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.

From Sommeri 6am to Melbourne with Christmas coming

Sommeri 6 am

The European tour ended at 6 am in Sommeri, somewhere east of just about everywhere. Walking home with Marc, trundling The Bag by my side, we passed a gravestone which, as Marc’s girlfriend pointed out, probably marked the final resting place of the last person to try to make this walk from venue to B&B on a freezing cold December morning.

I’d just played the final concert of 38 concerts. 38 concerts in 60 days. Then I flew back to Australia with 60 kilos of luggage – one for every day I’d been away. Like picking up a jar of marmalade every place I visited.

Bloody nice marmalade.

Just now I opened my guitar case and caught what I fancied was a blast of London studio air. Hadn’t opened it since producing a song for a friend there, sandwiched between Concert #38 and flying back.

It was 39 degrees centigrade yesterday in Melbourne. The tarmac on the road was sticky, and getting off the train I looked around to see where the shot came from, before realizing that I had stepped on a molten bubble in the pavement and it exploded beneath my feet.

Today a cold wind is blowing through the open windows, it’s in the low twenties and sheet rain is falling. It’s more like being in a car wash than a rain shower. I am thinking about that 6 am morning, walking home from the last show of the tour, and listening to a Robert Forster interview on ABC radio.

I heard the first part of it yesterday afternoon, whilst on my way to the car pound.

Around these parts it’s $300 if you get your car towed.

That’s a bill of $300 for looking up old Rolling Stones videos on youtube and trying to find the John Lennon interview with Bob Harris from 1974 I saw at a friend’s house in Italy.
x
There’s no extra charge for looking at pictures of vintage J-45 guitars – that comes when you try to buy one.

The tour that started in a bar in Copenhagen at the start of October is over. From Denmark’s cobbled streets, rattling the bones of my bags and guitars, I took the bus to Berlin. Flew to London and engaged in practices of the UK kind for thirty days and thirty nights. Travelling with Rad, who’s got the road sewn into the lining of his Iowa jeans.

We headed up to Scotland, practised bad Scottish accents and had a wonderful time with friends and shows, flew to Belfast and picked up The Insignia (or was it The Enigma?) – a sports car to rattle cages and set this driver’s heart a-flutter with its digital radio cranked up loud. Smelt like success. Drove that thing to Dublin and back three times and didn’t feel a thing.

The book was launched in Belfast on a wonderful Friday evening in the Black Box. Rad playing jazz piano, poetry everywhere, speeches and sister Ali joining me in the reading. We’ll be doing more of this in February – watch this space.

Before this, the album was launched in London at the Half Moon, another atmspheric evening (and only the second time Rad and I have played ‘Letter From T’).

In Italy a few days later the onstage conversation turned into band – with bass, drums and female vocals, all talking Italian. I settled back into the world of driving fast and eating lunch. Three weekends later I took a train from Milano Centrale north to Switzerland, which led me via late nights and laughs to that lonesome road, hauling gear at 6 am.

The last concert of the tour was recorded – that is one I’ll be listening to. You have sent videos too – will be in touch.

I’ll try to put them online, and any photos I can find, too. The ones of the J-45 you’ll have to look up yourselves.

Until we meet again,

Happy Christmas and let’s have an amazing 2010.

See you next time …

Andy

Top 40 no Beatles

Boys like lists. Top 5 hot female bass players. Girlfriends from Wales (a very short list). Leeds Utd first team, 1973-74 (a very embarrassing list), Suzi Quatro’s Top 10 singles (another short one). That kind of thing

So when I was asked for a list of my Top 10 songs “of all time”, and to come in to a Radio Ulster studio to talk about them, I knew the only problem would be cutting “all time” down to 40. A Top 10 seemed impossible.

Might as well say ‘Top 10 Shakespeare lines’, ‘Top 3 Martin Amis novels’ (OK, that one not so difficult), Top Sister. Top 3 movies where Julia Roberts looks good, Top 10 Dinners Made By Mother, Top Breakfast Cereal available in more than 3 continents.

The other problem was a practical one – the train to Great Victoria Street station left in twenty minutes. All I had was a pencil and the back page of the Irish Times. Well – people have survived in the wilderness on less.

My first decision – I would have to take the Beatles out of the equation.
Not because of the fuss going on about the remastered albums, not because of that video game where if I could only remove the numbers and whizzing plastic guitars I could see what’s going on.

No, it’s just because there isn’t room for much else in a Top 40 with the Beatles included. Since hearing ‘Revolver’ playing on a Black Box record player at an early birthday party, they’ve always been in a list of their own, for me.

