Thinking out of Lovebox

The thing about performing is that the thing is the thing. Like in the Deerhunter, when De Niro says, holding up the bullet “ This is This! This is this!”. But it’s hard to predict what the this will be. Sometimes the thing works and sometimes it doesn’t . But what’s always true is that you don’t know and (mostly) learn nothing from the experience in the sense that, while there’s a general sense of déjà vu, there’s rarely any actual replication. It’s not to say that you can’t recognise a situation, and have a situational response, maybe, to whatever ‘s happening, but specifically you have your eyes closed. Or open, even.
For example, there’s no point in looking at a formica table, where the rider sits, and wonder where the corkscrew is or why the wine is hot and not cold and think that the fact that it was different some other night makes any difference. You’re just snookered, is all. Get over it.


Tonight, at LoveBox, we’re sitting glumly in a Portacabin with a poisonous rain falling. This is a situational thing I can’t do anything about. We’re in this container because our “real” dressing room is a golf buggy ride away on the other side of Victoria Park and it can only be used for half an hour pre show! This is a new new thing. It's hopeless. Of course, this "real" dressing room, full of girly cushions, heating, lighting, corkscrews, grand pianos, wireless connectivity, chilled Puligny-Montrachet and a boxed set of The Wire etc, probably does not really exist, of course, like the moon landings or getting paid in 30 days. And why the 30 minute rule? Is it because Duran Duran are precious about their environment or something, and GOF might invade their personal space , and give them the heebie-jeebies? Not me, mate. Her Name Is Rio? Non!


Whatever, we opt for a Portacabin next to our stage. It has four stacking chairs ( because, I think, the promoter saw our name "Gang of Four" and thought we needed only four seats) four weak floor lights and one (! where are the other 3?) table with warm beer and wine on it. The floor is slick with water, mud & grass; it’s shite. & there’s no bottle opener. Thomas , our bass player, can open a bottle of beer on the rings on his fingers, a useful life skill; but he’s rubbish at poking a wine cork into a bottle. I blame the teachers.



Our set’s short’n’sweet . 45 minutes precisely. I do what I can to keep up. The sun goes down as we play , and the little lights our LD bought from a pound store twinkle in the microwave.



After us, Friendly Fires play . I introduce my daughter, a huge fan , to the singer, who is a very nice bloke. A picture is taken for Facebook. But , jeez, what am I doing , presenting a teenage girl to a rock and roll band!? I should be sectioned! I make our excuses and we split, super fast.

Don’t mention the War

Today, my I-Pod Shuffle throws me a line I can’t resist. The running order is impeccable, moving from Elvis Costello’s majestic “Shipbuilding” into Kenny Rogers’ masterpiece: “ Ruby, Don’t take Your Love To Town” .
The two songs, written years apart ,composed while events unfurled, on the ordinary lives of common people on the conveyor belts of war. Kenny’s character is a wheelchair- bound Vietnam Vet, back in the world, ruined and impotent, watching his woman doll herself up to find a man who still has some lead in his pencil . The drama’s cruel but underplayed , with none of the kitsch C&W bathos you’d expect. The vet sitsin a lonely room, waiting to die as the lights fade and his wife gets laid. It’s a fabulous and tormenting ( but maybe not intended to be) anti-war shout.
Elvis takes a different angle, focussing on the pathetic optimism of a man battered down by circumstance, hoping that maybe the Falklands war might turn around his life & he maybe will find work in the shipyard , which could mean “ A new winter coat and shoes for the wife and a bicycle on the boy’s birthday” . For this man, war's his only sad hope of doing any better. It's brilliant. The songs are just two examples of many across every musical genre.
Which brings into focus how pathetic contemporary musicians have been over the last 5 years. We’ve seen an illegal war in Iraq which has cost massive civilian bloodshed, cost trillions of dollars and cost us our security and peace of mind. And there’s hardly been a squeak on the subject. This isn’t nostalgia , it’s regret. Sometimes the music we get is what we deserve.

Someone just sent me the Youtube link to the cover of Damaged Goods by Hot Rats, the new outfit formed by Supergrass’s Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. It's all acoustic and spooky. I like it. We never made a video for DG, or any other song on our first 3 albums. Too expensive or something. A Magic Lantern show would have been more affordable and a relevant technology, the images flitting by , all herky jerky, married to Gill's fractured guitar & attacking bass. Duh-Duh Dink! Duh-Duh Dink!

The simple man
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to write a few words for The Independent newspaper about my favourite Neil Young song . It’s always hard to do this as different songs do different things for me at different times & a choice one day usually isn’t the same the next. Or from one minute to the next. But, that said, “The needle & the damage done” has to be up there among the best of many great tracks Neil has written, and the tune sits, insistently, on my I-Pod, demanding a regular outing. Like most of Neil’s work , the words are confessionally honest ; written in the first person, it’s the great man himself, talking about himself. Maybe the things he describes really happened. They probably did. Neil's tone of voice convinces you that he’s not a lifelong millionaire rockstar , spoiled by fate’s vomited generosities, but a simple guy , trying to tell it like it is, a plain talking man who might spill out his life to you over a beer and a game of pool. I see him in checked shirt and jeans, a Schlitz neon blinking blue-white over the bar, not wanting to head home, to a lonely bed. Now that the sad story’s told, I’m not sure I want to stay; things could, I feel, kick off at any point. I make my excuses and leave.

