I am so excited about the new record that I have just written, recorded. I am so excited and so eager to see it finished and released that I shall write about it.
It is the third (or fourth if you count an extended, extended player) LP attributed to the band but the second LP that I have made at home. For the last one I used mediocre equipment and I was learning as I went. Alex, who played the bass guitar, said of it that it sounded like a 'collection of B sides.' At the time that hurt my feelings, but it's the truth. There's only a couple of songs that could possibly be singles on it. It's a great record and the songs are actually better than B sides, but it is a little bit slow. I should have sped the songs up a bit. I sped up the drums before recording everything else for 'Unhappy House' and I was really tempted to speed all the songs afterwards, but I didn't. And then the year before last Pete from Spacemen 3 was around here for a few days using my studio to master his record (his house had been flooded and Randall from Mind Expansion Records put him in touch with me.) He said that he always speeds songs up a tiny bit. it's true, even speeding up by as little as a half percent makes a song sound more engaging and a bit tighter too. We released a single from the Words of Love record, 'A Million Crimson Roses' (an Alla Pugacheva cover) and I sped the B side 'Flamenco' (a Los Brincos cover) up by a whole percent. If you plan on doing this then use a program that uses the DIRAC algorithm. It's exceptionally good.
So this time I set about writing a record that was faster and catchier and I think it worked. It's fast enough not to need any speeding up. Half the songs are contenders for a single and I think that 'Elektrichka's Favourite Party Record' is destined to be a hit!
And there are great musicians performing on it, I'm very lucky. It's all finished except for vocals on a couple of songs but now the singer, Mira, is tied up directing a short film so it will be a couple of weeks yet.
Owow, it's such a shame that I can't play it to you! I'm sure you'd love it!
Showing posts with label The Projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Projects. Show all posts
Thursday, 11 August 2011
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
LSD in McDonalds
When I was seventeen I took a job in McDonalds. I wish that I hadn’t, I am embarrassed to admit it, but I did. It was in Peterborough, a dull city a half hour train journey from my dull home town. I worked there for only a couple of weeks until they sacked me, during the time that I was taking lots of LSD at Patrick's house.
I made friends with a fellow crew member called Tejeb (This may be misspelled, pronounced 'tay-web,') who had mutual friends in my home town I think. I don't remember too much about him. He had long hair, dearly loved the band Felt and shared my enthusiasm for LSD. We were in a pub in the city centre in the late afternoon after I had finished work one day and he gave me a tab. I thought, since we had been talking about taking the drug together, that we were to do so then and there, but it turned out that he was about to start a shift and had only given it to me to try some other time. Unfortunately I discovered this just after I swallowed it. So the trick now was to get back to Patrick's house before I lost my marbles.
I remember, an hour later, sitting on the train and asking a woman, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, "Is the train moving? You see, I have the sensation that we have been travelling for a very long time but perhaps we are still at Peterborough Station? I have taken some LSD you see and it's bothering me a bit." The kind lady assured me that the train had not yet started moving, invited me to the other side of the carriage to join her if it made me feel more comfortable and shared an orange with me.
I can't remember arriving at Huntingdon Station. I would have been taking the short cut to the side of the town which leads to Patrick's village, Godmanchester, because I clearly recall many policeman waiting for me on the other side of the field, on the ring road. I pulled myself together and realised that there had been a traffic accident. Still, it wasn't a pleasant experience walking past them.
Half an hour later I arrived at Patrick's house and he gave me tea and reassured me. I did well to get back so quickly because it was then that the effects of the drug increased a great deal. No doubt, whatever I got up to fascinated me.
I think of myself as being quite fortunate to have taken so much LSD at this time, every few days over a couple of months, and not have badly affected my mind. It is thought to trigger schizophrenia in some. At one point I went complaining to Kevin, the young boy (younger than me at the time) who sold it to me that he had sold me duds. "But Graeme," he explained, "you've taken it every day for four days in a row, you've built up a resistance" so that evening I took two and a half.
