Brendan sang lead vocals on Higher Deeper.

Where do I begin?

Brendan, as one half of the massive cult band ‘Dead Can Dance’ is something of an enigma to fans of their music. When the band split up in 1996, Brendan laid low for a while, putting together a beautiful spacious record he released in 1999, ‘Eye Of The Hunter’. I listened to my first copy of it when living in Dublin, late in the summer of ’99, about a week before I met him for the first time.

After touring the States with Eleanor McEvoy, Liam Bradley recommended me as guitarist for Brendan’s forthcoming world tour. Knowing nothing about him at the time, I got the CD in the post and put it on Mick O’Gormans lovely old stereo that had been playing the Beatles almost exclusively for weeks. His voice leapt out immediately as an exquisite thing, a sound and texture that took you on a wild drift through memory and thought, through light and dark, joy and melancholia – it was amazing. I was transfixed to the sound and looked forward to my ‘audition’…

… which was a week later. I was so hungover. When I finally found Quivvy Church, buried in the middle of nowhere in County Cavan. At that time it was cloaked with vivid red ivy, birds making a racket in the trees, and from within, the sounds of a guitar being played really bloody loud. He looked to me like a wizard of sorts, straight from ‘Lord Of The Rings’. After the guarded introductions, Brendan suggested we jammed on some blues progressions… not what I’d expected. Turns out he was hungover too. After about ten minutes of this, Liam turned round and said “For fuck’s sake Brendan, will you get a mic out and show him what this is all about!”

Never a man to miss the point, is Liam.

But Brendan acquiesced, pulling out an old valve mic. He sang a beautiful song, ‘The Captive Heart’… the opening line ‘The old clock is ticking now, marks the space between us…’ – it was so perfect in that moment, and it made me want the gig so much. Luck was on my side as I played along to the track… he offered me the place in the band.

Rehearsals were a time getting to know Liam better, on the long drives to and from Donegal to Liam’s beautiful house.

The tour was superb fun, the music inspirational. Some of the gigs were almost like being in a cathedral, the whole audience supplicating to Brendan, their god. He was a huge presence on stage, and almost as big offstage. And a sore loser on the PlayStation.

The tour took in Paris, Hamburg, took us all over Europe, then America, both coasts, Canada, down into Mexico finishing in Guadalajara after a visit to the pyramids of Teotihuacan outside Mexico city. I really enjoyed myself on that tour, and from that time on, Brendan and I became good friends, starting when he asked me over to Quivvy again to do a session for him, recording Tim Buckley’s ‘Song Of The Siren’.

I went on to design and build his website, visiting him a number of times in Cavan, getting to know him much better over pints of Guinness in ‘The Diamond Bar’. I also met his beautiful little daughter Emma who would eventually be the angel on the cover.

To cut a long story short, when recording Angels In Drag I had a song called Higher Deeper that I thought would suit Brendan’s voice perfectly. He agreed to do it, though he was careful not to promise a result, saying it wasn’t the sort of thing he normally did. I pitched up with a backing track in spring 2002, we climbed to the control room up in the eaves of the church, he set up an SM57 in front of his huge studio monitors, turned it up as loud as a Led Zeppelin concert, and said, “I’m doing this the old-school way!”

Mr. Perry proceeded to tear the track to shreds… it was AWESOME. And anyone who has heard it has been blown away by his performance. Combined with Thomas Lang’s power-drumming its a great track to stir the blood. Not too heavy, just with an edge that lifts you… I love listening to it. The only thing is that people think its me, and compliment me on the vocals. I have to wait for the enthusiastic praise to die down before saying, “Well, thanks, but, eh, its not actually me…” How embarrassing. Oh well, thats what you get when you ask the likes of Brendan Perry to perform on your record and they say yes.

Cai mixed Angels in Drag and Higher Deeper.

Cai and I vaguely knew each other from Belfast, from the good old days of the coolest gig in town, ‘The Warehouse’, where he worked as in-house engineer. He had come to London before me to work, finding mixing jobs for the likes of Jah Wobble and countless other sideways acts before I finally met him on the Foy Vance project in 2000.

I loved Cai’s vibe from the word go. He just DID things. Didn’t always tell you WHAT he was doing, but he did it nonetheless. Always ready to go the extra distance when needed. He became my favourite all-round engineer to work with for that very reason. We always worked in Intimate, my favourite London studio, mostly because of its laidback vibe.

