20 June 2007
 
  Why?  
 
It’s been like a big experiment – a three month experiment. I‘ve had the usual emails asking if I’m alright, and couple enquiring as to whether or not I’m still alive. I couldn’t tell if those were taking the piss or not but I was tempted to invent a name, open a hotmail account or whatever and send an email stating that I’d passed away and that the cremation would be taking place next Thursday, no flowers please, donations to The Starving Musicians Benevolent Fund followed by my Paypal details.

But I didn’t – instead I wrote back saying how I’ve been having a rest and I’d be back to regular updates shortly and soon etc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased that people care enough to bother sending an email. And I’m sure that they’re pleased that I care enough to reply. It’s just that I’m having the greatest difficulty in regularly updating this site in the face of the puerile idiocy which is what the worldwide web has now become.

I get sucked into it as much as everyone else. I know I’m not alone – my own daughter, Luci, rails on about it too. I’m not going to put a link to her myspace so that you can follow a fascinating trail of weaving, wode-laden whimsy through virtual no man’s land – I’ll just lift it and shove it in as a quote:

 
 
I'm sure many people have written blogs about this before.. but isn't it amazing just how much Myspace zaps your time and energy... and, basically, all your life away?..
I only came on the computer to check my mail, and maybe glance nonchalantly over a few job websites (show willing and all that YAWN) .. only to glance down at the clock in the corner of the screen to notice that 4... yes 4 VALUABLE HOURS of my life have seemed to evaporate and float away into the ether...
Now, that's 4 fucking hours that i wont get back.. myspace, unfortunately, doesn't offer that service. However, the most disappointing thing about all this is that i haven't gained one single thing from this elusive missing time.. i mean, i kind of have i guess.. for example, i now know that there is a family guy video to the tune of Scatman which i saw on someone's myspace, then spent the best part of an hour searching utube for... (when is "the best part" of the hour anyway... ?) i also found a picture of myself on dontstayin.com looking very erm "excited" about being at a Hixxy gig. I also found a very interesting site about a kind of Neighbours- based musical thing...
This is all well and good, but being unemployed, i seem to carry around this air of guilt for not using my days productively...I feel like a waste of space if i don't do anything... and these actions do not contribute to a fulfilling., action packed, mind- stimulating, ambition enhancing day. its just filling up the nooks and crannies of my brain with POINTLESS shite.

ha, I've just realised that the most ironic thing about all this is that i'm here right now writing about it, wasting yet more time!

oh, i do make myself laugh. Bom shanker and all dat ting xx
 
 

She’s a chip off the old block (except that I’m not a block and she’s not a chip). Luci put it into words – I remember talking with her on the phone just before that appeared on her myspace. And I will give you her myspace link because anyone who likes me would like my lovely daughter and should be friends with her. Even if it’s only virtual and virtual is, I’m beginning to realise, just another word for pretend. So here’s the link:
  
   
 
And this is the thing. Or this is two things. Time for columns – I’ve always wanted to do it like this.		  