I got lost in LSD thought. I recognised that there was a whole new way of thinking, and I felt inclined to return again and again. It was always present when I was sober but I couldn't quite place it and it took me a few years until I stopped being preoccupied with and comparing the two states of mind. During those years I felt quite sad and objects, especially curtains, patterns and plants, would undulate if I stared at them. But the price was a small one to pay, they were the most interesting experiences of my life. The morning after the second occasion that I had taken it was a huge revelation. I sat on a bench in a small, ugly park near the town centre and I felt overwhelmed. Every thing, life, that I had known since birth was suddenly so new, with so many hidden facets revealed. I saw people as they were but I also saw how they moved within the wider context of society. Habitual ways suddenly stood out. People not seeming to be fully aware what they were saying or who was saying it fascinated me. I felt that I began to see more clearly how many people have a lack of self awareness but it also made me empathise with people effortlessly.
The trouble with LSD though is that you just can't be sure of anything. I wrote a song about this for my band The Projects called Planets and I like the line 'you think you know things but you know you may be wrong and you'd like to do things but you cannot get things done.' Mira and I sing on it. Mira suggested that it might be fun if we take mushrooms together and it could be a lovely experience but I am concerned that I might find my having MS too unpleasant.
I think it worked out well. I am a creative person, I’m full of ideas, I write, I make music, I seem to get along with people, I'm self confident and I'm rational and I think that I have LSD to thank for these things in some small part. I would say that the doses that I took were too high. I think taking small doses, as Francis Crick did to ‘help him think,’ to help him envisage the DNA double helix, is not a bad idea but I am not sure that I will ever take it again in any dose.
But I can definitely thank LSD for my being sacked by McDonalds. It makes knowing that I allowed them to employ me a bit easier to deal with. One morning, late for work, I was still under the influence from the night before. I was marvelling at the patterns of the tiles as I walked through the shopping centre and, for a short time, I thought that I was actually in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London where my mother would take me as a child. I finally got to work. It was a very quiet midday morning and I was alone behind the till. Someone ordered a strawberry milkshake and so I turned the machine on and wondered off somewhere and became fascinated by something and before I knew it there was a disturbing sea of strawberry milkshake on the floor. A manageress came in from the back room, saw the mess and, quite rightly, sacked me then and there.
I made friends with a fellow crew member called Tejeb (This may be misspelled, pronounced 'tay-web,') who had mutual friends in my home town I think. I don't remember too much about him. He had long hair, dearly loved the band Felt and shared my enthusiasm for LSD. We were in a pub in the city centre in the late afternoon after I had finished work one day and he gave me a tab. I thought, since we had been talking about taking the drug together, that we were to do so then and there, but it turned out that he was about to start a shift and had only given it to me to try some other time. Unfortunately I discovered this just after I swallowed it. So the trick now was to get back to Patrick's house before I lost my marbles.
I remember, an hour later, sitting on the train and asking a woman, trying to sound as reasonable as possible, "Is the train moving? You see, I have the sensation that we have been travelling for a very long time but perhaps we are still at Peterborough Station? I have taken some LSD you see and it's bothering me a bit." The kind lady assured me that the train had not yet started moving, invited me to the other side of the carriage to join her if it made me feel more comfortable and shared an orange with me.
I can't remember arriving at Huntingdon Station. I would have been taking the short cut to the side of the town which leads to Patrick's village, Godmanchester, because I clearly recall many policeman waiting for me on the other side of the field, on the ring road. I pulled myself together and realised that there had been a traffic accident. Still, it wasn't a pleasant experience walking past them.
Half an hour later I arrived at Patrick's house and he gave me tea and reassured me. I did well to get back so quickly because it was then that the effects of the drug increased a great deal. No doubt, whatever I got up to fascinated me.