After my return from Ireland and the main mixing session, I did a bit of extra work on the song ‘Angels In Drag’, adding some Liam Bradley-played tambourine, and the mix of Higher Deeper wasn’t what I was looking for – we’d rushed it a little, as it was last to be mixed. So I called Cai, who was just about to leave for Japan, and booked him to come in and do the mixes. I was lucky to catch him – he was literally flying out a couple of days later.

He really delivered the symphonic quality I wanted for the track Angels In Drag itself, and got Higher Deeper motoring along exactly as I had hoped it would. It was such a productive session, and my delight in Cai’s work reaffirmed his position as engineer number one for me. I was sad he had to go to Japan – strange the places life takes us. At any rate, I’m sure he’ll do well out there as he is so good at what he does. Just hope I have enough money to fly him back for the next album.

You’ll hear his handiwork soon enough…

Alastair mixed most of Angels In Drag. There’s a good story about Al and me.

Just before the final of Rockschool, Spontaneous Dog (my first band) were given the chance, thanks to a couple of the guys’ dads giving us a few hundred quid, to go into the studio. Until then, all that existed were a few dodgy four-track recordings I’d done myself, and the others weren’t too pleased. We were so excited at finally getting the chance to record in a proper studio. Spike, the other guitarist, was given the task of finding and booking a studio. He eventually came up with ‘Active Recording Studio’ in Banbridge, Co. Down.

We pitched up a few weeks later like eager puppies, set our gear up and got ready to launch into the tracks we were going to record. Behind the controls was a young guy by the name of Alastair McMillan, who (as he admitted more than ten years later) hadn’t a clue what he was doing. Which was perfect – neither did we! He gave the impression of managing very well until the keyboard track, probably the best take Rob ever did, was accidentally erased. Not a great moment. The session was a mash of nonsense and sublime moments, like most I have been involved with since.

Anyway, we left the studio with a couple of dubious recordings on cassette, promising to go back and pick up the DATs very soon. Of course we stupidly never did, so the recordings, once the tapes got lost, vanished, never to be seen again. A few friends had the last remaining copies on compilation tapes, on old ferric cassettes that were degrading fast – this is before you could just stick it in your computer and burn it to CD straight off.

Years pass at this point. The Dog split up, I go on to my next band… things spin along beautifully until two years ago, when I happened to be asked to go over to Ireland to do some recording with Ronan Keating. It was happening in this grand old house down in County Wicklow, called Clonmannon. The engineer had been working with some big names, including the Rolling Stones, and I was looking forward to meeting him… again, as it was none other than Alastair. During that session he proved to be a man of extraordinarily mellow temperament and a fine pair of ears, so I decided there and then to ask him to mix Angels In Drag.

Just before I left that session, he said, “Actually, you know what – I have the DAT of your first session upstairs” – I couldn’t believe it! It has not quite disappeared into the annals (probably one too many ‘n’s there) of history, but resides quietly in a box in Al’s studio. I haven’t got it off him yet, but I know where it is, which is something to look forward to.

Mixing with Al was a great pleasure. I would wake in my huge bedroom and stretch out in the enormous bath, reading ‘Lord Of The Rings’ at the time. It was bitterly cold down in Wicklow in February when we did it, but the weather was stunningly blue and clear. The sea was a short walk away, over some abandoned railway tracks – a very remote landscape, down to a grey old strand where the wind blew the spray off the tops of the waves, forming rainbows. Amidst multiple interruptions from Van Morrison, who was coming to meet Al later in the week, we managed to get most of the stuff mixed, exactly as I’d wanted to hear it.

It was a lovely piece of synchronicity that we came together after so much new experience following our first meeting. He was very complimentary about the stuff, which was great to have around me. So many engineers are indifferent verging on dismissive, which drives me insane. Not so Al – he would always find the positivity in the music and focus on that… a great quality in him. We haven’t spoken for a while – last I heard he was up to his neck working for the infamous Mr. Van Morrison, so I shall label him Missing In Action, hero of Angels In Drag.

M is for… Mole and McBride – aka. The Biters, howling at the moon on Place Your Bets.

Where do I start with these pair? Its a brief foray into the arena of the outlandish, really.

McBride is a truly remarkable wordsmith. His academic works, published under the pseudonym Dr. Edward Sweetowers, have received critical acclaim in various journals of English Literature, as well as being lauded in educational establishments around the world. I was fortunate enough to have an article written about some of the lyrics on the album as part of some impenetrable study into surrealist imagery in contemporary music. If there are no copyright issues I might try and get it up on this site… although its unlikely that anyone with less than a PhD in English Lit. will be able to make head nor tail of it.

