Snatched vs Took: an everyday story of the National Express coach company

She’s a weasly looking older woman, face sagging but still somehow pinched, and topped off and surrounded by a mousey frizz.

‘If you want to change your ticket it’ll cost money’ she says.

‘Well, it can’t be that much - what are we looking at? Can you give me a ballpark figure?’

Must go easy on her.
I know to my cost how touchy National Express Coach employees can be, I was once banned from travelling on their coaches for a whole day because a manager thought I’d snatched my ticket out of her hand. I was later arrested and cautioned by the police after another National Express employee tried to goad me (without success) into a physical response.

That was in 2005. The plane had landed early. I remember feeling quite happy, light-hearted even, after a trouble-free flight, unencumbered by the usual brace of guitars and suitcase of leads and pedals and so on. 

I'd practically skipped along to the National Express ticket office. I was greeted outside by a big blonde woman in a shiny black parka with fluorescent yellow safety stripes and a walkie talkie sticking out of the top pocket. She asked if she could help so I explained how the flight had landed earlier than expected and asked if I could get on an earlier coach. She ask to see my ticket. I handed it over, she looked at it, said I'd have to change the ticket and used it to gesticulate towards the ticket office which was up a flight of steps in a temporary hut. We were standing at the bottom of the steps.

She explained what I’d have to do, and where the coach stop was, I thanked her very much and headed on up the steps, remembering as I did that she was still holding the ticket. She’d been holding the ticket for quite a while, absently gesturing with it. I reached over the bannister - ‘I’ll be needing that’ I said with a smile, and plucked the ticket out of her upheld hand. 

Her eyes turned to stone:

‘You snatched the ticket out of my hand!’

‘No I didn’t’ I said, ‘I just took it.’
At this point I thought she might just be joking but she left me in no doubt.

‘You snatched!’

‘No I didn’t, I just took’

‘Snatched’

‘Took’

‘Snatched!!’

I thought this was all quite funny. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I really didn’t mean to snatch but I think you’re being a bit over-sensitive.’

‘Right - that’s it, you’re not travelling today.’

She pushed past me and screamed instructions over the heads of a line of passengers. ‘This man is barred from travelling by National Express today - on no account must he be issued with a ticket.’

I protested, said it was crazy - I already had a ticket - she surely couldn’t stop me from using it.
She told me she could do whatever she liked. I asked to see the manager and she told me she was the manager.

‘So I’ve been barred for snatching?’

‘Yes sir, that’s right.’

I shuffled off in a state of shock and found a quiet corner where I could think about what just happened.

I decided not to take it too seriously, they surely couldn’t stop me getting on the coach - I had a ticket. I waited until it was about time, found the bus stop and joined the queue. I remember talking to a nice retired couple but I can’t remember what we talked about.

The bus rolled up and just as I was handing my ticket to the driver a plump hand snatched it out of my grasp.

‘Oh no - he’s not travelling today, he’s barred!’

The driver looked nonplussed and busied himself with other passengers. 

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this is ridiculous, I don’t know what’s been upsetting you but it’s got to be more than just me.’

‘You are not getting on one of our coaches today’ she said, and fairly stamped her foot. Then she was joined by a male employee who wanted to know what the problem was. She explained before I could.

‘Unless you’re her supervisor,’ I said, ‘I really don’t see that this concerns you - it’s none of your business, it’s between me and her.’

‘Well I’m making it my business.’

He squared up to me, got really close: ‘You got a problem with that? What are you going to do about it, eh?’

I sized him up, figured I could take him on if it came to it and probably inflict a fair amount of damage - I’d been on a fitness kick for over a year, going to the gym and working out three or four times a week so I was feeling quite confident. I also noticed he’d left himself wide open to a knee in the balls.

‘Are you threatening me?’ I asked.

‘No, you’re threatening me.’

‘Right’ said the manageress, ‘That’s it, I’m calling the police.’

I decided at that point that it wasn’t worth hanging around to argue so I told her she should really sit down somewhere and think about her behaviour or maybe just go and fuck herself, and then I walked away.

I was going to have to catch a train. I was walking around the airport concourse looking for a sign for the underground when I was joined by two policemen, one on each side.

‘All right sir, would you mind coming with us.’

They took me to a private room, told me they were arresting me for assaulting a member of National Express staff, cautioned me and read me my rights. I was quite calm about it, told them what had happened - it was really down to your definition of snatching as opposed to taking. I pointed out that there were plenty of witnesses who had seen the National Express employee square up to me, obviously trying to provoke a reaction, and that there was no law against snatching. I admitted to having told the woman to fuck herself but that someone had to do it.

I could see they thought the whole thing was quite funny.

‘You’d better catch the train,’ one of them said. They gave me a form that said I’d been officially cautioned and directed me to the underground by a circuitous route that avoided the National Express office.

It made a great story, how I was arrested for snatching, but I don’t want a repeat, especially after a long flight with too much luggage, so I’m trying to be as tactful as I can with the infuriating woman at the counter.
‘Pwhhrrr - you can go on the earlier coach but it’s going to cost five pounds to change the ticket.’
‘That’s ok, I think I can manage that.’

My original ticket was an e-ticket displayed on my phone. She takes my phone off me and fumbles with it. The phone on the counter has been ringing all the while. She notices it, picks up the receiver, says yaesss into it a few times, puts the receiver down and looks at my phone as if she’s wondering what it is and how it got there. 

‘Now, where was I?’

‘We were changing my ticket’ (easy boy…)
‘Yaess, you should just be able to catch the earlier coach. That’ll be five pounds.’

I hand over a fiver and try not to grind my teeth as she fills out a new ticket by hand and with a leaking ballpoint pen.

As she hands me the ticket she says ‘it’s running twenty minutes late but it should still come along before the one you were booked on before.’

Keep cool, don’t want to get barred and arrested!

‘But even though it’s running late you have to go out and start waiting for it now.’

Why? I want to ask - in case it suddenly stops running late?

But I don’t dare, I just do as I’m told.

amplifiers, guitars, amERICa, stuff like that...