I think of myself as being quite fortunate to have taken so much LSD at this time, every few days over a couple of months, and not have badly affected my mind. It is thought to trigger schizophrenia in some. At one point I went complaining to Kevin, the young boy (younger than me at the time) who sold it to me that he had sold me duds. "But Graeme," he explained, "you've taken it every day for four days in a row, you've built up a resistance" so that evening I took two and a half.
I got lost in LSD thought. I recognised that there was a whole new way of thinking, and I felt inclined to return again and again. It was always present when I was sober but I couldn't quite place it and it took me a few years until I stopped being preoccupied with and comparing the two states of mind. During those years I felt quite sad and objects, especially curtains, patterns and plants, would undulate if I stared at them. But the price was a small one to pay, they were the most interesting experiences of my life. The morning after the second occasion that I had taken it was a huge revelation. I sat on a bench in a small, ugly park near the town centre and I felt overwhelmed. Every thing, life, that I had known since birth was suddenly so new, with so many hidden facets revealed. I saw people as they were but I also saw how they moved within the wider context of society. Habitual ways suddenly stood out. People not seeming to be fully aware what they were saying or who was saying it fascinated me. I felt that I began to see more clearly how many people have a lack of self awareness but it also made me empathise with people effortlessly.
The trouble with LSD though is that you just can't be sure of anything. I wrote a song about this for my band The Projects called Planets and I like the line 'you think you know things but you know you may be wrong and you'd like to do things but you cannot get things done.' Mira and I sing on it. Mira suggested that it might be fun if we take mushrooms together and it could be a lovely experience but I am concerned that I might find my having MS too unpleasant.
I think it worked out well. I am a creative person, I’m full of ideas, I write, I make music, I seem to get along with people, I'm self confident and I'm rational and I think that I have LSD to thank for these things in some small part. I would say that the doses that I took were too high. I think taking small doses, as Francis Crick did to ‘help him think,’ to help him envisage the DNA double helix, is not a bad idea but I am not sure that I will ever take it again in any dose.
But I can definitely thank LSD for my being sacked by McDonalds. It makes knowing that I allowed them to employ me a bit easier to deal with. One morning, late for work, I was still under the influence from the night before. I was marvelling at the patterns of the tiles as I walked through the shopping centre and, for a short time, I thought that I was actually in Brent Cross Shopping Centre in North London where my mother would take me as a child. I finally got to work. It was a very quiet midday morning and I was alone behind the till. Someone ordered a strawberry milkshake and so I turned the machine on and wondered off somewhere and became fascinated by something and before I knew it there was a disturbing sea of strawberry milkshake on the floor. A manageress came in from the back room, saw the mess and, quite rightly, sacked me then and there.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Nerdy Emails
When I was little I loved a couple of of cartoon annuals, 'The Willy The Kid' books by Leo Baxendale, who I later found out invented 'The Bash St. Kids.' They were anarchic and chaotic and I was fascinated by the intricacy of the cartoon strips with their asides and little jokes. I had a new look at them a few years ago and they were still good.
I saw that the author had hidden some swear words in them. In each book there was a letter from Willy himself, full of spelling errors and scribbled out words. One example of a hidden word that I remember off the top of my head is 'count dracula' being mentioned, only it follows a scribbled out misspelling of 'cunt dracula.' I think that it's quite interesting that the author of a comic book for children hides swear words in it, no? Quite strange?
Well, The Projects toured the UK with Broadcast in 2003 and James and Lisa got on very well. As a result James remixed one of our songs 'Accidents Will Happen' and I also had a remix by Matt/Simon and I thought that a 7" with them both would be super. I sent Leo an email and asked if there was any possibility at all of him doing a quick sketch of the band in the style of Willy The Kid. He wrote back saying that arthritis had forced him to give up illustration in 2002, it prevented him from holding a pen properly. Isn't the inevitability of ageing the saddest thing?