I’ve been at this website business for a long time now. I’ve got Tony Judge to thank for that (must give him a call – it’s been so long that my guilt has turned into paralysis…) Tony started the site in 1996. He wrote a nice letter to me asking for my permission.
We talked on the phone - he said, I want to start a website about you on the internet. He already had a site dedicated to Stiff Records and I was his favourite Stiff so the next logical step was to dedicate a site to me.
That’d be great I said, er…what exactly is it?
Because not many people had websites then. The internet was something I’d vaguely heard of, a bit like colour TV back in 1965.
So he started the site and I used to ride my bicycle across ten miles of wind and rain-lashed French countryside to go and have a look at it at my friend Lo’s house. Actually I just put that shit about bicycles and bad weather in to give the story a bit of colour – I usually drove there in the clapped-out Fiat Panda you’ll have seen on the cover of my 1998 album, Karaoke (if you're lucky enough to own a copy – it’s very rare). Sometimes the weather was hot and then I might have riden there on my bike – I might even have stopped of at the market in Senonches to get some things for lunch. And when I got there Lo would fire up the internet, or dial it up or whatever on this little beige TV thing called a MacKintosh, with a typewriter keyboard attached to it. She'd suggest a cup of tea while the pages loaded up and we’d sit there on the verandah, miles from everything that seemed to matter to the rest of the world with birds singing all around us, and have some lunch. Then we’d go and have a look at what Tony had been up to.
At first he used to write everything himself. Writing wasn't really Tony's forte - he'd be the first to admit it. I didn’t realise what was going on, but every so often he’d call me and in the course of conversation I’d tell him what I’d been up to and he’d relay what I told him as best he could to the small gang of eager fans who were hip to this fantastic new technology. I was appalled sometimes at the things he was letting people know but it didn’t bother me too much because most of the fans were spread out across America – nobody else had the internet. The world wasn’t yet computer literate.
But as the internet took a hold the audience grew and I began to see possibilities. I started writing stuff myself. It was fantastic – for the first time I had a mouthpiece, a direct communication that wasn’t filtered through some second rate journalist with all the misquotes and half-truths that that usually entails. I could say what I thought about things, tell the world what my life was really like, and how I felt about everything, put an end to conjecture.
In 1998 I left France and come back to live in England. I had too, it wasn’t possible to carry on living on fresh air. I had to put myself back in the market place, as they used to say out there in the heady world of rock and pop. It was traumatic, coming back, but I suppose it all worked out for the best in the end. Not that this is the end.
Tony liked my input and enthusiasm. He fitted me up with a computer. The firm he worked for were upgrading everything. Once I had my own computer that was it – I wrote and wrote and wrote. I thought it was hilarious – I wrote about what a cunt Tony Blair was, about going shopping, about changing the oil in the car. I wrote about anything I felt like, gigs, how I felt in the middle of a set in some horrible club when I’d be trying to struggle through to some sort of conclusion with a lot of drunken morons shouting at me. I’d write about the journey to the gig, the journey home, and illustrate the whole thing with drawings made on the computer. I was embracing the technology, but I did the drawings with the mouse using the Microsoft Paint programme. It made a mockery of the whole thing – the drawings looked homemade. A few years later when the website designer was invented I used to get offers from suave individuals who felt sorry for me – or were stupid enough to think they could make a quick buck out of me. The word crappy was used more than once referring to the look of my site. It was punk all over again - they didn’t get it.
I think I had it sussed out then. Sometimes people complained that my site wasn’t clear and easy to navigate – I used to refer them to Hospital Trust sites where you could get the information and get out quick. Anyone who wanted that didn’t want to be entertained so they had no business looking at my site. I figured that once you stripped away the top dressing – Flash animations and suchlike – what the internet was good for was words and pictures. So that’s what I did. A digital camera was way beyond my budget and so was a scanner, so mostly it was drawings, wacky graphics and the odd photo that I managed to download or had sent to me.
Now everyone’s at it and what I used to call the News Page, in keeping with some kind of concept I had in the back of my mind of the site being a low grade local newspaper, is now called a blog, and I find this deeply unattractive. The word blog is vaguely suggestive of a blocked toilet and I don’t want to have anything to do with the idea.
And because everybody’s at it, and the minutiae of somebody else’s life, carefully documented and made available for the whole world to read without even leaving their house, is suddenly commonplace. For me the joke has worn itself out - perhaps I've told it too many times.
  