At the height of punk, walls covered in pages torn from the NME, I remember asking a girlfriend if it was still OK to have the White Album photographs stuck above my bedroom window, “Yes. They’re like church,” she gasped, shocked, inserting another safety pin into an artfully-ripped T shirt.

So here it is – Top 40 No Beatles, as scribbled down on the back page of the Irish Times while waiting for the train from Holywood to Belfast. It’s a true list – these songs are the soundtrack of my life so far. Old wave, new wave – any wave is OK.

They are In sort-of chronological order – or at least, this is how they happened to me:

1. Froggy Went A-Courtin’ – Burl Ives
2. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – Film soundtrack
3. Metal Guru – T. Rex
4. Life on Mars – David Bowie.
5. Working Class Hero – John Lennon
6. My Sweet Lord – George Harrison
7. Heartbreaker – Led Zeppelin
8. I Know What I Like – Genesis
9. Band on the Run – Macca
10. Walk on the Wild Side – Lou Reed
11. Sheena is a Punk Rocker – Ramones
12. Marquee Moon – Television
13. Teenage Kicks – The Undertones
14. Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick – Ian Dury
15. Heroes – David Bowie
16. Another Girl Another Planet – The Only Ones
17. Subterranean Homesick Blues – Bob Dylan
18. Tangled up in Blue – Bob Dylan
19. Rainy Day Women – Bob Dylan
20. Beasley Street – John Cooper Clarke
21. A Forest – The Cure
22. Almost With You – The Church
23. You Can’t Always Get What You Want – Rolling Stones
24. The Big Music – The Waterboys
25. When Love Breaks Down – Prefab Sprout
26. Don’t Give Up P- eter Gabriel & Kate Bush
27. Waiting For The Man – Velvet Underground
28. Bang on the Ear – The Waterboys.
29. Losing My Religion – REM
30. Nothing Compares To You – Sinead O’Connor
32. One – U2.
33. Way Down Now – World Party
34. Persuasion – Tim Finn
35. Human Behaviour – Björk.
36. Wonderwall – Oasis
37. Crazy World – Aslan
38. This Year’s Love – David Gray
39. Chasing Cars – Snow Patrol
40. Madame George – Van Morrison

As we passed George Best international airport I had got the 40 in the right hand margin. On the left, 10 which just missed out:

GPT – Martha Wainwright
Out of Reach – Gabrielle
Big Time – Rudi
Rio – Duran Duran
Enola Gay – OMD
Here Comes The Rain Again – Eurythmics
You Never Can Tell – Chuck Berry
White Riot – Clash
China Girl – Bowie
Bus To Baton Rouge – Lucinda Williams

The train clunked into into Central Station, which meant I had about five minutes until Botanic and then Great Victoria Street the BBC. I still had the front cover of the G2 section of the Guradian to get the Top 10 sorted. The train heaved its way through, under and around the Markets:

Top 10 no Beatles:

1. Heroes
2. Tangled Up In Blue
3. Waiting For The Man
4. Losing My Religion
5. Wonderwall
6. Hey Jude*
7. A Day In The Life**
8. Madame George
9. Subterraean Homesick Blues
10. Life On Mars

Times of my life in other peoples songs, you could say. It’s not even just the songs, it’s where you are, where you remember them playing.

Just made it, passing the Crown I thought for a moment I’d left the ’papers on the train. No worries, these songs are in my head anyway

See you on tour, album’s out tomorrow.

Andy

* OK, there had to be one

** OK OK – two. Just two.

'songwriter' album cover

 

 

That Menu in Full …

WOMAD asked for Andy’s Rock’n’Roll Breakfast menu, in all its glory.

The jury is in.

Sorry, make that,

The jury is out.

OK, I’ve got it.

The jury is in, but has gone out to lunch to get something decent to eat.

You see, the jury is a motley collection of celeb chefs who have just run their collective and experienced eyes over the Rock’n’Roll Breakfast Menu.

They have pronounced it one of the culinary wonders of the modern age.

They have warned against the recipe for such a tasty repast being made publicly available for the first time.

Andy himself has described his menu as answering an age-old call for the travelling musician. The challenge of making the best breakfast possible from the bizarre selection of food which can be found in the kitchen of whoever he or she is staying with on tour.

Because, dear reader, a touring life of five star hotels and waitress service is merely a mythical existence for most musicians. Most musicians are not in U2, and even if they were, Bono himself would be proud of coming up with as varied a menu as this, the morning after crashing out on the sofa at Edge’s pad.

I mean tower.

Or, rather, castle.

