Sunday 21 October 2012


‎"It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh."

- Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust).

Picture: "Confesiones De Año Nuevo" by Ivonne Gargano (2010).



Wednesday 17 October 2012

Thursday 11 October 2012


"Art! Be an artist or a writer. When you are cold, warm yourself before the flaming tints of Titian, when you are hungry, nourish yourself with great spiritual foods by listening to the noble periods of Bach, the harmonies of Brahms and the thunder of Beethoven. Do you think there is anything in the fact that their names all begin with B? But don’t take a chance, smoke a 3 B pipe, and remember the
se immortal lines: 'When to the suddenness of melody the echo parting falls the failing day.' What a rhythm! Tell them to keep their society whores and pressed duck with oranges. For you l’art vivant, the living art, as you call it. Tell them that you know that your shoes are broken and that there are pimples on your face, yes, and that you have buck teeth and a club foot, but that you don’t care, for tomorrow they are playing Beethoven’s last quartets in Carnegie Hall and at home you have Shakespeare’s plays in one volume."

- Shrike (from "Miss Lonelyhearts" by Nathanael West).

Picture: Frank Springer cover art for the June 1967 issue of "Evergreen Review".




Giegling Mix 01: DJ Dustin - Wild East.

Sunday 7 October 2012

Jean:
This other woman in grappling
weakens; in loathing, laughs;
           loth, she longs.
           Myself here I reserve.
Perpetuity in a smile bewrays
secret beat of heart in the faces
to the world turned.
           How can a man like this tell
           by touch of shell
the milk that forms inside
nut curdled by the hand?

- Joseph Macleod (from "Script from Norway" - Duan VII: Oslo: Man and Girl. 1953).

Picture: "Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida" by James Barry (c1800).


Friday 5 October 2012


Last night Shappi Khorsandi, Gaz Coombes and Jim Bob (Carter USM) were on Steve Lamacq's BBC6 Roundtable review show where one of my tracks (When I Go) was played. They gave it 8/10, 7/10 and 7/10. Not bad at all, very kind.
You can listen here if you so desire:

and you can find the album details here:


Wednesday 3 October 2012


A Classical Regularity.

We sat there under a hemlock tree,
The years in her but not in me;
And as the evening came on,
Extinguishing her light parasol kimono
Which draped her full-moon knees,
She talked more intimately, more
Succinctly to me, talked as though
She knew there were no need
For conversation between her and me.
And my eyes wandered less over the inconsequential lady-slippers;
For then, as the cemetery night wind
Motored through the small-town gossiping leaves,
Nestled in a wisp of new-mown hay,
And sang in a stunted Majolica tree,
I needed her, and she needed me.
She talked more intimately, more
Tersely to me, for the night
Dispelled the years,
The dry-boned years,
The memorial tears,
The inutility,
That lay between her and me.

"In four years my husband has been
Married twice," she said; "he was
Very brilliant, very progressive, but then..."

And looking for extinct lady-slippers,
I complete her sentence,
And quite aptly,
Not thinking of her
But of me,
"What is that to me!"

"And my daughter is nineteen; but she
Is different, quite different from me.
My boy, fourteen, decided and voluptuous,
My little girl, I don't know what she'll be."
(What we'll all be!)

Then I moved more closely,
Placing my hand over her August-moon knee,
But she continued to talk less succinctly,
Less intimately, to me:
"You see, my dear, you have not lived
In a civilized world, you
Do not know what it means to have
Responsibility.
You do not realize...
I do not want this modern mess,
If I may use a literary expression.
I have dusted in the sitting-room,
Struggled with the cut-glass
And the silver-ware,
Sweet-smelling the kitchen with golden-broom--
All, my dear, for a classical,
A classical regularity."

"All for a photograph-album,
All for a colonial-parlor
Family-tree."
But her years were weighing down on me--
It was inutile to say it
Either to her or to me.

The evening wind motored through the village leaves,
Nestled in a wisp of her dew-wet hair,
Nestled between her and the Majolica tree,
Sang strangely and sweetly to her,
But was mute to me.
The moon hung low,
As though suspended
On a trolley-wire,
And glittered over the baroque-roses
And the golden-broom
Beyond the garden-bed;
The irises, the larkspur, the sweet-peas,
Were a still lyre,
And lay extinguished in the darkness,
In the family-tree garden bed--
As in a sculptor's room
When the moon slits through no windows.

In the morning her face was a broken oval
In the raw light,
A white-slab broken oval around the mouth
Whose myriad lines were epitaph inscriptions
Which revealed not rain-fresh sadness
But a long-sustained drouth.
The evening was less cruel to her,
For in the day the years were more
In her than in me.
We said goodbye to one another,
A courteous parched farewell.

- Edward Dahlberg (1931).

Picture: "Private Discussion" by Felix Vallotton (1898)

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Monday 1 October 2012


My good friends, the fantastic Bob Constant and the Goodbye Horses, have just turned in a cover of my song "When She Comes", with a video too! Have a listen/watch and look them up on facebook, marvellous...