Suffice it to say that he is a great man to have a drink with. Almost invariably he will come out with an eminently quotable remark or phrase, and it is up to the individual to make use of what he gets, as chances are it will never be repeated.

Mole is no different in the ‘quotablility’ stakes. He is well known for his invention of new words and phrases. Words such as Teeky Waff (a dubious haircut) have passed into common dialect in my old home town in Northern Ireland. People now sixteen years old use these words and have no idea where they came from. Mole is now a professional golfer living in Dublin, though rumour has it he is moving to Turkey.

I used to collect things on my little dictating machine, as discussed in previous entries. One particular night I brought it with me when I was out on a Guinness mission with Mole and McBride, knowing the chat would become unusual at some point in the evening. Surely enough, as the advertisments for Guinness itself predicted, all I had to do was wait.

The discussion:

MOLE: “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? Fifty?”
McBRIDE: That all depends on what your definition of a man is…”
MOLE: “Fifty.”
McBRIDE: “…and that varies as much as varies the hairs on a pheasants back.”

May I refer you to the 29th of June entry or to the ‘Happytown Remix Engine’ to hear ‘The Biters’ in the flesh. They are also to be heard in ‘Place Your Bets’, when, at the end of the evening, completely sozzled, were recorded chanting on the way home, just at the top of High Street where the no-man’s-land of Hamilton Road meets the High Donaghadee Road, precisely one kebab from home.

Jules did backing vocals on Miss Alleluia

Jules has been an anchor for me… the persuader, the stirrer, the sideways necromancer, the thorn in my side, for a long, long time.

His brother Simon (who’s just made a cool-as-you-like lo-fi record) was in my class at school, always a little different to everyone else, and on retrospect, just that little bit cooler, although at the time he just seemed like a quiet bloke. When I met Jules, he was already a bit of a guru on the Northern Irish music scene, whatever that means. Any cool project that was going on, he’d be there, working with all the funky bears of the day.

We soon became friends, and he ask me to join him working on a contemporary dance piece called ‘Hard Shoulder’ which was going to be performed with a live band in Belgium and London. It was the best recording experience of my life to date… four of us went into the studio with a blank slate, and through various inspirations and displays of random genius, fuelled by cheap coffee and Marlboro lights, came out the other end with five hours of stuff on DAT. Jules took it away, put it together in a way none of us would have imagined, and presented each of us with a CD a month later, saying ‘Learn that, lads…”

The show was a great success, so Jules and I continued to work together on various bits and pieces. He is a master of the sideways approach. His albums, ‘Bolt’ (1997) and ‘Candyfloss’ (2000) were both great pieces of work, using ordinary people’s speech, old fitness records, and vice-presidential speeches reformed into new music. There’s one of my favourite samples in the EXTRAS box… he recorded it in San Francisco and in the south of France (the 90 year-old blind aunt of one of his friends) Apparently his website isn’t quite running properly yet so the link doesn’t work, but its still good fun.

He was AWOL during the making of ‘Angels In Drag’. I was quite distraught not to have him on the record – after all, he was one of the main inspirations behind doing it in the first place. I used his Wurlitzer piano on a few tracks, recording ‘Cheapskate Rainbow’ up in the heights of the Greenwich Dance Agency the night England beat Germany 5-1. You could hear the cheers emanate and echo all around London on that sultry summer evening… it was quite magical, a great night to record.

The last track to be finished was ‘Miss Alleluia’… there’s a snippet of it in the EXTRAS box. Jules had re-appeared from his self-imposed exile, and arrived at my house in West London for a cup of tea. I suggested he put down some backing vocals, even though he’s not really a singer as such. His vibe was great and the track lives to tell the tale!! I can’t really express my gratitude to Jules, but I miss him being around since he was here in March, and look forward to some new recording when I return to London next year.

Thomas played drums on Magical Mystery Girl, Diamond Princess, Angels In Drag, Cheapskate Rainbow and Higher Deeper

Thomas Lang is an outrageous player. And I do mean outrageous. World class – and I do mean that. You can hardly open a copy of any drum magazine anywhere in the world without seeing him somewhere in it. He’s a very well respected, much recorded drummer and producer, having worked on more records than you could possibly believe. His CV is frightening, his technique peerless (including such gems as being able to play two independent rhythms with ONE FOOT using his heel and toe, while going bananas on the rest of the kit – scary) and his spirit superb to work with. His contribution to Angel in Drag was massive, to say the least.