I imagine it’s all in a days work for a lot of artists, but the reception my amERICa album got took me by surprise. Putting out an album with a real record company, in this case Fire Records seems to involve more work than when you do it yourself. There are dates and deadlines and stuff the has to be done and if the dates and deadlines and imperatives are not all met the whole thing will unravel and everyone will end up hating you (me that is), and they’re all working so hard and I mustn’t let them down and so I carry on trying to get through all the stuff - recording and mixing and mastering and booking dates and writing stuff for an artist biography and so on when all I really feel like doing is to crawl under the table, cover my head, assume a feotal position and rock myself into thankfully mind-numbing stupor…

I finished the recording bang on schedule and waited until way beyond the scheduled deadline for decisions to be made about the track listing and the mastering of the album, and for the artwork to finally materialise. I flew to England to visit my family in such a state of desperation and paranoia about the deadlines that I took half the artwork with me in a suitcase - torn pizza boxes, some with the remains of various toppings painted into my arse-about-face versions of the Stars & Stripes. I thought I’d finish them off on my travels but I didn’t of course. They rode around England on the back seat of a hire car, flew back home with me to Catskill where I posted them to John Foster who finally put the fantastic cover together.

I’d stopped touring for a while so that I could record. I was a bit off touring anyway because I hadn’t had a good time on the last European tour. We had a drummer who was…to put it kindly - unsuitable. Things like that throw me out of alignment. I’d come home feeling depressed. I had a bit of money stashed away that I could live on for a few months so as soon as Christmas was over I immersed myself in recording. I’d get up, drive across the Rip Van Winkle bridge, marvel at the frozen Hudson river, enjoy a couple of espressos, drive back across the bridge (this time marvelling at the snow covered Catskill mountains), and all the time I’d be thinking about the new album that was unfolding in my chaotic recording studio.

Some days I’d take time off from recording and work on the house. I’m supposed to be fixing the place up which is a thing that hangs most of the time in suspension midway between joy and despair. I rewired the kitchen and built in some new cupboards. I could have been an electrician or a carpenter.

By May I was getting ready to tour again. It’s strange now to think now that less than a year ago I strolled onto a stage in Toronto with no idea what I was going to play, having passed the afternoon in a private crisis of confidence. I fell right back into it. I drove south, played in assorted venues, a couple of micro breweries, one or two record shops and the odd juke joint. I was figuring out how to do the next thing - play the album live. 

By the end of October I was feeling confident. I even had an acoustic guitar sound that worked. I started out with a Framus - I love Framus acoustic guitars. I had the electrics salvaged from an electro-acoustic - under the bridge piezo thing and a pre-amp with a microphone sticking out of it that you could mix in. It was unreliable so I tried an LR Baggs soundhole pick-up instead. i went through two of those, the standard one and the deluxe model with 360 degree extra-sensory perception or some such bollocks. Neither of them sounded good so I went with a DeArmond soundhole pick-up, the genuine 1970s item. The sound took me straight back to my youth, David Bowie playing solo with his Framus 12 string, Family in 1969 at the Brighton Dome on the day their third album came out. I rounded out the sound with a six band MXR graphic equaliser and went on tour with that until September.

I was hanging out in Atlanta for a couple of days with my friend and art agent, Shawn Vinson. We did the round of record shops and music stores and I stumbled across an Alvarez acoustic guitar. It vibrated in my hands, sung out warm and full, and felt just right. I called Amy, told her about it: 

‘You don’t want an Alvarez’ she said, ‘I had one back in the eighties. It was a piece of shit.’

I thought perhaps she was right so I forgot about it for a few days. I was looking for an acoustic guitar to keep at home. I’ve got several but they’re all somewhat esoteric and beaten up. I wanted one that would make me feel legitimate as a singer songwriter on the odd occasion, an instrument that wouldn’t lead me into the same old avoidances and detours that guitars with weird vibrations and dodgy frets always do. I went back and looked at it again. The third time I went back I bought it.

Amy was skeptical. She’s got a Gibson J45 which is a bit like having a Mac in a roomful of PC owners, you know the kind of thing. One day she admitted to having tried it and conceded that it does sound really good.

I didn’t want to start cutting holes in it and fooling about with the under-the-bridge pick-up shit. It had come without the manufacturers choice of electronics which I think is infinitely preferable in a new acoustic guitar. I tried the LR Baggs option but it sounded squawky and didn’t bring out any of the inherent tone. The DeArmond had already found its spiritual home on the Framus so I looked around and found a Seymour Duncan soundhole pick-up. I put that together with a secondhand LR Baggs Gigpro acoustic guitar pre-amp. They’re meant to clip on to the guitar strap which is an idiotic idea. I took the clip off, hardwired the unit to a power supply and velcro-ed it onto the top of the DI box on my pedal board. And that’s the acoustic rig I’ve been using ever since. It goes direct from the pre-amp into the PA and splits off through the pedal board and into a Fender Deluxe Reverb.

This is turning into a real gear nerd piece. The rest of you can skip ahead to some of the other stuff further ahead, but I’m going to stick around here for a bit and talk about amplifiers.

For sometime I’d been using Vox AC15s for solo gigs. Amy and I have one that we keep in England - she uses it when we play together and I was using it  for solo gigs. I’ve got another one here in the US. It gets a lot of use in the studio. I used it for solo shows for about a year but it never really gets loud enough or full sounding without breaking up. Last year I started looking around. I was going to buy a Deluxe Reverb but I found a Guild Superstar - a forty watt combo with one fifteen inch speaker. A relic of the early seventies. It weighs the same as a Vox AC15 but it’s taller and unwieldly. I put wheels on the bottom and fitted it with inset carrying handles. The reverb and tremolo are fabulous - the tremolo was modified by the previous owner, with a switch that puts it down to half speed. The reverb tank has a label on the side:

MANUFACTURED BY BEAUTIFUL GIRLS IN MILTON, WISCONSIN UNDER CONTROLLED ATMOSPHERE CONDITIONS.

It’s a great sounding amp in all respects but it’s big and bulky, and it takes up real estate in the trunk of the car so I'm looking for a Deluxe Reverb to use over here.

For the UK and European tour dates last year I bought a secondhand Deluxe Reverb 65 reissue that had been race-tuned by someone who knew what they were doing. My double fuzzbox thing tends to fuck the input tubes but it’s never let me down and it’s never not been big enough. And neither did too many soundmen ask me to turn it down. Not that I ever would.