I have also received a couple of other celebrity emails. I wrote to Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language saying only 'thanks for inventing C++' to which he replied 'No problem!' I had just completed a perfect copy of the ZX Spectrum game 'Manic Miner' by Matthew Smith that I wrote in C++. I then went on to make a fast 3D engine (I was pleased with it, for those who know C++ it used only pointers, it was slightly clever.) I also had a brief exchange of emails with Matthew Smith. Rumour has it that he took too many psychedelic drugs after writing his smash hit 80s computer game and lost his marbles.
I wanted to go on to become a programmer at some place or other making playstation games but after a little while I lost interest and carried on with my employer on Charlotte Road in Shoreditch and later freelance, making crappy games for the internet.
I also had a brief email exchange with Gary Gygax, the inventor of the role playing game 'Dungeons and Dragons,' who died a few years ago. I wrote explaining that I had enjoyed the idea of role playing when I was a child, studying the books and adventures, but usually no one wanted to play it with me.
I saw that the author had hidden some swear words in them. In each book there was a letter from Willy himself, full of spelling errors and scribbled out words. One example of a hidden word that I remember off the top of my head is 'count dracula' being mentioned, only it follows a scribbled out misspelling of 'cunt dracula.' I think that it's quite interesting that the author of a comic book for children hides swear words in it, no? Quite strange?
Well, The Projects toured the UK with Broadcast in 2003 and James and Lisa got on very well. As a result James remixed one of our songs 'Accidents Will Happen' and I also had a remix by Matt/Simon and I thought that a 7" with them both would be super. I sent Leo an email and asked if there was any possibility at all of him doing a quick sketch of the band in the style of Willy The Kid. He wrote back saying that arthritis had forced him to give up illustration in 2002, it prevented him from holding a pen properly. Isn't the inevitability of ageing the saddest thing?
I have also received a couple of other celebrity emails. I wrote to Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the C++ programming language saying only 'thanks for inventing C++' to which he replied 'No problem!' I had just completed a perfect copy of the ZX Spectrum game 'Manic Miner' by Matthew Smith that I wrote in C++. I then went on to make a fast 3D engine (I was pleased with it, for those who know C++ it used only pointers, it was slightly clever.) I also had a brief exchange of emails with Matthew Smith. Rumour has it that he took too many psychedelic drugs after writing his smash hit 80s computer game and lost his marbles.
I wanted to go on to become a programmer at some place or other making playstation games but after a little while I lost interest and carried on with my employer on Charlotte Road in Shoreditch and later freelance, making crappy games for the internet.
I also had a brief email exchange with Gary Gygax, the inventor of the role playing game 'Dungeons and Dragons,' who died a few years ago. I wrote explaining that I had enjoyed the idea of role playing when I was a child, studying the books and adventures, but usually no one wanted to play it with me.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Superstition (Stuffed Birds II)
I was sitting in the back room of the Golden Hart with Howard and Lisa soon after I'd made the discovery that I'd had the bad luck to have MS. I suddenly became superstitious and threw away a coin that I'd been carrying around with me. It was an American penny that I had found on a London street, Abraham Lincoln had been brutally disfigured by someone with a chisel. The coin looked malevolent and I felt sure that it was responsible for my illness, I was quite drunk so it was an easy mistake to make.
Superstition is unusual for me, an atheist who understands the world through a philosophy of determinism, denying people the free will that they mistakenly trust in. I surprised myself when I became much more superstitious over the following year, and coincidental events seemed to justify this. I even started drawing tarot cards to help me make important decisions.
I realised that it may not have been the cent coin alone that was bringing me bad luck. After Lisa had given me a seagull for Christmas, which I received shortly after I threw the penny away, I bought a stuffed magpie. Not a thing for a committed vegetarian but it was very old and quite magnificent. Shortly after I got the magpie Lisa left me. I remember that other misfortunate events occurred, although I can not recall now exactly what they were. I bought another magpie from ebay ('one for sorrow, two for joy') which, according to a note that came with it 'was found dead in the Christmas of 1931 in the churchyard.' It looked like a dead bird that you might see on the ground, turned upside down and mounted on a plinth.
