EVERYBODY CAN PLAY IF THEY WANT TO - JUST TURN UP

Sometimes, when I'm in a hole - pen in hand, paper at the ready but absolutely nothing falling out of one onto the other - I wander back through Neil Gaiman's online journalsjust to remind myself why I ever decided a blog was a good idea in the first place. I've been blogging for over ten years now and even though I've hidden the majority of it for current purposes, I've kept going anyway.

Whenever I stop posting for any length of time, not a whole week goes by without somebody sending me a message wondering what's going on... which is weird because I've never blogged about anything specific.

Maybe people like to read about nothing specific.

It's possible. If this is true, please let me know because if you want a whole stack of books that aren't about anything at all, I'm the very man you're looking for.

Anyway... some years ago, Neil wrote this:

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

And these words are too true. You do get immune to the buzz. You start to read a book and there can be two people in your head. The person who loves reading who is willing to roll with it and the person who says things like 'that's a nasty adverb' to themselves along the way. I am one of the worst. I won't read anything with a shitty cover any more than I would sit in a restaurant with dirty windows - I genuinely think it shows a total lack of self-respect for your work - and for the record, I can tell the difference between a cover I don't like and a bad cover. They are two very different things.

I'm also one of those people who wonders how a book can be £1. When an author spends months... years even... of their life writing a book, surely they deserve more than a share of £1 from you? Surely no author can be that desperate for the world to say 'Yes! You are indeed a published writer!' to give their work away for the price of a two litre bottle of Pepsi?

Maybe if you wrote it exclusively for the digital market it's not so bad but when you look at the supply chain for a heavily discounted book... publishing/agency staff, shops, trees, lumber yards, printers, delivery trucks, discounted sticker manufacturers (and that's probably the tip of the iceberg) that £1 ain't gonna be worth too much at all by the time they've all taken their share.

I can't help but wonder why all books in supermarkets are so heavily discounted either. If all of the Big Publishers decided amongst themselves that the supermarket could go swing for their discounts, the supermarkets would be left with two choices: stop selling books (in which case people would be pushed into bookshops... if we could convince them that amazon is the most boring shop window on earth if you study it with care) or stock them at the price on the freaking label.

Whilst that doesn't sound good for a reader who likes to grab a book for a discount, in the longer term maybe the industry could begin to support itself again. Tiny things y'know... like handing out an advance that's not embarrassing to talk about with your friends. Employ illustrators instead of using shadowy stock library figures of indiscernible figures running into the fog/night/forest/train station. Taking a chance here and there on a real wild card. Making celebrity authors write proper books for their blow jobs from the obsessed.

I sound cross but I'm not in the slightest. I'm sad. Sad that things in my beloved book world have moved so far into the realm of mediocre just because the internet has all but killed the gatekeepers who used to keep us from being exposed to garbage. I'm no lover of literary agents - mostly because none of them would have me - but that doesn't mean they didn't do a good job. 

I've come off topic. Damn. No wonder agents don't want to speak to me...

I'm not suggesting anything at all really with this piece, I'm just pointing a finger in the general direction of the world. In 2018, everybody can be a writer, everybody can be a critic, everybody can play... just like school sports day where everybody gets a ribbon for turning up... where the losers who suck at sports (that was me) are rewarded in the same way as the King of the Running Track even though the King of the Running Track will never get a merit badge for having a good stab at reading Moby Dick over the summer because it made it to his shelf due to a cool whale on the cover.

It's exactly the same thing but nobody said life was fair.

I know a cruise liner full of great writers, great tattooers and artists, great guitarists and songwriters who will never take their place in the pantheon because somebody with a bigger mouth and enough self-belief to fool the world is sitting in their chair.

Perhaps the world has always been this way. 

Perhaps there's no Perhaps about it.

Everybody wants to change the world but nobody wants to die and all that.

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Postscript: Here's a cover of Moby Dick because after writing that, I had to see for myself if there really were any great covers. 

This one is the best I've ever seen, though I'm not sure if it's a real published cover or an art project. Whoever created this (and I will make an effort to find out) understood that Moby Dick is not about a whale at all...it's about a man's obsession. Points-a-go-go for reading the damn thing.

THE ATOMIC CAFE AND OTHER STORIES

The Atomic Cafe was the name of the second band I was in. I say 'band' but there were only two of us in it after we had thrown everybody else out of the first band - and then - because we were art rock supreme, we sacked each other thus leaving a void. It made sense at the time.

I don't have a clue why we thought that was a good band name because it isn't. It is however a good album title and I may steal it from myself for some other time but I mention it today because this afternoon I watched the trailer for this and it looks pretty deserving of attention:

Meanwhile, rain has fallen from the sky all day long. Both of us smell like Wet Dog but only one of us has a genuine reason. Over the last few months - known in some circles as ‘Summer’ - I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of people while we’ve been out in The Shire but today... not one person. 

Where did everybody go?  

Rain is the greatest of all weather. If you meet somebody out in the rain who doesn’t give a damn about their hair getting wet or that they’ll have to change their clothes when they get home, make a friend of that person. That’s the person you can count on when the alien tripods fall from the sky and everybody else is running for cover. 

Last time I checked, going out in the rain doesn’t cause your skin to fall off or give you skin cancer. Contrary to popular belief, you won’t shrink either.