I’d just finished setting up at the Junction and I was playing my guitar, going through the pedals and into the amp. The soundman blanched:
‘You’ll have to turn down considerably!’

I’ve learned not to rise to this kind of thing. I looked surprised, smiled at him:

‘It’s perhaps a bit early for those kind of judgements’ I said, ‘you don’t know what I’m going to do yet.’

He looked embarrassed and beat a retreat.

I had it firmly in mind from the beginning of the tour that getting wound up and upset about things was a pointless waste of energy that I’d need to get through such a lot of touring so I avoided sugar as much as I could, ate healthy food, drank gallons of water and tried to seek out good coffee places.

I wrote this next bit on my way to the first of the European dates which was in Munich:

I’m on the ferry, Dover to Calais. I must be keen because I arrived early and got put on an earlier boat. I feel like death warmed up and the onboard Starbucks express-o is doing nothing to change that. The last good espresso I had was in an initially unpromising place in Nottingham called (promisingly enough) Wired. Since then I’ve been down in Margate constructing a stage set for my London shows. The construction is too big for the stage because I omitted to get the stage dimensions ahead of time. I like Margate in spite of its desperate lack of decent espresso possibilities. You can’t go round judging places on their coffee. That is, you can, but it’s limiting so I take the broad view and suffer the strichnine-like bitterness as uncomplainingly as I can.

The Nottingham show turned out well. I was there for two nights - the night before the show I did an instore appearance at Rough Trade Records. An easy start to the tour: play for half an hour, sign a few records, plug the show and hit the hotel. I hadn’t bargained for Guy Fawkes Night and a GPS with a personality disorder.

I rented a car, a Peugeot 308. Satelite navigation was extra so I bought my own with me, a TomTom thing that clips into a support suckered onto the windscreen. A stupid fucking idea - who invented the sucker cup system? Probably the same mentally negligible divot who invented the CD jewel case. It doesn’t work - once you’ve got it suckered onto the screen it’s generally positioned itself so it obscures the view, and then you can’t get it off to reposition it. The only benefit is the excersise - abdominal crunches everytime you try to programme it. Unless you’re blessed with Amazonian arms you can hardly reach the damned thing, and clipping and unclipping the thing is dangerous - I’ve very nearly dislocated a rib trying to do that.

So I got without the sucker thing, chucked it in a bin at some motorway services. What you need is Velcro, but that takes advance planning and there’s never time for that. I tell myself that it’s only going to be inconvenient for one journey, balancing the Sat Nav on the cup holder and so on, but one journey turns into six journies and then half a tour and you get used to the inconvenience, and the undercurrent of irritability that seems to accompany every journey. 

But it’s better than peering around the permanently suckered lump on the windscreen. I’m sure that everyone who’s used one of these things knows that the only time the thing will come off the screen is when you’re late for something, in rush hour traffic and presented with three different road choices - take the wrong one and you’re going all the way around the one way system again. And that’s when the sucker cup finally gives out and the stupid thing tumbles off the screen and falls into a dark recess of the passenger footwell.

Here in Dresden it's time for the one man group hug

With touring it’s best if you can laugh your way through it. Though it was a bit difficult to laugh my way through a wet Tuesday night in Dresden, especially after the communal dining experience - vegetarian pasta dish, hearty Germans all friends together, the support act, the promoter, the sound engineer, artist friends of the venue…all talking together in German and politely ignoring me because for some reason people usually assume I’d like to be alone. When the show got underway I holed up in an unheated back room until it was time to go on. The people were actually very nice, it's just hard to be a lone foreigner sometimes.
A few nights before I’d stayed in Dresden on a night off between Vienna and Berlin. The night before in Vienna was the night of the terrible massacre in Paris. It must have been going on while I was playing, or afterwards when I was talking and laughing with friends. I didn’t find out about it until late in the night - someone posted a comment on my Facebook page: thank God you’re not in Paris.

I was glad not to be playing the following night.

The morning after my night off I found a friendly cafe that served an excellent espresso. I wrote this Facebook post:

I'm in Dresden in a hipster coffee place. The espresso is very good. When I ordered I asked (n German if they spoke English and the answer came 'of course!'

I didn't think there was any ‘of course’ about it - I remember when speaking English in Dresden would get you the worst room in the hotel, your dinner spat in, or a blank refusal of service. 

During World War II the RAF bombed the hell out of Dresden, apparently as a reprisal for Coventry, even though Dresden could hardly have been classified as a military target. 

The generation who experienced this first hand are dying out. Hopefully the rest of us are moving on as we eventually have to. 

I can't imagine how some wounds can ever heal, how forgiveness and reason can ever be arrived at, but something about being in Dresden this Sunday morning is giving me some kind of hope.

The day after the show in Dresden I headed back to the same cafe. I bought a hand cranked musical box mechanism in an art supplies and handicrafts store next door. I went in to buy a notebook and bought the musical box thing on an impulse. I thought it might come in handy one day.

By the time I’d driven through torrential rain to Hamburg and arrived at the venue I’d decided to screw the mechanism onto my Telecaster. I asked the promoter if he had a screwdriver and some small screws. When I showed him what I wanted to do he was thrilled to bits, said it was imperative that we get this done in time for tonght’s show, so that’s what we did. I screwed the thing in behind the bridge and I’ve been using it ever since. It vibrates through the body and the pick-ups amplify it. It sounds very creepy, especially through a delay pedal.
Some reviewer in London didn’t like what he referred to as the electronic twiddly bits which apparently added nothing of value to my set. I remember when The Len Bright Combo was going, back in the mid-eighties - people said our one chord jams and long freeform freak outs were gratuitous. These people were usually quite smug in their own puritancial misery. They made me wonder how a creative act could be anything other than gratuitous and why gratuitous carries such a negative connotation. By virtue of that fact that more people abhorred what we were doing than actually liked us The Len Bright Combo was an almost entirely gratuitous project.
And so it goes on. It’s not as if I’m playing to thousands of people who queued up in the rain, spent the night huddled in nylon sleeping bags on some grimy city street for the privilage of buying an overpriced ticket for a stadium show that won’t be happening until sometime next year. It’s a small scene I’m in and I figure I can do pretty much exactly what I want. And that’s what I’ve been doing, electronic twiddly bits and all.

