D.’s gone home to the UK. The house is a bit lonely – uncannily quiet, missing her like I am.
Its flat calm out there. The flashing red wingtip lights of planes on the flight path are distant and silent. No surf tonight, no sound at all – its a perfect evening of tranquillity. I just left King’s Cross, a whirl of prostitutes and neon mayhem on the other side of Sydney. All the sleaze, the trashed-out people lying on the streets, a backstage grim reality of this beautiful city. Thinking I would, once and for all, get a feel for how far away we lived from the dark heart of the city by walking home, I set off for Oxford Street (King’s Cross, Oxford Street – am I actually IN London?). I did that in London once, and once only, tumbling out of Ronnie Scott’s on a jazz-fuelled high, doused with cheap wine, and put one foot in front of the other until the overgrown hedge that marked our house out from the others on the street proferred me a leafy welcome home. Its amazing what you see if you move slowly. We’re all trying to get places quicker – no, I’ll take the car – never wanting to walk, especially in the rain. Try it some time – make the choice to be slow, and see how good it feels. Its making the choice that counts.
Anyway, so much for me walking home all the way. My new shoes haven’t quite worn in yet, and I can feel blisters after a really long run yesterday, so the first bus that came along, the 380 to Bondi, I jumped on. I would have taken a cab, but I’ve spent a damn fortune on cabs today, taking them here (to Fideli’s pie shop on Bronte Road – superb!!!), there (to the airport) and everywhere (over to my friends’ pad in Pott’s Point). Actually I did end up getting one home from Bondi Junction, unable to face the walk back from Bronte Beach on my aching feet. Thats, let me see – $60 in cabs… ah, in pounds… thats only £24!! I feel much better now.
Need some of my Madagascan Vanilla tea – my new favourite brew.
That done, I return to this rambling pile of nonsense. Lets get back to Angels In Drag. I really should add a dedicated Angels bit to this page… maybe tomorrow I’ll start building that.
I wanted to quote my great old friend Simon Maxwell who said, about the album’s title track, “It is like a painting or a novel more than a song! It has beautiful intricacies and resonances to it. Songs as literature?” Thats the way I’m starting to think of this record. People have been getting dumbed-down with music for so long that they can’t handle anything with any depth or arrangement. I love the old Steely Dan records (amongst many other things) which by today’s grungey standards sound over-produced, over-arranged, over-complicated and overplayed. But they are awesome records… Gaucho is genius at work. And their lyrics – don’t get me started – I love them. But the tunes are complex, evolving pieces. I wanted to do something like that, something more ambitious than a three-chord trick. Sure, you can argue that some of the best music of the past forty years is made of three-chord tricks, and I wouldn’t argue. Sometimes that is perfect, just what a song needs. Simplicity, communication through simplicity. Coldplay are already around if that’s what you want. I wanted to make movies with sound, to take you on a trip through all I felt for a couple of years back there, to take you sailing out on that grey old sea and see where we end up.