I left the UK last December and went back to the kind of life I had in France in the eighties and nineties. (Hand to mouth in rented accommodation.) I've begun to realise how tired I was - grinding along doing this and that, every stupid thing I had to do tumbling over every other stupid, trivial Thing Of Great Importance that called for my immediate attention. Some of the things I was doing were things I wanted to do - recording, writing, going out and playing live, gardening, sorting out the house... but whatever it was I was doing I would quite often have a nagging guilt in my mind telling me that I should be doing something else.
I was working hard, chasing after gigs, going out and doing them, wondering where it was all heading. Late at night I'd watch a crappy film. I'd all but given up on reading books because my eyesight was fucked from hours at the computer - writing, recording and trying to keep pace with all the emails that were coming in. I never could keep up with them and I've still got a collection of unanswered emails going back three years or more, sitting there in a file reminding me to keep the guilt level up. I don't think I'm ever going to answer them but I was so glad to get them that deleting them would seem callous.
Anyway, all this hard work and in the end I was lucky if I could manage all the bills - I was spiraling into debt. Sometimes I was playing for so little money that by the time I'd paid all the expenses I was only just breaking even. I've never gone out of my way to earn a fortune but everyone needs to earn a living and I decided a long time ago that I'm prepared to forsake the chance of earning a good living for the pleasure of scraping by doing something I like doing.
Except there never seemed to be time to do the things I like because of all the other stuff that crowded in.
So I had to sit back for a while and figure it out. I've read more books in the last six months than I have in the past three years. I've had my first comic strip published in an annual book from Switzerland entitled Milk & Wodka. http://www.cookieluck.ch/milkandwodka
I'm appalled by the English ex-pats over here - a lot of them are morons that came for cheap wine, cheap houses and enough sun to give themselves skin cancer. You can always spot them - they walk bent with round-shoulders, wary because Johnny Foreigner's out to do them down. They talk loudly in English in shops, cafes and restaurants and drive white vans full of building equipment. The ones that aren't "builders" are mostly retired - the woman are all bottle-blonde, the men wear white vests. Copious alcohol consumption coupled with sunburn and high blood pressure turns them into a raw red mess. We saw a crowd of them in a bar the other night looking like a butchers shop window.
They've got their own badly written magazine edited by a pompous fuckwit. It's called Etcetera. I've started my own - Ex-Lax (regular reading for ex-pats). My editor's called Malcolm Purvis - I got his picture from an internet dating site for the over fifties. Ex-pats who've read the bigoted ramblings of Malcolm Purvis have been furious. The fact that the magazine comes from the village of Cognac la Purge should give them some idea but they still don't get it. People can't understand that the whole thing has come out of my head, right down to the the ads, the classified ads and even Dave and Fiona Pierce who run the British Shop in Cognac la Purge where, if you get there early enough, you may even be able to snap up a copy of the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile Amy and I have been recording and I've managed to write a couple of new songs - and I didn't have to do it in the middle of the night after a day fulfilling obligations. And I didn't feel obligated to write them.
And neither did I feel obligated to do this update. I've been having a rest, sorting out my priorities, having a laugh...


 
But just in case you're thinking that life's all wonderful, or that I'm never going to write again, here's a tale of everyday idiocy that I started in April and never got round to finishing or putting on the site:
  
 

The latest UK tour was a tough but at least it didn't end in violence like the last one. We spent most of the time either in the car doing ninety and a hundred miles an hour, doing the sound check, waiting to play, actually playing, or in whichever hideous hotel we happened to end up in.
The hotels weren't all hideous - just two of them. The Studio in Hartlepool is a strange affair. Normally someone who's had something to do with booking the show turns up on the night, but not in Hartlepool. It was all left up to the soundman, the lighting man and the bar staff who were very nice, but nobody could supply us with the wherewithal to even make a cup of tea.
Our friend Graham Beck (who I first played with back in 1973 when we were art students in Hull) came along to Dipton and Hartlepool and played piano and organ. I've got a fabulous clip of the three of us playing Hit 'n' Miss Judy in Hartlepool filmed by Patrick Waldron on his camera phone. The quality is pretty fantastic. I'm trying to find a way to upload it on to something - either here or myspace but it looks like a weeks work at least because the files are too big. Sometimes technology bores me rigid. At its worst it's time-consuming and unproductive.
And so are cars. I'm just recovering from a two day holiday in a motel at the Newport Pagnell services on the M1. I borrowed a van to go and pick some stuff up from a storage space in England. It was going to be the easiest thing in the world - a drive up to the coast, quick ferry crossing, wizz up to Norfolk, pleasant evening with friends, load the van the next day and hike on back to France via Leicester where I was picking up some racing car wheels for a friend of ours in France. The engine seized up on the M1. I was listening to Una Paloma Blanca at the time on the Euro Pop cassette that we were listening to when the Volvo engine fucked up last December. A bit of an eerie coincidence, I think the cassette's haunted. I'm not going to listen to it again unless I'm riding as a passenger in the vehicle of someone I don't like, and the inconvenience caused by a total breakdown of their vehicle will be offset by the malicious satisfaction that might be achieved by me. I'd have to dislike them a lot.
I don't know if anyone knows Newport Pagnell - I can't think that it's the kind of place that people who read this stuff ever go and visit. The town centre is a twenty minute walk from the northbound services where the motel is. You cross a bridge over the motorway and walk through a kind of living museum of twentieth century housing in Merrie Englande. You turn left at a pub called The Red House, past large mock tudor houses where once the G & T set who I'm sure used to frequent the Red House used to live. I fancied I could hear the ghost - I'll have a swift half with you Betty, that's very kind... Back in the seventies that was the kind of pub where the landlord would order someone like me into the public bar for fear that, in my dishevelment, I might leave a stain in the Axminster. Now they take anyone they can get - not that they were going to get me as a customer.
  