I’ve got more to say but there’s already too much to read. When I came to the Fire Records office and saw the vinyl copies of amERICa for the first time I was almost moved to tears. It’s the best album cover I’ve ever had. And it seems it might be the best album I’ve ever made.I was doing exactly what the fuck I wanted, no eye on the prize, no people-pleasing. It was a thoroughly gratuitous exercise. I’m glad it worked out.

I’m driving up to Albany now to pick up my ’73 Deluxe Reverb which may or may not be a lost cause. I’ll probably write a post about that, and my modified Telecaster. Another post for gear nerds.

Autumn Stoned

I’m coming round to the idea of Autumn. I was conditioned to not like it at an early age because Autumn meant back to school and I didn’t like school. New boys standing in a bemused and confused huddle, stared at by older boys who slouched against the railings deciding which one to beat up first. The smell of the brewery in the air which I thought was the smell of autumn leaves. Even now, thousand of miles away, when autumn turns the crowds of trees around here into something akin to a badly knitted fairisle sweater I think of the old Kemptown Brewery in Brighton.

Then autumn meant leaving home, going to art college, and that meant lots of sex and swinging times, and smoking marijuana with interesting people. Except that the reality involved a diet of tinned food and learning to use the laundrette, and being too shy with girls and drinking too much instead, and staggering home alone to a damp flat where the other inmates lay around on rotting couches, too stoned to apply Hartleys Strawberry Jam to another slice of Mother’s Pride white bread, and falling asleep fully clothed on a dodgy bed supported on paint cans from the time when we thought the disgusting hovel we lived in was going to be some sort of groovy seventies pad. 

The first months of college were a disappointment. The winter that followed was a living hell. When the spring came things got better. I put my trust in spring and summer.

I made my first record in autumn, waited for some sort of big bang, but nothing happened. I got through the winter on a succession of menial jobs - table clearing in a cafeteria, moving large items around in the basements of several department stores, clearing out the old Tannoy factory in West Norwood, cleaning toilets at Tarmac Roadstone in Greenwich (a low point) - subsisting with my girlfriend in the tiniest room of the huge Edwardian ground floor flat we managed to stumble across back at the end of the summer when we could hardly believe our luck. Now it was the only room we could afford to heat.

Spring came around and my track came out on a compilation album and everybody loved it and John Peel played it on his radio show. I left my job as a table clearer in the cafeteria at Swan & Edgars department store in Piccadily and became a freelance home hadyman with postcards in every shop window in Wandsworth - clipping hedges, mending garden gates, repainting woodwork… life was quietly idyllic.

I became friends with Ian Dury. His band Kilburn & The High Roads had come to an end and he was making demos, planning a solo career, wondering what was going to happend next. We formed a band to play my songs - Ian on a fire damaged Olympic drum kit, his girlfriend Denise Roudette on the bass. A True Romance rhythm section but only when they weren’t fighting. We played in the afternoons at my place and when we’d got good enough we recorded a B side for my track, the one everyone liked from the compilation LP. It came out as a forty five at the end of the summer and by the autumn it was a hit.

We went on tour and by Christmas we’d all fallen out with much fear and loathing. My burgeoning drink problem (which should have been noticeable to anyone who met me since the age of fifteen) was out of hand.

From then on autumn was all about new albums and touring - high hopes for a bright and glossy future. By winter I usually felt that I’d disappointed everyone, that I’d fallen short of the mark. Sometimes I just plain fucked it up and everyone, me included, felt let down. Bitterness and ill-feeling would follow and the winter was often fraught with misery.

In 1985 I stopped drinking and left the pressure of music industry record deals behind. I’d learned not to expect too much. Autumn was a time of rollneck sweaters, scarves, and interesting hat and jacket choices. We’d formed The Len Bright Combo. For once the winter wasn’t a disappointment.

I still preferred the spring, and summer was always best, especially in my period of being a bit of a slacker in France in the late eighties and early nineties. Winters were somewhat taxing due to a lack of heating, insulation or running hot water in my converted dancehall holiday shack, but I got by - installed a couple of woodburners, one I found in the street and another, a thirties one that would be worth a fortune now and which I bought for next to nothing at a scrapyard. I took up residence at the beginning of a hot summer in 1991. Never thought about heating or winter or any of that. I was happily scraping by in a bohemian paradise. 

The summer rolled by and the nights drew in and got chilly, I became aware of the aroma of wood smoke. Exciting fashion possibilities offered themselves, necessitated by the need to wear more clothes. One morning in mid-October I sat huddled in a woolly dressing gown (bought in a charity shop in Bakewell, Yorkshire) at a formica topped kitchen table liberated from a derelict French farmhouse and it crossed my mind that I really ought to address my situation. I went on tour in Germany instead and didn’t come home until the day before New Year’s Eve.

And so it goes on, autumn after autumn. Here in upstate New York the leaves are changing colour. It's quite the tourist destination - people come here from miles around to marvel at tree covered hillsides that look like chaotic, russet-toned fairisle sweaters. We're going to Walmart to buy a leaf blower. I’ve got a huge list of tour dates. By December I’ll be scraping ice off windshields, fighting off a cold, feeling vaguely tearful in some British motorway services…but for now I’m feeling quietly optimistic. I’m signed to a proper record label, Fire Records, and for the first time since the very early days of Stiff I actually like the people I’m dealing with. I’ve got a new album coming out on November 13th. I’m going to try not to fuck this up. I don’t think I will.