Directly after I acquired this second magpie I met Consuelo, which seemed to validate my superstition.
Consuelo hated the stuffed magpies and had me sell them on gumtree. Incidentally, a computer error made it impossible to erase my advert for about two years, and I received emails almost daily asking if they were still available. Strangely, almost all of the enquiries were from women. Fortunately, my superstitious tendencies disappeared with the stuffed birds. I wanted to get a tattoo of a single magpie over my heart to prove it but tattoos aren't really my thing and, besides, I have an overwhelming, irrational fear of needles.
I wrote a song for my band The Projects which features the birds and the coin and Lisa leaving me called 'Unhappy House.' It is a spiteful song but it was lots of fun to play live. The guitar part is very easy, you just hit the 'a' string and move your left hand on the fretboard at random if you fancy it. I used a tremolo pedal with my old fucked up Vox AC50, which doesn't sound quite so supreme now that I have replaced its faulty capacitors, and it was good!
Superstition is unusual for me, an atheist who understands the world through a philosophy of determinism, denying people the free will that they mistakenly trust in. I surprised myself when I became much more superstitious over the following year, and coincidental events seemed to justify this. I even started drawing tarot cards to help me make important decisions.
I realised that it may not have been the cent coin alone that was bringing me bad luck. After Lisa had given me a seagull for Christmas, which I received shortly after I threw the penny away, I bought a stuffed magpie. Not a thing for a committed vegetarian but it was very old and quite magnificent. Shortly after I got the magpie Lisa left me. I remember that other misfortunate events occurred, although I can not recall now exactly what they were. I bought another magpie from ebay ('one for sorrow, two for joy') which, according to a note that came with it 'was found dead in the Christmas of 1931 in the churchyard.' It looked like a dead bird that you might see on the ground, turned upside down and mounted on a plinth.
Directly after I acquired this second magpie I met Consuelo, which seemed to validate my superstition.
Consuelo hated the stuffed magpies and had me sell them on gumtree. Incidentally, a computer error made it impossible to erase my advert for about two years, and I received emails almost daily asking if they were still available. Strangely, almost all of the enquiries were from women. Fortunately, my superstitious tendencies disappeared with the stuffed birds. I wanted to get a tattoo of a single magpie over my heart to prove it but tattoos aren't really my thing and, besides, I have an overwhelming, irrational fear of needles.
I wrote a song for my band The Projects which features the birds and the coin and Lisa leaving me called 'Unhappy House.' It is a spiteful song but it was lots of fun to play live. The guitar part is very easy, you just hit the 'a' string and move your left hand on the fretboard at random if you fancy it. I used a tremolo pedal with my old fucked up Vox AC50, which doesn't sound quite so supreme now that I have replaced its faulty capacitors, and it was good!
Friday, 17 June 2011
Tear Gas At The Laurel Tree
The Laurel Tree in Camden is where all the indie kids would hang out in the 90s. Jane and I discovered the place by accident when we decided to run away from our flatmate one evening. He was queuing in the chip shop beside Camden Tube and, although it was a mean thing to do, I am glad that we did it. Parsley's band 'Dutronc' were playing cover versions of Jacques and I thought that the whole place was just fantastic. I returned the next week and met Morgane, the first of all of the people that would become my friends in London. I proudly let it slip that I was playing bass for the Television Personalities but she beat me by letting me know that she played keyboards for Stereolab, who I thought were just fantastic. Morgane introduced me to Nick and Dino who became great friends with whom I'd go to lots of parties with and with whom I'd start the band Miss Mend (and later play in The Projects with Morgane and later still Dino.)
