Writer-insighter – Page 45 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true…

A long time ago I took a cat to the vet. He never liked going there even though the vet was kind, competent and did everything he could that I could see to calm down the queue of indignant dogs and cats whose dinner was late and who’d just been bundled into a plastic crate for strangers to stare at. The cat was called Reg; his brother had been called Ron and they were London cats. Anyone of a certain age can guess which one was the clever one with an attitude.

Good manners don't cost nothing, know what I mean? — Good manners don’t cost nothing, know what I mean?

Reg needed two injections, a local anaesthetic and some antibiotics. He’d been fighting a fox for over an hour the night before and judging by the screams and cat threats coming from the garden, he’d been the one objecting to the fox not showing respect. Good manners don’t cost nothing, do they?

Reg put up with the first injection and waited with all his muscles rigid until the vet turned away to prepare the second syringe. Then slowly, but I knew how serious he was about it, he reached for the vet’s neck with his claws out. He was a cat not a lion, on a surgery table, not on the veldt. I said it was just as well he wasn’t bigger. The vet didn’t mind. He said it was just as well, that some animals, there’s a limit to what they will take and after that as he said, ‘we both know what would happen.’ The same way people in parts of London did when the two demented twins walked the streets the first time.

Secondhand Lions

I thought of that story today when I saw a picture of someone feeding presumably tamed cheetahs in their kitchen. It’s not the kind of animal I’d like to argue about who gets the sofa with, but maybe they’ve got lots of sofas. That made me think about those two showbusiness brothers in America who had a house and a circus act full of lions until inevitably, one of the lions wasn’t having it any more. And because I couldn’t remember their name I typed lions and brothers into Google and came up with a film I’d never heard of, Secondhand Lions.

It’s an American film. It’s got Robert Duval from just about everything and Michael “Doors Off” Caine, big box office stars. So let me re-phrase that. It’s a Hollywood film. And if it’s a Hollywood film there are strict rules for the script. It will have a happy ending. It will leave the audience believing that love, mom, Gahd and apple pie will prevail. That good will win and evil will lose. That there is hope and truth and justice and bad things will happen to bad people sooner or later and they’re never happy, really.

But for all that dishonesty it sounds like a good Sunday afternoon film. A misunderstood and lonely boy goes to stay with two old men who seem crusty and useless but really they had an exciting life and both have hearts of gold as well as a cellar full of it. There are filmic crises to keep the audience in the cinema and during one of them Duval responds with a piece of his “What Every Boy Needs to Know…” speech, that the actual truth is not as important as the belief in ideals like good winning over evil, honor, and true love.

Hollywood. Or Claire and Ben, both believing that in Not Your Heart Away, albeit for different reasons, she because she had to with her whole life falling to pieces and Ben because he thought ‘good’ resided within her jeans.

The moot point is the Oxford comma, the issue of where you put the comma without altering the meaning of a sentence, changing Ella Fitzgerald’s despairing “What Is This Thing Called Love” to the utterly fatuously funny, querulous “What Is This Thing Called, Love?” that Terry Scott or Bernard Cribbins might have sung.

“The belief in ideals like good winning over…..true love.” And sometimes, when things go completely wrong, that’s what happens. And it’s the saddest thing, when you know what had to be done had to be done, that it’s better for the person you love that it was done, but it isn’t going to get you closer to them at all. So maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Today, these last few weeks, I don’t know the answer to that any more.

First storm of winter

The first storm of the winter came in today as I was driving back along the A14. I could feel the car shaking as the wind took it, saw the trees waving through the windscreen. By the time I got close to the village where I live the road that always floods was under six inches of water, but the high road was flooded too, the water lying where I’ve never seen water on the road in the six years of being here.

clouds2

It’s been a raw wind all day, a damp chill that cuts through summer clothes and let’s you know you’re in for the long haul now. The radio was saying there’s a good chance the lights will go out this winter, because government after government has decided that having wars is much more fun than building power stations. Let’s face it, nobody is going to move out of your way at the G8 Summit just because everyone in your own country thinks things are going quite nicely for a change. That’s not what being a global statesman is about at all.