Rain. It always reveals the true nature of everything and in itself, that’s a beautiful thing.

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Meanwhile... this came out on Monday and I'm pleased they chose to carry on after Layne did The Thing. This is a great record and a real grower. 

JOHNNY BEATNIK LIVES

Just because I could, last week I designed some custom Johnny Beatnik guitar picks for no other reason than to see what they were like... and they're like this:

That's all of them... the design is a little off kilter and the picks are a little thin for my liking but that's what I chose so it's my own fault. Next time around, I'll go heavier and squeeze the design down into the space better - working in a tiny area is always weird when you're used to working with relatively big pieces of paper with straight edges but they're OK. I have no qualms with the quality... everything I think is wrong with them is my doing.

Being as I don't use a pick, I'll distribute these among some buddies who might get around to using and losing them and the next (better) batch can be used for what I was actually going to use them for.

A little while back, I also made a couple of shirts to see what they might be like as well. Only two of these exist in the world and with a couple of tweaks here and there, these will also become a something that serve a purpose.

Typically, as soon as I'd finished that and sent it to The Place, I had a much better idea for a shirt but those are still in the pipeline. I'll update on that next week and maybe make a batch of them available. There's that Sigue Sigue Sputnik part of me that thinks it's the greatest idea in the world to buy a shirt from a band you've never heard anything from... then again, Johnny Beatnik is also a story - yeah, you didn't know that did you because this is the first I've ever spoken about it - and one of those (maybe two) will appear in Scenes From The Coffee House which is coming to a letterbox near you in September.

Little by little, it's all coming together. 

In my head if nowhere else.

PENS AT DAWN AND SCOOBY DOO

Galley proofs of The Family Of Noise, proofed. Wading through a sea of your own inadequacies with a red pen in your hand and a green pen tucked behind your ear is a foul experience but it's got to be done - and now it is. 

I'm going to take some time out at Ant-Man and the Wasp tonight so that I'm not even in the house to mess with it, come back in a good mood because it looks like a sackful of fun and press on with getting those amendments into the InDesign file. I know a lot of people like to thrash about in the original document but for me, the final InDesign file is a no brainer because you get to see all those funky widows and orphans along the way and fix the damn things on the spot. I’ve probably said it before but if you’re doing things for yourself out there, use professional tools or you’ll be left at the side of the road like an old Fiat. 

Anyway, by my reckoning, that will be the lion's share of the dirty work done and in the next day or so, I can get down to the fun stuff. Not sure what 'fun stuff' entails anymore but so long as it doesn't involve looking at my own mistakes, that will be good enough.

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That's about all I got today - things to do and all that - but I'm about to dive into some mag work, found this on one of my folders and decided it needed a good airing here:

Tattoo by The Half Decent.

If you don't get copious amounts of joy from seeing a killer Scooby Doo tattoo, hang up your gloves and settle into The End Of Your Days.

HAND ME DOWN DAYS

I took a little trip to The Slaughtered Lamb to see Steve Conte do his thing with his guitar last night. That's OK... I get blank looks from most people I mention his name too, even those who know their shit. 

It's been a long time since I've been to a show in a tiny, sweaty room with a capacity of about 150 (and that was probably breaking fire regulations) but hand on heart, I enjoyed it 100x more than seeing Kiss earlier this year. Arena shows are great for some things I guess, but there's no substitute for rock n roll as it was meant to be... in your face, up close and personal. 

I took one shitty photograph before the show just so as I could illustrate what I'm talking about here...

...and that was enough. A couple of people were insistent on snapping and shooting video but for the most part, it was fantastic to see that everybody else was AT THE SHOW... fully present mentally if you know what I mean.

At £12 for the ticket, I felt like I owed the man some money when it was over. I need to get out to more shows like this even though they are few and far between. This is where my heart lies... in some backstreet London basement with a leaking air conditioning unit, four feet away from the stage and four feet away from the door I walked in through - at the same time, where any merchandise is stacked on a small table that still had beer mats on it from earlier in the day.

Here's one of my favourite clips of Steve doing his thing from a while back:

His music isn't hard to find online at all. Get it on.

Note to self: Jesse Malin is back in the country soon. It's in the calendar. 

DEEPER INTO THE FOREST

On a recent research trip, I came across The Irregular Casebook of Sherlock Holmes by Ron Weighell: 

You can grab it here at Zagava. The description doesn't give a lot away but you could always check that part out on amazon. Judging books by their covers is always a great idea when the cover looks like this - otherwise, what's the point of having a beautiful cover. There's also this version which is even more knockout:

Available now as a pre-order, this version will be 'bound in finest Scottish tweed, manufactured by the company which created a special Sherlock Holmes tweed on the occasion of the Sherlock exhibition at the Museum of London' and a magnifying lens will also be embedded into the front cover.

What Zagava do with their books is fuelled by a total passion to publish quality - the way books perhaps used to be - with no eyes at all on the mass market, not a thought for selling thousands upon thousands but rather publishing them because they deserve to be released in such a way to a limited audience who will appreciate them and don't mind paying a little extra to be part of an elite group of other book lovers.

It took about an hour of loitering around over there to change the way I think about myself and what I'm doing with Bad Hare.

Sometimes, you can get exposed to something wonderful and it will get under your skin. 