One time I was at Chris and Loretta's 'co-op' club night and I found myself wanting for cigarettes. I drunkenly pushed my way through the crowd to the stairs. The ground floor hosted a depressing pop disco and the dance floor was heaving with fake tans. I pushed my way to the cigarette machine and allowed it to prop me up as I slowly filled it with all the coins that I had, searching every pocket for extra five and ten pence pieces.
Eventually the packet of cigarettes was in my hand and I turned on my heel to find the whole place absolutely empty. The few hundred people had disappeared. It was quite a dream like experience. The room that had been a heaving, sweating, drunken mess was, to my surprise, deserted. Then I began to taste what I assume to have been tear gas at the back of my throat. I returned upstairs. It seemed that It couldn't have been a large tear gas canister that had been thrown down there because it didn't have much of an effect on me.
One time I was at Chris and Loretta's 'co-op' club night and I found myself wanting for cigarettes. I drunkenly pushed my way through the crowd to the stairs. The ground floor hosted a depressing pop disco and the dance floor was heaving with fake tans. I pushed my way to the cigarette machine and allowed it to prop me up as I slowly filled it with all the coins that I had, searching every pocket for extra five and ten pence pieces.
Eventually the packet of cigarettes was in my hand and I turned on my heel to find the whole place absolutely empty. The few hundred people had disappeared. It was quite a dream like experience. The room that had been a heaving, sweating, drunken mess was, to my surprise, deserted. Then I began to taste what I assume to have been tear gas at the back of my throat. I returned upstairs. It seemed that It couldn't have been a large tear gas canister that had been thrown down there because it didn't have much of an effect on me.
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Incredible Coincidence
Matthew/Simon has had many different musical projects, he’s very talented. One was, and I’m not so good at categorising music, a club/electro/pop thing which he had Lisa sing on. To be honest, it wasn’t my favourite of all of his creations. He had written a couple of songs, ‘Body Heat’ being the title of one, and wanted to shoot some promotional pictures. I can't remember who the photographer was.
He had found a great location for the shoot with Limehouse Town Hall. It was semi derelict, being used as studio space for artists, and had an amazing sense of faded austerity. The whole building was deserted except for us and Rory, with whom Matt/Simon had made the arrangements in order to use the place and who, today, is a successful conceptual artist. We stood chatting for a while in a huge central hall surrounded by manikins that were in the process of becoming someone’s installation before Simon/Matt and Lisa got to work. I looked on as the band were tied up with rope, back to back, sitting on wooden chairs, at the foot of a sweeping staircase, complete with masking tape over their mouths perhaps (or this might be my imagination at work) to evoke a story line of kidnap.
The following year the band that I played guitar in, and do mostly all of the organisation for, The Projects, had to find a space in which to record our first LP. Amanda from the band Saloon had a portable mixing desk and her and Adam were to do the production once we had found a location. I thought of Limehouse Town Hall, I got Rory’s telephone number from Matthew/Simon and ended up leaving a message on an answerphone. He got back to me a week later, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate.
In the end we used a rehearsal studio in New Cross that had once been a public library. The building was beautiful, sun streaming into the main room, making the wood panelling and wood inlay that adorned the place glow. The recording took a week, and throughout that week there was a heat wave and it was incredibly hot in the rehearsal rooms. We would have fans running constantly, switch them off for a take and then all be waiting for the recording to be complete in order to switch them back on again as quickly as possible. Just sitting in there forced you to drip with sweat.
It sounded great though I think, Amanda and Adam did a great job and we had the record mixed by Matthew/Simon.
In Spring 2004, the year following our recording and two years after Matt/Simon and Lisa’s photoshoot, I was walking home, crossing Aldgate triangle. A girl stopped me and gave me a flyer, it looked interesting, it was for an online art project, so I took it home. Months and months later I stumbled across it in my coat pocket, I was sitting at my computer so I entered the address written on the paper and was taken to a page with hundreds of tiny, clickable numbers on it, arranged in a square. It took me a few seconds to work out what was going on when I clicked on one of those numbers. From the speakers came, after the sound of an answer phone beep, my own voice saying ‘Hi Rory,’ explaining that I played in a band, that we needed a space to record in and that the town hall would be ideal. Goodness! Of all of the numbers, of all the messages I could have clicked on..
