Culture Show… oh god.

Quick preamble because it’s a red letter day: Monmouth Coffee has finally reached Brighton, albeit in a small way. Coffee@33, so fresh on Trafalgar Street they don’t have a business card or website yet, is using Monmouth’s espresso blend and - joy of joys - they reckon they can sell me a kilo of any Monmouth single estate beans/grind without a mark-up, if I give them a week’s notice. Trafalgar Street is notoriously tough to crack, so if you’re a Brighton coffee ponce and want to taste something to compete with Red Roaster (well, better than really, though in not such nice surroundings), check it out and, once you’ve seen the light, encourage them to train down the whole range.

I know I’ve got on the Culture Show’s arse before in The Morning Star about their overall turdiness but this week takes the fucking biscuit. I was so excited about the David Simon interview. The Wire sits alongside The West Wing as my favourite TV ever and those in the know will agree, Simon is not only one of the finest television writers but has revitalised the whole art. Well…

“…he now stands accused of breaking the laws of writing for TV. David Simon has been detained by The Culture Show for questioning.” 

Geddit!?

Yes, Lauren Laverne does the eight-minute interview (with heavy clips, so less than two minutes of actual insight from the subject) in a mock-up Police interview room, using a cassette of ‘controversial’ statements and challenging him on ‘breaking TV writing laws’. For fuckedy-fuckedy-fuck’s sakes!

Laverne: “We’ve intercepted a few of your communications… That is your voice on that tape… Can you explain yourself?”

Cripes chief, can someone put the programme-makers out of my misery?

Simon patiently plays along (“This may be something you’ll have to lock me up for…”) but, Christ, I wish he’d pulled rank and told them to fuck right off. The man had fascinating, probably important themes to develop, if they’d only let him.

“Wherever an institution has been given free sway, it has devoured individuals.” 

Yesterday I watched the first episode of Generation Kill, new HBO mini-series based on the book by Rolling Stone journo Evan Wright, who was ‘embedded’ with US marines during the invasion of Iraq. Adapted by Ed Burns and David Simon, it is vivid, downbeat, realistic, without over-embellishment and, so far, bloody brilliant. They are reaching toward truth - and can TV drama do any more than that? 

Surprise, no mention of this series in the interview. And since the only actual Wire plug was Season 5 starting on the FX Channel, it makes me wonder if the BBC has bought the rights to show the whole of The Wire from Season 1 in the near future and was getting some early familiarisation in, without telling us. At least that would be cash well spent.

The thing is, like Mark Kermode, who is one of the best critics on telly, Lauren Laverne’s no gimp, she can run a show and pull off a heavyweight interview when needs be. The Chris Addison chat in the same show is absolutely fine. Now she has to face whichever monkeys are throwing out shit idea after shit idea and stand them down. It’s time to climb off the gimmicks. This was the first time I’ve seen David Simon on British TV, though admittedly I haven’t gone looking. Now wouldn’t it have been fantastic if it was a straightforward lengthy and detailed interview. I’m tired of your weak shit!

By the way, same programme: if you take a talented folksy sounding new band (Clare & The Reasons) and give them their first TV exposure, please give us a teensy bit of background and PLEASE let them sing one of their own fucking songs, instead of a Tears For Fears cover given a sub Michael Andrews acoustica treatment. And could we have more homegrown bands please, instead of obsessing with already-signed American acts?

Honestly, someone should give me a TV channel.

 

ETS CEO Kurt Landgraf

After yesterday’s blog I got an extraordinary email from a friend, who is working as a temp at the coalface of this disaster - he’s responding to enquiry phonecalls from teachers who’ve had problems with their exam results. Because he’s signed a confidentiality agreement, I’m not putting his content in the blog but it is seriously shocking what has gone on at ETS. So, a bit of digging and…

Since the news agencies haven’t put any faces or names to the ongoing exam results fiasco, here you go, this is the man to ‘talk to’ if you see him:

“Tests and quality go hand in hand. At ETS, we’re doing our part.”
Kurt Landgraf, President and CEO, ETS

Read HERE what Angelfire.com said about him as long ago as 2003. 

