me the photos. He was just starting out as a photographer - he must have been all of seventeen years old. I feel honoured to have been there at the beginning of such a great career.

Everything I do seems trivial - while I’ve been engaged in all this a faction of society has been bombed out of existence. The champions of law, order, public decency, acceptable behaviour and the rest of it take a high moral tone. The defenders of decency are banning books, defunding libraries, and telling us the termination of a pregnancy is an abomination in the sight of God - they talk about the value and sanctity of human life, they preach forgiveness and redemption, and stand back while thirty thousand civilians are killed on the Gaza Strip. 

It’s all out of whack, but you don’t need me to tell you that. Why did that bastard take so long to call for a ceasefire? Don't answer that, the question is merely rhetorical.

Perhaps my life and activities are trivial - I feel bad in part for going on about them, but in this dumb and stupid society we’re living in it’s as well to keep the brain active. Use it or lose it, they say. It seems to me a large part of America has already lost it. I keep seeing a pick-up truck in the neighbourhood with a huge flag flying off the back: God, Guns & Trump. 

Excuse me while I plucketh out mine right eye.

I’m packing up, I’m planning tour dates, I’m keeping on keeping on.

The new edition of A Dysfunctional Success comes out on May 17th, the day before my 70th birthday. You can make an old man very happy by pre-ordering a signed copy from Rough Trade, who will then think I'm an extremely successful and sought-after artist...

Pre-order A Dysfunctional Success from Rough Trade