A musical memory
Well, another summer has slipped by and in the course of it I passed what some people insist on telling me is an important milestone: my 50th birthday.
I would be lying if I said that this anniversary hasn't affected me at all. Coincidentally or not, for the last few weeks I've been in a retrospective mood and have spent a good deal of time looking through old notebooks and diaries. It's strange to come across pages of notes, some of them more than twenty years old, for books which I never got around to writing. Many of these notes date from the early 1990s, the period between writing The Dwarves of Death and starting work on What a Carve Up!.
My trawls through the paperwork also turned up a good deal of journalism written during this time. People occasionally (very occasionally) ask me why I've never tried to collect my journalism in a book, to which my simple answer is that I don't think most of it's very good. The few pieces that I have enjoyed reading again, over the last few weeks, are my reviews and interviews for The Wire, the jazz and modern music magazine to which I was an occasional contributor back in those days. These, at least, did stir up some pleasant memories of some of the musicians I was lucky enough to meet while working for the paper: memorable encounters with Steve Reich and Brian Eno, a bumpy ride in the back of a van to a gig in Camden with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow (one of my teenage heroes) and - perhaps the best memory of all - an afternoon spent in the comany of Annette Peacock.
My interview with Annette now seems to be available to read here (the one with Brian Eno is also available online, I think, if you look around for it). I remember being very intimidated to meet this beautiful and talented singer, who had a dark and rather aggressive presence on stage (I'd been to see her in concert in East London a couple of nights before). Unusually, we didn't meet in a hotel lobby or the offices of her record company: she asked if she could come to my home instead. In those days I was living in a studio on the King's Road in Chelsea, and I shuddered to think what this doyenne of the New York avant garde would make of my little flat with its bourgeois furniture and fittings. But she came, and could not have been more friendly or charming. What I remember most vividly is the photo session afterwards: The Wire's photographer got her to sit on a wooden chair next to a window, her face caught in the fading afternoon sunlight, and for the next twenty minutes, while he took her picture, I put side two of X-Dreams (probably my favourite of her albums) on the turntable. Whether she liked being made to listen to her own music or not I don't know, but to me it provided the perfect soundtrack to our conversation while the photographer went about his business.
The resulting photograph disappointed me, slightly: it was very contrasty, in stark black and white, and showed only the contours of her face, with nothing of the room or the window in the background. Nonetheless, I kept a copy, and framed it, and kept it on the wall of my study for quite a few years. Where is it now, I wonder? It hasn't turned up during any of my recent nostalgic searches.
If you're not familiar with Annette Peacock's music, I warmly recommend her albums X-Dreams, I'm The One (a big influence on David Bowie) and more recently An Acrobat's Heart and 31:31.
And talking of music, I'm pleased to say that next month (October 7th to be precise) there will be a rare, one-off, staged performance of my 'spoken musical theatre' piece with The High Llamas, Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains at King's Place in London. Details are here, and I'll try to write a bit more about it in my next blog. Promises, promises!
