Slumming it. UK tour style for beginners – a continuing story

– Don’t listen to those people with attractive uniforms urging you to buy tickets for the Gatwick Express, take the normal train it’s not much slower and costs a fraction of the price. Similarly at Heathrow – forget the express and enjoy a rare breath of fresh air as the doors open to reveal the sylvan glory of Osterley station

– Always buy train tickets online, never at stations http://www.thetrainline.com/

– Always buy bus tickets on http://www.nationalexpress.com/home.aspx saving money and the endless queue at Victoria Station. You’ll think you’re living in an MC Escher lithograph http://www.mcescher.com/

– If you rent a car, tune in to BBC 5 Live all the time. It’s  the only way to catch up on gossip and sports news whilst pretending to be listening out for their regular and predictably disaster-filled traffic news.

– This traffic news shall be your guiding star, since driving from London to Leeds could take 3 hours but on the other hand it could take 6 or 7. The difference? You’ll find the answer in the harried tones of the traffic news announcer http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/

– If we’re on the BBC, after the show driving home you must listen to Janice Long’s show. She’s been the greatest BBC Dj since the days when she had the show before John Peel on Radio 1. Right now she’s on Radio 2 between midnight and 3 am and rocks the musician’s regualr post-gig driving-to-the-Travelodge journey http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006wr0n

– Yes. Situated on a motorway off ramp near .. err, nowhere much. A place where wireless costs £6 for 30 minutes and in their words “You are permitted to cancel your booking but not to get a refund”.  Book the inevitable Travelodge on the Edge of Town more than 21 days before you need it – right now they’re £12 or £19 if you do it early. http://www2.travelodge.co.uk/

– But … right beside the Travelodge on the Edge of Town will be a service station where you can sip expensive white coffee posing as cappucino and get free wireless while munching Marks & Spencer’s sarnies. If you do one thing you should always do it’s

– GO TO MARKS & SPENCERS AND EAT THEIR SANDWICHES. Because you know they’re worth it. For some reason nearly every motorway service station boasts one of these fine emporia (look out for the signs while you’re idling in the fast lane enjoying a 60-mile traffic jam

– Avoid the M25. Simple.

– If you must fly, go easyjet and have the heaviest hand baggage in the world and the lightest checked baggage ever checked in. See 21st Century Troubadour for detailed check in strategy.

– Never, ever, Ryanair. Repeat this mantra until you believe it. You are a musician. You have an instrumemt. Never. Ever.

– The ferries to Ireland are good too – have fun in a floating bar filled with fun-filled fellow passengers sinking pints and eating burgers, then driving off to terrorise citizens on the other island itself. Stranraer-Belfast, Holyhead-Dun Laoghaire Fishguard-Rosslare they’re interchangeable http:stenaline.co.uk/ http://irishferries.com/

Ireland … ah ha … like Scotland it’s a whole other story. Next time.

All too brief but it’s a start – let me know your tips.

Andy

Italy? Well, things happen a little differently there, don't you think?

 

Serious Bread

It’s a sunny morning on Sunset and I’m not back in the Casbah. My erstwhile favourite café in Los Angeles has closed its doors to me, with news of a $10 minimum charge for using their internet connection. As a result I am a couple of blocks down the road, sipping a latte – confusingly, to be ordered only with its second syllable stressed – outdoors at Insignificance.

Insignificance is totally dedicated to an alliance between coffee and Macintosh computers. They have worked tirelessly to create an environment where they can exist in perfect symbiosis. As I order my strangely-stressed hit of caffeine, the self-styled ‘Coffee Facilitator’ with the porkpie hat starts juggling the milk and I notice behind him a line of people at the counter, eyes down, tapping away at silver Macbook Pros. Each one identical, all new models. The computers look the same too.

I’m lucky to get a seat at a table between two guys reviewing a script (on another Macbook Pro) and a threesome gathered around a book entitled ‘Hypnobirthday’. It’s about a new childbirth technique, and they’re discussing when the new mother’s going to be ‘put under’. After her waters have broken, or for an extended period of time before this – days or even weeks.

I spot a pigeon strutting around the table in front of me, looking like it owns the joint. I swear I saw it pecking away on a small laptop earlier. Hidden in the shade of the potted palm trees.

A girl is asked to move, downgraded to the corner seat because she’s punching poetry into a last year’s white Macbook. After the ‘Table Co-ordinator’ finishes dealing with her, I fear I could be next. I have a 2008 computer, and it’s squarer and clunkier than all the rest, with it’s tell-tale silver keys. I love this computer, but right now it’s the Model T Ford of this particular parking lot.

The Table Co-ordinator knows I have nabbed a good seat and is worried about the age of my laptop. He greets me with a banality. Luckily my accent, age and profession provide my usual LA passport to celebrity (for which, see previous adventures).

I may know U2. I may even be a member of U2. I may or may not be a friend of John Fluevog. I sit tight.

The table in front of me looks strangely barren, until I notice that the two musclebound beach boys looking down have iPads neatly folded in front of them, reading the papers online. London is burning in real time in small articles on American front pages. People are getting arrested and killed at a rate seems positively prehistoric for the Los Angelean. The main home news story seems to be graphs falling at vertiginous gradients. Money wins out over violence every time.

The couple next  to me who are reviewing a script, start acting it out. “That’s not sexist, it’s sexy” one screams in a sitcom voice. “Nothing wrong with sexy” replies his friend, straying into Spinal Tap territory. They discuss the finer points of the dialogue, “He could say ‘I am OK with the idea, after all – oh my – you inspired it!’ Whaddayathink?” “‘Oh my’ or ‘oh well’?” “‘Oh well’ – that’s awesome. Then Turner goes back to surgery. I like that. I can feel…” (in a falsetto voice) “…serious bread.”

I’m in the open air but under a terracotta awning. Outside in the sun, to my right, a kid is working with strings of green numbers on a black background – like on the first word processors. Perhaps this is the guy who has caused those graphs to tumble down newspaper front pages. From the level of his concentration he looks like he’s hacking into the World Bank while munching a pomegranate, peach and avocado muffin.

*

I’ve just arrived from Maggie’s Café, where I promised myself I would just have breakfast, read the LA Times, and take in the sunny morning. Not worry about tour receipts and writing and dates and schedules. I’d phone my American friends, because that’s what I do in America. We talk for very pleasant short periods of time while ducking and diving through schedules (East Coast friends) and for long periods of time with pauses and many ‘Riiiiggghhhht’s (West Coast friends and Rad, who is actually officially coastless in the sense that he’s on permanent cruise control).

The tour soundtrack is on the Maggie’s Café stereo system – the “we could have had it all” Adele song, the Katy Perry one about Friday Night where nothing much seems to happen, and the Eminem song where he sounds so tight and frustrated. OK, I realise that’s not narrowing it down a whole lot. You know the one where even he has become so bored with that same tone of voice he always uses, that he’s roped in a chick singer to lighten things up with a bit of an actual melody.

So I’m at Maggie’s and, as is usual on my LA visits, inspired to write poetry. Also as is usual I have forgotten my black book dedicated to writing poetry in. I start searching my bag for hotel notepads. That’s where most of my poems end up being written. Songs, on the other hand, often start on the back of car hire rental agreements. That’s where a whole lot of fine-print real-estate is waiting for a  Sharpie’s scribblings to turn it into a manuscript.

I send a text message here, I receive an sms there. The morning’s going well. The friend I am staying with has a reality TV series crew round for the morning and I have promised to leave them alone.

As noted, I promised myself to have breakfast, read the LA Times, and take in the sunny morning. I’ve even filled a hotel notepad and some of an Avis rental agreement with a poem and a song. I’ve done all these things but I’m looking for a little human contact.

There’s a bearded 30-something year old guy at the table to my left. When I can’t find the sugar on my table I lean over to him and ask if I can borrow his. As he reaches it over I spot mine hidden behind an enormous napkin dispenser and apologise. “Mine’s better, anyway” he laughs. I’d noticed Chris (for it is he) is half-way through what in Scotland would be called “an enorrrr-mouse booowl a porridg’“ and he’s eating it with strips of fried orange bacon. The bacon has been artificially coloured and crushed by a James Bond villain to become a new substance, unrecognisable as meat.

Chris and I strike up a friendship, bonding over a combination of oatmeal and memoir. He tells me that’s what he’s writing. I say I think he looks a little young to be looking back over his life and he explains that ‘memoir’ doesn’t necessarily mean that anymore. Apparently it’s being used by young people to take ownership of whatever story it is that they are telling. Almost to simply express that it’s not a novel – a memoir has authenticity as the writer’s own story.

It’s the “is this the real thing” question I often come up against in Los Angeles. Like when I was sitting in my friend’s garden under the shade of  a tree which was growing oranges, lemons and limes from the same branches. And the fruit was undoubtedly real.

I’m thinking perhaps I was wrong to write “This is not a memoir” in the press release for ‘21st Century Troubadour’. For me, the word reeks of retired politicians – that and rock books half-written by drummers or rhythm guitarists telling everyone how the crowd went wild at their every show, the audience gave back amazing energy and – if I remember correctly – the drummer pounded out the beat for hours as if his life depended on it.

I ask Chris what his book is about. He won’t tell me – a good answer. Write the memoir, don’t spend the time telling everyone about it so many times that (a) you get bored of the stories and (b) there’s no time for the actual writing.

We talk back and forwards about books and films. Malibu (where he has come from), Ireland (where he has visited), cars (he has an old Porsche) and Justin Bieber. I should  qualify that last one.

Justin Bieber. You see, I’ve just arrived from Canada, and Air Canada has a highly effective Justin Bieber policy. Even if the flight looks like it’s on time as you’re boarding, as soon as the doors are closed they lock the plane down, keeping it on the runway for up to two hours with the air-conditioning off, so as they can force you to watch the Justin Bieber movie. There’s simply no escape from the precocious Ontarian wunderkind.

In another country this kind of behaviour would be regarded as direct contravention of the Geneva Convention of Human Rights. To lock people up without food or drink in an airless Bieber-filled environment would surely be actionable in the Hague Court of International Justice. Bringing charges of ‘Severe Aural Abuse’ could be another angle in a court of law.

 

In addition to mental torture, the physical pain I endure in the endless wait for the Justin Bieber movie to end – cramped conditions, no natural light, endless choruses of repeated banalities – is only exaggerated by the exhausting routine of the Biebs himself. He’s constantly dancing, exercising, playing basketball, warming-up, singing, signing (autographs) and always always talking and goofing for the camera.

About five hours into the movie there’s a let-up when JB loses his voice. Since it provides the only real drama of the whole marathon experience, I suspect it’s a set-up. Especially when, two days after wrecking his voice in a Mylie Cyrus sex-free love-duet, he is ordered to stop talking by his voice coach and pumped full of vitamins by a man in a white coat. These two offsiders say things like “You simply can’t talk for 24 hours. Period.” in a stern voice and, “Those two strips of flesh are what your entire career depends on right now. Your vocal chords are a sacred place.”

The drama is worthy of ‘Masterchef’. It’s that intense. Wondering whether JB’s voice will recover in time for the Madison Square Garden concert or not is the equivalent of the ‘Waiting For The Judges’ Verdict’ bit in ‘Whatever Your Country Happens To Be’s Got Talent’ or ‘Wherever You Live Idol’. It’s as nerve-wracking as wondering whether the soufflé will rise or not, or if Nigella’s hubby will go down and nick all the goodies in the fridge before the Kitchen Love Goddess sticks her finger into a Chocolate Surprise and breathes “Yummy!” into the camera.

Twelve hours later – the movie is shot in realtime, obeying the Aristotelian principles of time and place, ie it’s all set either in a characterless venue or a tour bus and takes as much time to happen as the events it portrays – the Bieb-boy takes the stage to wild applause and serious pre-teen screaming. He sings flawlessly, as if aided by forces beyond all human ken.

In Maggie’s, someone at the next table past Chris is reading last month’s MOJO magazine with Paul McCartney on the front cover. I ask if I can look through it. It’s weird to read lists of Ghosts of English Tour Dates Past. Although, not as weird as the ‘50 Reasons To Like Macca’ pull-out section. Why? Well – it’s a bit obvious, innit?

Because he’s fab. Always will be.

Chris tells me how to get into the closed section of the Malibu Colony. I tell him I’ve been to Ojai (a hippy town the same distance out of LA as Malibu, filled with aromatherapists and a place called the ‘Psychic Boutique’). I tell Chris I have written a book but since I know I have made a new friend I refuse to tell him what it’s about. Instead we talk about the number of words on a page. I think ‘21st Century Troubadour’ has 90,000 on 300 pages.