And an excerpt: “…In 1997, the parasite was investigated by The New York Times over concerns about the fairness and interpretation of its testing products.  In the articles emerging from that investigation, Nordheimer and Franzdelivered a stinging condemnation of ETS for its failure to correct profitable misconceptions about the meaning and precision of the tests, and for concealing the incidence of cheating.  In 1999, Education Week reporter David Hoff released details of the “non-profit’s” burgeoning wealth in an article entitled, “Testing ETS.”  Earlier, in 1985, David Owen had lambasted the company in a bitingly negative review (None of the Above).  The media has had nothing good to say about ETS, because there is nothing good to say about ETS.”

Perhaps the idiot Brits hiring ETS should have done a bit of background, say, a Google search, before selling out our education system to money-grubbing super-rich Yank corporation pretending to be non-profit.

euch

At 2000 Trees Festival, Manx Stef and I had lunch with a bunch of Gloucestershire guys. Inevitably conversation slid its way around to last year’s floods. The issue the lads wanted to make clear was how poorly their local community had responded to the disaster, especially in terms of cliched assumptions like ‘pulling together’ or ‘uniting in the face of adversity’. Mains water was switched off and everyone suddenly relying on huge water containers placed in the street. Instead of polite queues and convivial atmosphere of Brits under duress, there were a lot of rows and fights about where the water should be, and how much water each person/family could take. They said a lot of people stole more than their fair share, without any media coverage, until an Asian bloke took too much, at which point he was plastered across local press and scapegoated. They also said people were very thuggish, some posting ‘guards’, some even pissing and throwing rubbish in the water containers. Their account chimes with other things we’ve heard around the UK about the flooding. 

The other day, I saw an internal email which had been sent around a small company in Lewes, warning people to keep the door shut and on latch when they went out for lunch, because of the annual visit of travellers to the area. Transient people have a negligable effect on crime rates in that town - just as many crimes take place when they’re not there. Meanwhile, the company in question trades with multinational corporations selling arms, oil and pharmaceuticals, that make thousands upon thousands of peoples’ lives drastically worse across the world in the name of profit. Sometimes, when their suppliers (designers and web programmers) find out who they’re being asked to work for, they back out on ethical grounds, despite the loss of income. 

I think the people who shout about the ‘broken society’ - the right-wing media and its frightened readership, socially conservative pricks and anti-immigrant fact benders - are the very people who caused it in the first place, with their money-grubbing, greed-oriented divide-and-rule sleight-of-hand strategy where money is more important than people.

Anything to distract from the Grand Evils of the multinationals and corporations, manipulating this unsustainable oil economy to make as much personal profit as they can, before the whole thing collapses.

On Mauritius, variants on the phrase “You eaten yet?” are standard greetings, as commonly used as “Hello!” because, during historical periods of extreme poverty, it was a way of making sure your neighbours didn’t go hungry, without them having to beg. It’s obvious that what we’ve lost through the rise of Greed Culture and Debt Culture is far, far greater than what we gain by being able to watch a massive television or drive a landrover around the city.

We all deserve to be stabbed by a hoodie.

I realise I’m struggling to be coherent on this issue but I’m trying to write something more useful and it’s not coming together yet.

If it hadna been for flash company

An oddly solitary summer so far, despite being very busy. During the week I keep realising I’ve done two or three daytimes in a row without actually speaking to anyone, from when Rifa leaves til when she gets home. It’s not quite loneliness - but certainly disconcertingly isolating. I’m also hamstrung half the time by a vicious cashflow fuck-up. You might’ve thought - being a stride more successful now than I’ve been before - that I’d've sorted out the money thing, but no, it only takes a couple of cock-ups and a burst tyre on the 303 to stick me right back on the line. Note to self: still not good enough at building in fiscal safety nets. Anyway it’s the mighty Tim Victor’s stag tonight and hooking up with human males is exactly what I need, though they’ll be a mess by the time I get there.