I had a great video of him doing some of his kit magic in the studio, which has terrified drummers the world over, but I seem to have lost it – how, I don’t know! I’ll find it and put it up for the sheer spectacle of watching his limbs move faster than the shutter speed on the video camera. The photo is the cover to one of his tuition videos – it was just so, well, German, that I had to put it up. And it shows his arms (bigger than most people’s legs) off. Do you think he works out?

I met Thomas in China White in London, an ‘up-its-own-arse’ kind of club in the West End. I was there with Paul Turner, already a good friend of Thomas’s. He was supremely friendly – we talked for a good while about trying to do something involving more than music, maybe with dancers or some visual theatre. I also dropped into the conversation that I was making a record, and he offered to have a listen to the demos and maybe play on a couple of tracks. So later that month I sent up a few tracks on CD that I had him in mind for – two, I think – Magical Mystery Girl and Diamond Princess. I hoped he’d agree to play on them and not charge me too much. These big session players can be a bit pricey!!

The reality was something a little grander, and a ludicrous display of Thomas’s generosity of spirit. He called me almost straight away. The conversation went something like this…

“Hi Steve, its Tom. I love the stuff. I’d love to play on it, so I’ve booked a week down at StarTracks Studio, you know, in Wapping?”
“Hold on Tom, I can’t really afford a week on two drum tracks…”
“No, No – I do lots of sessions for the owner and he owes me about thirty days studio time so we can use that!”
“But that’s your time…”
“Well, I’ve got to use it somehow…”

He wouldn’t hear of anything else. He had booked his OWN studio time to record my stuff. And whatsmore, refused to take any money for the sessions.

When the time came to track the drums, we went to the studio, StarTracks in Wapping, East London. Tom’s gear was all set up and he was having a quick run around the kit… the owner of the studio, Michael Wolff came to feature quite a lot later in the tale, but basically was another complete gentleman of huge generosity. I ended up playing guitars on some stuff for him and Thomas as a pitiful attempt to repay my debts…

Thomas played on not two, not three, but FIVE tracks in the end. I couldn’t stop him. I’d think – there’s no way I can ask him to do any more, then he’d overhear another demo and go – ‘Yeah, I want to play on that one’ and he’d be off again. Each time he would listen to the track, listen again, listen again making a few notes, then go in and nail it in one take. It was terrifying to behold, actually, but a sublime experience, and a great privilege to have him doing his stuff on the record. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay him. I did a load of stuff on some of his own insane jazz fusion tracks as relief from mixing when I was in Ireland last year, but he hasn’t even heard that yet, so I guess the debt still stands until we meet again.

He’s recently moved back to London from a brief foray to L.A. – he was sorely missed in the Big Smoke, so we’re glad to have him back. I’m not there of course, but I’m sure the tale remains unfinished…

Kieran Kiely played accordion on Angels in Drag and the organ solo on Place Your Bets.

Kieran has had more true rock and roll experience than anyone I know, during his time with Shane McGowan and The Popes. I won’t go into it right here, lest I scare you off! The bottom line is that he is a sublime musician of great soul, especially when you happen to catch him at the right moment. He played whistle for Sinead O’Connor before she packed it all in, and keys for RK, which is how we met, at TFI Friday in the summer of 2000. I was drawn to the way he played the accordion and made up my mind that somehow, somewhere I would get him down on tape…

Sure enough, many late nights, tours, arena gigs, drinking/studio sessions and TV shows later he was sitting in my front room with his accordion, recording Angels In Drag. It was a one-take special, a beautiful performance, and it transformed the track before my very ears. The accordion adds a wonderful organic ocean-going dimension to the sound, that old sea-shanty feel I was after. I had programmed it before, but Kieran’s feel and sound made all the difference. Its great to have him on my favourite track on the record.

Just before we wrapped up to have a cup of tea and, if my memory serves me correctly, dinner at Adam’s Cafe, he ripped out some funky-ass Hammond on Place Your Bets, which helped the playout of the tune no end. So there we have it – the contribution of the Kielster… top marks for bringing to life the vision of ‘Angels In Drag’. He just got married in the Seychelles – good way to do it!

I’ll put up a mix of some of his accordion mastery soon…

In the meantime, I’m having a lazy Saturday, going shopping for my cousin’s wedding gift and hot chocolate in Max Brenner’s…

Ian Hunter played the Wells-Kennedy pipe organ on Cheapskate Rainbow.