pre-order the new album "amERICa" from Fire Records

At The Dentist

‘Musician… says here you’re a musician. What style? Rock? Country? Open wide, wider… that’s it’
‘Ahhhgghanggrokkglhh’
‘Music isn’t at all like it was back when we were young, not as good… some of these are very loose, a lot of motion. Yep, you’re going to lose most of these my friend.’
‘Hhaaghhwckkgwrrrrr?’
‘The Beatles - do you like The Beatles?’
‘Hhhrrghhh’
‘Turn towards me…open…wide…wider, that’s it. My son doesn’t like The Beatles. He likes music that’s unlistenable. He's got tickets to see some guy yelling his head off at Madison Square Garden, no music, just this guy yelling his head off, and drums. Rap - you know what that is? Crap, that’s what that is. That’s not music. Oh yeah, these are completely shot, they’re all gonna have to come out.’
‘gghhwhhhgrrrshttrrrr?’
‘No guitars. There are some great guitar players in rock. Eric Clapton - he’s a great guitarist, no one like him. Unique.’
‘kawwwwgggcuntgkkkwwwmmmgh’
‘I love music...real music. My son, he tries to explain music to me but I don’t know. I don’t understand it, I can’t tell the difference between melody and rhythm, but I know what I like.’
‘wggh%%%[fffgwwrr429%^^*&#$%^^aarrrhhghhhhh’
‘The Police - I bet you like The Police! She doesn’t know who we’re talking about here, too young. ‘
‘Sure I know them, they sing a song I like.’
‘Which one?’
‘I can’t remember, but I know I like it. It’s one that The Police sing.’
‘jgggwjwhkchwwwww***aghhhr’
‘Turn to face her…that’s right. Keep it open… wider…more suction. I went on a six hour road trip with my son and to pass the time we had a Diana Ross / Beyonce face off, listened to everything that Miss Ross has ever recorded. I think my son is finally beginning to understand why Beyonce isn’t fit to shine the shoes of Diana Ross.’
‘errrghhhHHHgwwwrrgh’
‘Hmm…that’s the best I can do for the moment. You can rinse and spit over there in the sink if you want.’

tour dates:

SEPTEMBER
14 FLORENCE ALABAMA 116 East Mobile
15 COLUMBUS MISSISSIPPI The Elbow Room
16 BIRMINGHAM ALABAMA Southside Lounge
17 HUNTSVILLE ALABAMA Vertical Records
18 TENNESSEE private function

OCTOBER
03 CALGARY, The Palomino Smokehouse TICKETS
17 JERSEY CITY Monty Hall / live WFMU broadcast TICKETS

NOVEMBER
06 NOTTINGHAM The Poppy & Pint TICKETS15 BERLIN Monarch
17 HAMBURG Hasenchaukel
18 DUSSELDORF The Tube
19 HAARLEM Patronaat
20 MANNHEIM Blau
21 FREIBURG The Swamp
28 BURY (Lancs) The Met TICKETS29 CHORLETON The Dulcimer
30 CAMBRIDGE The Junction www.junction.co.uk/wreckless-eric

DECEMBER
01 COLCHESTER Arts Centre info/tickets
02 BRIGHTON The Komedia TICKETS
03 LONDON St John’s Church, Hackney TICKETS
04 SOUTHAMPTON Cafe Reflections cafereflections.co.uk
05 PENZANCE The Ritz Bingo Hall TICKETS
06 WORCESTER Marr’s Bar marrsbar.co.uk
10 GLASGOW CCA www.fallenangelsclub.com
11 EDINBURGH Citrus Club
17 LEICESTER The Musician

Rolling into Clarksdale

I was standing outside CS’s in Jackson, Mississippi in what looked like a bad neighbourhood. The place was closed. Projects to one side and to the other a big old burned out house that might have been a bar, restaurant or hotel in some far distant and grander time.

An old black man shuffled down the street carrying a rusty ironing board and a bucket with belongings in it. The sun was merciless and we were the only people out in it so we said hello. He put down the bucket and the ironing board in the shade of a flowering Magnolia tree and asked me if I was headed for Galveston.

‘No’ I said, ‘I’m just trying to find out when this place opens.’

‘What is it? Is it a restaurant?’

‘Yes, I think it is. A restaurant of sorts.’

‘Now…you’re not from round here are yer?’

‘No I’m not - I’m from England’

‘Shut the fuck up! I bin to England. I was in the US Air Force.’

He shook my hand and didn’t release his grip for a very long time as he delivered a rambling and inconclusive travelogue which dwindled out and left me none the wiser.

Then a disposable lighter appeared, held in his mouth while he fumbled with a dubious tin that opened to reveal a collection of cigarette ends.

‘You going someplace? I really need a ride.’

‘I’m not really going anywhere, and anyway there isn’t any room in my car.’

‘That’s OK, I could sit on the trunk…’

I liked him but I could imagine him developing into quite a problem, and truthfully I wasn’t going anywhere, or at least at that point I didn’t know where I was going.

So I bid him good day and slunk off, returning by a circuitous route to the car which was parked on the other side of the building. I drove away as quietly as possible. I felt bad that I hadn’t given him some money, but I would have felt that I was patronising him if I didn’t hang around for the request which was bound to come - and anyway I’d just spent a fortune on car repairs and lost a gig in the process so I wasn't feeling flush.

Perhaps I should have got in there first, asked him for a donation.

I parked in a side street in the shade of another flowering Magnolia and consulted Hotwire for a hotel. It was a bad neighbourhood, not even transitional. It was scary but the doors were locked and the Buick, being dark blue, looks sinister enough that no one was going to bother me. Passers by gave me nervous glances. They might have thought I was a private investigator.

The day before I was hanging around in St Louis, waiting for the car to be repaired when I should have been in Huntsville, Alabama. These things come on so slowly, creep up in barely perceptible increments. There was a slight flapping sound, the odd creaking noise coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the front passenger side wheel. It came and went. It was probably just my imagination. It came back again and the car started to shake at sixty miles an hour. But it was nothing. Was it? Please…?

I made it to Pittsburgh through torrential rain, saw two brothers-in-law, a sister-in-law and a niece, and the next day I clattered on to Columbus, Ohio. There was definitely a noise but it faded at sixty five or seventy miles an hour and sometimes it went away all together.
It was probably just the road surface.

The venue was one of those arty places - post shabby chic if such a thing exists. If it had been in the United Kingdom it would probably have been affiliated to one of the major breweries. I don’t know how that works over here. The management got very excited about having me play - they googled me and found out that I’m hugely famous so they started following me on Instagram. They weren’t the promoters or anything, that was Ken Eppstein of Nix Comics, but it didn’t stop them from putting an advert in the local paper. Ken didn’t want me to see it but his wife showed it to me and we had a good laugh about it. They’d super-imposed a photo of me on their standard advert, an array of fancy cocktails and Hollywood searchlights: he’s travelled The Whole Wide World and now he’s here at Strongwater!