He had found a great location for the shoot with Limehouse Town Hall. It was semi derelict, being used as studio space for artists, and had an amazing sense of faded austerity. The whole building was deserted except for us and Rory, with whom Matt/Simon had made the arrangements in order to use the place and who, today, is a successful conceptual artist. We stood chatting for a while in a huge central hall surrounded by manikins that were in the process of becoming someone’s installation before Simon/Matt and Lisa got to work. I looked on as the band were tied up with rope, back to back, sitting on wooden chairs, at the foot of a sweeping staircase, complete with masking tape over their mouths perhaps (or this might be my imagination at work) to evoke a story line of kidnap.
The following year the band that I played guitar in, and do mostly all of the organisation for, The Projects, had to find a space in which to record our first LP. Amanda from the band Saloon had a portable mixing desk and her and Adam were to do the production once we had found a location. I thought of Limehouse Town Hall, I got Rory’s telephone number from Matthew/Simon and ended up leaving a message on an answerphone. He got back to me a week later, saying that it wouldn’t be appropriate.
In the end we used a rehearsal studio in New Cross that had once been a public library. The building was beautiful, sun streaming into the main room, making the wood panelling and wood inlay that adorned the place glow. The recording took a week, and throughout that week there was a heat wave and it was incredibly hot in the rehearsal rooms. We would have fans running constantly, switch them off for a take and then all be waiting for the recording to be complete in order to switch them back on again as quickly as possible. Just sitting in there forced you to drip with sweat.
It sounded great though I think, Amanda and Adam did a great job and we had the record mixed by Matthew/Simon.
In Spring 2004, the year following our recording and two years after Matt/Simon and Lisa’s photoshoot, I was walking home, crossing Aldgate triangle. A girl stopped me and gave me a flyer, it looked interesting, it was for an online art project, so I took it home. Months and months later I stumbled across it in my coat pocket, I was sitting at my computer so I entered the address written on the paper and was taken to a page with hundreds of tiny, clickable numbers on it, arranged in a square. It took me a few seconds to work out what was going on when I clicked on one of those numbers. From the speakers came, after the sound of an answer phone beep, my own voice saying ‘Hi Rory,’ explaining that I played in a band, that we needed a space to record in and that the town hall would be ideal. Goodness! Of all of the numbers, of all the messages I could have clicked on..
Monday, 30 May 2011
Guitar Chase
In 2005 I'd left the rehearsal rooms in Camden where The Projects met up once a week, gone on to a bar in Shoreditch, caught a bus back to Liverpool Street when I was done and then went in to the Tesco Metro for groceries. But my heart sank when I realised that I'd left my guitar on the bus. I ran outside and the double-decker was just disappearing from view down Bishopsgate.
It took some time but, eventually, I hailed a taxi. It didn't bother the driver that I might not be able to pay for the ride, having only ten pounds in cash, he was very excited by the challenge. He put his foot to the floor, he consulted with bus drivers and taxi drivers that we encountered en route through his open window as to the probable destination and current location of the bus, he was jumping red lights, he was having a really good time.
Eventually, on The Strand, we caught up with the Double Decker. He blocked its route, jumped on the bus and appeared triumphant with the guitar case held above his head.
It took some time but, eventually, I hailed a taxi. It didn't bother the driver that I might not be able to pay for the ride, having only ten pounds in cash, he was very excited by the challenge. He put his foot to the floor, he consulted with bus drivers and taxi drivers that we encountered en route through his open window as to the probable destination and current location of the bus, he was jumping red lights, he was having a really good time.
Eventually, on The Strand, we caught up with the Double Decker. He blocked its route, jumped on the bus and appeared triumphant with the guitar case held above his head.
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