THINGS THAT MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

I thought it was all over but after going out and looking at some cars I didn't really like, I took a rethink on the whole car thing, talked to the garage and we looked at it again. Some days later, my Saab made it back to the land of the living. Filthy from sleeping in the street during a heatwave, just ten minutes after I took it out for some juice, the heavens opened and washed it clean of sin. 

In as much as losing it made me ridiculously sad a while back, I'm now equally over-emotive to have it back on the road - mostly though, I'm appreciative. It's tough trying to replace The One That Hardly Ever Let You Down but for now, I don't have to.

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With that back on the rails, other things have begun to move forward too. Late August and Mid September will both see books released... that's all I've got for now otherwise there will be nothing to talk about over the next few weeks.

For one of these, a lot of envelopes, shopping receipts, notebooks, old proof copies - anything I find to write on when I needed to write - have been consumed, and now there will be fire. I like the fire part of my working life. I burn everything after writing - it's a good ritual to get it out into the world and off the damn table. Here's a sample...

People may pore over Neil Gaiman's work in future generations to come, but nobody will be lovingly turning the pages over my handwritten brain drain that's for sure.

Not anymore.

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And hey... want to know something about social media? Since I deleted all of my accounts, I'm not missing it at all. Not one scratch. I was not what I'd ever have called a "heavy user" but it's more than noticeable how much time I've reclaimed by steering clear. 

Want to know something even better? I'm not even interested in explaining why I left but I am a happier person for it.

DOGS, BIRDS AND FOXES

Eleanor came back from a holiday in France today and brought me this little slice of carved wood magic back. No caption needed right? I love it.

This last few weeks - and probably for a lot longer - two Jackdaws have been raising a chick on the roof of our house. This morning, taking to a shady place at the top of the garden to escape the sun, I saw there were three of them up there. The chick had gotten big and was waving its wings about, making a hell of a lot of noise as it got ready to take its first flight. It’s a long way down from the roof. I know because I’ve been up there.

Anyway, by the time we got to lunch, they were gone.

No fear. It’s just what you do when you’re a bird chick. You don't think about it because you have no choice... your food will have been depleted and if you want to survive, you need to fly.

That old rogue, Mr Aesop, painted the Jackdaw as a stupid bird in his fables who starved to death hoping the figs would ripen, prompting the fox to point out that ‘hope feeds illusions and not the stomach’.

I always liked that phrase. That fox always had smart things to say.

Except Jackdaws are not stupid at all. They are one of the only birds that communicate with their eyes and therefore are acutely aware that this is what we do too... so it's (relatively) easy to form a bond with a Jackdaw. If you put food out for them and look at the bird, then the food, they will follow your eyes to see what you're looking at and given time, this breeds trust... though if you break that trust, they will steal all your belongings. Fact.

I learned this a long time ago and over the last few years of feeding them occasionally and leaving good nest building materials around in the Spring (aka: Hector's haircut trimmings) they've left me small pebbles as ‘gifts’ that all look vaguely the same. There have been dozens and I've kept them all.

Seagulls on the other hand... I’m not certain they’re very smart at all. Those guys had been nesting on a roof a few houses up and had two chicks. At 5am, you will know all about this because of the unholy cacophony coming in through the window. 

But this morning, they could be seen with only one chick. A little detective work revealed the other one had got itself stuck behind the summerhouse (aka: studio/aka: shed) and tangled up in the bindweed that secretly grows there. 

I've no idea how long it had been there but it couldn't stay. That would mean having to deal with a dead seagull in a few days. Much easier to tend to it alive - except, it didn't want to be tended to. 

Not even a little bit.

It didn't want to be rescued so much that I had to enlist the assistance of my buddy Adrian down the street because he has Official Seagull Chick Rescuing Tools (aka: welders gloves and a blanket).

An hour or so later, the chick (actually, they're a little big to be called chicks - it's more likely called a fledgling but I can't be bothered to look it up) was safely out from behind the shed, delivered into the relative freedom of the path that runs at the back of our houses where we could see its parents and brother/sister sitting on a nearby roof for the coast to be clear.

What did it do? It ran - RAN - into the nearest bush 100 yards away like the unappreciative dumbass it is, but we decided to leave it alone at that point. If you had been pulled from bindweed with welders gloves, you would be scared too. 

As I write this, it's about 11pm so if it hasn't gone back to its family, that fox I mentioned earlier will probably have some wise words to say to it tonight - and they won't be about figs.

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Nobody could be bothered releasing a good album this week, so hunt this down and take it for a spin:

Great albums are hard to find and almost always slip under the radar. This one has been punished every day this week... never mind that it's nearly ten years old. 

THE END OF AN ERA

My Saab died.

I know it's dumb to get attached to a car but I've had it for about eight, maybe nine, years and it's never let me down. Well, once it did but that was a few weeks after I got it so that's allowed. 

Which means I need a new car (not that kind of new) and that we'll have to go through that whole 'trust' thing, like when you get a new partner. How far will they take you without spoiling your day? What kind of baggage are they carrying you don't know about? But at least with a car you get a sheet of paper that says how many other people they've been with and a rough idea of how they've been treated.

I was going to make some kind of cheap gag about how it would be funny if, when you start a new relationship, you asked to see their papers so you could get a glimpse into how it all might pan out and then I thought better of it. Somewhere out there in the world, there will be people who insist on knowing this kind of thing. It probably won't come up in the first week, possibly not even in the first month, but it will come up - and to those sorts of people it will be A Very Big Deal.