Since Andy is Irish but lives in Australia, he has tried to fuse two hemispheres of culinary experience in an explosive

(Editor’s note – the end of this sentence seems to have gone missing. Could this be the culinary equivalent of the missing lines of ‘Kubla Khan’? At the very least, this tragic omission could serve as a timely warning that overindulgence in this recipe can lead to memory loss, mental instability and severe difficulty in walking a straight line when asked to do so by members of the local constabulary)

Ladies and gentleman, we proudly present:

Coco Pops & Kahlua

Ingredients
1 box of Coco Pops
1 bottle of Kahlua
1 large bowl
Small bowls, as required

Method
It’s all plain sailing after you have located both ingredients for this perky little ‘start me up’. The most difficult thing will be to find anyone who has a bottle of the exotically-named vaguely coffee-flavoured liqueur. Try the dimmest, darkest, local nightclub, or failing that, the back of the drinks cabinet at a teetotal friend’s house. He or she will have stashed and forgotten it long ago.
Pour Coco Pops into large bowl.
Stand back to admire rarely-witnessed sight of so many Coco Pops in one large bowl at one time.
Pour in bottle of Kahlua.
Mix.
Eat out of large bowl or, if in company, serve into small bowls.

Main Course

Cereale di Melbourne, alla surpresa di Dublino
(aka Toasted Granola with Black Pepper Strawberries Flambéed in Irish Whiskey)

Ingredients
Serves two people
1 small mug of large oat flakes
1 large mug of small oat flakes
1 medium-sized mug of medium-sized oat flakes
1 cup (not too small) of oat bran
1 slightly smaller cup of wheatgerm
1 large spoon for honey
1 small spoon for sugar
1 large pot of organic australian honey made by worker bees with funny accents
1 small bag of non-organic irish sugar made by Messrs Tate & Lyle
1 large bottle of Irish Whiskey
1 saucepan full of beautifully tasty English strawberries cut up carefully
1 litre of yummy soya milk not the dodgy yellow looking longlife stuff
1 squeezed lemon
1 mango sliced x 2
1 peach x 2
1 kiwi fruit x 4
1 raisin (just testing if you’ve read this far I know you don’t like raisins)
1 large saucepan1 milk frother – looks like a french press but with more holes in it
1 lump of butter
1 pepperpot containing black pepper

Method
Put said lump of butter in very big saucepan on a low heat until it melts.
Start adding all the oat flakes of varying sizes, bran and wheatgerm.
Don’t stop stirring as you add them. Ever.
Pour in lots of the the honey – maybe about quarter of the pot, and some spoons of sugar.
Don’t stop stirring.
Stir some more, without stopping.
Warm up the soya milk. Gently does it.
Don’t stop stirring. I thought I saw you stop.
Have a taste of the toasted granola.
Nice, isn’t it?
Froth the warm milk in the frother.
Take the toasted granola off the heat.
Put sugar into another saucepan.
When the sugar melts, add lemon juice.
Start again if you’ve messed this bit up and the sugar all stuck together in a sticky blob.
Keep stirring. Don’t stop.
Add half the saucepan of strawberries.
Pour in liberal amount of Irish whiskey.
Light with match.
Repair clothing and hair.
Fall about with nervous laughter.
Add cracked black pepper.
Take off heat.
Put frothy milk in bowls containing cut up mangoes, kiwi, peach.
Add toasted granola.
Top off with the black pepper, strawberry and whiskey sauce.
Dig in.

Side Order

‘The Ashes Challenge’

Ingredients
2 loaves of bread
1 large jar of Marmite
1 large jar of Vegemite
1 Toaster
1 packet of butter
2 colours of plates

Preparation
Toast one loaf of bread, butter, and spread with Marmite, put on one colour of plates.
Toast one loaf of bread, butter, and spread with Vegemite, put on other colour of plates.
Ask friends who prefers Marmite to Vegemite, and the other way round.
Listen patiently as they scoff at one or the other vegetable-based spread.
Distribute toast to friends on different coloured plates remembering which contains Marmite toast, which Vegemite.
Ask friends to guess which one is which.
Get totally confused and forget which is which.
End up not knowing what this proves, but satisfied.
Sort of.
Bit like The Ashes, really.

Dessert

‘Champagne and Strawberries, with Ceylon Tea (optional)’

Ingredients
1 bottle of champagne
The remainder of the strawberries left after making the sauce
1 china teapot (optional)
1 packet of Ceylon tea leaves (optional)

Method

Boil water
Put leaves in teapot
Add boiling water to teapot
Wait
Put strawberries in champagne glasses
Add champagne to glasses
Don’t wait
Drink
Pour tea (optional)
Drink tea (optional)