They were expecting in excess of at least a hundred people. The staff were busy moving the furniture out of the cavernous warehouse of a room where I was going to play. I made them put some of it back. The acoustics were taxing to put it kindly. Polished concrete floor, brick walls, high ceilings. A fabulous echo with no off switch.

Later on the people crowded round, formed a human mattress and it sounded pretty good. It was an event, a good start.

The creaking and flapping noise had slackened off in the morning - the car just needed a good rest. I searched for coffee and found a bike shop that was also a coffee place. Just like Moto back home in Hudson - they serve coffee, they sell bikes, and their espresso is the best. Now it seems they have a Mid-Western twin.

Except that when I got there they sold bicycles and they had no espresso machine. I had a French press made with great care. I would have preferred an espresso but it was OK.

The drive to St Louis was long and when I got there, to the Schafly Brewery where I was going to play, the front wheel noise was horribly apparent - I could no longer dismiss it as just one of those things. I had visions of violent and bloody death on the road to Huntsville. Something had to be done about it.

The Schafly Brewery is modern and purpose built, a brewery, bar and restaurant. Bands play there, anything from rockabilly to blues rock, the whole spectrum of bar band dross, doubtlessly littered with smug and forlorn singer songwriters who trot out James Taylor covers and slip in one or two of their own when they think no one’s listening. Which they aren’t. 

It was a tough gig but at least it was a gig. People came to hear me play, and after I’d fucked off the happy hour crowd with dischords, feedback, insults and dissonance it was a good show, even though I hadn’t yet quite hit my stride.

I stayed with our friend Rick Wood who puts on stellar house concerts. In the morning he helped me find a garage that had a reasonable reputation for honesty and efficiency and so on, and I had the car fixed for more than what I actually paid for the car in the first place. The entire steering system was shot. I knew it wasn’t great because even this time last year it was losing steering fluid.

By the time the car was fixed it was too late to get to Huntsville in time to play. I’d already called and explained the situation. I called again, told them I could be there by ten but they said it wasn’t going to work because I was supposed to play at eight and they had another show booked for later. So we cancelled and I set off for Jackson feeling thoroughly dejected. I really enjoyed playing in Huntsville last year - I was looking forward to it being a highlight of this trip. Hopefully we’ll be able to reschedule it for sometime soon.

I booked into a hotel on the outskirts of Memphis in the middle of the night, slept through the morning and arrived in Jackson way too early.

I checked into my hotel on the outskirts of town, sat on a chair and stared at the wall for a while, got up and drove back to the venue. By this time the promoter and the owner had both arrived. They moved some furniture out of the way and I got set up between a pinball machine and an antique giant screen TV. The whole inside of the place seemed to be covered with stickers, and disturbingly quite a few of them were Republican stickers from the last three US general elections. The owner was white, both the cook and the waitress who seemed to be running things were both black and in their sixties. I was told later that this place was where the Republican candidates hang out when they come down to campaign in Jackson.

People arrived and everybody wanted to talk to me. They wanted to show me round, take me to see the graves of obscure bluesmen - they photographed themselves standing next to me, asked me how Dave Edmunds was doing and did I ever see Elvis Costello? I expected the mayor to walk in any minute and present me with the keys to the city. 

The opening act played. He was tall and confident, not short and full of self-doubt like me. Competant too, maybe a little too pleased with himself. I was complimentary and I meant it. 

By the time I’d finished my set most of the gladhanders had left. I didn’t go down very well. they didn’t get it and I didn’t really pull it together. Maybe my new song White Bread pissed them off. I did a version of Broken Doll for a guy I know who was sitting in the front row. It’s his favourite song of mine. I never play that song but I played it for him and it came out well, it surprised me and on its own I think it was worth the price of admission.

The opening act had to stay because he supplied the PA. Afterwards he packed up and left as quickly as he could. I said goodbye. He couldn’t make eye contact. I found the whole experience quite depressing. It wasn’t the right venue and the audience were expecting something different to what they got. It happens.

To get to Baton Rouge I realised I’d be passing McComb, Mississippi, where the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane came down. I felt I had to stop there and somehow pay my respects. I love Ronnie Van Zandt’s voice and the story of that plane crash haunts me. I did some internet research and found the co-ordinates of where the crash actually was. I wrestled with the idea  - was it ghoulish? In the end I didn’t know why but I needed to go there.

It was scary - I drove off the highway and down a road through a holler - trailers that had somehow mutated into houses, still really just trailers with bits built on, damaged by hurricanes and never quite repaired but still inhabited. I turned off a road and then another road, I pretty well drove in a circle around the crash site which seemed to be deep in a forest of pine trees. I got out of the car and looked around but there was no way I was going into that forest. It was one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been. I listened to most of the first album there and felt sad but almost overcome by some kind of gloriousness.

I drove on to Baton Rouge and realised that in my haste to leave Jackson I’d forgotten to stop for breakfast - I’d had nothing to eat all day and now it was too late, there was no time - I had to get to Lagniappe Records and do the show.

I had a good feeling about this one from the outset and I wasn’t wrong.

Lagniappe Records is Tess and Patrick, and a strange bird that flies around the shop and sits on your shoulder when you’re not expecting it. They were a delight. Tess opened the show, Gibson SG and vocal, and then Toby Hartleroad from Columbus Mississippi. Toby normally plays with his brother Max on drums and their cousin Miles on bass and keyboards. Tonight he was solo - Roland Juno going through heaven knows what and an amplifier, the same with Bentley Rhythm Ace drum machine, and a vocal mic going through a delay pedal and heaven knows what too. It was loud, ungodly and magnificent. Imagine if Devo had been younger and cooler, with real attitude instead of just a pose, and had came from the deep south instead of the rust belt. And yes, they look like the Hanson brothers from Slapshot, even though they'd never heard of it!