If you are one of those people - buyer beware! You will be lied to. The mileage may not be quite as accurate as you had hoped. 

And so, the search begins. I have a few ideas but there's one thing I know for certain before I begin. Cars have become dull as hell - much like our phones. Once upon a time you could go into a phone shop and choose from a hundred designs and it made phone shopping quite a thing. Now, all you can do in a phone shop is choose a size of a sheet of glass. 

Cars have gotten pretty much the same... technology has driven them to be so aerodynamic and safe that vehicle design has gone out of the window. A VW saloon looks more or less like a Peugeot saloon, looks more or less like a Toyota saloon etc... if you stripped their badges off, your average Joe would be hard pushed to get excited about any of them. Your choice in 2018 (unless you have won the lottery) is A: a very small hatchback type car B: a medium sized car - usually a three door affair C: a large saloon type car for going 100mph without noticing D: an off road 4x4 type thing E: something that looks like a van but is pretending to be a car that is only acceptable if you need to do the wheelchair thing or F: a people carrier. 

A, B and C should look to the past and do something about it because ain't nobody going to look back on the new Audi A4 with the fondness they have for the 100 or the Coupe or the Quattro. It may be a technological marvel that can park itself or whatever but at heart, this too is now a slab of glass.

D: There are loads of these in our street and so far as I know, they are either used to go take kids to school and/or to transport very small dogs... a maximum of about four miles a day. Where I go to take Hector for a walk - which is very much off-road - I have never seen one of them. 

E: Unless you do have a wheelchair - in which case they're just the thing - I'm not sure why anybody would buy one. They're horrible and people who need to use wheelchairs are not totally devoid of taste. Wheelchair users of the world should unite and tell whoever makes them they too would like a useful car that looks great and not like something the Pope used to drive back in 1986.

F. The people carrier. Bah. How many people do you actually need to carry that you can't get in a regular car unless you happen to be a taxi driver? Your kids should be in school and they should get there on the bus... unless you live miles away in the country, in which case you should be doing D not F. Next time you see a people carrier that's not a taxi - check it out for how many people it's actually carrying. That number will be One. Who would buy a car called Sharan anyway? More to the point... who the hell let that through in the marketing meeting?

Tsk.

This is car design:

The Citroen DS

The Triumph GT6

To own either of these now (in their original form) would be a Money Pit of the Highest Order, but surely it can't be that hard to put today's tech into yesterday's design. 

Know this. One day they will... because much like the phones we're all using, there's nowhere else to go.

Maybe I'm just sore because for the first time in about twenty years, I no longer have a car. Best get busy.

A WEEK IN MUSIC

A man could get used to blogging once a week. Maybe I'll keep it up, maybe I won't but while I'm busy, it suits me fine. This week I have done NO WRITING AT ALL because I took The Mag to print (so I have written really) and for some reason, it was tricky beast, thus, my lust to string words together disappeared with the wind. This week coming is little lighter on the soul so I'll get moving.

Talking of strings - and I don't recall posting about this before, but maybe I did - David Hale (a tattooer and artist I much admire) blagged a guitar from Gretsch some weeks/months back - then set about it with his tool kit. It's finally out there up for auction and looks like this:

AND HOLY MOTHER OF ALL GODS THAT EVER EXISTED, THAT HAS MY NAME ALL OVER IT.

I'm keeping my eye on it. If I ever post a picture of it again, it will feature me holding it. I'm so in love with the damn thing, if I can't have it NOBODY WILL... umm, except for the winner of the auction I guess. 

If you were going to have a guitar for life... that's what it would look like.

File under pending. In the spirit of raising money for the cause it was intended to and you fancy your chances at owning it yourself, here's the page.

Meanwhile, writing songs continues. Some are great, some are good, some are in pieces all over the floor. Some never made past the lightbulb moment. One isn't for me to do anything with other than hand it on to somebody else... don't ask me how that works. Maybe songs just need bringing to life occasionally and then your job is to find a home for them. 

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On which subject: 

I’m not the greatest guitarist in the world. Fact. Then again, as I keep telling myself, I don’t need to be - the guitar is the lesser of my triangle of terror. I’m a lyricist above everything, my voice is not so bad and the guitar is more of an accompaniment to those first two things... but that doesn’t mean I don’t try to get a little better every day. Some days are good on that front but some days can be horrendous. 

The mind is a peculiar thing. If I write a set of lyrics and later decide they are in fact, shitty, I’ll just throw them in the trash because some more will be along later. If I have a bad day with the guitar though, it’s like the end of the world. Makes me wish I had bought a piano. 

Anyway, a few weeks back, I ordered a capo from Thalia. They make beautiful capos and wrong though it may be, a good looking guitar is essential. Thus, the things you choose to dress them up with should be too. I figured it would be a good investment based on what people had said about them but I didn’t expect it to be quite as fine as it is. Makes me want to give all my other ones away and restock exclusively with these - which I probably will. They’re not cheap but nothing this good should be.  

It's been thought about at the engineering level, it works like a charm, it’s pretty and if there’s one better in the world I’d love to hear about it because this little baby is unbeatable. 