Recently, two unusual little mentions of me on Drowned In Sound have made me stop and think about the company I keep, both in life and in other peoples’ perceptions. I’ve enjoyed reading DiS forever, since it started really. Years ago, I even wrote a bunch of reviews and articles for it (under a different name - they didn’t know it was me and I didn’t review myself or anything!) and I think it anticipated the direction both music and journalism have travelled, over the last 5 years, far better than more corporate efforts like NME.com. Particularly in terms of building an interactive readership and merging conventional journalism with open source content, DiS should probably be seen as truly pioneering. Original editor Sean didn’t like my stuff but he was polite/friendly and never nasty or anything (we haven’t met in the flesh) and, over the years, some of the very best-written pieces about me (positive and negative) have been on DiS.

Anyway, these two mentions are making me ponder the difference between ‘company’ (your friends/colleagues/partners in life/musicians you actually associate with) versus ‘company’ (other musical acts outsiders might connect you with or place you beside, for whatever reason).

The first was long-standing senior Gareth’s thread about “classic DiS bands” that included me in his list, along with Idlewild, Bright Eyes, Radiohead and Reuben (!!). His slightly screwy definition of ‘classic’ was about having been heavily covered in DiS at some point but not innovating, or something (Radiohead!?) but it was well lush to be included. However, the thing that really catches my attention is the Flash Company I’m put in - because in lists like that, I’m so often the token obscure one, who fewest people have heard of. Certainly DiS readers! In those circles, even Reuben are better known than me: maybe more older acoustic/folky fans know my songs but they’ve sold out places like The Astoria.

Then the other mention was another incongrous list but this time it takes the biscuit. Gets my goat. Gears grinding. In a (really harsh) review of Luke Leighfield’s single, reviewer KK (who the fuck?) mentions me in passing, alongside Get Cape and - deep breath - pause to load up a big fat shotgun - Scouting For Fucking Girls! Obviously there’s a nasty (quite funny actually) description as well: he wants us to die (suffocating, tied up in front of a mirror I think). But that’s not important. This is important: Scouting For Girls? SCOUTING FOR CLUMPING UBER REPETITIVE INANE DUMBO PIANO BASHING DOFF-DOFF-DOFF FUCKTARDERY GIRLS!?

So. I know it’s unprofessional but I’m calling you out, “KK”, you custard-thick substandard shit-stick of a hack you… you’re not too big or too old for me to put you over my knee and give you a good hard thrashing. I’m serious. If I learn who you are, and we’re in the same room or field, and you don’t surround yourself with muscle very fast, I’m going to give you a spanking, my friend. Bare arse and everything. No belts or paddles, but you’ll pray you weren’t born. The relentless teethgrinding trite-city that is S******* F** G***s? I tell you, you’ll be wishing you’d never even typed their name out so close to mine, as your tearful friends rub antiseptic cream into your aching butt-cheeks. You are fuckked.

Anyway everyone, please don’t forget I’m now available for childrens’ songwriting workshops. ;o)

x

the meat trade

Having a fun time on tour, to the extent that me and Thomas have vaguely talked about taking it to the USA in autumn - now that would be wicked. So far on this tour I’ve seen 9 lizards of one kind or another, which must be a record.

In Glasgow we managed to lock the keys in the van - left them still in the ignition! This was because the key had a hairline crack, so we’d got in the habit of locking and unlocking doors from the inside, to reduce wear until we had a chance to get a couple new keys made. After swearing quite a lot and getting nowhere with the AA, we just left the van outside the house overnight (you couldn’t see the key in the dark and it was a posh area), then I got up at 5.45am to watch the van til we could phone a mobile locksmith. £45 later, we were rescued - and of course it took him about 15 seconds to get in, with one of those scary locksmith devices.