That’s a whole lotta words, as someone without much imagination might say. I can’t help it. It’s a whole lotta words.

I’d like to put the book out so that you could read it on one of those ‘e-reader’ devices (you could read it though I couldn’t – my eyesight isn’t good enough any more). You see there’s no way I can carry around enough copies of the book on tour. Every time I leave I fill up The Bag with them. They disappear just as quickly, the first few days I’m on the road. Always.

I remember that a slim volume awaits me, on my return to Australia. I haven’t told anyone about it yet, but I’ll have it on Thursday. Perhaps it’ll find its way into The Bag and stay there for a little longer.

*

Back in Insignificance, a man walks in with a four-day-old puppy, the cutest thng you’ve every seen. He’s grey-haired and stubbly. Looking OK in a T-shirt and Converses, like an older G. Clooney he is giving guys like me hope, but the real centre of attention if the four day old puppy. Did I say it was the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? Cuter than Prince in the video for the song that’s just playing. Cuter even than the baby labrador chewing on a Macbook power adaptor under the poet girl’s table. Cuter still than the girl with the hat at the coffee counter. Not cuter than the French girl with the stripey top who walks past now and then clearing tables outside the next-door restaurant. The one where Daniel Lanois and Patti Smith played an acoustic fundraiser last month. If you bought a ticket you had dinner with them. Heavy-framed glasses were a prerequisite at that table, I don’t know how I can tell. I just can.

This morning, Raybans are back in in LA. Goodbye Aviators, Arrivederci Mirrored Wraparounds, Farewell to the Face-Eater. Open those drawers and see if you can fund that old chunky pair of ‘Highway 61’ style face furniture.

The table on my left breaks out singing in a chorus of “Hypnobirthday to you” and the four-day-old puppy walks past with the grey-haired man. The hypofans dissolve into jelly screaming as if possessed “he’s sooooo cuuuute”.

A guy has just sat down beside me with an equally old Mac laptop. It’s clunky and the keys are covered in grey grime. I am willing to bet that the screen carries the imprint of the keyboard. He’s on Craig’s List looking for a place to live, like everyone else in this café. Chris told me earlier that a one-bedroom place costs $1600 per month. That’s better value that $1600 per moth, which is what I originally typed. Those lepidopterae sure earn the big bucks for all that window-banging.

This afternoon I’m going to break into Malibu colony, mentioning my new friend’s name. Then I’ll finish the song I started on the Avis rental agreement and search pet shops for as cute a puppy as the four-day-old puppy whoe grey-haired owner has just left Insignficance.

He’s smiling (the cute puppy) and panting (the grey-haired owner, who’s just experienced more chick affection by puppy proxy than I’ve ever seen anywhere).

Serious bread indeed.

 

New York City Of Models

Yesterday New York was like a movie set. Alright, it’s always like a some kind of movie set, but this one was a romantic comedy with the sun shining on the brownstones and people walking around in T shirts laughing. Like they’re all living in the “shopping and trying on hats” section of the film, and it lasts forever. The headcases roaming the streets dressed as Superman and fast food items (1 x Burger, 3 x Hot Dogs) were characterful heroes of the sidewalks,  not to-be-avoided-at-all-costs crazies.

I met Rachael in a 9th floor rehearsal room, and I was instantly ushered into the leather-clad world of New York rock, with posters of Blondie, Lou Reed and Aerosmith (?) on the walls of the hallway. The reception room was peopled by guys with stubble and rock t shirts wearing shades indoors, and musicians lounging on sofas looking like they’re going for a ‘Velvet Underground Reformed – This Time They’re All Attractive’ audition. Wish I hadn’t shaved today.

Later, skipping over kerbs dragging the only slightly lighter second cousin of The Bag, my guitar and a hundred plastic Troubadour bag, Rachael and I were transported into Model World. The sidewalks were glistening in very recent rain, as if art directed. Statuesque girls gathered in groups. waiting for the lights to change, with expectant open-mouthed looks, but never crossing the road. They leaned against lamp posts and stood against walls with one foot raised in the traditional ‘Rock Model’ pose. Were we dragging luggage through a Vogue photo shoot, unawares?

Gaggles and cliques and broods and displays of girls over 6 feet tall with tight jeans and leather knee-length boots. They glanced over their shoulders as we passed, their eyes fixed on a far off point, somewhere in another galaxy. Occasionally one of them would laugh, exposing her perfect teeth to the streetlamps’ glow, and then the rest would join in, like a giant commercial for a mobile phone company.

All around us, House Concert Wars raged. Tiny sparks flying up above the skyscrapers from states as Iowa and Florida. That very afternoon I had been phoned by one of the adversaries, calling from a small town in the Mid West. Reports were serious – thousands affected, CNN crews approaching. Never underestimate the collateral damage caused by the wrath of a slighted House Concert presenter. My phone still humming from the ferocity of one side of the conflict, it rang again. I pressed ‘Ignore’. Rachael told me about a concert she’s been booked to play in Amsterdam. Thoughtlessly, I told her about a group who organize concerts in a library in Rotterdam. I should have known better – this group split from the Amsterdam House Concert people in a schism the likes of which still resonate throughout the Lowlands.

It’s a long way from the less than zero cold of Canada, to 27 degrees at 10pm on 7th Avenue, hot and close like before a thunderstorm. Turning a corner the first drops of rain started and I saw a guy hailing a cab. As multiple cabs passed him by, I realized he wasn’t really hailing a cab but posing like an advertisement of someone hailing a cab. Ridiculously good-looking, hair tousled and now gently flecked with rain, we had left the girls behind only to run the gamut of a group of muscle-crunching stubble-dusted male models gathered here to celebrate their own beauty. Not far from their female equivalents distance-wise, but in their own separate world of exquisitely beautiful suffering. No smiles this time, only chiselled jawlines pointing towards the glowering heavens.

*

A change of weather this morning, and it does seem extreme. RIght now it’s raining, and the non-stop stream of corduroy-wearing artistic types and style icons is unstoppable outside the cafe window where I’m writing. Half an hour ago I walked in and asked a man studying diagrams in a text book, and sketching them on note pad, if I could sit down. He moved his papers and I handed him his phone. I decided not to write, not to read – just to watch. But it’s difficult not to write it down when it’s happening all around you,

A tall guy in a checked shirt with geek glasses and fairly long hair walks in and I notice him waiting for ages to get a seat. There’s a line-up for soy cappucinos and chai lattes stretches from 4th Street to Central Park. This guy’s trying to eat a sandwich and hold his coffee while standing up. Just as he masters this, someone hands him a soup and toasted cheese sandwiches. He asks if he can sit down and asks me if there’s room beside me and the scribbler. He asks what my pin says (that’s a badge, UK people). I tell him it says ‘Stand Up To Rock Stars’ and was the only piece of U2 merchandise The Teenager and I could afford to buy at their Melbourne show. We loved the show but the $50 T shirts just didn’t cut it.

It seems my new friend played in a band last night at a Banana Republic fashion show for their new collection. It was, by all accounts, Model World 2. Full of the same 6 foot plus girls I’d moved amongst the previous evening. As he described the fashion show, I notice a girl at the table behind him studying a script. Tall, Eastern European looking, all cheekbones and dramatic expressions. Until now she’s been doing yoga stretches while reading. Now she quickly looks around and takes out a Subway sandwich, breaks it in half, and eats it ravenously, hiding it under her script.

My new friend turns out to be from LA. He’s wearing a checked shirt from the home of vintage clothes. In fact, from the city where vintage clothes never have to call themselves vintage. He knows Tom Petty’s daughter – she plays Highway 61 at high volume in her house opposite a friend of mine. He has been to the Casbah Cafe and busked on Grafton Street in Dublin. It’s a small musical world in this café We strike up a conversation with the guy drawing diagrams, who’s trying to work out the relationship between (a) the planets in the solar system, (b) the chakra points in the human body, and (c) the notes in a musical scale. We talk digeridoos and baritone guitars. My theory is that low instruments draw people towards them. There’s something mysterious and exciting, satisfying, about their sound.

As we’re talking, another towering model walks in and I watch her sit down beside the yoga-stretcher and eat the other half of the Subway sandwich, kneeling down under the table so as no one will see her.

Another day, another movie set. The sound system in this café just played ‘Uncle Albert’ by Paul McCartney and ‘Tangled Up In Blue’. Like the Beaqtles in Liverpool and U2 in Dublin, it’s impossible not to think of Bob Dylan while walking on 4th St, Bleecker Street and the village. red bricked houses with stoops like the Stones video for ‘Faraway Eyes’. The sound system plays ‘Mandolin Wind’ by Rod Stewart and as the first bars of ‘Freebird’ start, I feel it’s time to be movin’ on. There’s a show tonight on Allen Street and I’m off to collect my guitars. Friends old and new are phoning. Another model buys a take away coffee and is bent over in the café doorway, trying to light a cigarette underneath her perfectly-formed lapels. The wind howls up 1st Avenue, and I am stuck in one of those moments when I think this Troubadour Life is where it’s at.

All I have to do is to get out of this café before the guitar solo starts.

13 April 2011

As summer turns into spring

It’s a hot evening in Melbourne. The temperature has hovered around 40 degrees, as summer kicks in after the wettest December – January here for ages. There’s a cyclone warning on the TV for Queensland, and in Victoria reservoirs are up to 53% of capacity from around 30%. This year floods are the story – two years after the bushfires. Can somebody tell me why there’s any doubt about climate change? The jury is most definitely in. It’s so ‘in’ that it shouldn’t even remember why it was ever ‘out’.

Since getting back from the autumn European tour (I just read the previous ‘landing’ story and realise it’s a long time since I’ve written here) I’ve been in the studio, reading, producing songs or thinking about producing songs. Watching or playing tennis, with The Teenager, jamming with his group occasionally and preparing for the ‘Fearing & White’ project – of which more later.

The Australian Open is over. It’s hard to believe I live in – or just outside – a city which holds a grand slam tournament every year. It’s not something which people talk about when extolling the virtues of Melbourne – they’re always banging on about galleries, cafés and theatre. Christ – you can get a latte anywhere now. Give me the blue courts any time.

When I lived in London, years ago, Wimbledon was just a hazy childhood dream  – it never seemed real enough to actually go there (or to be able to afford to go there). So, even though I did make it to Centre Court one blowy June evening to watch mixed doubles, Wimbledon exists in my imagination as a blur of colour TV, with a particular shade of yellow lettering against the green, with the soundtrack of Dan Maskell’s gentle commentary. The pick-pock of balls, interrupted only by gentle applause and Dan’s breathy approval of a shot or rally – “Extraordinary”.  As a headbanded Bjorn Borg beat McEnroe again. And again.

I have loved tennis since I was ten or eleven, when I realised that sport doesn’t have to involve being buried in mud and then sat upon by 14 huge guys intent on your unnaturally early demise. Or in which a hard leather ball is aimed at your head on a regular basis either by a variety of specialist assassins, or an entire team wielding wooden sticks designed for the purpose of splitting open your teenage skull.

That was when my love affair with tennnis began. I was never that good – except in my head, where I won rallies and tournaments – but all these years later my personal tennis-based journey continues with an ongoing series of matches vs. The Teenager, who has taken up the racquet and playing better with it than I ever did. Since I have about a year left where I have a chance of beating him, I have to pack as many matches into this period as possible. Today I narrowly avoided  the  drubbing I received last week, escaping to win in the third 6-1, 6-7, 6-2 (though this may have had something to do with the fact that he was late for band practice, as I found out to my deep chagrin after shaking hands).

So. I apologise for the silence, but I have not been idle by any means. The autumn tour was simply too full on to write anything more than a note in passing on facebook or twitter as the miles and kilometers fell off the road signs. I remember mornings spent at coffee shops on the M1 and M6, angling the computer to get wi fi with my taste-free coffee, and wondering if I could ever have written ’21st Century Troubadour’ in 2010. Having my sister Cathy on the road with me was fantastic, but the family love-in time we had together (and with other sister Ali at the Northern Irish concerts)  meant a social footprint from the tour, not necessarily one measured by a word count.

Rose writes to me that we have a new monthly newsletter format. I’ve given up the Myspace blog, mainly because my computer won’t load the home page but also in a sulk because they deleted the old site I designed specifically for it. As soon as they imposed the ghastly new advertisement-filled interface I lost mySpatience with it. Even though I miss the fact that you could upload songs easily to it – or check out someone’s style quickly – but ever since Murdoch bought it I guess we’ve all know that it would (a) end up terminally unhip and (b) try to steal your music or try to get you to pay for something you didn’t want.