I've spent hours today putting it through the motions and simply from being happy in my workspace, stumbled across the bones of a new song. Maybe I should cheer up more often... but being cheered up is not as conducive to writing dark songs as I would like. 

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Finally, this is neat: the business card of Lester Bangs.

Lester never seemed to be the kind of guy who would remember to take his cards out with him. Maybe there's a big stack somewhere with an elastic band around them. Unused and sadly, never to be used again. 

On the very same day, I saw this in the latest GQ in an article about business cards:

So I threw all of mine in the bin next to some song lyrics that didn't make the grade.

Life is simple if you let it be that way.

FINALLY...

I have become a real writer in my own eyes. Not with a multi million publishing deal. Not with a glut of writer friends to eat noodles with on a Tuesday afternoon. Not with a crazy writing tour schedule in which I’m able to meet and greet people who say they love my work.

No... I have begun to drink red wine alone in the evening because... well I don’t have a good reason but it seemed like a good friend to talk about writing with and so far, so good. She’s a good muse and knows her way through the fog.

I suspect if you got to know her well enough, pretty soon you could learn not to give a fuck about anything. 

Meanwhile, this afternoon, I put a bullet in the head of my twitter account. Nobody cares unless you’re Royalty Famous. I walked. What used to be a good place has become a platform of such inconsequence, even a writer of Dirty Realism can see no value in it. 

This is part of a much bigger picture in which three of my friends have also closed ALL of their social media accounts along with me.

We all have our own reasons but the common denominator for all of us is how the ‘socials’ have you performing like a circus pony without you knowing you were doing it. If you’re still in that zone, take a long hard look at how much time you spend on your feeds, how they make you feel and what they have you talking about.  

If you’re honest with yourself, it ain’t good. It may have been once upon a time, but it isn’t anymore.  

HOME IS WHERE YOU HAPPEN TO BE

As the years do what years are supposed to, it's a good thing to remind yourself where you came from. Where you are right now is not so important because in the next second or two, you'll have moved on from that. You're about to go into your future and that's the way it is with every passing moment. The future seems to be the place in time on everybody's lips - probably because you'll have to live in it and you're the only one who can create it, but this too will eventually become the past.

Spare a thought for the past while you're busy being the one determined to die with the most toys. It's important to remember where you came from. This picture is about as early as I can remember:

No phone, no TV, no car, hardly any money, what we ate grew in the garden and for some reason, my mother (not in the pic here, this is my grandmother) chose to dress me in the same clothes that Mickey Mouse would wear. For me, this picture is 'home' even though nobody lives there anymore. How I came to be the person I am is a mystery - just the same as you. Most of life is one long chain of accidents, good vs bad decisions and chaotic liaisons. 

I have no reason at all for bringing this up. Maybe it was going home for a few days that brought it on. Sometimes I wonder how I could have come so far and still have got nowhere - but I know the answer to that already. 

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Like a stupid person, I promised myself that I would buy no more guitars this year - that three much loved guitars was more than enough. Then the power steering on my car decided not to be power steering anymore more and I'm staring down the barrel of close on £1000 for making it right again - I've bought cars that have lasted years for less than that before now. It's currently up on a ramp for another couple of days but as I was contemplating the best part of a grand for the privilege of steering with little effort, my mind wandered to the one that got away... and how it could easily not have gotten away if steering wasn't necessary. 

Next time I put cash to one side, I think I'll make the call to The Man In Germany and bring this Hagstrom home where it belongs.

A man could write some great songs with that.

REALITY BITES

Last week, I downed tools for a couple of days plus the weekend and headed north to see The Mother, The Brother and his family and most importantly, my two buddies - Darryl & John - who have been my buddies forever and quite honestly, I can’t imagine them not ever being my buddies. One day, Death will drive a wedge between us somehow but that’s OK. Death likes to do that to everybody. We ain’t special... but Death.. if you’re reading, we’re in no rush.

It’s always struck me peculiar as to how the years make no difference at all to any of us.

“Hey, good to see you!” 

”Damn, you too!” 

Cue manly hug. 

Relationship continues like we saw each other yesterday, even when “yesterday” collectively consists of 14 years since I last saw one of them, 6 children, a bunch of houses and some ‘other people who drift in and out of your life’.

That’s real friends for you. I would have shed a tear if boys were allowed to cry. 

I also saw this outside a pub and realised I missed somebody way more than I thought I would. It had only been two days: 

Meanwhile, back home, I’m approaching the week I’ve set aside for recording home demos of the songs I’ve been writing. While I wasn’t looking, four songs turned into eighteen, so my task this coming week is to figure out what I think is good and what’s possible. I’d like to get through as much of it as I can because I can feel more songs bubbling around but that’s a dumb approach. I'll never get through all of them in a week.

Patience with myself is not my best skill. 

I don’t even know what to do with them when they’re done. I have a huge stack of demo songs here by other people - Chris Cornell, Bowie... that kind of level - and some of them are super lo-fi but mine are going to be even more lo-fi than that. 

I guess I'll get that far first and figure it all out later. It is what it is - something to build a band around perhaps (or perhaps not) then find a studio to run it all out properly... or maybe I’ll base my entire repertoire around just writing and writing and writing some more and never bother recording them on an industrial scale and simply be like ye olde wandering troubadour spinning tales because they are there to spin.

