Thursday 22nd of February, 2001
Breakfast record: Something with Liz Fraser from Mezzanine by Massive Attack. Bit ominous that. Is it a Massive Attack sort of a day?
After Breakfast I practise that right hand some more - definitely more fluid this morning - and then move on to something like the first and second primaries except for the fact that instead of cross-picking an NST guitar, I'm finger-picking a completely different instrument. It does help, though.
Then I go and get my hair cut.
I quite like my local barber (it's a shame I only visit him once a year). Quite lugubrious. No inessential chat. When I went from hair-below-my-shoulders to a No. 1 shave in the early 90s his only comment was "Much better, yah?", which I thought was entirely appropriate. Scared the dung out of myself with the haircut though; I used to catch sight of myself in shop windows and flinch - "Who is that dangerous young man?" There is an upside to it: you can stick fuzzy felt characters to your head. We had to make our own entertainment in those days. I think my barber believes in the moral superiority of short hair, that he's improving my soul with every snip. This time it's a generic Short Haircut. I feel relatively normal.
It can't last.
He spends ages getting the hair to sit just right, in a way which (between you and me) I hate. But never mind - I go to the gym straight after and ruin it all. My book for this session is The Mind's I but I don't get much reading done. For a start it's a stonking great hardback, difficult to hold and pedal at the same time. I have to resort to watching MTV.
Westlife have done a cover of Billy Joel's Uptown Girl that finally erases whatever difference there was between Pop and Karaoke. It is like those muzak versions of pop tunes they used to have (or the tracks on the infamous Top of the Pops albums of the Seventies) - it sounds a bit like (but not in any signficant way different from) the original record until you pay attention and realise it is a cheap copy. Still it means a few extra pennies for Mr Joel, not that he needs them, but all the same...
What is the point of Westlife?
Wreck the pizza I was intending to have for lunch. Exactly what happened is too complicated to explain, but I had to clean a vast quantity of congealed cheese of the base plate of the oven. Eat what's left - essentially a piece of quite cheesy bread - and make extra salad to compensate.
Drift a bit after lunch. Don't achieve anything concrete. I'd have been pin-sharp if I'd had a properly cooked pizza to eat.
The lovely and talented Rachel Pantechnicon (actually a nice chap called Russell) calls me back over a Kamel Klub booking - I put them down for the 13th of May.
After dinner Yuka calls about recording on Saturday. This will be interesting and, I hope, fun. One woman and her ukelele. Hopefully, I will be able to overdub things onto it. She's going back to Japan on Wednesday and will be recording with her band on Tuesday, so let's see if we can get some tracks down. I saw her do her first (and last for a while) public appearance at the RedEye in Islington last Thursday. It's a bit of a dive, and it was nice to see something so different happening there. For example, the band that followed Yuka on the same night were pretty good, but a straightforward Modern Rock Trio. How flat that all seems, no light or shade or anything to engage the spirit - I much preferred Yuka's stuff. I experienced a similar feeling after half an hour or so of Wayne Kramer last year. That said, I'd dearly like to play Unpleasant Rawk Guitar, if only for one gig.
Maybe I should do something about that.