Monday 9th of April, 2001
I get onto more Household Chores - vacuuming and ironing. The washing machine (in its Unspeakably Violent Spin Mode) manages to vibrate the glass jar of teas off the counter so that it smashes on the floor - this is at my feet, while I'm ironing. I wonder whether this is some kind of hint to me - either to cut down on my caffeine intake (I broke my teapot the other day as well) or at the very least to get a new jar. The excessive vibrations of Unspeakably Violent Spin Mode act as a sort of accelerated entropy - otherwise blameless objects that would normally just sit there are thrown across the room. I sometimes have to leave the room, or indeed the building, for fear that the shelves and so forth would collapse around me.
I go to the supermarket to stock up on Various Foodstuffs. Certainly, when I see my fridge bulging with vegetables and fruit, I feel a calming wave of unbearable smugness wash over me, the nearest thing we get in this part of the world to health and contentment. The fact that I have got washing liquid and a new low-energy bulb for the bedroom has added quite a lot to the bill. I am noticing these things. I'll be collecting vouchers soon. Trying to get 2p off a tin of beans. God help me.
At 2:00, Joe calls to say that he's still phoning around different printers. I try to explain to him that getting 100 printed of anything is like to be quite expensive (compared with getting, say, 2,000 or 10,000 printed - on a unit cost basis anyway). He says he'll continue shopping.
I use the opportunity to go the the crockery/household goods shop on The Cut to get some jars. Not a replacement tea jar, but some large ones to put pasta and rice in. And, for reasons known only to my unconscious, a parmesan cheese grater. not that I don't eat a lot of pasta, and yes I do have parmesan cheese with it, but it's a bit excessive getting a dedicated grater for it.
Inside every hopeless slob is a rabid bourgeois trying to claw his way out.
Gerard calls about the Angelaki cover blank, which I have sent to him already. So that's alright. We discuss an e-mail he got recently from some Belgian admirers of Cultural Amnesia, a band we were in in the early eighties, requesting a full discography. Ben seems to know all of that, but it appears that the Belgians know even more. How curious.
Joe forwards me an e-mail from the people he thinks will do the printing - actually quite reasonable, I think, for that sort of run. I send them a mail querying something in their specs.
Very quick dinner.
Meet up with Laura to go to the Barbican to see Tom Zé and Tortoise. As we're getting off the tube, I notice a poster for John Lewis which suggests that they sell a number of toasters that cost more than £50. I wonder about the sanity of anyone who would spend more than £50 on a toaster. But then I'm a man with a dedicated parmesan grater, so what do I know? Meet Ben outside the door and chat about various things, including Cultural Amnesia (possible digital remixes thereof) and household appliances - apparantly in John Lewis (spooky coincidence) that afternoon, Ben had seen a fridge with a computer in it. I presumed that this was part of Bill Gates' project to get all household applinces running on Windows CE. Which is a very scary thought, since they would (presumeably) be reporting your every movement to Redmond, and the washing machine would keep crashing ("Please re-install all the plumbing and restart").
The concert is a curious mish-mash. Although the two performers do have a lot in common, they are very different in style - Tortoise solid and taciturn, Tom Zé leaping about like a mad thing - very spry if he is (as he claims) 64 years old. I wonder what his secret is.
Living in Brazil probably has a lot to do with it.
Some of it really works - the solid rock of Tortoise underpinning the latin rhythms. Some of it less so. The highlight for me was the track that Tortoise did by themselves - suddenly they expand to fill the stage, and you realise how extraordinary they are, drummer John McEntire particularly (Laura compares them to Magma after the show, which I am scornful of at the time, but am now reminded that that is another rock groups led - or at least driven - by a jazz drummer).
Mr Zé does very long introductions - often longer than the songs - and he does not really speak English, so they can seem even longer.
The "clee-max" to the show is a song which involves Mr Zé and one of his sidekicks donning protective gear (rubber jackets, glasses gloves and, especially, hard hats) and hitting each other over the head (but in time) with hammers. And tearing up newspapers in time, too.
And he has a tendency to stick things down his trousers in a faux-phallic way.
Still, I'm intrigued enough to want to get some of his records. So that's all right.
A very strong sense of there being two completely different audiences - the Tortoise audience, waiting for ... something ... and intermittently getting it, and the Tom Zé audience, mostly Brazilian, hanging on his every word (since they speak Portugese) and probably wondering who that band are.
I do leave wanting to make music - that's my best response to a concert these days.
As we are leaving, Tim Gane and (allegedly, but we don't see her) Læticia Sadier from Stereolab are spinning discs. Playing as we pass is an instrumental version of Brel's Les F... ("un opera comique!"), which actually sounds like the real instrumental track with the vocals left off (they don't quite marry up on Brel's version to be honest). I'm not sure I really go for this celebrity DJ thing - what is the point of standing around gaping at musicians playing records they quite like? Unless they go for the proper experience - I suggest there be one of those old hi-fi-in-a-sideboard affairs from the 60s at one side of the stage, a sofa at the other, and the DJ actually has to get up and walk across the stage to change the record, possibly muttering things like - "I love this one it's really good!" or "No, wait a minute, I wasn't going to play this one, it's crap!" and moving the needle to a different track. Singing along loudly and out of tune, going "Nur nur nur" because although you think you can remember the lyrics, you can't actually.
Perhaps a lampstand, as well. And a coffee table.