That sounds good written down. I’ll do that. 

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To wrap up the week - because it sounds like I've done not anyting but hang about the world and eat barbecued food - when I got back, there was also a magazine to get to print. I've pulled this out of the proof I signed off yesterday simply because it's great:

Sometimes I forget how much I love my job and how much work is put into it... mostly because it can be a pain in the ass like any job, but once a month, when it all comes together, I get that glow that tells me it's all been worth it - this one goes on sale a week today if you happen to be keeping track.

---

TATTOOED DUDE OF THE DAY WITH A GREAT VOICE TINKERING AROUND ON HIS PIANO:

THE WEEKEND IN PICTURES

The weekend looked a little naked so I went back out into the world and found Fatherhood In Pieces by Michael Chabon - he of the Hector doppelgänger - and Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine by Diane Williams, who I’ve never heard of but if Lydia Davis and Franzen are on the train, that’s good enough for me. GQ also arrived yesterday morning. Thus begins a weekend of reading underneath the umbrella.

Talking of the umbrella, this little guy landed on it in the afternoon:

That's shot on my phone camera - an iPhone 6S - but the detail in those wings is off the scale - good thing the sky was in the right place. In ten years, even pro-photographers will give up lugging around Canon bags and be happy with the slab of glass in their pocket.

I also decided the current capos I have for my guitars were letting the side down. A little investigation and I discovered a company called Thalia who make some seriously beautiful products, so I treated myself to one of these:

If they're as good as people say they are, it's probably the first of quite a few. I'll report back - if nothing else, the kids will have Christmas sorted out for many years to come. We've come a long way from a Toblerone and a Doctor Who comic that's for sure.

The Unholy Trinity

I also got tattooed last weekend by my friend Fiumix. Here's a small corner of what we got up to - because people like to steal things out there, this is probably all I'll ever post of it: 

He also made/drew me a present. Here it is:

Funny how the smallest things can make me so happy - not that it's small, it probably took hours to draw. That just about sums up my whole life and I should probably get it tattooed - it's certainly something I'm thinking about hard but no rush... I'm still getting over the hares.

I've never looked so good in my life as I do in that picture - see:

I don't normally take pics of myself but I was messing about with an app called NOMO and took this by accident... at least it looks like me. 

HOWL

The running programme came to a halt early last week when my knees decided they weren't going to be knees anymore. I strapped them up and went out anyway but they weren't very convincing about their role in the project at all. I figured I would give them a rest for a while and presto... I went out tonight and they were just fine.

I can't remember if I put up the playlist for Week Three so here it is because I've decided to go back and do that week from the beginning again. Never under-estimate the power of a great playlist to get your ass back into gear. Pretty sure I should be on something like Week Five now but I'll just keep chipping away here until I make it.

---

SKY NEWS called me earlier this morning. Asked me if I would be game for contributing to some live coverage on Raheem Sterling's tattoo of an M16 on his leg. Of course, the answer was yes... but I'll admit right here that until that a couple of minutes after that call, I didn't know who he was, had never heard of him and if it hadn't been for that call, that's how it would have stayed.

Having said that, the more I dug, the weirder it got. There's coverage everywhere about it online today, so I won't repeat it here, but the tattoo doesn't mean what the two newspapers (The Sun and The Daily Mail) insinuated it did (they didn't actually insinuate anything but by just pointing it out, did) and then Mothers Against Guns came out (or rather their spokesperson did) and said he should get it ..."lasered off or be dropped from the England World Cup squad".

In his own defence, Raheem's father was gunned down and from what I can gather, the guy is really just saying he shoots from the right foot - which is quite funny for a tattoo. I'm not sure I would have chosen it if my father had gone that way but Raheem was just two when that happened. I can relate to that in a kind of "don't miss what you never had" way. Sad - absolutely, but it's not a raw memory.

Anyway, I went ahead and figured I would back up his case on there. I was armed to the teeth with research by this point. Up against such a statement from Mothers Against Guns, I thought I might find myself in a strange war of words... but that's not what happened.

What really happened (I think) is that we met at the fence and more or less agreed with each other - the press have made a mountain out of a water fountain chat (and there's no way that tattoo is as new as they have made out) and left social media to do what it does best/worst... which is giving people with keyboards on their phones a reason to stab at them with sticky fingers.

News coverage and discussion sure does move fast these days and from my experiences over the years, if you can't say what you want to say in less time than it takes to brush your teeth, you're playing a losing game. There was a point where I was asked whether small children would see the tattoo, not read the backstory and think the message of it was something it wasn't - which is a great question. That could indeed happen. I remember seeing Paul Stanley wearing a Star of David pendant in a photo-shoot from the late seventies and adding it to my Christmas present list without a clue what it meant, but it's not quite the same thing at all.

My head began to formulate an alternate reality scenario in which I wanted to throw the ball back into the TV by saying "if you can honestly sit there and tell me small children went out and found Jesus after seeing David Beckham's tattoo, I'll agree 100% with you", but there wasn't time. I am built for long-form things rather than drive-by chat.

Mostly though, I was concentrating hard on not sneezing on air because The Old Hay Fever arrived with a vengeance yesterday. Here's me thinking about sneezing... and playing with my beard too much - which is better than playing the beat to Dr Feelgood on my teeth with that pencil I'm holding which is what I was doing while I waited...