Ian Hunter. What a privilege to have this man on the record. We go way, way back… back to the first day I set foot in secondary school, where he was the feisty head of the music department. I didn’t imagine then that we would ever see eye to eye, never mind become friends. He has been a guru of sorts to me, an inspiration as a person…

My music teacher in primary school, Mrs. Tennant, had told me, using these exact words, etched on my mind, that Mr. Hunter was ‘red hot on theory’, in an effort to encourage me to ‘keep up the good work’ – there was great promise for my advance through the music hierarchy of Bangor Grammar School. However, I was far from hot, soon discovering that music and academia don’t breed a happy mixture and decided to give music a miss as soon as possible, which was in second year.

I didn’t get back into it until I got an electric guitar at 15. Just after that, Ian, who was always very classically-orientated, took the leap and bought an Atari ST with Notator for the music department, pretty advanced music software for the time. He was very receptive to my enthusiasm, and let me take it home during school holidays, where I would stay up for days and nights on end writing stuff. I told him that computers were the way to schoolboys hearts, and that he could do something really good if he bought a few more with the budget, but again, the answer clearly etched in my mind, was ‘But Stephen, we need to buy a tuba’.

In ’91 it was the Year Of The Dog – not in Chinese calendar terms but myself and a few other guys formed a band, Spontaneous Dog. No kidding. To cut a long story short we entered the Panasonic Audio Rockschool Competition, after persuasion from Mr. H. After winning the regional final (outrageous celebrations) we travelled over to Bradford for the Nationals, accompanied by the cool and quietly supportive head of Mr. Hunter. He was brilliant at the time, very genuine and I saw something in him that changed my opinion from one of manipulative tolerance to real admiration. So I joined his choir, the Gryphon Consort.

A ruthless taskmaster he was! But the music was stunning. What would life be like had I never heard ‘Faire is the Heaven’ by William Harris, or ‘Lo The Full Final Sacrifice’ by Gerald Finzi? I went to St. Pauls for a week of singing Evensong with Ian and the choir. I shall never forget being in there alone at night, music drifting around that glorious emptiness, a truly heavenly joy. After the week of singing we headed for Cambridge, to catch the final evensongs of the year at King’s and St. John’s college, the perfect encapsulation of the English summer evening, unchanging through centuries, time losing itself in the amber glow falling on cathedral doors, thrown open to the birdsong, the late light on the river…

On to 1996. Ian Hunter, still head of the music department, bought an Apple Mac and Logic 2.6 – again, great software for the time. He was beginning to get into computers himself by then, and I could see the floodgates open. By the time he retired from teaching, the school had a completely custom-fitted studio complete with 26 workstations… when I walked in and saw it I nearly cried – for one man to achieve all this was fantastic. The room with the computers is always completely packed… lots of music being made, and that’s Ian Hunter for you. He will leave music in his wake.

So, I asked him to play pipe organ on one of the tracks, Cheapskate Rainbow. His brother Peter had a lovely little pipe organ (very ‘Bagpuss’, I know) in his house in Holywood, County Down. A Wells-Kennedy, 1976. Beautiful sounding little instrument – I had originally thought we’d be recording it in a church, but the irony of the smallness of this organ was perfect for the album philosophy.

Ian doesn’t play by ear, so I had to score the piece out. We argued the toss over a proper cadence at the end. He won. He played exactly what I wanted – I was delighted, we all had a cup of tea, Ian drove home, and I drove back up to Homestead studio to give Mudd his mics back. The result will be online soon… God bless ya, Mr. Hunter – now drifting towards a life as an ex-pat on the sunshine coast of Spain.

Continuing with the ‘Angels Co-Conspirators’ series, lets move on down to James Hallawell who played the Hammond A100 on Magical Mystery Girl

After a piece of news… the CDs went to print today in Hong Kong!!

I had met James a number of times. Firstly in a little border town in Northern Ireland where he was playing hammond for Brian Kennedy. I asked him at the end what unit he was using to do all his sweeping filter sounds and he said ‘No man, thats just using the drawbars’ – ie. some serious organic hammond organ trickery!! Awesome stuff… later that same year we were quaffing champagne at a big celebrity bash and vowing to hook up in London, listen to each other’s stuff, throw some ideas around. He’s a very accomplished songwriter and producer, as well as being able to play every instrument and sing like a demon if need be!! Bastard.

When I called him to see if he would play hammond on the record, he was very enthusiastic about it. I brought a demo round to his studio in Kensington, the hammond played (badly) by me on a software B4 organ…

James put the disc on, sat between the speakers, and furled his brow into something of a ‘wing-commander’ expression. He sat through a couple of minutes of the song, saying nothing, not looking round once and I thought ‘He doesn’t like it. Bollocks.’