Someone had left my gate open and a dog fox was calling as I stepped out of the car into the dark and moved my bags indoors. There was a spicy bean stew in the freezer and a bottle of wine in the rack. Put the washing into the machine and unpack the bags, make the list of Stuff To Do and read three really, really nice emails from people who didn’t owe me a nice email but sent one anyway.

There’s food on the table and a bed waiting for me. And some days you count your blessings for those things alone, because there are plenty of people without and more to come. Tomorrow if the weather is ok I’ll cycle down to Caroline Wiseman’s Suffolk Arts Club at lunchtime. There’s always someone interesting to talk to there as well as a glass of wine.

None of us know what’s going to happen next, not anybody at all. I think the secret is wanting to find out.

Getting it wrong

Ronnie Lane (centre) and the Slim Chance Band.

I always thought I should write books. Recently two people whose opinions I respect said no, you’re much better not doing that. Someone else wants me to write lyrics. I always thought I should play the guitar too. Tonight, after not the best few days I’ve ever had, I picked up my old saxophone. And no, that’s not me being rock n roll. It was made in 1924, even older than me. A bit.

I haven’t played the saxophone for months. It must be at least three months. I got it years ago, a really nice Christmas present and stopped playing it when I had four top crowns done. They grind your teeth off down to the gum and put bionic titanium ones on top of them. Now I can bite through steel hawsers. Obviously, I’m down to about ten of those a day. Just socially, you know. I could give it up any time I wanted, but I like the taste.

Good thing

So the odd thing was that not having played the sax for a while, once the reed was behaving itself it was fine. The reed is literally that, a thin strip of er, reed. You clamp it to the mouthpiece and blow through it. The whole sound depends on the reed vibrating and that depends on how hard you blow and how wet the reed is. They misbehave. They wear out. If they’re too dry they don’t make the right sound and if they get too wet they don’t either.

But when they do, when they do you just know it. You can feel it. And it felt good.

A bit of Eagles (New Kid In Town and yes, you can on a tenor sax), a rip through Dexy’s Burn It Down I really enjoyed playing. I didn’t play Kate Bush’s Saxophone Song, nor Steely Dan’s Deacon Blue. But I did play a bit of Ronnie Lane. When I was about nineteen I went up to Sheffield to see a friend of mine at university there. You know her. Fictionally, she became Liz in Not Your Heart Away. Before I had to run for the train we found Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance album. Maybe that year, maybe the year before, she tracked him down on his farm where his touring outfit, The Passing Show was based, as much as a passing show is based anywhere. I still have that record. The album folded open to show a picture of the band. Try that with a CD. You can see it at the top here.

Wasted time

I make mistakes. I’ve been wrong about lots of things; what to say, what to do. But there are some things I seem to do quite well and it makes me pause when I find they maybe aren’t the things I think I should do. My sax playing needs some work. But it plays better than the guitar. John Coltrane still doesn’t have anything to worry about, and nor does the guy playing sax for Ronnie. The guys in the picture don’t look rich and they weren’t. But they look as if they’ve found what they want to do and they’re doing it, as best they can. I want to get that feeling back. I always wanted to be in that picture. I would have given anything back then to have been in that band. But Ronnie died of Multiple Sclerosis in 1997. And besides, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Lifeboat Launch – Again

I did the sixth Lifeboat Party show today at Radio Castle. It’s on every Monday, noon till one and I could tell before I got there that just about everything that could go wrong was going to er, go wrong. Different studio. Different mixing desk.

Couldn’t remember the wifi password. Lead was too short to plug the laptop in. The mix was different through the headphones to the level it was at in the other studio. I’m really sorry, ok? It got better as I improvised a way around it.

But it wasn’t what it should have been. Sorry.

Good parenting

I emailed my mother about the show. We don’t talk much. There’s a reason. But I thought I’d make the effort. I’vbe got this show, I said. Here’s the link, so you can listen to it. Within the week I got a reply.