So I’ll write something every month on this wordpress site  – and copy it to the andywhite.com blog page here, to see who’s interested. You could have a look at the facebook page or my twitter feed if you want to get in touch.

At the end of the summer break in Australia I end up playing the Port Fairy Folk Festival, down the Ocean Road about 5 or 6 hours from Melbourne. Port Fairy used to be called Belfast, but changed the name by deed poll a while ago. It’s a great town and the music extends well beyond the Folk Festival Fence.

Aftet that it I head for North America again, to play ‘Songwriter’ launch shows in Seattle, New York and the Mid West. Seattle I haven’t played for ages and I am looking forward to getting back there. It’s a haven of good friends, one of whom – Drew Dundon – is opening for me at Egan’s Ballard Jam House on the grooviest street in town.

The New York show is at Rockwood II in the East Village, next door to the Rockwood Music Hall where I’ve played the last couple of times in Manhattan. Wildflower Records are finally releasing the album and I am sharing the bill with the highly talented Rachael Sage, a New York singer-songwriter whom I met in York last autumn.

Talking of the UK again – Cathy and I are planning a June concert in London where we’ll be performing a similar mix of readings from 21st Century Troubadour and songs from ‘Rave On’ to ‘Songwriter’.

After this I’m headed for the Mid West. Meeting up with Rad and driving the long open roads of Iowa and Minnesota. I can’t wait. The kind of trip where it’s so flat you have to open the door to check out if the car’s still moving.

We start in Chicago playing the latest in my one-show-a-year residency at the Celtic Knot in Evanston. After that there’s a concert in a museum in Mount Vernon, near Rad’s hometown of Iowa City, followed by a return visit to the ever-wonderful Oak Center General Store. Those of you who have our live album will know the vibe, and it features in ’21st Century Troubadour’. In fact, Sandy Dyas took the photos for the book inside and outside the General Store.

The last show in this run is at the beautifully-named Aunt Annie’s Quilts in Avon, Minnesota. I haven’t been there before, but Rad loves it and Lucy who runs it sounds great. I did have a wonderful Aunt Annie, though, who lived in Dublin …. but that’s another story …

The next morning I leave for Canada, where I will open six shows for Judy Collins in and around Toronto.

Judy owns the aforementioned Wildflower Records. I just saw her Melbourne show and it rocked. Folked. Well – you know what I mean. Her voice is amazing and her stories of helping discover Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and of being in and around the folk revival and civil rights protest movement in ’60s New York City, are amazing.

But before all of this I have a new project starting up. I’ve never been part of a duo, but my Canadian buddy Stephen Fearing and I are about to unleash a duo album on the world. We’ve written songs for ages – ever since meeting in Winnipeg in 1998 in fact. You might have heard ‘If I Catch You Crying’ or on ‘Boy 40’ or ‘Faithful Heart’ on ‘Songwriter’.

After writing a sequence of songs for Stephen’s group Black and the Rodeo Kings we looked at how many we’d finished together. Twenty or so. We chose fourteen and recorded them last autumn.

‘Fearing & White’ will be out in Canada next month, and UK/Europe this autumn. I haven’t got a copy yet so it’ll take till early March for you to be able to get hold of it. For now you can have a look at the cover. listen to 3 streaming songs and join the F&W mailing list at either:

http://www.fearingandwhite.com

or our Facebook fan site.

Finally,  I got to play bass. A lot.

In the meantime, the road goes on … I hope you’ve had a chance to get a look at the book ’21st Century Troubadour’. Getting my first copy was the biggest surprise I’ve had since the ‘Religious Persuasion’  EP was put in my hands, somewhere in London during the eighties.

Which reminds me – or Rose has nudged me to remind you – we found a box of those original EPs if you’re interested in getting hold of one. Part of the fairly complete discography up in the new andywhite.com shop which I am sure she has written to you about.

And see you on the road this year. Even if you suspect it doesn’t make sense, remember the words of Liam Neeson:

“It’s my job. That’s what I do.”

As ever, with love.

Andy

2.2.11

Coming In To Land

I’m on the plane and I just had to open up my Mac laptop, after watching so many opening and closings in ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’, somewhere 30,000 feet above India on the approach to Singapore. In every scene of the film there’s  a silver computer showing us a glowing white apple. Furious actress fingers skitter over its keyboard and on the screen windows open and close as each innovative feature of the magic box is lovingly demonstrated.

The plot of the film may not be as good as the book – sorry, I haven’t read it yet – but the screenplay seemed to have been written by the same guys who write the ‘how to’ instruction videos on the Apple website. You know the ones where windows flash open and zoom shut, revealing secrets, information, photos and emails with incredible technological ease as a guy in casual clothes and a calm voice tells you the only thing you should covet is his lifestyle in general and, in particular, one of his computers.

In the movie, these backlit objects of desire are mercilessly snapped shut after they reveal their secrets. Banged together like clapperboards, only to be yanked open again by another clumsy pair of actor hands, stabbing and jabbing at the ‘on’ button with a rough index finger.

Since writing ’21st Century Troubadour’ I seem to have experienced a row number upgrade. Perhaps the airlines’ computers have talked with each other, flapping open and shut in an electricity break. Maybe data-searching actress fingers have alerted them to the fact that I should really be moved up the plane from Seat 68F – the position I thought I was brought into this world to occupy – to somewhere a little closer to the wings.

So here I am stretching out in Seat 40K, the new 68F. And I’ve just had a Hogwarts moment, up at the back of the plane. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve gone looking for Platform 9 and a half at Kings Cross Station in London. Well, the scene which just greeted me at the back of this aeroplane is no less impressive than the extra platform.

I made my way to the furthermost regions of the centre aisle and came upon a staircase bathed in light exactly where the toilets usually are. You know – the place where a crowd of stretching people gathers (unless its an American airline, in which case this kind of congregation is classed as a subversive meeting and all involved can be arrested by an air marshall and dragged off for immediate waterboarding by a man with a moustache, a stumpy cigar, and a set of electrodes).

Today these glowing steps look like a stairway to airline heaven. A brave new world that has about 150 seats in it. Even though there’s no smoking upstairs, this is a double decker plane, and it reminds me of the old buses they used to have in Belfast. Many’s the afternoon our Granny would take us on ‘Joe’s Bus’ for a trip to Belfast Castle, Stormont, or the airport. Yes, Aldergrove international airport, nestling between Lough Neagh and the Lisburn bypass, to watch the planes taking off and landing. I remember riding the carousel with the bags. Well, it kept us off the streets.

So, as dawn breaks on this Singapore morning I am thinking about the top deck of a Belfast bus while the Girl With A Dragon Tattoo sighs and pulls on a blonde wig while a caring Swedish actor looks on, craggy as a handsome crag in snowstorm. We’re coming in to land at Singapore and there are cliffs and crashing waves below. The pilot tells us it’s 27 degrees and to switch off our laptops.

I am about to slam mine shut. I’ll see you next time, if it survives.

Voter Registration

I’m at the Australian embassy in Ottawa to get my application for a postal vote witnessed. The election is on August 21. It’s compulsory to vote in Australia, but that’s not why I’m going. Maybe it’s something to do with growing up in Northern Ireland, a place where my vote meant nothing until I voted ‘Yes’ to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Although I do remember putting my cross on a ballot paper in Hammersmith in 1992. As I recall, Toby had a handful of voter registration cards and distributed them to his friends to try to get the Labour Party guy elected. You didn’t need photo ID in those days. As the man says – vote early and vote often.

All of my years in Dublin I didn’t have a vote at all, not even in the presidential election. Try to imagine how many Quickpicks I bought in Alex’s Lucky Lotto Shop in the mistaken belief that they would eventually qualify me to vote. I could but dream. However, I didn’t think I missed anything not voting when I lived in Dublin as neither Southern politics nor any Southern politician really ever excited me. I can still see Albert Reynolds’ face, the the Taoiseach, as he stepped into a Temple Bar lift and realised he was trapped with several ragged yet artistic members of his voting public and that there would be no escape from their stares for six slow openings and closings of the lift doors. It was a mix of granite and sheer dread.

I rock up to [arrive at] the Aussie embassy wearing thongs [flip-flops] and a T shirt. Traditional Australian voting dress. The guy behind the glass looks as relaxed as it’s possible to be. No sign of election fever or lines of potential voters pounding the counter and demanding their constitutional right. “Hawyagawin’?” he drawls, punching a key or two on the keyboard to make it look as if he’s doing something useful. His name is Josh (I know because it says so on his name tag).

“Good thanks, Josh [I feel like I’m in Safeways]. Can you have a look at this application for a postal vote?” “Yi, ‘ll give it a squizz mate.” Josh looks at the printed out form for a while and drawls “She’ll be roigh’ mate nahwarreez.” “So can you post the postal vote to the UK where I’ll be at election time?” “Yi mate, yi.” “When?” “Coupla weeks I guess.” “That’s not going to work, is it, it’ll never get to me in time.” “Roight mate yerroight the’. Maybe yeh wanna rock up to the Embassy in Lonnon.” “You been there, Josh?” “Nah mate, nah.”

Just then the phone rings and he picks it up, putting the receiver to his ear the wrong way round, George Bush style. “Speak up mate, can’t hear yeh.” The guy on the other end of the phone is asking about a visa. Luckily Josh has a card with a number printed on it to read out to him, asking him to call someone else to talk about it. There are a lot of ‘yi’s’ and ‘nah’s’. During the call Josh pecks at the keyboard with a busy forefinger.

‘Sozzmate got rid of him nawaareeeez.” “Josh, can you witness this form for me and I’ll post it now to the UK. It’ll save time and I’ll get the ballot paper in time.” “Juzzaminute mate, I’ll need me glasses.” Josh goes off to look for his glasses. Minutes pass. The clock ticking above the emu and kangaroo crest chimes the half hour. The furled flag by the door begins to look a little older as the afternoon sun disappears from a tiny window high in the wall behind the computers and I am left in the glare of ozone-unfriendly strip lighting. One of these computers is a real beige original – surely a museum piece. Poor old Josh’s screen isn’t much better. It’s tiny, with green numerals in rows and a flashing cursor.

Eventually Josh returns and has a squizz at the form, looking at it like it’s the first one he’s seen. “Nah mate, nah. Can’t witness it for you, nah.” “But you work in the Embassy?” “Yi mate, yi.” “Can you find someone who can?” “Ah’ll ask Sheila” (I kid you not). Sheila arrives and she’s able to witness the form for me. Josh looks on proudly as she scrawls an unreadable signature at the bottom of the official piece of paper which is covered in printed subclauses and caveats to try to ensure the security of the citizen’s right to vote and the sanctity of the witness’ identity.

“Can you maybe stamp it with an official stamp, Sheila?” I ask, thinking this might do the trick when it arrives in London. She smiles. “No worries, Andrew. I’m stamp happy today, aren’t I Josh?” Josh smiles, sheepishly. Perhaps I have interrupted some inter-office stamping fantasy roleplay. Sheila takes a deep breath and digs out a stamp from a drawer. Buries it in a red ink pad and obliterates half of the handwriting on the form with an enormous blotched emu’n’kangaroo. It looks great – imagine if Banksy had no art training whatsoever and drew with a felt pen held between his toes whilst both blindfold and drunk.

“Noice,” breathes Josh, approvingly, spectacles off. He rummages and finds me an envelope while Sheila prints off the Australian embassy address in London. They’re a great pair, working tirelessly for democracy.

“Anything to keep Julia in power, eh?” I try, to see if I can get a rise. A breach of protocol, or even a sign of bias one way or the other. They both laugh. “Ever met any of them?” Sheila says “I met Rudd once but he was supposed to come over again – the day after Julia became Prime Minister,” [note who is on first name terms] “You mean just after after she put the knife in his back?” I try. Sadly, no reaction, although the two of them say they were disappointed Julia didn’t come over that day instead of Rudd. Josh pipes up “I met Howard once.” “What was he like?” “Alright I suppose, shook his hand. Yi.” Perhaps Josh’s political memoirs will have to remain on hold for now.

The clock chimes the hour. Since I’ve been here the phone has only rung once. There is no one else around – just Sheila, Josh, the emu, the kangaroo and the flag. A couple of old computers and fizzing neon strip lighting. I’m thinking about the barrage of information from the big mining companies over the past few months, saying that Canada would reap the benefits of a new tax on the multimillion dollar companies That investment would flock from Australia to Canada.

I hate those companies, but maybe they were right. I can’t imagine old Josh and Sheila putting up much resistance. It’s as quiet as Melbourne CBD on Grand Final day.

