S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

Such a long time since my last confession. Oops.
I managed to break two of my touring records yesterday and today:
1. The shortest stay in a hotel room, namely 7 minutes
2. The longest continuous drive - 18 hours on the tour bus, from Clermont-Ferrand in France to Bratislava in Slovakia.
By the end it seemed I [...]

I downloaded the Radiohead record last night. What did I pay for it? Nothing. I thought to myself, “I’ll check it out, and if its good, I’ll pay something at a later date.” And I will - I’ve been working this way with shareware for a while now and have honoured my self-made agreements with [...]

After an initial burst of frantic anger at losing my MacBook Pro on Friday night, I managed to get all the data off it on Saturday thanks to my wonderful neighbour letting me use his computers pretty much all day. I toast the existence of SuperDuper! - an amazing backup app that just works so [...]

My bastard MacBook Pro has died. Logic board gone. One minute its fine, I’m just opening Safari to check the news, next minute the display is scrambled and an enormous beard starts sprouting from my face. I can barely imagine (hot on the heels of my post on the spiral of misery that any single [...]

I had another hat on last week - presenting Guitar Rig for Native Instruments and helping Apple show the amazing new Logic Studio at a couple of workshops. I say workshops… that was something of a misnomer, as demonstrated beautifully in Liverpool, when a poor kid came up at the end and said, “I brought [...]

That was a great little expedition… a whirlwind of a tour where something seemed to be happening every minute of every day. From the magic of a North Beach Italian restaurant with Nick Phillips of the Imaginary Foundation (home of my favourite T-shirts) to chatting to Beck backstage at the Greek Theatre LA about being [...]

OK, so you know I’m an Apple fan. So try and imagine the moment when, during lunch with Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iMac, iPod and all the beautiful magic of Apple, I said, looking at his iPhone - “Ah, an iPhone… I’ve been dying to have a play with one of those” to [...]

I got an email from Foy Vance today that just said “FOX CAKE (which is our pet way of saying “for f**k’s sake”) POST WILL YE” plus three hundred exclamation marks. After hosing myself, I decided to respond - with a great and unexpected riposte - by, eh, posting.
Yes it has been a long time. [...]

“Toddler stabbed to death in East London flat”
“Teenager stabbed to death in street fight”
“Man beaten to death outside his house for trying to stop youths from vandalising cars”
Its just too depressing, and it really does have an effect on me. I’m looking at my little boy, playing on the floor and watching “Maisy”. laughing and [...]

Situation at this point:
Its 22:15 in Trencin, Slovakia. I’m sitting outside a very strange hotel that has just opened for us - not really ready for guests. By that I mean such delights as no phones, and a large plank of wood where the door to the swimming pool should be.
Our truck has broken down [...]

We’re climbing into the heavens on an Iberia Airlines jet. In the name of passenger comfort, some airline exec has asked his wife to put together a collection of her favourite easy-listening cover versions so that the poor folk travelling with Iberia get subjected to this musical drivel to the point of insanity. I mean, [...]

Call me pretentious but I think I’m finally getting a handle on why French wine is superior to New World wines… its like true beauty and the mystery of attraction versus plain pumped-up glamour.
I opened a bottle of Bouchard-Finlayson “Hannibal” 2004 last night - a South African recommended to me when I took a recent [...]

At least ten times a day, the thought crosses my mind that modern life in “developed” countries is just insane. The things we worry about, the craziness of the things we have to do making us stressed out and completely crazy in response. Like air travel and all that goes with it - Foy Vance [...]

Having played Oxegen festival in Ireland last night, pretty much all the bands were heading over to play “T in the Park” today… and we were ALL on the same plane. It was great crack, if slightly surreal - Snow Patrol (good to see some old faces!!), Queens Of The Stone Age (long live Josh [...]

Foy’s album “Hope” is out today. Just Google “foy vance hope” and buy it. That’s an order. Not only is it full of drifting magic both soulful and shambolic, perfect and imperfect, light and colour that is rare these days, but the vocals are stunning, the playing has a touch we all dream of, and [...]

It was pretty much perfect. Getting out of the minibus to catch the midnight train to St. Petersburg, there was some Russian brass band music playing at the station in Moscow. The train is straight from a movie scene - Earl (Air drummer) and I are sharing a compartment at the end of a long [...]

I’m into day four of looking after Luka on my own, and I have to say its more than a full-time job. All of a sudden, the perspective from which I have never seen life is etched in my soul. The mothers who freak out when their hardworking husbands say “well, all you do is [...]

When all’s said and done, how good a singer is Bryan Adams?
Pity his music sucks so badly.

Later with Jools Holland is rattling away on the TV. Aside from the mighty White Stripes, its been a bit uninspiring to say the least. I saw the White Stripes play in Top Of The Pops once. We were all sitting there thinking, “here we go with a royal display of bluffing…” at which point [...]

So here I am, back in London. My garden is in full bloom and really beautiful. The mayhem of New York City seems a long time ago, as once again the strange accordion of time pushes and pulls its dusty old bellows pumping haunting melodies into my soul. The last post was definitely the low [...]