“As you know, I don’t really like that sort of music.”

I am so glad I bothered. No, really I am.

Listen Again. Just do it. Please.

You can listen again to all the Lifeboat Party shows here.

Ligging, as it used to be called

When I first went to journalism school (oh, didn’t I tell you? Why don’t you buy me a drink and I will?) we all thought we were going to be fast-tracked onto the free drinks circuit. All the movers and shakers and people who wanted to influence people were bound to want thirty 18 year olds swigging their free champagne and stuffing vol-au-vents in their pockets for supper while we practised our T-Line shorthand and forgot people’s names, starting on the fifth free champagne and an empty stomach, with our own. Bound to. Somehow the 46th Annual Bread, Cake and Confectionary Exhibition at Cardiff City Hall didn’t quite go that way and nor did I.

cardiff — Cardiff City Hall. Dropped the camera. Bit skew-whiff now. You’re my besht mate. No, really you are. You know that?

But today reminded me what ligging was really about. Not scoring free drinks and some nibbles instead of buying your own lunch, but getting your face about and keeping an ear to the ground, although now not drinking so much that you do that literally.

I was walking down the street, like you do, when I saw a friend of mine walking towards me. Where are you going? Off to a press launch. Invites only. Mind if I come? No, if you like.

It’s that simple. Like many things in life, the hardest thing is believing you can do it. And not acting the arse when you do. I met a few interesting new people. Made some contacts. They might come to something, they might do later. Might have some new guests for the Lifeboat Party radio show at www.radiocastle.com. Gave them my card (thank-you Vistaprint, £6.59 well spent) and something might come of that. Who knows?

Even if it doesn’t it reminded me of two things. More people usually want to meet you than you think. And you don’t always have to buy your own drinks.

Pretzel logic

Long long ago when the world was young and me, well, I was younger too a band called Steely Dan used to play a song called Pretzel Logic in the days when bands apart from The Archies had to usually write their own songs, then play them on instruments they had to learn and then sing them themselves. I know!!! How fake is that!?!?! It’ll never catch on.

Well it did, because there wasn’t any other way of doing it. People like Frank Sinatra never sang a darned thing they’d ever written because that’s not what they did and so far as I can guess, Elvis and Suzi Quatro didn’t either. Suzi Quattro. I mean, what? As someone who is a little over 21, each time I see this I can’t believe I saw this. It wasn’t just the obvious bra-less ness, (like OMG) or even the leather jumpsuit, or the huge hairy blokes she surrounded herself with (and apparently it was the drummer, I seem to remember, if I got that right). It wasn’t just the fact that back in ’73 this stuff went out on air live at 7:30 on a Thursday on Top of the Pops.

Suzi Quatro. A healthy influence on fourteen year-old boys, back then. It explains a lot, doesn't it? — Suzi Quatro was considered a healthy influence on fourteen year-old boys, back then. It explains quite a lot, doesn’t it?

That’s right morality crusaders. Ever wondered why youth street crime went up? Back in the day you could leave your back door unlocked, if you’ll pardon the expression, because every malenky nadsat droog was safe at home trying to memorise every stitch in the seams in the lingering crotch shots the BBC thought appropriate before the watershed. And there were quite a few.

Were they strange times? I don’t know. Like any time, we all thought it was normal, even when we heard stuff like Sparks singing some of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t just the bloke who played the keyboards and looked a bit like Hitler, or his androgynous brother (how weird was that, man? as we said back then). It was the whole, you know. Thing. We were fourteen or something. Why did we have to deal with stuff like this? I mean, it wasn’t 1918, except for the Souix.

But then, why did we buy it? Because we did. We all bought hugely into the whole sad song laments of Americans dragging thirty (how old? Nobody’s THAT old, man) not least because back before the whole interwebby thing and Wikipedia it wasn’t easy to find out that Ian Hunter was born in 1939.