You’d go a long way to find a cooler couple than Josh and Sheila in an embassy. I liked their style. I like having an Australian passport, and a vote which means something. Now all I’ve got to do is find a post office. “Josh do you know where the nearest post office is?”

“Nah mate, nah.”

Samuel Beckett – Front and Centre

I’m kicking leaves walking down Nicholson Street, and these new shoes are hurting. I’ve been told once already today that this level of suffering is run of the mill for any girl who wears high heels, but that’s not helping. Much. My ‘Typically Male Pain Threshold’ has been thoroughly mocked so I’m trying to tough it out. And all because my beautiful new pair of black birthday boots is exactly the right size. For my smaller foot.

I will admit that comfort wasn’t the decisive factor in my choosing the wrong size of boots. If you’ve been shoe size 43 most of your life, and then notice over the years that the size which fits you increases to 44 and then to 45 – and if you then go into a shoe shop and the assistant offers you a size 43 which seems to be an exact fit, you’re predisposed to take it. The years slip away as you slip yourself in, Cinderella-like. You know you’ll buy into any decreasing numbers game – even it’s a losing one.

So I’m kicking leaves and limping in the Melbourne winter sunshine, wondering if my slight shuffling will win me any sympathy votes, when I notice the Melbourne Museum is advertising an exhibition of memorabilia from the Titanic. I get a frisson of hometown pride as I crane my neck to look up at the enormous black and white exhibition poster blocking out most of the clear blue sky above me. It shows a group of shipyard workers at Harland and Wolff standing beside the Titanic’s propellor blades in the dry dock, dwarfed by the scale of the ship’s steering mechanism.

It crosses my mind that the Titanic museum in Belfast may be lying empty, cleaned out by this travelling circus. And that most of the things from the Titanic should be at the bottom of the ocean, where they belong. The last exhibition I noticed at this museum was called something like ‘Treasures of Pompeii’, so they’re obviously stuck on a mass-grave theme. Shining sarcophagi? Bring ‘em on.

As I look up, I inadvertently kick over a half-empty cleanskin bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon standing on the pavement next to a parking meter. 2004 – not such a good year. You’ve got to hand it to the Australian wino, he’s got taste. And in the middle of a nationwide wine glut, he can afford to be fussy.

*

I cross the road and make my way past Parliament station onto Lonsdale Street. The Comedy Theatre is where a three week run of ‘Waiting For Godot’ is coming to a close, and I have a ticket for today’s matinee performance. Estragon and Vladimir have been advertising the show for months on television and in the papers – Ian McKellen and Roger Rees have taken the two tramps and made them Everymen everywhere. There’s a guy with ragged hair and a grey beard sucking on a cigarette standing by the stage door. Looks like … it can’t be … was it?

Even if it wasn’t, my instant reaction to a guy in battered clothes smoking near the stage door is not to ignore him but to wonder which part he is playing. Sam Beckett’s characters have entered into the life of the city, filling up the back pages of colour supplements and giveaway newspapers with full page advertisements and news stories. They are not only to be found in the arts pages. In the queue to pick up tickets, the girl behind me tells her partner that one of the actors has been speaking at a Same Sex Marriage rally in town. Her partner replies, saying that that during rehearsals McKellen took a breather – in costume – on a bench near the theatre. Someone running past dropped a dollar into his upturned bowler and the actor has stuck the coin above his dressing room mirror for luck.

The queue is buzzing. People are talking about this 1956 Theatre of the Absurd drama, the last shot of Joyce’s ex-proof reader for success after a series of eccentric novels. People who won’t have seen anything else by Beckett are going to see this play. People are going to this play who will only go the theatre once this year. And one of them, I am ashamed to say, is me.

I held off buying a ticket for weeks. They’re so expensive I kept telling myself I’d read my battered student copy of the play sitting on a park bench near the cricket oval down the road and save myself $100. I’ve seen the play before, I’ve read it several times, borrowed a couple of lines from Pozzo’s last speech (in ‘Na Na Na Na’) and paid an hommage of sorts in the song named after its author on ‘Garageband’. But yesterday I gave in – I couldn’t miss this production.

I called the theatre box office and the lady who answered told me that she was about to make my day. “Go right ahead. Please,” I said, trying to get some Clint Eastwood grit in my voice. I waited. She waited. The pause went way past Beckett – it was positively Pinteresque. Eventually she told me the producers had just released some tickets and that I’d see what she meant by “making my day” as soon as I walked into the theatre.

This afternoon I emerge from fhe upstairs bar and as soon as I enter the theatre I understand. The usher looks at my ticket and escorts me to my seat. I am sitting front and centre in the dress circle to watch Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece. It’s like being onstage for Neil Young at the London Fleadh in 2000. Hold on, it’s better than that. It’s like opening the envelope with my name on it outside David Bowie’s Rod Laver Arena show in 2004 and realising I’d be in the front row, barely twenty feet from my childhood hero. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.

I remember once being upgraded to business class on the notorious United Airlines sixteen-hour ‘Back to the 70s’ Melbourne to LA flight. Alright, I admit it, nothing involving seating is better than that.

*

The theatre isn’t grotty, but it’s getting there. It has seen better days, but this suits the play. The seats are tough, red, old-style cinema seats and the plaster walls need a little work. Some of the lights in the candelabra aren’t working. Since the stage set is what looks like a bombed-out theatre, all grey plaster-covered bricks and empty spaces, it blends into this real live theatre seamlessly. You can see right through to the back of the stage where there are more broken bricks, wrecked walls and plaster dust. The tree has grown up through the boards of the stage, so the destruction must have happened a long time ago. It’s like a bombed theatre in 1945 Berlin, or London after the Blitz, left to rot.

I am extremely glad I’m here and not reading my battered student edition of the play on a bench by the oval (even if that’s where Sam might have preferred to be on this sunny May afternoon) because there is so much in the performance of Beckett, so much squeezed between the lines which you miss on the page. The music hall atmosphere between the two main actors allows the comedy to shine. Lucky’s speech is still near-incomprehensible, but it doesn’t matter – I can understand the sense of what he’s saying through the rhythm and repetition of the lines. When reading the play, your eye is tempted to skim over this tour de force – in the theatre it’s captivating.

Act One opens when Estragon hauls himself over a back wall and sits down to take off his shoes. They’re hurting. I can feel my boots and start the long process of slipping them off without anyone in the dress circle knowing.

I’m seeing McKellen for the first time since the RSC Lear a couple of years ago, and this movement from King to tramp is ringing bells in my head. Estragon is not mad, but he is old and it makes me wonder whether it’s easier to have only a little to lose, rather than a lot. Or whether it’s just difficult in a different way. Since it’s Beckett, the latter is probably true – it’s all difficult.

On stage, the difference between the two main characters is startling. Reading the dry, stripped-down lines on paper, it’s easy to lose track of a clear distinction between the two of them – but not in the theatre. Estragon is a tetchy, forgetful clown, played a bit ‘Grim Up North’ glum, like an ancient Eric Morecambe. Vladimir is more of an optimist, a dreamer. But he can still remember details – he’s an educated man fallen on hard times. He reminds me of Little Dorrit’s uncle or – yes – Ernie Wise.

Although the tramps talk of ‘going’, they’re going nowhere. All the time they say nothing is happening, they are busy. Busy passing the time while waiting for Godot. His arrival could mean anything – Godot stands for whatever they want to happen. I used to think it was a religious thing, but today I don’t. As far I can see, religion is disposed of early on in this play.

By the end of the first half I’m laughing and my feet are hurting from the too-small shoes – I haven’t been able to slip them off, though I tell myself it’s making me empathise with some of the onstage pain. As happens a lot with Beckett, what isn’t there (a plot) is making my mind wander towards the big questions. What’s it al about. Where does it all end.

Looking at these two Everymen I come to the conclusion – for now – that none of us knows anything. Or, alternatively, all of us know nothing. Life is just passing the time, waiting. While waiting, what’s important is company. Friendship is is what wil help us get through.

*

By the end of the first half, Lucky and Pozzo have come and gone, and Estragon leaves his boots centre stage. During the interval I mainline caffeine and chocolate in a coffee shop around the corner. On the way back I see the same grey-bearded man in the battered suit smoking at the stage door. Now I know he’s not one of the actors, but he looks like a Dublin bookie, hassled and dragging hard on his cigarette. I mark him down as the reincarnation of Beckett, standing eagle-faced at the stage door in a false beard, keeping an eye on the director, seeing that he’s keeping to the stage directions precisely.

*

At the start of the second half, leaves have appeared on the tree, but nothing else has changed. And perhaps the first half didn’t even happen, since no one on stage seems to be able to remember it.

I finally cast off my shoes, under cover of darkness. I hope I don’t lose them under the seats. Onstage the boots move around, passed from character to character, but eventually return to centre stage. I’m getting to the heart of the play.

The boots, the pain they bring, and… the hats. It’s as if Morecambe and Wise didn’t get a TV show but ended up in a bombed out music hall. I wonder what Bob Dylan and Tom Waits would be like playing the tramps, sitting on Desolation Row. Although it’d be great, I think it’d be a waste of their time – they could write their own absurdist drama and it would be amazing.

Just when my mind is wandering , and I’m wondering if Vladimir and Estragon really are Everymen, or is it just about the two of them, the stage lights focus into one large spotlight beam. Night falls, they stare up at the sky and then face each other.

One says, “Well? Shall we go?” and the other, “Yes, let’s go.”

As the light fades, I can see and hear the stage direction from memory. It’s as if someone has read it aloud in my ear:

They do not move.

*

The end of a play is a strange thing. People on stage turn out not to be the people you thought they were. Your neighbours sitting beside you (the ones trying to avoid eye contact all afternon) smile and want to share how good the play was with you. There are no closing credits, just curtain calls without a curtain and a soft-shoe shuffle across the stage by Ian and Roger.

Outside it’s five o’clock, and the afternoon performance of ‘Mamma Mia’ at the theatre across the road has also just finished. The two sets of theatre goers mingle, collide, and make their way towards the station. On the way there’s a line-up of people near the stage door which I assume to be for autographs – it turns out to be a queue to pay for the multi-storey car park.

We gather on platform four, clutching our programmes. Weirdly, the Abba fans look more dysfunctional than the Beckett ones – but also a lot happier. The Beckett fans bury their heads in the glossy pages of their programmes, trying to glean every cent of value from the $20 they have forked out for them.

At the next stop, Richmond, the train is mobbed by football fans. Talking statistics and wearing scarves. Red and black, black and white. That’s when I know that we’re all still in the play together,

“Do we get off here?”

“Yes.”

The train goes through the station without stopping. Nobody moves. Nobody gets off.

“Do we get off here?”

“No, we have missed our stop.”

“Which stop?”

“The right stop. The one we just missed.”

“Why did we miss it?”

“This is a limited express.”

“But it’s not going that fast.”

“That’s why it’s limited.”

“So we have to get off at the wrong stop?”

“Yes. That’s right. The wrong one.”

Nobody moves.

These shoes really are starting to hurt, and here come the ticket inspectors.

Casbah Café Confidential

Greetings once more from Los Angeles. Shark just walked out the door and I am left alone with the typing pool in the Casbah Café. All there’s left for me to do, after contemplating this most beautiful of afternoons, is to unzip my laptop and up the 5 :1 Mac to PC ratio to 5.5 : 1.

That’s right. There are eleven white apples, lit up between these walls, and Sunset Boulevard sunlight coming in through high windows. The PC couple sit defiantly at a back table, frowning. Gaming. The café is painted in Mexican colours and has second-hand clothes and pretty trinkets for sale as well as coffees, sandwiches, and an enormous pile of bananas for $1 apiece.

On my right is a guy with a beard who looks to me like a Metallica roadie until he takes a portfolio out of his steel roadie case and starts showing the man next to him his photos. I can see the pictures as he flicks through the pages – fashion shots, CD covers, portraits of actors and politicians. Black and white, colour, big arty magazine covers. His friend nods and he quickly put the shots away and goes back to sipping his coke. Real slow. Roadie slow.

On his right, also on the bench against the wall, looking into the bright room, is a grey-haired woman wearing black. I have already met her outside the café – in fact I know her name.

I was waiting outside the café in the bright lunchtime sunshine for Shark to arrive when she spotted my Beatles T shirt. She came up and started talking to me. Well, I say that she talked, but to be truthful she really only said one word. I am wearing a T shirt which has a magnified black and white photo of the Beatles from around the time of ‘Rubber Soul’ on the front. The grey-haired lady dressed in black just took one look and let out a long sigh. “Paul…”

Anne Elizabeth (I can’t decide if she has a surname or simply two first names) told me she’d been at the last concert the Beatles ever played. That’s right, she brought up the subject right there on that corner of Sunset Boulevard. With the lunchtime sun blazing down and the line to get into the Casbah spilling people out onto the sidewalk.

