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The Big Smash re-release arrived today. We’ve got this wacky French postman – I suppose he would be French really, seeing as we’re in France. He’s very jolly, seems to think it’s all a big laugh, delivering letters in the pissing rain. He always looks so pleased when he hands over the mail, as though he was giving us a special present. He looked particularly full of joie de vivre, largesse and all that when he gave me a package from London that turned out to contain five copies of the bumper edition Big Smash CD.
Re-releases are difficult – I recorded that stuff between twenty-seven and thirty years ago when I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t always had the best guidance, or any real guidance at all sometimes. Not that I’m complaining exactly – I got away with it at times, sometimes I could be completely brilliant and absolutely crass in the course of one three minute song. The trouble with the Big Smash album is that it’s pushy, bombastic and quite often too fast. And the idiosyncratic me has got lost. Amy put it very well - she said it sounded as though I’ve been pasted into something that hasn’t got much to do with me. My voice was fucked too - I recorded it in a year when I was permanently on the verge of laryngitis thanks to constant touring, loud bands and crappy or non-existent monitors.
The stuff that came with Big Smash, my first American album, a collection of songs from my first two British albums plus a B side or two and the odd single, is possibly the most worthwhile part of the collection. It’s all included on the CD - a double CD package for the price of a single one by the way, so it’s really good value for money. I think you should disregard most of what I’ve said and buy it anyway. I can’t believe this, I should be a rock journalist – I’ve just given my own album a three star review.
I think I can do better than that – Big Smash is great! It’s got Pop Song on it, and Tonight Is My Night, and the ever in demand Broken Doll with its fab Walter Hacon guitar break –I can hardly take much credit for that one (here I go again), it was Walter’s idea in the first place. It came about in a dressing room in Copenhagen. Cliff Richard covered it on his Wired For Sound album. I rather put my foot in it by suggesting in an interview in Sounds that if Cliff had broken his neck in a motorcycle accident after Move It he could have been a rock ‘n’ roll legend, but as it was he was just an also-ran. The nerve of it. Never got to meet the man. Never got to meet The Monkees either, and they covered Whole Wide World. I should have gone to see them at Wembley when they did the comeback tour but I didn’t think they’d be interested in meeting me. And anyway it was the eighties and I was depressed.
But that’s by the way - this is all by the way actually but never mind, let’s press on: I can hear bits of me in Big Smash. Amy said she could too. The odd harmony, and even though my strange timings were somehow sorted out, a lot of my chord changes remained intact. Some of the lyrics, which could never really be described as intact in the first place, just stayed as they were when I first wrote them – sketchy, improvised and slightly unfinished. But not always, just where I couldn’t be bothered, or ran out of either confidence or inspiration, or both.
But really there’s a lot I like about it – it’s just that I can still hear the ideas that I had originally, that I couldn’t convey to producers, engineers or musicians, but no one else can see inside my head so they’ll never know how fractionally better it could have been. I just hope the world is ready to forgive me now for not having been totally great all the time. And by world I probably mean the music press - particularly the British music press.
And I suppose I should mention that you can order it from The Turkey Zone.

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Amy and I have been recording some stuff, but just as we got going the computer broke down. It can be a terrible feeling, wondering how you’re going to get anything repaired when your sitting in the middle of the French countryside. I remember the transport system on a Studer eight track fucking up and sending the multi-track of Kilburn Lane into a tight concertina. I had to flatten the tape out (it worked OK but there’s an audible crackle somewhere on that track that made it onto the finished CD - that's The Hitsville Houseband 12 O'Clock Stereo album by the way). I was lucky, I found a repair man living just down the road who had actually worked for the Studer company. In this case it’s all a lot less exciting – there’s an English run computer servicing company in the next village.
The Studer is sitting here waiting for the rack with the amplifiers to come over from England. I wish it was working now, computers are easy but analogue recording gets a lot more wacky. I feel that I should do it in period costume, with perhaps a smudge of soot on my face.
But today broken down computers are the least of our worries. We’re snowbound. This morning the lights flashed on and off repeatedly. Not with the kind of frequency that leads to epileptic fits in discotheques, not like that, just off, then back on, (read two pages of book) off…back on, (enough time for complacency to set in) off…(extended period of gloom) on again etc.



We’ve got oil fired central heating so we’re very lucky, except that it’s got an electric pump so a full on power cut would leave us shivering because that’s the only heating we’ve got. We haven’t even got a working fireplace because the grates have been taken out and the spaces boarded up.
Oil-fired central heating sounds really posh. It puts me in mind of country living - hand made wooden fitted kitchens, green wellingtons, range rovers, expensive pullovers, dogs, the girls away at public school, trugs, cut flowers, classical music and weekends. You know what I mean. I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with some of it (except possibly the Range Rover and the girls away at public school) but the sum total can be so nauseating.



Anyway, our central heating isn’t like that - it takes up half of a small barn. There’s a large, square, black tank that holds two thousand litres of fuel, then the boiler itself, an 1970s mustard yellow affair, standing about five feet tall with a mass of pipes coming out of it, and next to that a wood burner that we were warned hasn’t been used for about twenty years. Apparently, if we wanted to, we could switch back and forth between wood and oil at will. As long as the wood burner still works. It’s all quite industrial. There’s even a toilet built into the corner, and for me this underlines the industrialness of it all – it’s as though whoever is in attendance - and someone would have to be in attendance to keep shoving more wood into the wood burner - can’t leave the scene for long enough to go and use the domestic toilet in the house, so they have to use the industrial one on site, in the barn.
I should move the Studer out here, then I really could record with a smudge of soot on my face.

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