I’m sorry, I still need to pause to let the horror of that statement go away a bit. “I got out my six string razor and hit the sky.” As we said back then, what does that even mean? Did we ever listen to the words when we heard bands like Eagles, singing coked-out dead-end laments like Desperado and Hotel California? How did that resonate with someone less than half their age, living 5,000 miles away on an estate in Trowbridge? Because it did.

Probably it meant just the same as it means now. The words change but the feeling doesn’t. Someone said to me yesterday, “you’re good with words when you speak. But when you write it down it’s shit. Sorry.” And sometimes, she’s right. I can’t catch that feeling, the way the music made us feel, the way it probably makes younger people feel now. Same things, different words. The same feeling, just a different way of saying it. I thought that as we sat on our bar stools as the music played. This hasn’t changed in three decades, for either of us.

For me, it was always Deacon Blues. Back before I had to do something about un-becoming the expanding man in the opening line (yes I did, yes you can, buy the programme…) Steely Dan’s song did it for me. It got in my head. It became my anthem. I don’t drink scotch whisky all night long. Not for years. I don’t drink drive. But I sometimes think the real thing I should do is learn to work the saxophone and play just what I feel. I’ve been called many names when I’ve lost, usually short ones but they still don’t call me Deacon Blue. There are days, more often nights, when I wish they did. Somewhere in that parallel universe, sometimes, just sometimes when the nights are getting longer and the apple wood smoke is heavy on the ground, when the winter starts to feel its way through your clothes, somewhere they still do.

And pretzel logic? Oh, you know how that works. Or maybe you don’t, if you’re lucky. It’s late and the words make perfect sense at the time and they curl back on themselves and make their own sense, in a big circle, like one of those who was that Dutch guy who did the drawings of lizards running upstairs in a circle. You want another? You drive here? You know how that thinking works and where it’s going, at least until you sober up.

So as The Archies used to say, pour a little sugar on it, baby. Just pour a little sugar on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Catching Up

Each week I do a community radio show. Me and Garrison Keillor, we’re like that. I wish, anyway. His rather more famous show is called the Prairie Home Companion. Mine’s unoriginally called the Lifeboat Party and I try to get a new guest on the show every week, to prove there is life in Suffolk.

It’s at noon every Monday. All you have to do is go to www.radiocastle.com.

But wait, I hear you cry. I can’t listen to the radio on the interwebness at noon on a Monday. I have a life, apart from anything else.

Well click here then. It’s the Listen Again thing.

Get in touch. It’s darned lonely in that studio. I sit there making love to all of Suffolk. Then I go home alone…..

Learning experience

Learning or experience, or both? Who knows? It has to be a combination I think, which sits at odds with things I used to believe, that learning meant sitting still and reading a book. I didn’t learn as much as I should have done that way, and my grades showed it. I got bored, I looked at of the window and wrote poems about trees and girls, all the stuff the lovable but messing-up kid does in films, a kind of budget Owen Wilson, a bit older.

Same as me, really. Sort of. No, really.

Video Killed The Radio Star

I looked-up Owen Wilson on a movie database. He came out with the kind of thing I’d say:

There’s that great quote from Beckett, I think, ‘He had an abiding sense of melancholy that sustained him through brief periods of joy.’

Why? Because I know that feeling. I live that feeling. It’s not altogether a bad thing, but that’s the way it is. But I also recognise the academic slopiness betrayed by the ‘I think,’ the attitude that says look, I’ve read quite a lot of stuff and if I’m just generally quite charming and seem assured I can usually get away with saying things that maybe perhaps aren’t entirely accurate, because to be honest, charm beats rigour.

As it should and it’s fine unless you’re say, building a motorway bridge or doing neurosurgery, but it’s not the nicest thing to know about yourself. You see? You see what I mean?

But the learning experience, well, there have been several this week. For the first time in a long time I went out and interviewed someone on their territory.

The Monday Lifeboat Party show, my radio slot now has two interviews all lined up and sort-of ready to go. Almost. Except one I recorded onto CD and I can’t get it off onto my editing software because my CD drive is bust and I can’t unwrap the files from their email format and the other one is just about edited and now I can’t burn it to a CD because my CD blah…..

