Thursday 19 July 2007

Girls are sugar and spice and all things nice and guitars are wood and wires!

The lyrics of my songs play a strange game with me, they go in and out of focus at different times. Sometimes they are just threads of rhyme and reason that are interwoven with the music to make a whole. Other times they stand out in stark contrast to the music and I get a new insight, just like a fan might, and I think, “Did I write that?”
Elements like that are surprising and pleasing when writing and performing songs and I sometimes say to myself, "you’ll leave that all behind if you stop playing".

True, but I went through the nineties without playing and I survived.

True, but I was probably impoverished in some way because of it.

Taken once a day vitamin Cminor 7th is guaranteed to keep the blues away.

I caught myself looking longingly at a brand new Gibson Les Paul this very lunch time. I was in Tones music shop buying some strings for my current guitars.
Once I realised I was doing it I quickly looked away, feeling like a cheat, like I’d been admiring and longing for another woman. This analogy is not perfect I might add as I have three guitars but I do not have three women who share my bed. I must admit to using this metaphor regarding guitars before but it is a way to describe the closeness I feel to my instruments without appearing to be one string short of an Ernie Ball ‘Not Even Slinky’ set.


Guitars are very personal though and coveting another person’s only works if you love the model itself. Richard Holgarth, guitarist with Eddie and the Hot Rods recently invited me to admire a wall full of his Gibson SG guitars. I just stood there admiring the wall for taking the weight, not what he had in mind.

It was nonsense for me to fantasize buying a new Les Paul, not just because it cost £1,500 but also that I am trying to give up playing with the Neurotics, still old habits die hard and the lines of that famous guitar are very seductive.


When you think how much technology has changed over the years, whether it be computers, recording studios, the apparatus (apparatus that’s an old technology word) we play music on, the formats on which it is available, synthesizers and samples. It is comforting that we still want to make an ungodly racket with a piece of wood with wires strung on it.

Long may it be so.


1965

I blinked first. Why should it be me that does it? I bleated unconvincingly.
Because it's your fucking turn you moron. I did the first dare and jumped into Patty and Parkins yard and I came out with a handful of wood and some rare Green Kryptonite.

( that was true, he did come out of their premises with a strange dark green plastic square that shed it's outer layer to expose a lighter green underneath and it ticked when you placed it up to your ear. I didn't like being near it, if it was green kryptonite I had so little power as it was that, I couldn't afford to have anything else taken away!)

and Graham climbed the roof of the service bays and ran right the way to the other end.

You ain't done nuffing!
I have, I've done loads of stuff, you know I have!

That was yesterday, this is today!

Oh you’re so useless we may as have a girl with us cissy boy, never mind I’ll do it…

There was a moment left to save this, I either do as they say or pay the consequences, it was quite simple. I just needed to find the courage.

In my mind to do it or not to do it was like a tug of war but the rope wasn’t moving

It was a waste of time, I’d pay the consequences anyway, they’d just be different consequences.

I let go of the rope.

Oh for heavens sake, give it to me. I said,

They dropped the stuff into my hands as they stumbled backwards.


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