Saturday 24th of February, 2001
Spent a couple of hours tidying the living room to make a space to record in. Yuka arrived at about 11:00. I was still copying files from the Powerbook's hard disk, so we had tea and discussed strategy. The options open to us were to record the vocal and the ukelele separately in completely different takes, to try to record the vocal on one mike and the uke on another one or to set the microphones up to catch a stereo picture of the whole thing at one time, each of which appeal to different parts of my brain. Yuka plumps for the latter option which is the simplest, but with the least latitude for control-freakery (probably a good thing in itself), but has attendant problems of lo-fi-ness and the fact that it will be very difficult to separate out the voice and the uke later.
I assemble all the leads and bits and pieces that I will need to record with. She does three songs in one take each. So that was easy. Playing back one of the songs, I demonstrate various wacky plug-ins - Pluggo things, North Pole, some even more deranged things that normally only Nine Inch Nails impersonators mess with. I warn her that when I've finished, the songs might be most suitable for John Peel. I then explain who John Peel is. Hope that this is not too worrying for her. She certainly doesn't seem too concerned.
We repair for lunch to the noodle house on Newington Causeway (or is it Butts, I'm never sure) on the south side of the shopping centre next door to Pizzeria Castello. Very nice, can't imagine why I've not been in there before. It's the first time I've been in a restaurant since coming back from Italy, and so is the first time I've had to search a menu for the vegetarian option. I have vegetable noodle soup. If you can restrain yourself from telling me that it was probably made with chicken stock, I can restrain myself from thinking about it.
I end up trying to explain Guitar Craft Level I at great length, since it appears that no one here was very sure what I was doing - some people thought I was learning to make guitars - and Yuka's a bit confused. I describe the performance with a certain amount of relish. After lunch, Yuka shows me the small South American community that has sprung up under the viaduct next door - South American shops and cafes and so forth, lots of different people, too - Peruvians, Colombians and so forth (although this is based on my being able to judge where they come from by looking at facial and physical characteristics, which isn't likely). I feel out of place and insecure in a way which Yuka doesn't, obviously.
Yuka says that she may be playing at the 12 Bar on Tuesday evening. That would be nice.
On the way home, I walk through the shopping centre on the upper level in order to avoid the Tlön Books and consequent penury. Here too, there is a strong Latin American prescence, something which commentators seem not to have noticed. This is one of the nice things about living in London, and particularly living in a slightly dowdy part of it, since it makes a natural magnet for any incoming communities, and life is more interesting and varied for it. If only it were possible to convince the people who want to "improve" the area again of this. Their efforts will probably be as successful as the last time they tried to do it. The whole locality was demolished and this shopping centre was built, which, even if it does offer a haven for newcomers, has ever since been a byword for all the things the urban planners were trying to avoid.
Sadly, I pass the CD shop and am sucked in by a tractor beam. I decide to see if they have the new Tortoise album (not even sure that it's actually out yet), and in browsing discover a number of others that I'd like. So instead of buying one new album, albeit at full price, I get seven old ones: News From Babel's Work Resumed/Letters Home; Here Come the Warm Jets and On Land by Brian Eno; a Golden Palominos compilation featuring tracks from Blast of Silence (and thus a number of Peter Blegvad songs, including Jack Bruce's take on Something Else (is Working Harder); Esquivel! Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, Dick's Picks Vol 2 (an official release of a 1971 Grateful Dead bootleg) and The Draughtsman's Contract, my favourite Michael Nyman album. A few of these I already had on vinyl, but want to add to the CD gumbo. Some of them are cheap enough to make the average cost very reasonable indeed. However the aggregate cost is still more than I ought to be spending on CDs at the moment. I'm happy that I now have all of them, though, so there.
I managed to stop myself from buying some doubtless inlistenably scratched and played-to-death Vinicius de Moraes and Maria Bethania vinyl, so there's hope.
Getting home, I overdub double bass, banjo, classical guitar and slide guitar parts onto one of Yuka's songs - Your Place. This is fun, and an awful lot easier than doing it for myself. Let's see how it sounds tomorrow. I leave the mics set up for future work on these tracks - my aim is to have something mixed, at least roughly, for Yuka to hear before she leaves for Japan.
All I can muster for dinner is a cheese sandwich. No salad or anything. Are my standards slipping? Watch this space. At 8:00 I leave to go to the Human Soundwave, where I'm supposed to be playing a set tonight.
I get home at midnight, have my cocoa and check my e-mail. Someone in Australia has found this site via the Scott Walker mailing list. Deeply touched, I am. Isn't the internet wonderful! Bed at twelve-thirty. I'll be a dead man tomorrow, mark my words.