“It was at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, August 29, 1966. They played for fifteen minutes. It was wonderful.” I asked her how she could remember the exact date, “How could I ever forget it?” “Did you scream?” “Of course I screamed!” “Did you scream because you thought you should scream, or because you really wanted to scream?” Anne Elizabeth looked serious for a moment – thoughtful, reverend. Then back to joyous, “Those four guys just had it all. They made you want to scream. Frank Sinatra had it… Elvis I guess… so we had seen the screaming before, but those four guys just had it all.”

“Really, was the show only fifteen minutes long?” “It might have been twenty. It was short, but they could have done whatever they liked and I guess they got frustrated with us screaming.” “Did you hear anything?” “No, we were screaming too loud.” “Was there anyone else playing that day?” “Otis Redding sang ‘The Dock Of The Bay’ and the Ronettes were on too.”

Here I am talking Candlestick Park. And they said no one would understand the title of my song.

A car screech up to the kerbside, with another one close behind. Two guys get out, looking lost. That’s because they are lost, and looking for Santa Monica. The ocean. Anne Elizabeth goes into the café to get a pencil and paper so as she can tell them exactly how to get there. All the passengers pile out of the two cars and start smoking. They are parked crazily and one of them tells me that they’ve just arrived from Poland.

Anne Elizabeth comes out with pen and paper and starts drawing a map on the roof of their rental car.

By now the Casbah queue has diminished somewhat. There’s a chance for me to go in and hold a table. I order a coffee and sit down, excited amongst the cyber-surfers after my encounter with history. I’m thinking that the Casbah in Liverpool was where the Beatles started. Maybe it’s even where they first played as a group, since it was owned by Pete Best’s mum.

And I’m thinking that the chances of being greeted outside the LA Casbah this morning by a grey-haired woman wearing black called Anne Elizabeth who had gone to the last ever Beatles concert at Candlestick Park which is the name of a song on my latest album which I am launching in LA tonight are slim indeed on any kind of scale you’d care to mention. Apart, that is, from that of a 21st Century Troubadour.

I love this life, and you know I do. Because things just happen this way. You put yourself out there on the corner of the lights at Sunset and Maltman and things will happen. We both know that by now.

The tour has its own logic, its own narrative. Its own crazy characters spinning inside this world but starring in their own personal movies, who nonetheless want to reach out and touch and share or say hello, on this fine Los Angeles afternoon, to the lost-looking tour-knackered Irish guy wearing a black and white print of the Beatles in 1965.

*

Back amongst the Apples, a Goth girl at the table beside me is on the phone. She’s simultaneously reading through a script called ‘Cassowary Part II’ and talking to a girlfriend. She’s got one of those up and down could-be-Australian-or-Californian accents in which the pitch of her voice glides up at the end of every sentence making it sound like a question when in fact it’s no-ot?

One half of the conversation, the one I can hear, goes like this:

“You’re going out with a rockstar. What do you expect – you’re going out with a ROCKSTAR.”

“OK… he’s going to teach you synthesizer. It’ll be alright.”

[Question to self: when is anything OK while learning the synthesizer?]

“How long is your brief?”

[How green is my valley – wasn’t that a TV series?]

“Is this your lunch hour? … I said you’re with A ROCKSTAR. How bad can it get?”

[Don’t ask. Pretty bad.]

She looks at another call coming in on her phone, while her girlfriend’s voice squeaks on for a bit. She puts the phone to her ear again,

“What do you expect. HE’S A ROCKSTAR!”

By now her computer is signalling that someone is trying to Skype her. There’s a chime and a whooshing sound effect. Obviously the girlfriend overhears this, as her mouse-like squeaking amplifies to something more like a large gerbil or a guinea pig.

“No, it’s not HIM. He doesn’t make phone calls. He’s a ROCKSTAR.”

The rising tone at the end of the sentence is coming in useful. I can sense the reason why call centre girls and dental receptionists are trained in the art of making every sentence like a pleasant question, when in fact the news is probably grim or at least foreboding.

“No. He DOESN’T know my number. He’s a ROCKSTAR. Get over it, dude.”

[small beep]

If she could have slammed the phone down, she would have.

In the old days it was much more satisfying to slam a receiver down than to fiendishly stab at the ‘end call’ button on a mobile phone, invariably stubbing a finger or not knowing exactly which button to stab at.

The bad-tempered phone jab has none of the physical force or audible crack of a receiver banging against its cradle. The lingering ring of the metal bell inside the phone you’ve just half-crucified. The fact that you can walk away from the phone, glancing black at the implacable dial, telling yourself you’re finished.

Nowadays – unless you’re Russell or Naomi, accustomed to launching your mobile at will – you’re a slave to it, and you have to sheepishly put it back on the table or in your pocket after a phone fracas. Half-hoping it’ll ring again so as you can have another go at the slamming thing. Or merely to remind you that you are still wanted – somehow, somewhere, by somebody. The pathos is excruciating.

The Goth girl checks she has pressed the correct button and goes back to ‘Cassowary Part II’.

All this time I’ve been thinking ‘zombie movie’, not ‘large flightless bird’.

*

On my left, a girl in a willowy dress is reading lines quietly while the guy sitting opposite her at the same table writes in a block of yellow legal lined paper. I try to work out if they are a couple – there are no tell-tale signs, but they look good together. The sun is streaming in through the high windows, and I can feel the tour slipping away.

Last night was the final show of the tour. Totally different from every other show in every other state. I lean back and savour the welcome I got from the staff at the club.

This welcome has been scientifically proven as imperceptible to any of the five human senses. Perhaps men in white coats have invented a machine which is positioned somewhere inside the Hubble telescope, focused on the infinitesimal shifts of particles millions of light years and trillions of centuries away from us here on Earth. Perhaps this machine could be realigned on central Los Angeles in order to try to detect some warmth in the welcome from the staff at this particular club. If it can find any, I would like to check the data.

I arrive on time and introduce myself to a barman who has napkin holders in his earlobes and sideburns cut to within an inch of his ears. He grunts in return, eyes staring straight ahead of him, his massive face wholly impassive. However, in comparison to the soundman, he is a blubbering idiot full of wet kisses and Stephen Fry style luvvie hugs.

Perhaps the machine in the Hubble is too crude an instrument to bring to bear upon the soundman. Perhaps in central Germany someone has invented a more soulful instrument of gradation. A facial movement detector, which can measure emotion by registering the slightest change in the molecules which go to make up a person’s facial expression. In this case, maybe they can send over one of these machines to run tests on our man on sound – JD – to see whether he feels any emotion whatsoever when talking to a fellow member of the human race.

To measure his welcome in terms of nano-microns would be to overstate the emotion in his greeting tonight. However, later in the evening I swear I see the corner of JD’s mouth curl ever so slightly as I effusively thank him for doing such a good job – or perhaps it was just the memory of an annoying fly which had landed there, only to be exterminated by thought transference.

The soundcheck is ends before it has begun. It exists purely in negative time. I remember from my last show here [Dear Reader – this is an important gig] that as soon as you say “Great” or “Sounds fine” or “Thanks” or anything positive, the soundcheck is over. I resolve to say nothing, climb the steps and set one foot on the stage. JD instantly fades up a hair metal anthem on the PA system, and the check is over.

However, despite this, JD is a master of his chosen art. His sound is tremendous, his talent unimpeachable, it’s just that sometimes you need a few minutes to relax, and get the feel of the stage.

Since persistence is often regarded as a virtue – and sometimes can cause an evening to change direction in unexpected ways – I ask the barman for a drink. He grunts in the direction of the soundman, flexing his lobe-based napkin rings in the process. When I turn to the soundman, he lets out an elongated sigh. I ask him if there’d be any chance of possibly having a drink if it isn’t too much trouble. Another sigh, then silence. I wonder if I’m in a workshop production of a long-lost Beckett play.

After this silence, accompanied by the dying last seventeen choruses of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’, there follows a silence filled with absolutely no sound – the ideal situation for JD. I notice he has personalised earplugs stuck in his designed lugs.

He digs in a drawer and pulls out a micropscopic red ticket. “This entitles you to one drink under the value of $6.” he says in the type of computer voice Radiohead would try to sample. He keeps looking straight ahead, past where I am standing. He tears the tiny ticket in half and I see that he has signed it one one side. He gives one half to the barman and one half to me. It’s like being in the follow up to ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’.

I look at the pricelist behind the bar. The cheapest drink costs $8.

*

I know how many tickets have been sold for tonight’s show. I know how many we have to sell in order to get paid. Every other concert on the tour you simply earn money when people show up – or you are promised a fee before you arrive. In this club, getting paid is a fata morgana at the end of a very long and very lonely tightrope walk. It’s the podium you know you can’t reach in your dream, it’s the wall you will never be able to build. You can see the bricks – but the wall you must build with them? It’s too high.

After the show, outside the front door, the man with the book of ticket stubs looks at me as if I have gatecrashed his wedding party branding a machine gun. “Who are you?” “I just played” “Oh, I think I owe you money then.” It’s a special moment, one I would like to prolong just a little. You see, if you sell over a certain number of tickets, you get a percentage of all the money that night, not just the amount you have exceeded the magic number by. If not, you get nothing.

“No,” he says, looking at the door tally, “I pay you nothing. Goodnight.”

*

As I said, playing LA is different from everywhere. – but I love walking working playing and thinking in this crazy inspiring city which everyone all around the world knows something about. Built out of sprinklers in a desert between the ocean and the mountains.

I am delighted that my publishers are here, and good friends too. There’s time to talk afterwards and then to go to eat Mexican in a place opposite the Casbah café where I am sitting now.

This is a place for writers. I don’t want to see the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard, just take me driving down the streets of James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Bukowski, John Fante. Tom… Waits.

Where a thousand scripts are being sweated over this very afternoon. Where typewriters have pounded for generations. Writers constructing the world’s impression of America out of images, fine phrases, fashion and special effects. The emotional mirror the world loves to hold up to itself. All this done constructed and worked upon with the help of strong men and beautiful women, some of whose descendants are in this very café, tapping and thinking and phoning and blogging and continuing to build this Babel out of a parched corner of Spanish desert.

As I leave, the girl with the willowy dress is tidying her things away. The guy opposite her nervously finishes what he’s writing on the yellow legal pad and gives it to her. She stops packing up, takes the sheet of paper and looks at him. Their eyes meet. It’s a moment from a movie.

Walking out of the Casbah I look up and see the HOLLYWOOD sign really is falling down. It says in the paper that Hugh Hefner bought it. At the lights I can see the Griffith Observatory where James Dean and Dennis Hopper ran to in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’.

The half-ounce of live ladybirds bought in a recycled yoghurt tub by a friend of mine to spread on the lettuces in her front garden so as they can eat the aphids are flying away to breathe their one day of freedom in peace, and I am on my journey back to Australia with a squeaking dog toy in my pocket. Changing season for season, springtime for autumn.

Here they call it the Fall. To follow will show you how far I fell on tour.

Stay tuned.

I always did like them American apples.

A Letter From Canada

I’m sitting in the children’s congregation room of a United Church in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, picking the strawberries out of a plate of dressing room fare and cunningly secreting a glass of wine in an anonymous looking styrofoam cup. I’m thinking of saying “I drink it [pause] Jesus drank it,” if anyone comes in and questions what I am doing knocking back booze while seated a plastic kiddy play table in a room full of bibles.

As regular readers of these notes from the singer-songwriter front line will know, this is par for the 21st Century Troubadour’s course. In fact, the fruit and wine is perfect luxury. As is the full church next door listening to Stephen Fearing, with whom I am touring. The Tall Man from … err … Halifax is singing about driving and playing guitars, so it’s all fitting together quite nicely thanks. It’s the last but one night of the tour and all that’s left is one of my solo show in Calgary. Where people think I am someone I am not, but I can’t bear to tell them since everyone is kind of happy as they are, and it makes no difference anyway. I’ll explain later.

I have just discovered a tray of six fancy pastries so I am digging into a date slice with hazelnut icing, as Stephen coasts into his third song. The two of us have written songs for a few years now, some of them appearing on his group’s albums (they’re called Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) and some on mine (‘Trying To See God’ and ‘If I Catch You Crying’ on Boy 40 and ‘Turn Up The Temperature’ and ‘Faithful Heart’ on Songwriter.

After a couple of days rehearsing the songs and filling up with vast quantities of brown-coloured liquid, hotter than the earth’s core, which they call ‘coffee’, the tour opened in a Calgary church. 250 people in a still atmosphere comes when the musicians are literally playing at the altar, and it hasn’t looked back since.