Pic by my good buddy John McMeiken... who actually has SKY

HOW CAN MAY BE NEARLY OVER ALREADY?

The pages are starting to stack up for Scenes From The Coffee House. I feel like a real writer again... it's a very different beast from the day job even though that involves writing too. The difference is the same as showing somebody your brain and showing somebody your heart. Anyway - it's getting somewhere fast. I'll post an update here at the end of the month because I hope I won't be far away from drawing a line under it and doing that thing known as Pressing The Button.

The songwriting is surging forwards too. My ambition is perhaps exceeding my talent but I'm working on balancing it out and some kind of 'thing' is coming together for sure. I should probably remind myself more often that I'm a lyricist not a guitarist but damn, my heart is firing on all four cylinders with the guitars and I'm even enjoying it. 

In a chain of events I didn't see coming, I've really grown to love the D'Angelico I picked up a while back and I write on it a lot more often than the Gretsch. Funny how things pan out.

---

That's all I got. I just felt like being positive and emptying my head a little. There's a busy week coming up into which I'd like to stuff as much as I can before I disappear to Alexander Palace for a long weekend of hosting our Great British Tattoo Show.

I'll leave you with this:

THE PENCIL OF TRUTH

Yesterday, I read an article on writing by one of my favourite writers - Joan Didion - and I’m going to steal chunks of it here because I think it’s important. It was for me, but maybe it will resonate with you too. Here goes:

Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it.

Sometime later, she hits The Nail really hard in the face with The Hammer:

In short my attention was always on the periphery on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

That section in bold is the one that swung it for me:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. 

When I had read this over and over because I was captivated by what it meant, I realised she was talking to me. 

I figured that what people respond to most is when I write about life. Anyone - (well, maybe not anyone) - can write a 'story' but only I can see through my eyes and colour it with all the filters that already exist in my head. I see no other reason to have accumulated so much junk in there and held onto it for so long. Thus, on this fine day, I have decided not to write certain types of things anymore - ie: fiction, though I do have a few scraps around here that I'll finish just because I should.  

There simply comes a time when you must decide what you're going to talk about around here - and that time is now.

It sits well. Maybe I need a photograph of myself that makes me look like the kind of writer I think I am. Here's a picture of Joan (from Vogue I think) that says more than any biography could. Once you know she's a writer, this photograph says everything else there ever was to say - in fact, you don't even have to know she's a writer for it to speak to you:

I will more than likely steal this idea very soon. I don't think Joan will mind.

There's also a Netflix documentary about her called The Center Will Not Hold. Here's the trailer:

OPERATION ANTI-BEATNIK

I got a newsletter in today from the very cool Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company. I've only been there once and it was a long time ago too so it's high time I went back. With one eye on my last post about things not being as relevant/cool/important as they once were, I'm going to steal their first paragraph here and tell myself it's OK because if you're not on their mailing list, you can fix that by going to that link and filling in the box on the top right of the page.

It goes like this: 

For almost three years in the late 1960s, Shakespeare and Company was barred from selling books. This was due to a bureaucratic imbroglio attributed variously to CIA influence, to the Paris Préfecture’s “Operation Anti-Beatnik,” and to simple bad luck in business. Undeterred, George Whitman kept the space open as the “Free University of Paris,” hosting discussions, concerts and readings, including one with poets Langston Hughes and Ted Joans. In May ’68, when the quartier famously erupted in clashes between students and riot police, the bookshop was perfectly situated to become a refuge, intellectual as well as physical. As Molotov cocktails flew across rue Saint-Jacques, the shop sheltered people fleeing riot police, and stayed open all night to host political debates. In our history book, the poet Christopher Cook Gilmore describes hiding out in the bookshop one night, watching from the upstairs window as students unfurled a huge red flag from the top of Notre-Dame. Standing next to him, George said: “Isn’t this the greatest moment of your entire life?”

Which says a lot about the bookstore, its owner, beatniks and the French. This is why Shakespeare is still open, still highly regarded and still on my radar when hundreds of others are a distant memory of averageness. If I ever get around to making a video series like Old Weird America (see same previous post as mentioned before) this is where I'll begin... because a man needs an excuse to go to Paris like he needs an excuse to buy another Gretsch. 

Books huh. 

---

Meanwhile, the running continues and my knees are screaming at me to stop. They're not in a good way but they're going to have to suck it up for another six weeks because we're finishing this little challenge one way or another.

I came back from my run last night (the playlist for week three is here) and crash landed in front of Lost In Space on Netflix. The first few episodes were pretty good so I stuck with it as something that passed before my eyes while I recovered and then... episode five we hit a jackpot.

Not only were we rewarded with giant lizard/dinosaur type things but also a fist fight between them and The Robot - and that my friends, is sometimes as good as life gets. A large mug of tea and a cage fight between a lizard and a robot. Ain't nothing wrong with that.

NOTES ON BEING YOURSELF

This last few days I’ve been digging into GarageBand to get some songs down. The positive part of me wanted to get three songs into at least a workable state but you know how it is... you get started, overthink it more than you need to, battle some inner demons and come out the other side wondering why you’re not better at the things you love to do, but that’s pretty normal around here.

Then again, the one song I did lay down is one song more than I had on Friday morning before I started so that gets filed under ‘a step in the right direction’. Also in the win column is now that I’ve messed with a million settings, I shouldn’t have to mess with them any more and can just plug in and get more of them down. 

