I fancied and egg sandwich and some lentil soup so I cracked and egg and out flopped a big fat chicken embryo into the frying pan. Clay was watching, as was his Oma and Nora too as I cracked the egg. We all got a major fright.
Then I opened a tin of soup and put it in a saucepan on the gas. When it boiled, I poured it in a bowl and put some in my mouth. There was chopped up sausages in it!! I spat it out(Paul) and looked at the tin. It had a label on the tin saying vegetarian. Nora called the manufacturer and they said we were the second folk to call and that someone in the factory had mis-labeled a large quantity. They are going to send us some more soup to make up for the mistake.
Man that chicken embryo will stay with me though. Errrrraaauuughhh!!!
Last week, 2 men rolled into our communal back yard here in Berlin, tooled up with chainsaws and hatchets. Some property developers are about to rip the place apart to build some pokey apartments. That’s a reality in Berlin and I kind of resigned myself to it but it was sad to see what they did. The men spent 5 days tearing these two massive wall climbers down. They had grown there for 40 years. Hundreds of birds and bats nested there.
Nora took some pictures out on the street of them filling their huge truck. When she turned her camera on the two guys, lazily leaning against their van, the bigger one ran at her, grabbed her wrist and twisted it behind her head. Nice people.
I had until the past week been going to bed between 1 and 4 in the morning and getting up at 8. After arriving back from New York, my jetlag sent me to bed before midnight. I thought I would stick to this and I have experienced much longer days. 1pm feels like 4 or 5. 6pm feels like 9 or 10. The last week felt like a week instead of the usual WHOOSH “God is it Friday again!”
I have been listening to the absolute finished album. The last stage is puting the transition between each song. Some songs need an extra second before they begin, some need an extra pause when they end. Emily and Joe at the Lodge (uh!) did a great job. We also changed the mix of the first track of the record. I’m relieved we reopened this track. It’s the first track of my solo record. Ohhheee!
Snow seems to be a running theme this winter. I was thinking late last year how I had seen far more snow as a child than I have in recent times, so it’s nice to finally get some. I spoke to Nora on the phone and she said that alot of the snow in Berlin had begun to melt. She was saying how she hadn’t seen so much dogshit on the streets in here life. She said it smells rank . Dog shit is a massive problem in Berlin. People don’t want to pick it up. I wouldn’t want to pick it up either. It’s dogshit! I need to not get started on dogshit…
Anyways more snow. Last day in studio. I am out here because I wrote 2 more songs way past the 12th hour. I am swapping them out with two on the record. The two in question were incongruous with the rest of the album. The 2 new songs are called “Shadow Boxing” and “Anything”. I have one more vocal to do. Wish me luck.
It’s a beautiful sunny day today in Berlin. I have been writing and writing and writing. It’s been good. The strike rate has always been 20 flat songs and 1 that stands up by itself. These songs come from a different place in the brain than the others. I’m not familiar with right left brain responsibilities but I think the reason it is hard to write a good song maybe relates to it coming from an unconscious area of the brain so there is no way of repeating it because it’s unmapped, unknown. Like being blindfolded and taken in a car somewhere and then blindfolded on your return, you would never know how to get there again. A song from here is a postcard which ignites upon consumption this area of the brain.
When I hear something which comes from this unmapped place, I get a little jolt and for a moment I am transported there. This feeling is addictive. It is escape.
Anyways I got one of these the other night. It is nice to know if I empty my head enough, I am still light enough to float off to that cool secret place.
On another note, I was driving the other day and I heard a familiar voice singing on the radio. It took a while to figure out who it was because the lyrics and his voice were beautifully juxtaposed and later it all made sense when the announcer said it was a cover. The song is by Magnatic Fields and the singer is Peter Gabriel. Still one of the best voices Britain has produced. The song is called The Book Of Love. I’ll take it down if it’s naughty to have it here.
It comes from his new album of cover versions buy it
It has started snowing again in Berlin. I have been holed up in my room, writing. It’s nice to have a room to do this. Before we bought this house, and before the people that had it before us, it was a bar. This room was a disco. A friend of ours came by and while here she realised why the place was felt so familiar. She was all “We would sit over there, and the bar was over there and the DJ was over there…” She even found some photos of some nights they spent here. It’s cool to imagine all the parties that have happened in this room. It’s the best writing room I ever had. I think there are many good ghosts in these walls.
The writing place I had in London was this huge room. We took out the 1st floor and opened the whole room up. It sounded great but the space I created was cramped into a corner. I wrote some nice tunes in this room. My Eyes was written on the piano there and Re-Offender. Before this we lived in a tiny little house down the street. I had a nice little room there. I remember covering the walls in poems and writing before writing Driftwood and Blue Flashing Light. I wrote Sing downstairs there while watching MTV with the sound down. Before this all 4 of the band stayed in a house on the Haringey Ladder. We had a horrible landlord. This little fat Italian man called Mario who would come in regularly, uninvited, and take vegetables from the garden and nosey about. It was a nasty place but we had fun in the summer of 96, traveling from there to The Fortress rehearsal studios and to Camden for drinks at The Good Mixer. I wrote Midsummernight’s Dreaming in that house. It features on the back of Good Feeling. It wasn’t the most inspirational of spaces.
Oh and between the place I had with the guys and the little place were Driftwood was written, there was a flat with the most awful neighbour downstairs. One weekend while I was in Rome with the band, my friends did an all nighter and when I got back, the neighbour was livid. To get me back he turned his sound system up full at 7.30am in the morning and blasted The Lighthouse Family. It was torture. We almost came to blows. Another time I was lying on the couch and had the TV on super quiet and all of a sudden I could hear someone shouting. I thought maybe he and his girlfriend were arguing again but I froze when I realised he was screaming at me!! He screamed “YOU ROCK’N'ROLL WANKER” which to this day is the best insult ever thrown at me…
Has anyone else experienced passive aggressive/ aggressive shop assistants or flight attendants, waiters etc? I got one today at the art store Boesner. We were paying, and the moment we put our stuff on the counter the girl started behaving in an odd way, like the way you might expect your sister to behave the next day after you’d dropped your jammy donut onto her art project. Then I gave her my card and she slammed it into the reader. At this point I had to call her on it. “Is there a problem?” Her face flushed red as a tomato. I thought she was going to keel over “No?” Now she was outwardly pissed off and verging on purple so I asked if I could see her manager. She called him, and suddenly she was all giggles and flirty and I can’t speak german but by the tone of what she was saying it was apparent she was covering her ass. So the manager came and I explained and he was all “Ahh, she was puting that card in the machine hard because it wasn’t working properly…” which was totally bollocks. Anyways, anyone else experienced this kind of thing. It must be common. Ok rant over. Let’s talk about what we did at the weekend…