As a side thought (I nearly wrote “sidebar” but so far I haven’t been able to force myself to say it in conversation. Yes, people do the inverted comma thing and smile ironically while saying “sidebar” when they want to tell you additional, related, information about something.

Anyhow, as a sidebar I have lately found that the Canadian urge to call someone ‘Canadian’ if he/she is successful is even stronger than the Australian urge to do the same. At the Oscars, James Cameron was “The Canadian James Cameron” and I read a two page article in the paper yesterday explaining why Jimi Hendrix was, in fact, Canadian.

Jimi Hendrix, Canadian guitar greatest guitarist who ever lived. Hmm… does it really matter?

It’s coming up to the half time break. I start the show and he joins me for a few songs, then I leave the stage and sit in the dressing room typing or talking with Suzy from Worldvision. There’s a stall at every concert which is dedicated to enabling you to sign up and promising to fund a child’s education in a troubled or poverty-stricken part of the world such as Africa or parts of Asia.

This has been the Star of David tour, with a town called Red Deer at its centre. I’ve been riding shotgun on the right hand side of the road, watching grey trees and faraway horizons. Usually it’s just the prairie stretching into the distance with the Rocky Mountains stretching across the hoirzon, snow-peaked and tiny in the distance (they are literally hundreds of miles away). I’ve been writing in a little black book given to me by a sister, drinking aforementioned hot brown liquid and munching cheese sandwiches.

We’ve covered a lot of miles in the Impala (don’t get excited, it’s like a Mondeo without a sense oh humour). My guitar has changed shape in the dry snowy air, strings tightening as the wood stretches. Here are some highlights I remember, caught between coffee stops and bottles of beer, scribbled setlists and signed CDs:

CALGARY – GLENBOW, AL GREEN AND CONCERT #1

After going round the Blackfoot tribe exhibition, sitting in a teepee and reading up on some First Nations history (the usual story – extreme prejudice from the British colonialists, widespread massacres and exploitation, broken ‘treaties’) I meet my ‘Indian sister’ Heather who introduces me to Agar, an Indian elder who works part time at the museum showing people round, explaining things to visiting schools.

He motions us to join him for a cup of Persian tea. I have tried to learn some of the sign language. ‘Hello’, ‘Want to make a deal?’, ‘Come and let’s drink tea’, ‘That’s a good price’. Hearing my accent, he starts talking about playing football. Driving on the wrong side of the road. First Nations language and customs. Sign language and his family. Heather. History. A particuar design on a teepee of a horse. The markings which his tribe put on a horse so as you could see what kind of work it was used to. A joke involving buying and selling horses, and a blind mare. His stories are circular with one leading seamlessly into another. He holds us in his calm level gaze, with a mixture of seriousness and eyes glinting with delight and humour. I feel honoured to be in this man’s presence. I like the way time really doesn’t exist for him. We must wait for the story to work its way around to the beginning again, or to its conclusion (which lies in the beginning anyway). I feel hassled by the outside world’s schedules. Eventually we say our goodbyes and I meet Heather’s kids who have all grown up. She leaves me back to a house immersed in schedules and tour organization.

Walking into the church a chap approaches me and welcomes me. He’s one of the organizers of the show and comes from Saskatchewan. Talks to me for so long and in such a friendly fashion people think we are related. Not for the first time I am pinned to a pew by the friendliness and kindness of a Canadian folk person, and escape by the skin of my fleece. (I have brought a lot of winter clothes with me, but it’s sunny and warm outside the whole time).

I am nervous playing songs for the first time. And playing a whole string of them for the first time is even more nerve-racking. With two people singing pretty much the whole way through, and an ‘opposite-of-ALT’ wish to get the lyrics right each night, I have a lot of them written in black ink stuck to the ground by the monitor. Except that this is a church, so they are stuck to the altar. It’s the first church I have been in since the Rev. Al Green’s at Folk Alliance in Memphis a couple of weeks ago.

Al’s church was filled with testifying and prophesying, bursting with love and enthusiasm. The glory. The Rev. John White (sadly, Al had toothache and couldn’t be there) welcomed each one of us into the congregation and asked where we had come from. He gave each of us a scripture to remember (a quotation from the Bible). The subject of mine was ‘joy’. When I told him this is my mother’s name, the good Reverend stopped, first cast his eyes to the floor and then turned his whole head up to the ceiling and praised the Lord. Everyone responded “Praise the Lord” and the choir’s lead vocalist started singing. It was quite a moment.

I wanted to voice the question, turning around the heads of all Europeans in the congregation – if church had been as exciting as this, would we have enjoyed it more. If University Road had had bass, drums and a guitarist playing solos through a Fender black face amp would we have been waiting at the car on Sunday morning to set off for the service. And the Big One – would we all believe a little more.

CAMROSE

Albertan roads are gritty and grey in the winter sunlight and freezing wind. Most of the tour we spend travelling up and down the same stretch of highway, passing and re-passing Camrose and Red Deer. It’s exciting, but after five or six times I forget which way we are driving. I have to keep reminding myself that if the Rockies are on the right, we’re heading for Calgary. If they’re on the left, we’re bound for Edmonton.

Today the tour is yet young, and the Impala grinds through the grit into Gasoline Alley, a marvellous oasis sprinkled with seventeen different types of filling station an enough fast food outlets to turn a pole-faster into the Michelin Man. After filling up, it’s a case of heading east to Camrose along smaller highways where the snow comes to the very edge of the road.

The show is in a bar called Scallywag’s. Another dubious-looking apostrophe, and I must admit I feel something of a pirate theme to the establishment. There are bookshelves filled with half books. What I mean is that if you look closely, the shelves are very shallow – too shallow for normal-sized books. I take a closer look and discover that the (genuinely) antique books have been sawn vertically in half, so it’s really a collection of spines.

I look around and find some of Charles’ finest work: Bleak. Nicholas. Oliver. Leaning up against the shelf is a volume which thankfully has escaped the circular saw’s attentions. It’s called ‘There’s A Wide World Out There’ and is by uncelebrated American author H. G. Mungen.

Any UK readers will immediately understand when I say that this literary colossus occupies the same place in the world of books as the legendarily famous author J. R. Hartley, star of a leaden-paced Yellow Pages advert where he asks in a secondhand book shop for a book on fly fishing and it turns out it’s his own. This is exactly how I picture Mungen. A doddery old gent wearing a deerstalker, bumbling round the streets of small twon America with no idea of the outside world, haunting Salvation Army stores looking for his forgotten tomes.

Mungen writes in a chapter about Australia that it “has no real cities outside Canberra”, and under the heading ‘Odd Animals’ states that the kangaroo is “a peculiar beast” before describing the koala bear as “not merely odd, but extremely odd”. Is that all he can say about one of the cutest creatures on earth? Would the koalas really come to see H.G. Mungen sitting in a diner eating a drooping burger with as much fascination as we stand in awe watching koalas munching gum leaves.

Mungen also devotes a sub-heading (sidebar?) to ‘Methods of travelling to Australia’, stating that there are two main ways you can get to the ‘land-continent’ from America. One is to head east via Europe, the other to sail west from California. He advises that one method is shorter (the second) – a fact that a four years old child looking at a globe could have told him.

Perhaps globes were hard to find in Mungen’s hometown. Perhaps he hasn’t worked out yet that you can get to anywhere from anywhere else by either going east or west. It’s just a question of time, and distance.

After the show, I head to the Windsor Hotel with a bunch of Camrose students who are planning on staying up until a student-style early morning breakfast of beer cans and Coco Pops. The walls of the Windsor Hotel bar are lined with the heads of stuffed animals, and more different styles of wood-finish wall than you will ever see outside a wood-finish wall showroom. The wood panels in the wood finish go in every direction of the compass and they are weird shades of orange.

I feel sorry for the animals who have unwittingly provided the decorations for this garish room. There’s an enormous moose’s head dominating the room. A couple of antelopes. A goat looks sheepish, mounted between an ibis and a lynx. As the evening progresses, I imagine the animals are alive, sticking their heads through the wall and staring down at us poor humans. Waiting until we are too inebriated or tired to fight back and then attacking us, wreaking a terrible and justified revenge.

In the meantime, guys talk about hockey and a rapper gives me a hard time about not wanting to trade a CD with him. His tone is hectoring and I can’t face the thought of listening to it on record. I have brought my albums too far for them to end up like this. He does however, get the point of ‘If You Want It’. He tells me things about that song which, looking back, are wiser than anyone else has done. It’s his story about going onto a bus in a wheelchair (he’s not disabled) and forgetting to put the brakes on, the bus coming to a sudden stop, falling out of the wheelchair and having to lie there until someone came and lifted him back in, which lets me know things are getting out of hand.

It’s even later and I am playing pool with a young guy at his place near the Norsemen hotel. It’s a mini pool table with tiny cues, and for some unfathomable reason I am beating the student. Perhaps he is not drunk enough to play with abandon. I imagine myself potting every ball and right now it’s working. Perhaps this young chap works too hard and has not spent the amount of time I did in a bar with my friend Jon shooting pool. The angles. The cur technique. The bravado. It’s all coming back to me, with a strange power I imagine invested in me by the mighty moose on the Windsor Hotel wall.

A veil comes down upon the evening, as I stumble back to the Norsemen (an inexplicable plural to match Scalliwag’s roaming apostrophe) walking as the crow flies across newly-fallen snow, six inches deep.

MEDICINE HAT

Next show is in Medicine Hat. If nothing else, it’s got such a great name that I try to write as many emails as possible from the hotel room that night entitled ‘Greetings from Medicine Hat’ or ‘Hi from Medicine Hat AB’. Something about the voodoo, the spititual thing, the First Nations, the poetry of the name really gets me. It’s like Salvation City or Los Angeles.

The Hat show is in a sports hall, all excellent PA and friendly people everywhere. CKUA is a great Albertan radio station which not only actually plays my records but which people listen to. The perfect storm of radio. This airplay helps every show on the tour. It’s difficult touring without radio support and everything changes when you have it. At one show someone knows the lyrics of ‘James Joyce’s Grave’ so well that I have to keep from looking at her. She knows the words better than I do –  the legacy of Andy Donnelly’s Celtic show.

IN the Medicine Hat morning, I perform a long-observed tradition which involves visting the local vintage guitar store (that’s secondhand instrument shop if you’re in the UK) and sit playing old guitars while drinking the second coffee of the day through the oldest amplifiers we can find.

This store is called Lucky Dave’s, I think, and it’s  full of ancient axes which used to be sold in department stores in the 50s and 60s and are now prized specimens. Stephen plays a couple of these weird-angled machines and after a while the guy pulls out a few battered cases from a back room, opens one and hands over the guitar inside. It’s an old acoustic with an arch top and ‘f’ holes. It sounds like from a Django Reinhardt scratchy record – instant atmosphe and kind of rough and plinketty. It’s beautifully made, and while Stephen plays, I try to read the pricetag as it swings around. There’s a scribble at the start which looks like a ‘2’ and then the figure 2295. Must be a ‘$’ dollar sign. $2295. That’s expensive.

As the price tag swings and the store owner taps his foot and smiles and  Stephen’s fingers dance up and down the fretboard, right arm crossing and recrossing the ‘f’ holes, I come to the realisation that, yes, it’s a ‘2’ and this guitar is for sale at $22, 295.

I should have known it all along. I should have taken it as a warning. I take down an Italian shaped Epiphone mandolin. Old and battered, with a cool pick-up. Sit playing it. Plug it in (always a fatal move – if it sounds good plugged in then you’re really hooked).

Traditionally, how you should leave a guitar store is most definitely guitar-less. The 21st Century Troubadour can’t be buying guitars. It messes with your mind. It strains the excess baggage limit beyond breaking point. But sometimes you just have to – for there it is, hanging on the wall of the guitar store, just singing to you.

Seeing a guitar/mandoin/amplifier in a guitar store which you want to buy gives you a dull ache. Less than a yearning than a nagging thought that there’s some unfinished business in the air, and something sweet which should be in your life forever. You walk away from the shop, cash intact, and buy a coffee from the local espresso store. Eat a sad muffin and glumly look into the cup thinking about the guitar/mandolin/amplifier (delete where appropriate).

I felt this feeling in Medicine Hat. The greyness of the town with its straight quiet streets and lazy traffic lights intensifying my mood. People huddling at traffic lights as monster pick-up trucks covered in mud patrol the town. I hurry across the road shielding my burning coffee from the icy wind and regain the Impala. Close escape – no mandolin.