The Hartleroad brothers

My set was slightly haphazard due to not having a chance to eat. I couldn’t eat beforehand because I didn’t want to miss the other acts. It was fine though, and I felt much more confident than at the last three shows. It was great to finally get in front of an audience who were all into it.

I had a day off the next day - I should have taken up an offer to play in New Orleans but I didn’t realise it was so close - only an hour or so down the road. Next time… 

Instead I spent a relaxing day off in Baton Rouge hanging out with Tess and Patrick who were having their last day off before moving themselves and the record shop to Lafayette. I think they’re probably open for business by now so if you’re in Lafayette….

They took me for a drive past Huey Piano Smith’s house. Apparently he’s a Jehovah’s Witness these days, a recluse who never leaves the house except presumably for weekly trips to the Kingdom Hall. Seems like a waste to me but then it’s his life.
We had a good time, hanging out in parking lots talking deep into the night. I hope I get to see them again soon. I’m a big fan of the southern United States, there are some very smart people down there, it’s not all like a lot of people (including me at one time) assume it might be.

The next day I set off for Dallas. They say Texas is it’s own country so I’ll perhaps tell you all about that another time and skip forward a week.

I couldn’t drive across Mississippi without stopping at the Clarksdale crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil - well, that is I could because I’m not much of a tourist on these trips, but Tess and Patrick told me about a guitar shop in Clarksdale that has every guitar you’d ever expect to find in the birthplace of the blues, and all at very reasonable prices.

A sweltering Tuesday afternoon in July wasn’t perhaps the best time to pitch up there. The shop wasn’t open. I climbed out of the car into the heat that wrapped itself around me like a moist and over affectionate animal and studied the door with it’s big CLOSED sign. 

A perspiring black man wearing a grubby airtex shirt and shorts that were either nylon satin finish or soaked in sweat scooted  up to me.

‘Weer you come fro’ man’ he asked

‘I’m from England’

‘Now, you might heard tell of me,’ and he gave me a bluesman sounding name of enough complication that I immediately forgot it. I admitted that I hadn’t heard tell of him but he was undeterred.

‘If you have got the tarm then I gotta song I gonna sing for you - have you ever heard a song called Amazing Grace?’

‘Yes’ I said, ‘It’s a Scottish folk song’

That threw him for a second but he rallied:

‘If you got the tarm to listen to ma song then I gonna sing it for you now’

‘Alright, go on then’

He threw back his head and sang with the maximum of soul, arthritic fingers clawing at nothing like a hanging man in his death throes. A little flat but fairly passable. Sweat poured from his face and neck. He finished on ‘…I once was blind bu-ut nowwww.’ A split second went by during which time we both realised he’d landed the thing a bit early and then he added I seeeeee to finish it off as best he could. 

He asked for a donation. I gave him some dollars. He thanked me insisting that he didn’t drink or take drugs and scooted off in search of his next victim.

I wandered up the street in the other direction and found a bar called The Stone Pony that served food. They obviously don’t get much custom in there on a Tuesday afternoon - I was the only customer and it seemed to me that the entire staff were taking turns to come out and take a look at me and ask if everything was all right. It wasn’t all right, it was fairly disgusting - some sort of pasta dish with a lot of cream - but I wasn’t going to tell them, they were all so earnest, and besides, I’m English, so I smiled and said it was lovely and rearranged it on the plate to make it look like I’d eaten some of it. In retrospect I think they were checking me out to see if I was some famous visiting father of the British Blues. Apparently those people come to Clarksdale all the time.

I swung back by the music shop but it was still closed so I got in the car and took a drive around. It was way too hot to walk anywhere. I drove into Yazoo Street, found myself on John Lee Hooker Lane, saw a cafe and parked next to it in the shade of a tree.

The cafe was painted in light, jolly colours - pistachio green, lemon yellow, cornflower blue… A middle-aged white guy wearing share cropper dungarees and a mauve angora beret was picking the blues on a sickly green Telecaster. He sat on a stool on a little raised plynth. A sign above his head said World’s Smallest Stage. He paused in his picking to welcome me in. I did a double take - ‘Are you English?’ I asked.

‘No mate, Australian.’

A middle-aged lady appeared and asked what I’d like. I ordered coffee and she asked for payment up front. The Australian carried on picking, accompanied now by a gangling black kid who clattered out a rhythm on anything and everything behind the counter with a pair of carpenter’s pencils.

Another pause: ‘What brings you to Clarksdale?’

I told him I was passing through and hoping to visit the music shop but that it was closed. I asked him if he was the owner of the cafe.

‘Yeah - I run this place but occasionally, about this time of day, I take a break and play some music - remind myself why I came to live here in the first place.’

The experience was beginning to feel somewhat secondhand, a sanitised, white version of the blues, competantly executed but lacking in any devil-may-care audacity. The Telecaster was new, and played through a Roland busker’s amplifier that you might buy at the Guitar Center. I thought about my green Microfrets guitar sitting there in the trunk of the car. I was almost tempted to bring it out and ask to join in, just to be able to say I’d sat in in the birthplace of the blues. but good sense and modesty prevailed. They would have freaked if they’d seen my battle-scarred guitar - it’s the real deal.

I asked where the famous Crossroads were, drove back down to John Lee Hooker Lane, parked the car, took a few photos, checked the music shop for signs of life (there weren’t any) and wound up outside the Ground Zero Blues Club.

A grubby looking white guy speed-waddled across the road towards me.

‘Hey man - you want me to take a photo of you in front of the club?’

It occured to me that he might just waddle off with my phone, and anyway I don’t need to be in a photo to know that I was there so I gently declined the offer.

We got talking and pretty soon I knew that his name was Steve and he played the harmonica and sang, and had a band called The Clarksdale Blues Revue who were playing at the Ground Zero juke joint tomorrow night if I was sticking around…

We talked about guitar players - Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley… about Duane Allman, his work at Muscle Shoals, particularly on Wilson Picket’s records

The Clarksdale Blues Revue were losing their guitar player, looking for a replacement - perhaps I might like to try out… I didn’t think so, I don’t imagine The Clarksdale Blues Revue would sound good with a Hound Dog Taylor knock off on the guitar. That is - they might, but they probably wouldn’t agree with me.
I’d love to, but I’m leaving town.