Then we went and got new keys cut. We were told that the key cutting man used to be an infamous local pimp before retiring into ironmongery. What a career change!

So it’s a week later and, during our day off, I catch up on laundry and watch some films. Across town, Thomas makes a gourmet meat paté from a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall book. Thomas White is a meat freak, people… he’s got a dream and it involves a whole pig’s head. I suggest (how good an idea is this!?) that we cut the paté into manageable slices, clingfilm it up, put a sticker on it saying “Thomas White Paté” and sell it on the merch. That would SO rule, at least for the few days before it went off in the van.

What is it with classic fantasy literature being ruined by shitty films? It grinds my gears! Watched The Golden Compass and Studio Ghibli’s dismally embarrassing attempt at Tales From Earthsea in the last few days and they both need someone to get a severe beating for their sheer shiteness. Goro Miyazaki (son of their legendary master Hayao Miyazaki) is simply not up to the job. I can see why Ursula Le Guin was so uncomfortable with the cartoonised Earthsea - I wonder where Pullman stands on The Golden Compass.

When we were kids, our house had a ban on any Disney cartoons that adapted (read: ‘fucked up bigtime’) classic books, like Winnie-The-Pooh and The Jungle Book. Good move T-T Snrs, I’ll be carrying that one forward if I ever have sprogs of my own. There’s honestly not much worse in the world than a Walt Disney re-imagining of Winnie-The-Pooh, it’s on a par with Robert Mugabe or those idiots in Burma.

The Lizards, The Scientologist and Marc Riley

Me and Tom White jump in the Electric Soft Parade van (a well customised and lived-in Merc sprinter that steers like a dream compared to the last one I drove) and head north for the first leg of our co-headline tour. I’m increasingly secure driving these beasts and after the last blog entry, I’ve started planning a coffee-table picture book of tour splitters and their bands. Awesome idea, Chris.

Before leaving town we scoot across to Metway Studio, where Tom’s brother Alex is demoing with The Pipettes, to drop him off a spare guitar. Chatting outside the van on a sunny Brighton morning, suddenly a lizard runs along the pavement. It’s about 3 inches long.

We get to York in reasonable time but then the Satnav (she’s called Madame Swish) lets us down (that’s twice so far) and it takes 40 minutes to find the venue. They’re nice about it though - lucky we’re acoustic or there’d've been no chance of getting checked. I forgoe a soundcheck, so my set is entirely acoustic, but it goes well and I enjoy myself more than expected.

Tom reprises his monumental Nina Simone cover, which took the room apart in south London a couple of days before, in a venue that didn’t deserve us.

In the evening Charlie phones to tell me a funny story: walking with his daughter, they spotted a lizard in the street. I can’t believe it, it’s a 2 lizard trip.

After York, we’re hosted by Sam and his friends, who’ve just finished college. It’s a household of musicmakers and fans, yet it’s spotless and comfortable - which is rare - and you can feel a slight air of sadness that they’re about to go separate ways. 

The next morning, eating breakfast in a café, we’re leaning into a conversation about appalling religions and obviously Scientology comes up, thinking about that poor kid who is being taken apart by The Met for waving a banner at a protest that used the word ‘cult’ with reference to Hubbard’s Hoons. Suddenly the middle-aged woman on the adjacent table introduces herself with a broad smile - she runs York Scientology Centre. Cripes! She launches into a broad defence of her ‘faith’ that within one minute is becoming a brazen attempt to recruit. That took balls, it must be said. Well, either balls or the funneled focus of unquestioning faith. She’s full of holes but friendly and (I think) sincere. Her starting point plays down the religious side almost entirely - describing instead a benign business networking opportunity and a chance to self-improve. Quickly though, she openly accepts some of the looming tenets I find most disturbing, while determinedly dressing them up as positive spirituality.