I did wonder for a while if anything worthwhile would come from such a DIY endeavour. The world is set up to make you think anything is possible if you throw enough tech at it and maybe it is, but I’m also a writer who endorses the fountain pen, a fistful of Blackwing pencils and to many notebooks. If you take a look around the web, there’s always somebody who’s been able to piece something solid together with tech but not so many people wielding acoustic guitars that I actually liked, or so I thought...

I came across an album by a guy called Dan Tedesco. He recorded his last album using 'not very much at all' on his iPad. You can read about his big plan here (if you can handle the nineties design of the news site it's on) and the link to his album on iTunes is here. 

Inspired by this, I see no reason I can’t play that game. I’ll more than likely use even less than Dan simply because I don’t understand half of what’s going on. Right now, my job is to get skeletons down and I’ll dress them in nice clothes later.

Dan also made a movie about what it's like to do everything yourself out there and he makes it look easy. It's called Chasing The Lightning. I could post it here but Dan would probably appreciate it more if you watched it on his site so here's the link. 

Meanwhile, I also came across a guy called Otis Gibbs. He runs his Own Damn Show and lives life on his own terms - or at least that's the message that comes across. He also makes fine records and has started a new video project called Old Weird America. You can find everything you need somewhere on his site, but here's his latest instalment of the OWA series... I adore this and wish the world was still like this way:

The days of wandering into a bookstore and finding a homemade pamphlet of Beautiful Words are long gone. I guess it got replaced by the internet but it's not the same because to make your own pamphlet requires Effort and Commitment rather than spewing up some words because somebody thought it would be nice if we all had keyboards on our phones. 

We need more people like Dan and Otis in the world. With the possibilities becoming ever more endless - and perhaps, meaningless - as human beings there’s way too much to consume out there. It’s almost impossible to absorb yourself into something in the way we used to. What’s going to count in the future is people going out on their own limb to create material that belongs to them and them alone. We’re awash with cookie cutter ideas and algorithms that tell you what you want to see next. 

If you have any desire at all to be an individual in a world that’s trying to make us all the same (for no other reason than to take your money from you), you’re going to have to do pretty much the same as these guys and have a little faith in that thing called Yourself.

You need to be the person that people in the future will talk about... or at least try.

WANTED. DEAD OR ALIVE.

This running thing. It's tough. My knees are objecting a little but I must persist as it's part of a bigger plan... and if I can't run 5km without having my lungs hang out of my eye-sockets, I may as well abandon all hope before I start.

Earlier this week, the running track was full of people at rugby training which threw a brick through the window of my plan but across the road, there is a park. A kids park, general park - you know the kind of thing - just a big patch of grass really and there was nobody in there. I parked up, went through the gate and ran. It wasn't too dark when I went in but as the songs passed by on the playlist, it was kind of getting that way, but no big deal.

I had finished the scheduled run, went back to the gate and found it locked. No problem - there was another gate a little further along. Also locked. Down at the other side of the field there are some tennis courts but those gates were locked too.

Hmm. Not even nine o'clock and I find myself locked in a field. I'm not particularly inconspicuous and I wasn't running in the shadows but whoever it is that's in charge of the security of the field didn't give a damn either way and strapped those babies up good n tight with their industrial padlocks.

What's a man to do?

Close to the tennis courts, there's a house where I thought this security person may live. It's the only house within the field so it made sense. I looked around some and then shouted up at the only window with a light on:

"Hey motherfucker! How about letting me out!"

Action behind the curtains and I see a man looking down on my wearing blue pyjamas. You know what he did? He closed the curtains against me and did nothing at all.

Maybe I went in too hard a little too early.

The field, all the way around, is circled by one of those fences you find protecting schools. Metal rods about ten foot high with arrow-head spikes to stop people climbing over. The kind that, when you're in school, there's always some story about a kid who impaled his testicles on them when he went to get his ball. That was the first thing that crosses my mind while I was standing there looking at them.

To hell with it. What does a man need testicles for anyway in an already over-populated planet. 

Using the chain and padlock around the gate as leverage, I hauled myself up onto the top, teetered around between the spikes for a few seconds and jumped. 

Not so bad. The landing was not so good and my knees complained a little but I was out. If nothing else it might make a humorous story...

The following day, I took the dog out. To make a change in the mini-heatwave, I figured I'd take him to the park with the river running through it - there's not much he likes better than jumping in during the summer and getting cool. 

We parked up, crossed the road with some other people who were hanging around and found that over the winter, somebody had moved the gate and replaced it with a fence, though there was a sign saying to use the other gate maybe fifty metres along the road. Simple.

"Somebody moved the gate," I said to one of the guys who had crossed with us and was looking confused. This guy looked mid-thirties, maybe forty at the top end - certainly a fair whack of years younger than me anyway - which is important because then, he looks up and down the road and says:

"You're young enough to just jump over the fence."

And I stood there for a moment wondering if a) I suddenly looked a lot younger now I had been running for one whole week and/or b) pictures of me escaping from the playground had made it onto the internet without me knowing. 

Or maybe the old guy in the house had put hundreds of those blurry CCTV posters up around the place of me like when a cat goes missing. 

The universe sure does have a weird sense of humour.