I stopped in a store that sold reissues of every blues record ever made plus the odd John Mayall album. I bought an album of Robert Johnson (everything he ever recorded on one CD) and Mississippi Fred McDowell’s album I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll (which I used to have until it was misappropriated in a 33s & 45s moment).

Avoiding the perspiring scooter, who had made another appearance, and a couple of other panhandlers who were emerging from the periphery, I got back in the car, turned the AC up full and drove off in the direction of the Crossroads where Highway 49 crosses Highway 61. I thought about selling my soul to the Devil but when I got there it was just a busy intersection - a roundabout with a couple of tacky blue electric guitar cut outs on a pole sticking out of a neatly trimmed box hedge, and a sign that said The Crossroads. The Devil was long gone, and in his place there was a Chicken Filet.

I took a few photos, declined an offer from two black men in a freezer truck to buy some steaks, and drove off for that night’s show at Proud Larry’s in Oxford.

Bubblegum With Dementia

‘And why would someone know to book you to play in Toronto?’

‘Because I’m famous - I wrote the tune they use in the McDonalds commercial’

‘Really’ (flat voice)

‘What sort of music do you play?’
I could hardly say Rock Music, just me sitting there alone, posing as an old buffer in a Buick Le Sabre, so I said the first thing that came into my head:

‘It’s Bubblegum…with dementia’

She handed back the paperwork, and threw my Green Card at me as an afterthought

‘Enjoy your stay in Canada’

I wasn’t sure that I was going to. I’ve been pretty nervous about this show, the NXNE Festival in Toronto. everyone else on the bill seems so young, vibrant, fresh, up and coming, exciting and positively now. And then there’s me - feeling in comparison like a sixty one year old has been - yes, I’m sixty one, so I must be a has been, if I ever even was.

I haven’t played for a while, not one of my own solo shows, not since last December. I’ve been busy recording a new album, and recording Amy for her new album - separate albums, two careers, two income streams… It might possibly even work. Amy and I have played together for a long time now, I’m used to it, it’s comfortable, it’s easy, I love it, but it’s time to move along - we’ve both got things we need to do. Sometimes I almost feel that the next stage is just something we’ve both got to go through and then we can get back to playing together again.

So here I am in Toronto, still desperately trying to compile a set list. I forget about songs, lose faith in the ones that bubble into my consciousness - I make lists of every song I’ve ever written on every album I’ve ever made. The list bewilders me so I look for a distraction and try to convince myself that a set list will somehow magically occur.

It doesn’t.

In my room at the Hyatt Regency Hotel I’m experiencing a crisis of confidence. I put a post on Facebook: Slowly losing my mind in a hotel room in Toronto. People posted helpful suggestion - Toronto’s a cool town, go out and explore… No chance of that, not before the execution - the show that is. No rewards, just constant low-level anxiety and a feeling of anguish.

I often wish I could start again, come at playing music fresh, fully formed but without the baggage. As much as I try to re-invent there’s still the baggage, a sense of obligation, as in people come to see me because of things I’ve done, like Whole Wide World, or Reconnez Cherie, or Take The Cash. Like it or not you get known after a while for certain things. I really don’t mind playing Whole Wide World - fuck it - I love playing Whole Wide World some nights, it’s every boy’s dream after all - it’s a hit! If I get a bit jaded (and I can honestly say I don’t) the audience’s enthusiasm for the song lifts me up and turns it into a glorious moment. But how can I do that in the context of something new without doing something lumpy and embarrassing like singing it acapella or performing it in a drone style, or worse as a rap number? I don't think I'm going to do that.

I force myself to eat and that makes me feel a bit better about everything. Then I go to the venue. The organisers, the crew, they’re all kids. The stage manager is barely twenty. She’s never done it before. They seem really pleased that I’ve actually showed up. A crew of teenage boys help me load in my equipment - two guitars, one case with leads and pedals in it, Guild Superstar amplifier that none of them can lift alone. They take it all very seriously and put everything in a corner of the tiny, grimy backstage. They want to make sure it’s going to be safe. They discuss putting some kind of tape around it as a sort of cordon but I disuade them of that idea.

There’s no soundcheck so I have a quick discussion with the sound engineer. He’s a bit older than the others. He tells me not to expect too much of the monitors, I tell him I’ve already figured that out, I’ll be using an electric guitar, no acoustic, so all I need in the monitors is my vocal and electrified harmonica. I warn him that I’ll probably be playing quite loud and he says that’s fine, he likes volume coming off the stage. This surprises me, I’ve never heard that from a sound engineer before.

Then there’s time to kill. I stroll through a residential neighbourhood and meet up with a woman called Claire who’s taking photos of me for some sort of online magazine covering the festival. I can never understand why anyone would want to take a photo of me because in the end I just look like a bloke - here I am standing in front of a tree, propping up a lamp post, loitering outside a shop… She’s very nice, good company - we talk about the nature of creativity and she takes photo with a real camera, one with film in it.

Suddenly it’s time to play. I still haven’t written a set list so I go on with a notebook open at the page where I last desperately tried to concoct a set list and play a completely unrelated set of songs. The anxiety falls away, I’m here in the moment, playing a few tunes for these people who seem so happy to see me. Someone shouts for I Wish It Would Rain and I excuse myself from playing it. ‘I’m sorry’ I say, ‘I just don’t feel like playing that one tonight, here’s another one…’ 

I think the set went something like: Same, Joe Meek, Several Shades Of Green, Just For You, Paris In June, Local, Sysco Trucks, Whole Wide World. I know I ended with Whole Wide World - I didn’t mean to be tacky but it was a forty minute slot and it just fell out that way, and I wanted it to follow Sysco Trucks as a sort of nod to the Canadian McDonalds TV ad that features Whole Wide World. 

I have a laugh about Rush playing in Toronto on the same night. The hotel lobby was full of successful looking middle-aged men - lawyers and businessmen - looking just slightly not quite comfortable in their various eras of Rush t-shirts - all together they present a fairly awe inspiring Rush Through The Ages tableau. I talked to one of them in the elevator - he told me he’d seen Rush ninety two times. Tonight would be show number ninety three. He was excited.

I’d prefer to be Bubblegum With Dementia than Mullet Rock.