The summer is back. I used to be an autumn kid, but the beguiling feel of warm air on the skin is increasingly appealing to me as I get older. There’s probably some allegory in that but I can’t be arsed with Freudian musings on mortality at this point in the day.
My dear friend Matt was staying with us last night. He’s a kickass cook (check out his blog for a masterful sous-vide beef wellington recipe and, ahem, badger bourgignon) so we fired up the barbecue, Matt making a killer burger mix, and me supplying a variety of bicicletta cocktails and Aperol spritzes. Later we drifted on to a Franco Mondo Rose Barbera d´Asti Superiore Nizza red wine and a nightcap of Balvenie Caribbean cask. I absolutely love drinking like this – good friend, quality libation, nice weather. Yes.
We listened to the first live album from (forgotten?) Glasgow band called Lies Damned Lies. I had not listened to it for a long time but was completely blown away all over again. There’s a track at the bottom of this post which still gives me shivers – The Divine Image – a William Blake poem set to the most exquisite harmonies to you could hope to hear in your short-ass days on this planet. When I was playing with Iain Archer in the early nineties these guys were held in complete awe by all of the musicians around that scene – and rightly so. It’s fabulous music.
Well, I managed to write the XML importer and got a whole bunch of archive stuff online – you’ll see it if you scroll down. I need to sort out some decent navigation in this blog, and yes, that’s coming too. It was fun reading a lot of that old stuff back, from a different lifetime. It’s funny how we process memories. There is absolutely no way to distinguish a memory from last week from something that happened ten years ago in terms of clarity. We just pluck them out of the cupboard, dust them off, look at them for a bit, then put them back. So it has been with the old blog posts; time blurred into one amorphous mass.
I’m doing some production work for a Russian rock legend at the moment (life can indeed be strange). He’s very cool – a fellow by the name of Boris Grebenshchikov. His band Aquarium are usually labelled as the founding fathers of Russian rock music. Anyway, the track I’m working on has an instrument on it called a nyckelharpa. I’d never heard of it, but it is a Swedish keyed fiddle. I like the name of the instrument, that’s all.
I’m off to water my tomatoes and get some food on.