I suppose I should be happy that someone in the world hasn’t heard of Emerson Lake & Palmer. They can’t have been all that bad anyway – not now we’ve had Jon & Vangelis. I liked ELO when they started – Roy Wood was in it and it was like a continuation of the Move. But Roy left to form Wizzard (See My Baby Jive) and it was a downhill middle-of-the-road slide through the seventies from thereon out.

The book is a bit of a downhill slide as well with a sort of happy upturn at the end in the form of the Len Bright Combo and an end to wretched drunkenness. People I know who were around at various time in my life fall into two camps: those who want to be in it and those who definitely don’t. I met Slim of 1978 Blockhead Of The Year fame last night – Slim who played the piano in my band in 1981, played the accordion in the Boothill Foot Tappers and the Blubbery Hellbellies and currently fronts Slim’s Cider Co – he said judging from what I say about people on this website he’s quite relieved that I forgot to put him in. I was quite uncomplimentary about the Boothill Foot Tappers but I’d forgotten that Slim was in that outfit and anyway he left because, as he told me at the time, some of the band were getting a bit dizzy. That’s what being on the cover of the NME does for you – I remember it well.

Everybody’s going to be very offended but not half as pissed-off as I’ve been with all the people who have told me in the last couple of years while I’ve been writing this thing that they were thinking of writing a book too. It seems that everybody’s got a book and a pop record in them ready to gush out and supply them with five fame-drenched minutes. Or so they think. I can well do without it myself – you get a bad back and no time to update your website.

But I wish I could apply the writing discipline to recording – I wouldn’t stop until I’d written eight hundred or a thousand words every day. I don’t know how that translates into recording terms – I won’t stop until I’ve recorded sixty one bars of music or a hundred and forty one correct notes????

It’s not going to work. I don’t usually stop until I find myself dozing off at the mixing desk and that’s what I’ve been doing since the book went to the printers – I’ve been making an album. But last week, two days before the Tate Gallery gig I found myself staring at a wall and wondering what my life was all about. The house was a tip, I hadn’t updated the website or answered an email for months, the summer was going on without me and I still hadn’t unpacked since my third move in the space of twelve months last January. And all this to get an album finished by the end of July, ready for release in October. Suddenly it was obvious to me that it couldn’t be done so I’m going to re-release the Len Bright Combo albums instead. The new album’s been re-scheduled for February 1^st 2004.

I should explain that I’ve started up my own label. It’s called Southern Domestic and it exists solely to put out my own records – I haven’t got time to bugger about with other people’s aspirations so please don’t bother sending anything for my consideration. The last thing I want to do is turn into an A&R man - I don’t want to meet anymore of them - that’s why I’ve started the label.

What a laugh that was. It took four and a half hours to drive there from Norwich and two hours to get the necessary permissions, passes and trolleys to load the gear into the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery where the gig was taking place. The PA was a bit more powerful than the average domestic hi-fi and the soundman was a congenital idiot from France who’d obviously done a course in Being Good Looking. But somehow we pulled it off. I think the people understood that bad sound was all part of the experience – we were all there so that we could later say that we were there. It was an event. I know the projections were fabulous but I didn’t have time to turn round and look at them myself because I was too busy trying not to incur a life sentence as a result of killing the soundman. I think I just sort of got used to the sound in the end. It was peculiar – there was a man in a suit sprawled on the floor in front of me doing the Evening Standard crossword. Do people ever think how difficult that kind of thing makes it for me? It’s like someone looking at their watch, or starting on about car maintenance when you’re trying to make love to them. Apart from that it put me in mind of a school photo.

Here are some pictures:

In the meantime, if you live in Lancashire come and see me open for T.Rex at the Radcliffe Town Festival on Saturday August 2^nd.