Interestingly, despite running a centre in a town, she is still a volunteer and not doing her OT levels (or whatever they’re called) yet - so one gets a real feel for how deep members have to go before they start to gain any ‘intuition’. No answers, anyway.

I’m not going to call her the 3rd lizard of the trip because that would be mean (!)… But the whole time we were talking (which must have been at least 30 minutes), her companion - an unsmiling younger man - sat silent and still, not reading or even looking around curiously, waiting for her to finish, seemingly eternally patient. If you told me he hadn’t blinked I wouldn’t have been surprised. Or that he can re-grow his leg if you bite it off.

We say goodbye and drive to Manchester. Matt Thwaites’ band Restlesslist are doing Marc Riley’s show on BBC6Music this evening and Tom is drumming. On the way, we do a quick stop-off at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where a young sheep escapes and has to be harried back through an open gate by punters. Then we rumble over the Pennines and park up at the Beeb, where we head for the bar.

Restlesslist are storming, doing complex, instrumental psyche prog-pop (spacerock?). Bloody ace - and it’s nice to meet Marc. Refreshing to see a DJ at that level actually playing entirely from CDs (and some bloody brilliant ones to boot) and just wanting to talk music, not bollocks.

And when that’s done we’ve got to make it to Glasgow for midnight…

 

UK Police try to ban political film

I wasn’t going to post again until we were on the road - but this is fucking shocking:

For weeks, the Duke Of York’s Cinema in Brighton has been advertising a free screening (on March 17) of a locally-made political documentary film, On The Verge, about a long-running protest against a Sussex arms manufacturer. A few days ago, shortly before the screening, Brighton & Hove Council environmental health officer Martin New phoned up the cinema and said that because the film was uncertificated, the screening would have to be cancelled, or the council would revoke the cinema’s licence.

But we’re not talking some dodgy film club in a bar here, the Duke Of York’s is the longest continuously running cinema in the UK, owned by the Picturehouse chain and absolutely central to indie movie-going in Sussex. Down here, it’s an institution. And of course, they regularly do uncertificated screenings (with far more ‘adult’ content than a doc about some protestors) without any problems or criticism from anyone in the council.

Allegedly, cinema managers even offered to add a home-made ‘18+ only’ certificate to the film to keep the screening on - but this was turned down. The screening was cancelled! They showed the film twice upstairs in a local pub instead, until that was stopped too, allegedly by some kind of threat.

It turns out, Brighton & Hove Council were put up to it by Sussex Police, who phoned them about the screening. At first, local cop Chief Inspector Taylor told the Argus newspaper that the Police “played no part in the controversial cancellation” but they were soon forced to admit this was not true, when Green Party councillor Keith Taylor spilled the beans that the phonecall did take place. Pathetically, then Police blamed it on a “junior officer based out of town” to get their CI off the possibility of being seen as a shameful fucking liar in the local paper.

Even more ominously, in the few days since, threatening Police phonecalls have popped up all over the UK, as the film tours around community centres, church halls and arthouse cinemas. As I type this, they’ve tried to ban it in Oxford and Bath (where it only survived by moving venue to a Quaker Meeting House), succeeded in banning it in Southampton.

I didn’t get to see On The Verge but obviously, as a doc, it’s not going to have much blood, gore or hardcore sex in it. The reason no-budget indie filmmakers can’t get a certificate is the sheer cost of applying (over £1000), which is why - in reality - places like the Duke Of York’s ARE perfectly within their rights to screen uncertificated films in many circumstances, including if they’re shown for free or to members.

Got to wonder what exactly is in this movie, that Sussex Police want rid of so desperately they’d mobilise their colleagues across the UK and make a mockery of freedom of speech.