But then, and with great weight, he turned slowly to me, eyebrow raised, and said, “Oh yeah… I’m going to rip the SHIT out of this!!” It was one of the defining moments of the album-making process for me, I can tell you.

The thing about James is, he will make a statement like that, and then do exactly what he tells you. What may seem like arrogance from your average bear is merely a promise from him. So when he pitched up at Intimate Studio in London’s docklands, my engineer Cai Murphy had the A100 revved up and ready to receive the mighty fingers of doom. He blew us to bits with a single pass containing every sound that thing could make, all perfect for the context of the song. Amazing!! Everyone who dabbles with hammond that’s heard the track is completely awestruck.

There’s a great little MPEG video clip of him doing his stuff with a big vibe and checked trousers which MUST go somewhere soon…

After yesterday’s short piece on Liam Bradley, today I will proceed down the alphabet of Angels In Drag co-conspirators to the voice of the Magical Mystery Girl… D. Cheung – backing vocals on Magical Mystery Girl and Angels In Drag.

D. posseses a superb Scottish voice that you can hear the smile in, a truly unique quality. It was only proper that she become the voice of the Magical Mystery Girl (more on that track soon) and sing the most important line on the whole album – ‘Let your North Star be love’ in Angels In Drag. She sang them beautifully, so praise be to that funky Chinese Scottish Chick!!

Ages ago there was an extended section in Magical Mystery Girl where she went off on one about the four secrets of life – Grace, courage, compassion and desire. I was leaving London to fly to Belfast, and had hoped that D. would be able to read the lyrics into my little dictating machine to mix into a drum and bass section, but as usual, we ran out of time.

Or so I thought… When I got on the plane, I pulled the machine out and pressed play to see what I had on the tape (it got a fair amount of use on the album) and there she was. She had got up at some excruciating hour of the morning and done it! I decided in the end not to use it, as the track had changed shape. The little sad face was too much, so I sculpted a plan to get her back on the record… like I say, you can hear her smile as she sings, and it just adds a certain inexplicable air of sunshine to the tracks she’s on.

I was thinking about the recording process, and decided to mention something else. I don’t know if you know this, but most records these days are made with a piece of machinery/software called ‘AutoTune’ – if you don’t believe me, just click on the AutoTune link in the extras box to be shown once and for all that all the tuneless popstar donkeys of the day make it to record ONLY because of this suspect technology. I decided from the outset to make an AutoTune Free record. A bit like the old days, when variations in pitch and notes not quite on the mark sometimes made much more of an impression than clinically accurate ones. Like most of ‘Astral Weeks’ by Van Morrison – a beautiful and totally loose record…

…The way I see it is this. As long as Marvin Gaye has records available, you can forget about being the best singer there ever was. And as long as Bob Dylan has records out, you can forget about being the worst. So all of us, from Kylie Minogue to George Michael to Sting to you to me are somewhere in the middle. All you have to do is find YOUR OWN VOICE!! Thats what Dylan did and thats why I LOVE some of his stuff. Even Mark Knopfler managed to find some little niche of uninterested-sounding vocals and Dire Straits were HUGE. He’s another great inspiration vocally, for the reasons I’m talking about.

Zen Guitar. Don’t be put off by the title if you aren’t a guitar player, or for that matter even a musician… just go and see what this guy has to say. I picked the book up in Wildcard’s house a long time ago and it changed something about the way I see and feel music now…

The first extra is a QuickTime Virtual Reality of Waverley Graveyard. Might sound grim, but its a beautiful place just along the coast towards Bronte Beach, and along with Pere La Chaise in Paris, has to be one of the most excellent final resting places in the world. I run through it on most of my training routes. I just put it up because its part of life here. You’ll need QuickTime to view it.

Not much else to report. I went over to The Sandringham Hotel tonight to hear Brooke McClymont, the awesome singer who supported RK on the Australian tour last year. She’s mad as a bag of sand, but could sing the phone book and blow your mind. Walking into the hotel downstairs was the all-too-familiar Aussie bar scene… pokey machines (gambling machines), pool tables, betting TV screens and a sense of dinginess matched by stale beer. Forlorn, I thought my railing against the Sydney music scene was about to scale new heights, but no – there was an upstairs bit – candles, red velvet, nice. And there was Brooke, belting it out. She really can sing. Its a great inspiration to hear good singers, because I am NOT one of their number.

Goodnight.