     
 
 
 


My friend Nick who lives down the road, and whose father-in-law lent me the van, came to pick me up. He arrived with another borrowed van towing a large, decrepit looking trailer. We had to get the van back to a local garage for an autopsy because the it looked as though they'd fucked something up. As it turned out it would have been cheaper to leave it there and just give Nick's father-in-law the price of another old Renault van. But that's the value of hindsight.
I had to pay a hundred and sixty quid to get the van out of the car pound at Newport Pagnell Services. I forgot to say that I spent two nights at the Travel Lodge motel there, waiting for Nick to arrive. It's a real motel, just like the Crossroads Motel from the TV. A relic from the seventies, or possibly even the sixties. If you want to see it in all its shabby, unrefurbished glory you'll have to hurry because they we in process of renovating it while I was there. In two nights I got to know the staff - I can't remember their names or faces now of course because I'm a fickle, insincere showbiz tyke, but while I was there I began to feel like Alan Partridge, propping up the reception desk and making small talk. Well, there wasn't much to do after I'd had a look at whatever it is Newport Pagnell had to offer.
I had the van towed out into the lorry park and Nick arrived with the trailer. We loaded everything out of the broken van and into the new van and then winched the old van on to the trailer. The winch was hardly up to the job so that was exciting - if it had broken one of us could have been decapitated by the free-flying steel hawser, so that added an extra dimension of jollity and a touch of hysteria too. The lorry park stunk of piss - years of lorry drivers from all over Europe climbing down from their cabs in the middle of the night to piss on the tarmac. I found myself hoping that the pope lands there on his next visit. I suppose they'd clean it up if he did. But I'd like to think of him kissing the tarmac just as it was.
The trailer looked a trifle crushed under the weight of the broken van - the tyres were under-inflated but the air pump thing was out of service so we just set off as we were. Not much choice really. After a while we noticed that other drivers were sounding there horns and gesticulating at us. We were almost expecting it because we were fully aware that we looked like gypsies, fairground people or scrap metal dealers - the sort of people that Merrie Middle England doesn't have much time for - so we just laughed, gesticulated back and didn't let it bother us too much. Until we noticed the smoke.
It was lucky that the trailer had four wheels, two on each side, because we had to crawl along the hard shoulder at less than walking pace with a listing van atop a limping three wheeled trailer for about fifteen miles before we could get off the motorway and on to a garage forecourt.
The garage owner was very nice about it and I almost felt sorry for him when he discovered it was going to take a week for the part to arrive to repair the trailer and in the meantime he'd he'd have it sitting there with the old white van on top of it looking like a pikey scrap metal dealers wedding cake. (I suppose some cunt's going to complain about the word pikey now even though I was using it in a humorous and lighthearted fashion. But with luck that lot have stopped bothering about me, the most bitter man in showbiz).
We came home without the van and trailer assembly, arrived at five o'clock in the morning, When the van finally came home - on another trailer because the first one was un-repairable - the garage admitted negligence, fitted a new engine which ran for a full five minutes before it too seized up because they'd salvaged the drive belt from the old engine and put that on the new one in order to save twenty quid or so.
Last I heard that put a third engine in the van and that fucked up too. So I don't think we'll be taking the car there.

So that's the way it goes out here in the back of beyond. I hope that's enough of an update for the moment because it took me ages and I had to go out in the garden and pull up a few weeds up in between.