Technology. It’s not the studio’s fault. This is my own kit that’s broken. The learning was one of those usual learning things. I’d never edited sound before. I got about an hour and a half of material from the first interview, about forty minutes from the second one in Walberswick. That one I recorded on my iPhone. Depressingly, the sound quality was way better than on the expensive digital recorder I got just a couple of years ago, really good, easily as good as the studio recording.

It's a bit over the top for editing audio tape, isn't it? — It’s a bit over the top for editing audio tape, isn’t it?

But too much of it. I had to learn to cut bits out of the recording and join it back together again. It used to be done with magnetic tape, a guillotine and glue. You’ve seen it in the films.

Just kidding and anyway, it’s all done, like most other things (yes even that, or arranging it, anyway) these days on a laptop. It took me hours to get started. What I should have done is listened through with a piece of paper and a pen and marked-up where I wanted to cut.

The first ten times I cut anything I deleted the entire track and had to re-load it from the place Steve Jobs at Apple had thoughtfully put a spare, knowing I’d probably do something like that. Thanks for looking out for me, Steve. You don’t get that from Bill Gates, just 46 questions asking you if you really want to do that are you sure you want to do that are you really sure you want to do that and do you feel lucky, well do you punk? And we all know how that one ends.

But then it clicked, literally. I got it. I found how to cut. I found out how to cut just at the start of a word so there’s no silence and no dreaded Splicer’s Disease, where words get merged into each other so that people talking about a delightful cream-coloured jumper ruined when someone fell out of a punt changes utterly when you cut the wrong nine words and six letters. And as always, after I’d learned how to do it I couldn’t really imagine a time when I didn’t know how to do it. It’s so easy. Except until you learn it by doing it, it really isn’t. Which makes learning a much more complicated thing than I’d ever really thought about, but I’m thinking about learning a lot this week.

This morning a final listen through and see whether I can be bothered to cut the coughs and intakes of breath (no, just normal ones, it wasn’t that sort of recording). Then find a way to get it onto the mixing deck at the studio. I might go in on Sunday and see what I can do. A day you don’t learn anything is a day wasted, after all.

Getting it right

So I just finished my fourth show, the Monday noon Lifeboat Party slot at www.readiocastle.com.

So far I thought the third was the best, with someone saying to me ‘you sounded like a real DJ!’ which flattered me hugely. This time I had no guests at all though, everyone had blown me out and I forgot my Kid Creole Lifeboat Party CD for the signature track.

I thought the whole thing was a total disaster, his fourth show. I just wasn’t in a great mood, bad weekend and chaotic. I couldn’t hear through the headphones, I couldn’t remember which CDs I’d loaded into the decks, the iPod feed was about half the volume of anything else and I couldn’t hear anything from the iPod at all, so I didn’t even know if it was playing or not.

So I talked about BT’s broadband to Rachmaninov’s Second (Rach 2, as we call it down the station, darling) and that seemed to go a lot better than I had any right to expect it to, unrehearsed. Then I played Magazine’s Permafrost and totally, I swear, totally forgot about the line that runs I will drug you and oh look at that out of the window. Except there wasn’t a window in my studio.

Got home. Thought I’d blown it. Got email. One word: “Brilliant.”

It made my day.

There’s a band playing

About a million years ago I fell in love with a song. I know, another one. But this one, this one was really special. It had something other songs just didn’t have. Rythym. Lyrics that touched my heart.

It was Roxy Music’s Oh Yeah (On The Radio) and the rhythm of rhyming guitars still does it for me. *sigh*

Anyway pop-pickers, you can hear my own selection of corny old songs (and some new corny songs too) at Radio Castle on my show, the LifeBoat Party.

It’s on Monday at noon BST. If you miss it you can listen again if you make like a dolphin and click here. As we say down the station.

Any requests, let me know – we’ve got 21,000 songs on the system apart from the awful old stuff I bring in as well.