I woke up early to write
but the words were still
asleep – so I prodded them,
made coffee for us both,
put on some music and
waited.
Still waiting. The coffee
was good, the music was
fine but the words were
sure they had earned their
sleep-in. I kept waiting for
nothing.
Which of course had arrived
and continued to turn up in
abundance. A nothing that
was neither spectacular nor
glorious. Just a nothing that
haunts.
The picture of Sam Hunt
leaning against an old Valiant
with a can of Leopard beer
is not a haiku. But it comes close, in my mind.
A New Zealand from 40 years ago but it might
as well be 60 or 70 or 100 years now, the way
we’re speeding. The Valiant wouldn’t cope with
all this mileage we now get; I’ve changed my spots
so I’m not interested in that can of Leopard and
Sam Hunt seems as much like a rock-star or a
wizard or a schoolteacher (he was all of those things)
as he does a poet. Which isn’t to shit on poetry,
rather to point out that we should think of it
as a type of magic, as a beer stain on a rug, a bunch
of late nights after gigs, and first coffees for days –
an old car with the
window wound right down. The sound
of sonorous charm.
There’s a line about a drunk actually
being two people – one that doesn’t
want to drink and one that’s trying
to force that particular issue.
I’m not sure I ever – quite – had that
fight but I think I picked the correct
version of myself to continue to be –
the better option, the safer bet.
And yet, sometimes when someone else
is trying to bend my arm, perhaps because
it best suits their version of me – or more
likely their version of themselves,
I can see the fight is out there still and
everywhere – and it hits people hard in
a way they will never quite admit and in
some cases perhaps never even know.
Admit to powerlessness, it is everywhere
and in everyone. You fall down a hill and
lie deep in a hole, the fault is not yours, but
it is your responsibility to try to stand up.
I’ve never been as disappointed by a music bio/auto-bio as I was when reading the Bernard Purdie one; it’s hard to know what the book was even trying to be – it’s written in third person but claims to be an autobiography, there’s no attempt to even ‘get’ Purdie’s voice, there’s no real attempt to hide the fact that this isn’t even an as-told-to tale but a hackneyed bio hiding behind an autobiography-credit. But worse, there’s no real energy there – it reads a bit like a long Wikipedia entry with far too much stuff about his early childhood and his parents and nowhere near enough about his time making music with Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan and King Curtis and the thousands of other recordings he’s made as solo artist and hired “hit-maker” for a range of soul, jazz and pop-rock acts. Read More
There’s only one exit, but we still
crowd at the entrance, we still think
the rules are for everyone else, though
anyone can be the police – if they are
sure they’re pure. How to know –
in these days of woe. I don’t believe
anyone, and doubt myself more often
than I ever did. But I’m still here and
still hoping. So that’s two good things.
I still own Bruce Springsteen’s single-disc Greatest Hits and the triple-disc set, The Essential Bruce Springsteen. What about when he released that four-disc box-set Tracks. Then the bastards put out a single-disc version called, somewhat unimaginatively, 18 Tracks. And that featured three songs that were not on the box-set. Man, that’s cruel. I actually tempered my approach to being a completist music buyer because of that particular example right there. That and the fact that I one day realised I owned at least five different Lou Reed anthologies of one kind or another. Read More
It’s 1987 – and my favourite band in the world (for a few months, anyway) is Def Leppard. I buy the cassette tape of Hysteria and I receive a free badge! It was metal, and triangular, in reference to the album cover/logo. And I loved it – possibly as much as I loved the album. It had pride of place on my pencil case. I used a black felt pen to write band names all over the pencil case and then I had the Def Leppard Hysteria badge in the top left corner, just below the zip. Read More
While the lie travels around
the world, the truth takes longer
to put its boots on, all thanks go
to conspiracy theorists, who walk
barefoot over jagged rocks and
through any matter that might
harden their sole, just to bend down
and tie the truth’s laces in a knot,
the classroom pranksters, idiot-goons,
now the embarrassment of the world.
You only get one chance to make a memory –
everything that follows is a memory of that
memory, delivered like a series of bad-joke
photocopies (constantly lowering the toner!)
So remember that, the next time you’re
trying to remember anything – because
you’ve been there before, and your shot at
total recall is as good – or bad – as anyone’s.
We can’t see (m)any gigs. We can’t have (m)any gatherings. Live music venues are taking a hit. It might all feel doom and gloom – and possibly with the good reason that it actually is rather dooming and very, very gloomy….but we have memories of the past, right? We’ve seen some shows. Some incredible gigs. I know I have. For a while there – and I mean about 15 years – I was paid an embarrassing pittance to go to shows and relay how they played out. I did it for the love of it, never for the money. When the gig wasn’t good I really earned that terrible paycheck. When the gig was great it was irrelevant that some beer-money was going to trickle into my account. Read More
DD Smash. Napier. Marine Parade, Soundshell. 1984. I was at primary school. I loved DD Smash. Well, I liked them. Well, I knew that one song Outlook for Thursday. But more importantly, my brother liked DD Smash. And mum and dad did too. They didn’t like them enough to pay – so we sat outside on the concrete, with a blanket. Just staring at the tent wall as the cacophony of muffled sound spilled out on to the street. Just us. And one hundred other families that weren’t keen to pay. Read More
Our apocalypse arrived by meeting
and dragged for days and there were
so many experts all of a sudden, most
of them weren’t even on the clock, but
even that – and the apocalypse! – couldn’t
stop them. So the days (and nights)
continued their drag and people continued
to flaunt their version of nearly-normal as
some type of staying-power, and took
every opportunity to back-pat about how
adaptable they were in the face of it all,
even though this wasn’t it all, this was
just small, this was in fact all it took – just
the seed of the germ. The rest of the undoing
would be carried out by the people and
the logic lapses, and the herd that hadn’t
correctly heard the right mentality, and the
media’s long-lost ideal of something passing
for neutrality, and the big business moguls
who just wanted more – such ghouls; all of
this was the real pandemic. All of this was
enough to level us. And the slow walking
trudge that lasted so long was the very cruelty
we deserved. And had earned. And hadn’t
ever learned from at all. How very white indeed.
The apocalypse delivered in a meeting but it
wasn’t in anyone’s calendar. So that’s just rude!