Got to wonder what exactly is going on in Brighton Council that, over and over again, they try to stifle and control local culture. From April 11th, you can’t give people flyers outside a gig without applying and paying for permission.

an Easter message of love and joy

Happy Easter! Egg hunt time…

Apart from all the chocolate and Bill Hicks’ jokes about six foot bunnies and what Jesus would make of everyone wearing crosses, Easter always makes me think of Sinead O’Connor (years ago) being booed off by a New York crowd at a Bob Dylan tribute concert and responding by stopping the house band and belting out Bob Marley’s ‘War’. Despite being the sort of people who’d pay to see a tribute gig for a ‘protest singer’, the audience attacked her because the week before, she’d highlighted child abuse within the Catholic Church on a TV show by tearing up a picture of the Pope. If you’ve never seen this, it’s well worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCk2YQS8vaw

Jesus Christ only got angry once. It’s one of the most consistently documented stories about him, present in all four Gospels and other accounts of his life, giving it greater historical weight than many other bits of the Bible. (It’s easy to forget in amongst modern Christian flim-flam that a lot of the most well-remembered tales of Jesus only show up in one or two books, like the Sermon On The Mount, for example, which is only in Matthew.)

Anyway, Jesus shows up for Passover at Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem and there’s a bunch of moneylenders and people trading stuff (selling doves, for a start) out in the courtyard. So Jesus goes a bit nuts - he knocks over tables and shouts and even makes a whip out of chord to drive the livestock off the land, to stop people trading and money-lending on land which should be reserved for prayer.

Making a scene like this - rather than mere benign preaching and performing the odd Derren Brown-style miracle - probably contributed to his arrest and trial. He really riles the local priests and temple officials, who try to have a pop at him later but he out-argues them.

Nowadays, ‘Christian’ churches (of many kinds) prioritise whatever maintains their control over peoples’ lifestyles, well ahead of the actual words and deeds of their prophet. They’ll bang on and on about sexual manners, the peculiarities of the church-owned marriage ritual and side-issues of personal morality, none of which were of any serious concern to J.C. who was busier preaching “love your enemy”, “turn the other cheek” and getting pissed-off with people using religion to exploit the poor. Hmm…

I went to a Catholic primary school where I was taught the Stations of The Cross as fact, the Easter weekend as fact, the inevitability of hellfire (especially for me as a non-Catholic attender) as fact. So. Happy Easter! Deep in our hearts we all know Jesus Christ would be way happier to see kids getting chocolate eggs from magic rabbits than what the Bishops will inevitably boff on about over the weekend.

I think there should be full democratisation of religious organisations. They wield as much power and influence over peoples’ lives as governments. If moderates everywhere are consistent in their wish to spread democracy (like they did in such a charming way in Iraq), surely they should agree - it needs to be rolled out across any powerful organisation that holds sway over many people. Big businesses and religions are up first.

on prophets

One thing Arthur C. Clarke did that was amazing, quite apart from writing the very most astounding sci-fi ever, was he predicted / invented the geo-stationary orbit for satellites. This is where the orbit speed of the satellite matches the rotation of the Earth, so the satellite ’stays still’ above the same piece of land, allowing its use for communications etc. Clarke described it (ahead of the technology) so accurately, that no single government or company could patent the idea and it became an open globally used piece of innovation that affects every one of us, every day.

This morning I’m utterly gutted (selfishly) that I won’t get to meet him, he’s the last one, my final true childhood hero to pass on.

Interesting how few media outlets have mentioned one of the key issues in the Tibetan uprising: the Chinese government’s kidnap and ‘disappearing’ (read: continued holding) of the young boy, who Tibetans believe to be the Panchen Llama. Even when some of the protestors have placards about him, no news shows seem to be bothered to explain. Oh, it turns out, neither can I.

Read about the Panchen Llama.

We’ve been watching Michael Wood and Jeremy Jeffs’ BBC series The Story Of India, which Rifa got on DVD from her Dad. It’s outrageously good. As beautifully shot and human as Palin, as strong socio-politically as Andrew Marr and better at drawing together threads of ‘big’ history than any other series I’ve seen. Tara Arts’ moments of performance are a bit declamatory for my taste (though it’s probably stylistically appropriate) and the occasional badly-filtered CGI is piss-poor but neither of these go any way towards spoiling the enormous whole.

