A Sound Salvation...

To the Radio Festival in Edinburgh to produce a session, and wonder why people involved in making radio programmes - and spending a long time thinking about how to make them sound really interesting - think that there isn't any reason why they should just chuck a live session together without much thought.

Reason To Be Cheerful

Walking down Ockendon Road, a quiet residential street in North London yesterday, I passed a plastic traffic island bollard in the middle of the road. And stopped. Balanced upon it was a book. A hardback, red book. Outsize, with gold embossed lettering down the spine.

The street was deserted, and so I crossed over and had a look. It was a brand new copy of ‘The Dangerous Book For Boys’. Unopened, the spine not even cracked. I was so impressed, I took a photograph of it on my phone;

I’ve been thinking since about this quite a bit. And it’s all good thoughts. The most likely explanation of how the book got there is that someone had found it lying in the street, and, assuming someone had lost it, placed it somewhere highly visible in the assumption that it’s rightful owner would trace their steps in the hope of finding it.

This simple act of kindness, a small attempt to help out a stranger, gave - and continues to give me - a warm glow. Just when you get worn down by the incessant screwfaces, the refusal to give up seats on the tube to pregnant women, the general abrasiveness of life in London, you witness something which reminds you there are people who are trying to be pleasant as well.

Either that, or it was a situationist art prank/book review. It was near Dalston, after all.

The King Of Shinar Is Hiding Out In Dalston

OK, so much of my time is spent planning how to get out of London. But that doesn't stop me loving the way anyone with half an eye can have their minds thrown in wildly random directions by the bizarre signs and views the city throws up. I don't mean to get all Iain Sinclair, psycho geographic on yo' ass, but take today as an example. Finished recording The Word podcast on Pentonville Road, had a couple of hours to kill before next meting in Dalston, so wandered through Islington towards my destination.

And just south of Dalston Junction I stumbled across this sign. I's a dead end, one back from the shopfronts on Kingsland Road, and the name just leapt out as slightly incongruous in this neck of the woods. Having googled him, I now know that Nimrod was a biblical king, who got his hands on the clothes worn by Adam & Eve, which gave him great power and the ability to kick seven shades of shite out of anyone he wanted. He started building the Tower of Babel - and that's where it all went wrong. A classic case of over-reaching yourself. That he's now given his name to a cobbled alleyway in one of the most multicultural areas of London has a certain pleasant symmetry to it.

Do The Hippy Hippy Shake

Just been absorbing a lovely record by Al Wilson. Best known for his recording of 'The Snake' which apparently was a big Northern Soul tune 'back in the day' - about which I have to confess, in the manner of Manuel from Fawlty Towers 'I know nothing' - I picked it up because of the title track, his take on Fred Neill's beautiful 'Dolphins'. Wilson's voice is a lovely instrument, and the arrangement does Neill's song justice.

But there's other good stuff on there as well. The stract I can't stop playing at the moment is 'Summer Rain', a very funky tune whose chorus details 'dancing in the sand, to Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band''. Got me thinking how many artists from, say the rock/indie field would current soul singers namecheck in a lyric? Maybe Radiohead might crop up on a Saul Williams tune, but that's about it. Shame, in a way.

Back To The Old School

Apart from the upcoming Echo & The Bunnymen reunion, I've been left a bit cold by the recent craze for playing whole albums live. But the news about Public Enemy's Brixton rendition of 'It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back' has got me buck wild, as a believe we used to say back in the day.

Speaking as someone who saw P.E. quite a few times when they were releasing records that people were bothered about, rather than appearing on reality TV and curating Black music history, I'm most interested in seeing who's actually going to be attending the gig. Given hip hop's obsession with 'the new thing' I can't really see many current heads getting down with Night Of The Living Baseheads' and 'Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos'.

So, it could well be the oldest hip hop crowd in living memory. Whatever, it'll be fun.

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.