Searching for a metaphor

This September will be the anniversary of the release in the UK of the EMI version of Entertainment!
Gill & I want to celebrate this and will play 4 concerts , Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leamington Spa And The Forum, London, in which we’ll play the whole of the album. We’ll also play other stuff, so we may play 2 sets. There’ll be a re-released special edition of the album with a bunch of stuff from that time that strangely has only recently emerged , including multi-camera shoots of us onstage in the UK & US when we were cute. I don’t recall any of this having been done, which doesn’t say much, I guess. Seeing this will be a surprise for me, too.
Today, Gill & I are in his studio re-recording “ Glass “ as a bonus track for this special edition. We’re doing this because when we made Entertainment! we weren’t that sure about putting the original on the album, as it was the last survivor of music we’d been writing before we found our own sound. It was a little too this and a little too that. A little too much genre. The irritating skippy snare, like a gerbil on amphetamines, the too literal bass, mooching around like an audition for the Stuka’s , the overly musical guitar - which Wilco would have not approved of- and my lazy lyrics which used way too many metaphors before I’d escaped their tyranny.
Once we’d recorded this, we felt we’d let ourselves down by not pushing the ideas and parked the song for a long while and hardly played it live until we looked at it again , stripped it down and reinvented it. Embraced repetition. Dumped the winge factor. It became, we felt, a fine song . I even grew to like the lyics, especially “ Light myself a cigarette, nicotine really goes to my head” . It did. The eroticism of smoking. I’m pleased we can re-do this, give a tune away in a form that has time to live. There’s a metaphor in there. I just wish I knew what it is.

I watch The Who

So, I’m in the Arsenal Emirates stadium for the Teenage Cancer Trust fundraising dinner. Matt Lucas, of Little Britain, is the compere. He’s very funny, and a proper Gooner. The entire Arsenal first team is seated on a table just over there, looking trim. I get to meet Cesc Fabregas and have my picture taken with him.
On the table next to ours I shoot the breeze with the wonderful Feargal Sharkey, who is singlehandedly taking on the Government about protecting musicians’ rights against evil file sharers who think that it’s OK to pay for Mars Bars but not music. He and Andy Gill played an acoustic version of Teenage Kicks to confused UK MP’s in Parliament last week. I hope this helped change a few minds, as incredibly, it’s illegal in the UK to stand up and play a song in a pub or club without written police permission given in advance! You have to submit your name, address & , sinisterly, ethnic origin, before you can so much as whisper “Desperadoes”. How will you know you’ll be that pissed in advance? The law’s designed to stop the wrong kind of people ( i.e musicians or anyone else) singing the wrong kind of songs ( i.e any ) in the wrong places ( i.e anywhere) . Stasi-land or what?
Over there is the great Arsene Wenger sitting next to Roger Daltrey, who’s very committed to the Charity. The invite says that The Who will perform a set. I think this is a joke of sorts but it’s not. Roger & Pete Townsend hit the stage & play some of the greatest music ever written. The set is acoustic with 3 fine muso’s in support, one on stand-up bass and the others on Spanish guitars. Roger’s voice is as magisterial as ever, and is better now than ever. There are few signature voices like this. Pete’s guitar work is brilliant, a privilege to be so close to. . His lyrics inspired me as a teenager , and I still know more or less every song on Tommy off by heart. As a lifelong fan I can’t resists taking pix and a little bit of video on my mobile. Once a fan, always a fan. Thanks, guys.
Later I get to meet Arsene. I have a photo to prove it. He is incredibly nice and says to me“ You know the Who? They are very big in France”. Sensational evening!

All Tomorrow's Parties, Minehead

The Butlins Holiday camp in Minehead reminds me of my childhood. We always had family holidays these places , hectares of family chalets or caravans clustered around an all-weather “entertainment” hub rammed with one-armed bandits where depressed mothers and fathers tried to keep their sugar-stoked children occupied as the chill rain poured interminably down. Looking for an alternative to this led to the invention of the Costa Brava and the fall of Franco .
Which means that ATP have found the perfect site for a May festival in England. Today, of course, it’s pissing down, but the punters have somewhere dry to sleep and party and mooch about in between shows. What’s unusual about ATP is that it’s a music festival for people who actually love music ; and the curators of this weekend’s shows , The Breeders, have done well. A lot of fun is being had, the Brechtian delights of the complex are surely not being overlooked, the lineup is interesting, the production is good, they’ve read our rider and there’s a bottle opener , too. Sensational!
Gill & me have an hour long interview for a Franco-GermanTV series on post-punk that will be broadcast next year. The interviewer asks surprisingly interesting questions . This is too much. I have nothing to moan about. Even our management is doing a good job. It's not right.

We’re on stage for an hour & the fine audience - aficionados , all - get right into the cracked drama of Army – in which I don't drop playing on the four - and to Andy’s improvised genius guitar on Anthrax & to What We All Want , which funks out magnificently , drums’n’bass locked together in a devilish embrace. the rhythm section do good. Damaged Goods is the final song; we don't have time for To Hell With Poverty. Another day. We are born across the grave, there is a brief flash of light, and then all is dark.