It starts with this jawdropping revelation: south Indian mystics have handed the same complex chants down for thousands of years. They’d never been recorded or analysed before but just recently were taped and assessed - and they’ve been proved to be older than human language - they have no connection with any known linguistic heritage or ancient music form. In fact, they’re most closely connected to the language patterns of animals, such as birdsong. It’s a direct, living cultural connection to the absolute beginnings of ‘human’ existence. Even better, the villagers in this area themselves have direct genetic links to the first known migration of people, out of Africa and into southern India.

coming home

Day 14

To the cannabis “dispensary” with ******* who has a medical marijuana card. It means he can buy pot legally according to California State law and was able to score the incredible cookies that fucked me up on the bit of the desert trip I didn’t tell you about. Of course it’s still a federal crime and highlights the complexities / idiocies in the relationship between state and federal law in the USA. The feds regularly bust these places but can’t actually prosecute anyone, just take the gear and generally intimidate people. You can smell the enormous fat double-standard that allows clued-up Californians (and folks in about 10 other states) to score to help them through ‘pain relief’, while across the US, kids still get sent to prison for carrying small amounts of pot. Sick really, especially when you look at the USA world-beating prison population.

As we walked out, a bike cop passed by and smiled ruefully at us.

These cookies look so harmless, I’m briefly tempted to bring a load back on the plane, though I simply don’t have the balls for those kind of smuggling shenanigans. I got nervous enough last time bringing across Cholula Sauce!

I scoff another half cookie for British Sea Power at Spaceland - kind of like facing your fears. And it works, this time I’m happy-as-Larry, especially washing it down with single malt scotch. Sea Power are lions tonight. Some of their jams are Sonic Youth and the new songs are the best, apparently they had a tough one at Echo the night before but there’s no sign of it here – they’re bloody marvellous and according to their PR, they’re going on BBC 2’s Country File, the jammy bastards. It’s a six-piece lineup with Phil (who blew cornet on my album) doing brass and keys and Abi doing viola. Phil is still recovering from trashing himself earlier in the tour and had scary dental surgery. Slightly sad that Tom White isn’t here (he filled in on drums when Woody was ill) but it’s right’n’proper that Sea Power have their lineup back.

Their US tour is crazy. They’ll still be here in May.

Virgin atlantic

Colin Firth is on the flight, which makes for excited, happy stewardesses the whole way. Apart from the Mr D’Arcy film-star stuff, his mother Shirley is an amazing woman with Quaker connections, who does a load of important work fighting for immigrants’ rights on the south coast. Her uncompromising views, coming “against type” from a very well-spoken elderly English woman, inspired at least two of my songs a few years ago and shaped my opinion on the movement of people.

The train journey from Heathrow to Brighton with 30 kilos of luggage is a fucking mess but I’m not going to moan about it. I’ll take the coach in future.

Thank-you very much Stephen and Jane for hosting me and working their arses off, making the tour and video shoot possible. Thanks also Charlie, Dani, Ben, Matt for the free clothes, all the nice promoters and of course Frank.

A word about Mr Turner. Despite what some people assume, Frank and I didn’t know eachother hardly at all before this tour but getting to know him properly in the last two weeks was fucking superb and he’s been both a consistently ace live performer and a brilliant, charming man. Like when Robyn the nutjob soundwoman at Pappy & Harriet’s tried to sabotage his set by shoving crazy echoes right up high through his monitors, he calmly switched off the guitar pick-up, moved away from the mic mid-song and finished unplugged – it was supremely suave and took the wind out of her sails. And she’d done it because he’d politely asked her to fix a sound problem that she was ignoring, during my set, to help me out.

Anyway, if you can afford more than one album this month, then as soon as you’ve bought your copy of Capital, purchase Love, Ire and Song, it’s damn fine.