It May Be Hell Down There...

A bright, cold and shining morning today. The perfect weather for listening to Echo & The Bunnymen's spiky second album, 'Heaven Up Here'. Haven't heard it all the way through for a long time, but doing so reminded me why they were/are such a special band. The complete package. From Mac's perfect haircut down, they had it all. A virtuoso guitarist, a fantastically muscular rhythm section, a motormouth vocalist who could (almost) walk it like he talked it, and, in Bill Drummond, a lunatic visionary for a manager. Come on, a tour of ley lines? Genius.

After the slightly druggy disheveled bedsit debut of 'Crocodiles', 'Heaven Up Here' was wide open spaces, as wide as the Weston Super Mare mudflats the band were pictured in the middle of on the cover. Will Sergeant's sharded guitar, at one moment angled and chorded, the next deadened and picked, provides a perfect counterpoint to McCulloch's grandiose lyrics. It's a blown clean kind of record - cold, frosty, but something I find easy to love.

Can't wait for Ocean Rain at the Royal Albert Hall...

Drying out

Spending January, as have done for quite a few years now, without the crutch of alcohol to help me through what must be the dreariest month. It's become quite the thing nowadays to do so, apparently. Around a table at the Word offices t'other day, when someone said 'how about a pint' the other three demurred, citing being on the wagon for Jan.

Actually, as this is the first 'two kid' attempt at this, it's remarkable a) how easy it is - somehow easier than previous attempts, probably due to general feeling of extreme tiredness anyway, and b) how, to completely contradict my previous sentence, both Em and I look at each other without fail around 7.30 each evening and one of the other utters the magic words '...I could just murder a glass...'

So. despite the fact there's the best part of a month to go, a case of something mysterious has just been ordered from the lovely people at Laithwaites so that come Feb 1st I'm not scrabbling around the back of the local offie trying to find something nice. And failing.