We regain the highway. Desultorily scanning the bland foreign pages of a newspaper. News pages full up with post-Olympic articles and opinion pieces about the Oscars. Instrumentless, I flick through the pages glumly.

The drive to Lethbridge is short and we swing into an industrial estate mid-afternoon. The GPS chick tells us we’re playing beside a tractor factory. It turns out that we are in fact playing beside a tractor factory on the second floor of a surveyor’s office.

In the distance there’s a mountain. And another mountain. We’ve just passed the biggest mountain I’ve seen since Alaska. Man, it’s huge.

In the gig there are pictures of Allison, posters and guitars and geological surveys. It’s all a blur but the Geomatic Attic is where it’s at tonight. The static is tangible. The Comfort Inn comforts. I drift to sleep thinking about the mandolin.

I am still thinking about it four days later. I am still thinking about it six days later.

Eventually I call Lucky Dave’s. Over the past week I have convinced myself that the mandolin costs $219. I have looked it up on the internet and it is definitely worth more. I have tried to trick myself into believing I could buy it at this bargain price and then sell it when I get home. This, of course, is delusional. Never buy guitars for profit – buy them because you love them. Who am I kidding?

Nevertheless, the strange hormonal activity which acompanies buying a guitar has kicked in and even though everything in the store is over-priced, by the time I call the store I have convinced myself that a bargain is to be had and the swinging pricetag said ‘$219’.

“Hi. Lucky Dave’s? Dave! Irish guy here, I was in last week. You know the mandolin which I was playing in the store? Yes, that one. The old one. Can you remind me of the price? Ah, yes. OK. Oh well. Alright. It was great visiting. Sure we’ll be back. Click.”

$2195.

MURPHYIA EDMONTONIA

Spruce Grove is outside Edmonton, and everywhere is covered in snow. Not fluffy puffy touchy-feely snow, but grey stuff like mounds of sleet. There are housing estates stretching into the disance and an inexplicable street system. It’s a gritty tough cool-feeling place. The theatre we are playing is just that – a theatre. With stage guys, proper lighting, raked seats and sound.

Andy Donnelly arrives, my DJ friend. The two of us have driven the roads of Alberta in the summer sunshine. Hung out at South Country Fair, eaten bananas and listened to Leonard Cohen together. We have met up in winter where he’s held my hand in a guitar shop as I did buy the Fender XII I used on Garageband (it was singing to me from the walls). He has played ‘James Joyce’s Grave’ so many times on the radio that people know the lyrics better than I do.

Andy had a heart attack recently. He’s a big guy and he and his wife have adopted their grandson who’s five or six. It’s made him young again but it’s definitely not an easy thing to do at his time of life.

At half time he comes in the dressing room all hugs and smiles. Proud that I am playing to a lot of people. I’m teary to see him again. Don’t want him to check out early. Bill from the folk club is there. Terry too. Terry’s a real Dub who has found a home here and looks after the biggest folk festival in Canada. We are definitely building towards a meeting of minds. A gathering of the Murphyia in the land of the dinosaurs.

I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

Forestburg is the greyet of flat grey areas. We eat grey sandwiches in the local café. There’s a grey mist in the air and the eyes of the people are grey. We arrive at the show for soundcheck. I sit sidestage and taps keys. I tune my guitar, fighting against the anti-humidity. I check the vibe of the Community Centre. Dig the minister who’s in charge. Dig his ponytail. Sample his sermon, suck in his  scriptures, check his urgings to clap and sing. The lights are bright, cut through they grey. Two kids in the front row dance during ‘Turn Up The Temperature’. Two teenagers groove to the recordings on iPods.

I look at the crowd. I do not see the mnister. I do not see the kids or the lady who made the meal, the sound guys. I see dead people.

Drive back to Calgary listening to Joni. Travelogue.

COLEMAN

Mustard. I am thinking about mustard. The bit on the side of the plate which made them millions. Driving past Canada’s biggest water storage cooler, Canada’s most popular tractor museum, Canada’s biggest rock slide. It happened in 1905 I think – early last century, whatever. Buried a town and a whole lot of people died. Today the road goes through the rockslide, enormous boulders on both sides. The stones are bright washed grey. Not worn at all, as if the mountain side crashed down last week.

There’s a blasted tree stands at the entrance to Crow’s Nest Pass on this road. Silhouetted against the sunset it looks like it is guarding the Pass. Bare branches sticking spider-fingers into the reds and orange. When we drive past there’s a trucker has stopped his truck in a lay-by and he’s photographing the tree. Taking his time, trying to get the right angle. Only in Canada.

The tree has one long branch sticking out at 90 degrees horizontal, parallel to the ground. It is so old it is held up by a support, like a crutch. It looks just like the devices Dali paints which hold up branches of trees in the desert, clocks dripping in the heat. Saw a whole lot of them in Melbourne last autumn, beautiful in their size and craziness. The exhibition commentary said that the branch supports stand for something sexual but right now I can’t remember what. Seems the opposite right here – barren, bleak, wind-blasted. More King Lear than Antony and Cleopatra.

The church we’re playing in this evening is dedicated to coffee, cakes, cooking and music. All the pews, the altar and eveything taken out and changed into the Blackbird. Where dreamy people sit around tapping laptops and talking about hippy fashion. Incense burning, candles on the tables and every shelf on every bookshelf wardrobe and chest of drawers scattered around the room covered in tasteful things. Toys, shirts, figures, calendars. On the desk stickers badges and signs. In the middle of what was the church is the kitchen. The stove the cooker the toaster pots pans saucers and fridges.

This evening the gentle Coleman girls are having one of their first concerts and it’s time to use my European tour PA knowledge for the first time since coming to North America. It’s a breeze. The most fun concert yet, and stay up really late talking about … who knows what. Taking photos and eating. Always eating.

I drive to Calgary in the morning with Suzy. Going through Nanton we stop in a couple of thrift stores. Western shirts are beautiful in this part of the world, and Suzy is buying.

It’s time to draw in a deep breath in preparation for the St Patrick’s Day show. Because it exists in another dimension, far beyond the reach of the Hadron collider or the influence of Higson’s boson, I’m going to skip over this wormhole in space until the drive to Fernie, British Columbia, The only tour date outside Alberta.

FERNIE WELL MY LOVELY

Fernie’s like a gold town. Prospecting streets, old houses and fabcy cafés. Bars open late at night and people who know who Split Enz are. An Italian neighbourhood (North Fernie) and more Australians than I have met in the whole of the rest of the tour.

It’s snowing when I walk into the Arts Station. It used to be a station, and now it presents Arts. That’s it. The guy with the Bg Beard in thc soundcheck is the guy who runs the show and he’s switched on and plugged into indie music. Ukulele and brass band music. His own band features a stage show in which a confetti blower throws industrial amounts of confetti “sixty feet into the air” while they pound along on noise guitars. There’s a plug-in robot with flashing lights and rotating testicles which flash as they spin, like the giant eyeball in the Bunuel film which gets slashed in the first scene.

Every piece of gear the band has is painted bright pink. Amps, pedal boards, guitars. The confetti blower too. The two guys we meet from the band dress like they’re in The Band so it’s an interesting combination. I get the feeling this is my kind of gig. Aliens or not, this crowd is going to work for me. They are open and poetic. The room is most like somewhere I have been before.

It’s a great night. Afterwards we stay up late in the classiest latenight venue so far. All around a table with $5 Guinness arriving like clockwork. Turns out the band guys love the Finn brothers and we talk about them for a while. Their songwriting seems like a perfect place, flying through the air compared to all this road driving. Artistic and beautiful, high above the ground.

When I get back to the hotel it’s  too late to try the water chute. It’s too late to enjoy all the TV channels or variety of soaps. All I have to concentrate on doing is getting up in time to not be late for meeting Stephen in the lobby. It’s my new job – being on time. So far it’s going OK. I was late once but think I got away with it.

ELK HALL, HORN STREET, RED DEER

I wonder what the theme of tonight’s concert is. What was the person who named town, street and hall thinking. The Elk Hall is full of balck and white framed photographs of people sitting in rows, staring at the camera. Some are in funny hats, so I am getting a masonic vibe. However, the ‘Elk’ part is supposed to stand for “Equality and Loving Kindness” so perhaps things are not as they look.

Tonight’s show is the surprise of the tour. Pre-concert everything is quiet and restrained. There’s nothing really going on – no vibe at all until a crazy photographer with a Dennis Hopper look in his eye comes in and starts showing us his shots in a portfolio. Then he grabs a camera and starts swinging around the room firing off digital photos.

Lights go down and the sedate crawd of people goes nuts. Nuts for James Joyce’s Grave nuts for If You Want It nuts for the whole thing. Standing ovations when Stephen and I do our songs. and we play as many of the new ones as we can for an encore. Nearly go into Get Back. “Jo jo was a man who thought he was a woman …” Moments from the second line, I pull in my head then it’s finishing in dropped D and the place goes crazy.

Later on, watching yet another great Canadian young blues player playing yet another beautiful vintage guitar (a red Harmony Rocket, since you ask) a lady is telling me she’ll paint the aura of my songs when she listens to the CD. There’s a rocking beat going on and several of the people who have followed us into the bar from the show get up to dance.

It’s a wild rocking night. We’ve passed and re-passed Red Deer twenty times on this tour and now it’s taking charge. The night takes over as we hang for an hour or so. It’s great when you’ve done a good show and everyone else takes over. You can let things slide until it’s time to get to the hotel.

I can’t believe I have started to leave my guitar in the car. OK. I haven’t started to leave my guitar in the car. It’s over there by the other cases in the corner. Beyond the dancers and the red Harmony guitar,  the folk club people and the tie-dyed T shirts and aura photographer. Digging the blues music, everyone else is going to a club and I’m not. I am goingt to the hotel where there is a line of five white pillows (I counted) on the bed.

BRAGG CREEK

It’s hard to leave the five pillows, crumpled and tossed around as they might be. A pillow fight on your own isn’t much fun, even if you put on Fox News and turn it up then fling the pillows at the right waing commentators trying to convince you that the health bill which Obama just got passed is a red-flag green-light for communists and socialists and terrorists the world over to immediately infiltrate invade and overthrow America and all that Fox News stands for.

Fox News is appalling. It is pro-Church during the sexual abuse scandals rocking the Catholic leadership. It portrays Chicago as a town of murders and extortion – that’s where Obama comes from. It is opinionated garbage and you should be made to watch an hour or so just to try to grasp the pro-bank anti-abortion anti-Obama pro-life slant it puts on everything. Right now there’s a mute nun being held up as an example of the tremendosity of the Church hierarchy.

The bed and breakfast in Bragg Creek is a beautiful castle made of wood. Incredible cathedral ceiling like an enormous pine church. Every room an example of European good taste. The owner is Polish and doesn’t stop talking once the whole 24 hours we are there. He speaks with a superb accent and swears in Polish between every other sentence. His wife is quiet, smiling, and listens to opera loudly. The music reverberates around the cathedral walls. Arias and swelling orchestras, me sitting outside at a wooden table in the unseasonal sun. There’s wi-fi (there always is in Canada) and all is right with the world. Our Polish host introduces me to his daughter for the third time. He talks of this and of that. He invites me for a Polish beer and makes me a Polish coffee.

I feel I am on my way home today. There are over 300 people at the concert and it’s the classiest of the tour. Controlled. There are a lot of English people in this place, and later on we gather round a table in the local saloon. Peter from Australia and a crowd of folks, some of whom witnessed the great St Patrick’s Day massacre. Things are different this evening, it’s one of the ones which work and make some of the others bearable.

Far off the moose are munching through the undergrowth. Pine forests everywhere and snow on the roads. There’s a full moon and it lights up the pines through cloudless night skies.

Moon and stars. Stars and moon. Upside down now. Nearly home.

HINTON

Last concert and driving into Hinton I stop off in a bank. The local branch and I feel they’re watching me and listening to my accent. Sure enough, later on at the concert someone comes up and tells me they saw me there.

It’s far away, this church. Right up north through miles of forest and grey grey roads. A five hour mountain drive the likes of which I have rarely seen. It’s scale is different from Switzerland. It’s less crowded, it feels more remote. Milan isn’t on the other side of the mountains, the Po Valley and civilization. Here the mountains go on for ever, stretching towards the North Pole. Vast landscapes, snowy peaks, glaciers and ice-covered lakes. First and, doubtless, discovery. All this and a tiny tin car rattling up the road trying to get to a folk gig. Sure puts you in your place.

So that’s where I am now – backstage at the folk gig, in the children’s playroom of the United Church in Hinton. Tomorrow’s solo show in Calgary I will pull out the old songs and re-enter that world. Turn my amp up past 2 and tomorrow morning take the plane to Atlanta, Georgia.

I’ll be in touch.

Andy and Stephen in Camrose

A Week In Ireland

It’s a different world up here in seat 32A. Goodbye 68F – once you’re out of that back cabin, you’ll never give the poor bastards back there a backwards glance. We have just taken off from London, heading west towards the city of Chicago. Where Irishmen in their beds are dreaming of their mothers back home. Behind me, a group of UK lads cheer as the entire in flight movie system fails and has to be rebooted, resulting in business class losing their personal entertainment and the rest of us a Bruce Willis flick. A family moves down the aisle very slowly, three generations shuffling towards the bathroom at the same time, forming their own moveable queue.

I’m only slightly dazed from a week in Ireland full of literature, shows, old guitars, Nashville songwriters and driving the Ford Buble 900 miles around the auld sod from corner to corner. The holy trinity of directions supplied by shows, sisters and sympathtic shibboleths. A week of three-hour sleeps and five minute soundchecks.

I arrive at George Best City Airport in grey early morning light on a flight from from Memphis, Tennessee via Chicago and Heathrow. It’s not the never-ending Monday this time, but rather the hardly-begun Tuesday. I’ve been flying for 24 hours but somewhere along the line have lost a whole night. Instantly I am catapulted into the UK’s world of self-fulfilling tabloid scandal, with unfaithful footballers and mendacious politicians on every news stand. Whatever next – Keith Richards with a bottle in his hand, or a high court judge in a brothel? In my swirling whirling world of imagined jetlag, meeting someone who writes songs for Garth Brooks in a semi-detached house off Belmont Road is completely normal.

This week Belfast is musically twinned with Nashville – its sister city – with a planeload of hat-wearers arriving for a festival. A normally suspect hotel becomes a hangout for the musicians and verily Ralph McTell is witnessed talking with guys in Western shirts and expensive acoustic guitars. As well as concerts, I am due to take a songwriting workshop. When I ask someone where it happens I am told, “The International Musical Centre for the Interpretation of the Performing Arts”. “Where’s that?” I ask, “a wee room above Harry Ramsden’s chipper.”

The supra-butty environment isn’t ideal for working on songs, especially since one of the students has just been at a workshop where all possible secrets of the songwriting art have been revealed by a slick Californian. The student interrupts the class continually and tells me one of my songs “ticks most of the Nashville boxes”. This is not what I had in mind – I tell him I am trying to open them all up to art and inspiration. It’s questionable whether I’m having any success, when a seventeen year old boy asks me what he should be writing about in order to have a hit song.

Botanic Avenue in the rain, and Belfast’s Left Bank seems to have been taken over by convenience stores. Apart, that is, from independent bookshop No Alibis, where I am going to read next Monday evening. Later on, driving to Dublin in the Ford Buble, I am overcome by exhaustion approaching Drogheda. In the old days the road was winding and frustrating. You drove through every village slowly. International cross-border traffic would stop whenever a granny pulled out into traffic with her groceries. Now there’s a motorway and you can drive at 90 mph all the way to Dublin, only stopping to pay a toll. It’s strangely monotonous, and I feel my eyes closing. Turn off the road into a laneway and immediately fall asleep. I wake up an hour later, with a rabbit looking at me out of the grass.

*

Next morning, Thursday, after a rehearsal with my sister Cathy, I am on the N11 going back into town, listening to RTE and trying to get to grips with the latest scandal to rock the Irish nation (and nowhere else). It’s one of those complicated political stories which regularly surface due to a leak or an enquiry. It involves acronyms and junior ministers in a coalition government I am not familiar with. Yesterday in Belfast it was Gordon Brown bullying, and cuckolded footballers – here’s it’s all leaked letters and financial favours. The recession moves on apace in Ireland – even in this the traffic jam beside Lansdowne Road.

I make it back to Belfast in time to see a workshop taken by the slick chap who holds all the secrets of successful songwriting. He tells us as many as he can in an hour – the rest we can buy in his book. It’s a lecture not a workshop, based around his analysis of the Country Music charts of 2009. 66% of number one songs are about love, 80% sung by men – that kind of statistic. He ends up telling us that the ideal ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ country song would be up tempo and about love, sung by a man, and with a structure of ABABCB. With a melody which repears simple phrases over and over again. I split to get to a Radio Ulster interview.

That night there’s an ‘in the round’ session in the Art College Students Union café. I point outside and tell the English singer and Amercian songwriter who are doing the show with me that this used to be a no-go area. They look puzzled, as a lonely policeman scurries down the road in the rain, the only person in sight. There was a bomb in Newry the other day, and a murder on a road across the border in Donegal. Chilling reminders of the bad old days.

Tonight I played ‘Six String Street’ for Terri Hooley, ‘In A Groovy Kind Of Way’ for Kirsten Dunst (and the English guy who sings it on the soundtrack of ‘Bring It On’ as she’s getting dressed to go out) – and ‘If You Want It’ for all of us. A great session during which people materialised out of the gloom to sing and clap along.

*

Friday morning and I meet with Glenn Patterson to discuss the upcoming ‘in conversation’ event. Glenn can effortlessly process large amounts of information, preparing the shape of the evening’s conversation in his head. I guess that’s a novelist’s skill, and one I envy. The Nashville guy’s formula for a hit song seems easy in comparison.

I rehearse with Rod McVey, another friend-since-schooldays, bandmate, piano and organ player co-producer of my first five albums. History is something we have, as well as friendship, and going over new songs and making notes on the old ones was a total pleasure. He plays the riffs on the albums, and that means a lot during shows (if I see Lloyd Cole it’s extra special hearing Neil Clark play the ‘Forest Fire’ solo).

I get a lift to the venue for soundcheck. Another cold wet Belfast evening, with parents and old friends, sisters and cousins gathering to warm it up. We play as a three piece, Rod, myself and Cathy – makes me think of the ‘Destination Beautiful tour. It’s an emotional concert, with tears welling up every other song. ‘If You Want It’, ‘When I Come Back’, ‘I Will Wait’, ‘Berlin 6 am’ especially.

Afterwards, a family gathering. I spot Ralph McTell in the bar. I go over and ask him if he remembers the guided tour of Sun Studios in Memphis – that’s where he asked me to take a photo of him standing in front of Elvis’ microphone. A sweet moment for me, since the first song I played in public was ‘Streets Of London’ in the school chapel, my sister Ali on recorder.

And here comes Ali now, interrupting Ralph by saying ‘Sorry, Andy you’ll have to come now,’ I smile, knowing she doesn’t realise that this is the writer of her peerless recorder solo.

*

Saturday is the first blue sky morning of my time away, with the sun splitting the sky above Belfast Lough. I act relaxed, without knowing quite how long it takes to drive to Galway. All I know is that there’s a brand new motorway heading west from Dublin. Driving on it feels like driving in Spain. I phone the venue and realise the show is thirty minutes earlier than I had thought – the crucial half hour which makes all the difference. I break all speed limits (everybody’s doing it) to get there.

Something else keeps me awake – what Radio 4 calls “Lenny Henry’s ‘Othello'”. Shakespeare doesn’t get a look in, but from Act I Scene I I am hooked. Every line calling me from school classrooms and corridors. Our English teacher’s formidable voice booming out the key lines. The plot comes back to me more slowly, as events escalate towards Desdemona’s brutal murder. Above all, the handkerchief – I am shocked that in the intervening years, I have completely forgotten the handkerchief.

As usual with Shakespeare, it’s difficult to imagine teenagers getting to grips with the emotions involved. How embarrassing must my school essays have been. It’s great we were made to study it though, and revisiting it this afternoon (as with King Lear last year) is a mind-opening process.

Listening to ‘LH’s O’, at regular intervals I find myself asking, “Am I the only person in the British Isles listening to this?” The English rugby team are playing Ireland at the same time, and it’s a beautiful sunnhy afternoon. I call Mum to see what she’s doing – sure enough, she’s glued to ‘LH’S O’. Truly, I am never alone.

*

I have a lot of personal history in Galway. It’s not that I’ve spent a lot of time there, but the times I did stay were intense and tender – in that order. Driving into town this afternoon through the docks and up past the Spanish Arch I can remember each one of them. The first show, with Hothouse Flowers, in Salthill. Playing Monroe’s Tavern with free entry and a thousand rat-arsed drinkers. Staggering across the road to the Atlanta Hotel afterwards. ALT playing Galway Arts Festival, one of our very best concerts. And then my solo gigs at the Roisin Dubh. Seeing my sister in the Druid theatre company. Cuirt literary festival when ‘The Music Of What Happens’ came out. A drunken conversation with Pat McCabe at another. Tender? That would be the wonderful time spent with my love in a little bed and breakfast near the Spanish Arch.

He or she who wishes to write poetry and finds he or she cannot do so when walking the streets of Galway or looking out over the bay is in serious danger of never being able to write at all. For the streets and houses are full up with art and culture. Auld chat and humour. James Joyce, Norah Barnacle and all that. Even post-Celtic Tiger, where the gloss has worn off the newness of the ‘improvements’, it’s still the most exciting and ‘Irish’ city on the island.

The Crane, meanwhile, is one of the friendliest concert venues I’ve ever played in. The room above the bar breathes music from its worn floorboards. The PA helps project the guitar and voice, but you don’t need it. You can stand back from the microphone and let the room itself carry the music. I read poems and sing songs from way back to the present. It’s a very special evening – one of those ones when anything is possible.

People buy books, old friends are there. A French girl called Cecilie tells me she likes the show and disappears into the night. I mix sound for the next band. The place is packed. I hook up with a theatre guy with a great voice who’s singing along wth ‘Jackson’ by Johnny Cash. We go to the next bar and I leave him talking to a pack of travelling Canadians. It’s 3.30 am as I stumble towards the B&B past students drinking cider and playing on swings and roundabouts in a kids’ playground.

*

Sunday finds me parking near the Spanish Arch and walking down by the painted terrace houses behind it. This morning is attractive like a Real Ireland card. I find my thoughts blur like my eyes these days. I’m not complaining – I like life to be a little smudged. It makes the present tense more indistinct, and the future as unclear as, in reality, it probably is.

Tourist Board skies and a clear road to Dublin. Half an hour after arriving I am on court number three at Shankill Tennis Club, playing the Nephew. The strangest thing is feeling the freezing intake of breath when serving, remembering the 40 degree days when I last played in Melbourne. Cathy and I rehearse again. Then it’s into town for dinner at Ali’s and soundcheck in the L-shaped room upstairs at Whelans.

Tonight I play solo, with Cathy as a guest. Songs from all over the catalogue like in Galway, with more of the focus of Belfast. Less dreamy than Galway, a little harder. There are enough people in Dublin to make it fine, and none of my old crowd. Paul came from Holland and a couple of Scottish lads.

Monday and it’s sunny again. I race back up to Belfast where meetings run into one another – the festival, a singer-songwriter I am producing this summer, the book people. The book people, since this is the day of the ‘in conversation’ event at No Alibis bookshop. Glenn has suggested passages I can read. We’re going to talk about how the book is closer to a novel than a rock memoir. Although the structure is episodic, there’s a build-up and an ebb and flow more like song structure which develops and intensifies towards the end. We talk Eliot, Joyce and Kerouac. David Barker, the cameraman who shot both the ‘Religious Persuasion’ and ‘Get Back Home’ videos turns up straight from the airport and films the whole thing.

Mid-afternoon I call Glenn and asked him what he would be wearing. “Not sure haven’t worked it out yet,” he told me. I swear I could hear him changing. I replied that I hadn’t made up my mind either. We turn up at 6 together with the same stripey tops on and even similar jackets. At last – we’re in a band together.

The ‘in conversation’ interview you may see sometime on film. There were readings, songs, questions from the floor – wonderful. Signing books at the end and then running down Botanic Avenue for drinks in a hotel bar getting itself ready for breakfast.

Tuesday morning and I head for another production meeting before heading back to the bookshop and leaving the Ford Buble back at George Best City Airport.

*

An Irish week is full of poetry. Reading back it seems I can only write what actually happened it in prose. It’s what lies between the paving stones which is where he real action lies. As the plane turns away from the airport I can see Mum and Dad’s house far below, I even fancy I can make out the dove with the broken wing. He fell out of his nest a couple of days ago, and has been waddling around the front garden flapping his one working wing and trying to avoid cars. We fed him water, chased him off the drive, cooed at him. I fear he won’t be around next time I come back, his neck puffed up with feathers against the bitter cold. His mother fussing around without being able to heal him.

I am looking down from the plane toward the little dove, our roles reversed as I bank and wheel across the lough, headed for London. More than a world away.