Times change, people change, but some things will always stay the same.

Ben and Jane are flying to Florida today to visit Rayburn and his family. They came round with Simona last night and we went to Venus, as it is a bit quieter than the Standard or the Charles Holden. It was Simona's birthday on Saturday, and she had to finish her evening shift before she could get out, with Ben and their friends, celebrating that.

All of which makes it pretty unlikely she will be able to make the Camden Jazz Café with us at the end of the month (passim). I think I will offer her place, if that comes to pass, to old muso-chum Andy M. The universe sent me the message. I had mentioned to Ben in the Holden on Thursday, that Jane, I Andy and his Sarah went to the Jazz Café together years ago to see Boz Scaggs. When Ben went off to the gents I took a look at my phone and there was a WhatsApp on it from Mr Mulford recommending a drummer called Yusef Dayes. Some things never change.

Would love to get Thump The Clouds back in the studio one more time.

Am I Blue?

Thump the Clouds have come to mind this morning as I met up with AndyM and a bunch of other folk earlier this week, so for your Valentine's present you can have the lyrics to an eight bar blues of ours from back in the day. It's all very sad, but then it is the blues after all and the last word links to a deliriously romantic story. Cheer up, it might never happen.


I came to the party
I saw you again

It's hard to believe this

But it took me way back when

To when I first met you

The scene of the crime

To once upon a time

Sucking white wine up

From a paper cup

To kid myself that there was

No need for a cover up

I asked you a question

You told me a lie

You didn't see me cry

I woke up on Sunday

I wrote down this song

And started to think that

I had been away too long

I thought of that singer

Of love and of life lived in vain

And headed for the train.

Joey Goodbye

Apropros of nothing, the lyrics of an old Thump the Clouds song. Written as far as I can tell when Pete Doherty was about five. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I knew Joey for a while
I guess I always liked his style
He'd break your hear with a smile
But you'd be laughing all the while
I met him at the usual bar
He tried to sell me his guitar

And that's the last time I saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

I heard Joe was in a fix
Needed more, and got less kicks
Mixin' things you shouldn't mix
Cuttin' corners, turnin' tricks
His man says you're my good friend
And you can try the special blend

And that's the last time he saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

Kids found Joey on waste ground
Straight and stiff and flat face down
All the people gathered round
And said nobody heard a sound
Watched the wagon pull away
But no one there had much to say

And that's the last time they saw Joey
Joey Goodbye

Kettners Champagne Rooms

I went to Ronnie Scott's last week with Andy M, who I've known since we worked together on the BP Grangemouth project all those years ago. (Thump the Clouds trivia hounds should know that "Shieldhill" is on the braes overlooking Falkirk and Grangemouth.)

Andy being something of an oenophile, we gave the wine list a thorough going over at Ronnie's and then retired to Kettners Champagne Rooms for debriefing. I'd never heard of Kettners but I enjoyed it a lot. In fact I enjoyed it so much that I had to email Andy to ask him to remind me of the name.

I had a bit of a shock when I got back to Leicester Square to get the tube as they seem to close all of the entrances except Cranbourn Street late at night.

Andy arrived at Paddington in time to just miss the 0:34, had to wait for the 1:34, and got to bed at 2:40.

Next day, after being woken at 7 am, he took his daughter to Thorpe Park as planned and thus came to endure with a hangover:

• X-no way out, a backwards roller coaster in the dark
• detonator, 150 ft vertical drop
• Nemesis Inferno, hanging roller coaster with loop-the-loop and corkscrews
• Stealth a 30 second ride, 0 to 80 mph in 2.3 seconds (straight line), vertical rise to 205 feet arching over to a vertical drop of the same.

You're a better man than I am Gunga Din.

Seventh of the Seventh

We have come so quickly around to the first anniversary of the 7/7 bombs in London.

I want to record an apparently trivial thing that happened that day: I got my first inkling that something was wrong when Michael from Bangalore popped up in Microsoft Messenger checking that I was OK.

He, in India, had heard of the outgrage before I was aware of it in SW19.

One world.

---

.... which reminds me .....

Back in the Eighties - and certainly before Achtung Baby, Thump the Clouds tried to write the ultimate U2 song for a bet. This was in the days of the more overtly religious U2, and what we came up with was:

One man come
One man come

Twelve men come
Twelve men come

Children come
Children come

Kingdom come
Kingdom come

One way
One way

One Word
One Word

One day
One day

One world
One world

Our virtual Bono certainly came up with goods there in a way that the real one hasn't matched for a while.

On Acting

I'm off with Andy - younger than me, erstwhile Thump the Clouds stalwart, brother of Phil and widower of Sara - tonight to see Kurt Elling in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Elling's 'Flirting with Twilight' is one of my most treasured albums, and Moonlight Serenade - the opening cut - is one of the tracks I would take to a desert island.

I can't remember how or why I became aware of Elling - I bet if I was blogging at the time I would - but I'm really looking forward to this evening.

I remember that back in 1989, Andy's father was working at Matthew Hall in London, pretty much opposite the theatre where Dustin Hoffman was playing Shylock in a production of the Merchant of Venice directed by Peter Hall. The show was sold out, but Andy's Dad decided to check for return tickets at the end of each day on his way home. When he eventually got a ticket, I remember him comparing the production to a recent RSC version with Anthony Sher ans saying that, although Anthony Sher convinced him, he wasn't really convinced that Hoffman wanted the pound of flesh.

At the time I took that as a criticism of Hoffman's performance. However, as it happens, the South Bank Show shot a documentary around the rehearsal's for the Hall/Hoffman show, and in that when it was screened several months later I remember Hoffman saying that - in his take - Shylock didn't actually want Antonio's pound of flesh; he just wanted to humiliate him; a point of view he evidently managed to communicate on stage in character.

Note to self: what I had taken for criticism was in fact the success of a precisely articulated and achieved performance,

Whiz Kids

A universal human trait that we don't really like to admit is that we secretly rather like having our prejudices confirmed, so I bet a lot of us got a kick from this story in the The Times yesterday.

CITY brokers have never enjoyed the best of reputations. The popular image is of a brash and boastful twentysomething with more money than sense or sensitivity.

But now a study by a group of eminent American academics suggests that star performers on the stock market may be even worse and could best be described as 'functioning psychopaths'.

In a study of investors' behaviour, the team from three US universities suggest that people with brain damage can make better financial decisions than the rest of us.

I'm no stranger to schadenfreude myself, so this has brought to mind the rather ungenerous response of Thump the Clouds to the fate of those dumped on their uppers by Black Monday, the Stock Market Crash of 1987 as illustrated by the following extract.

924 from door to door was temporary glory.
Equity from equities was just a fairy story.
Chinese walls were not designed to stand the wind.
Puts and calls and bless me father I have sinned.

Whiz kids and was kids
Don't mean a lot to me.
Wish kids have been washed up kids
Since the 1970's.

That seems rather crass to me now.

Shall Gods be said to ...

Out of the blue, it strikes me that for all I have never explained 'Thump the Clouds'.

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds
When clouds are cursed by thunder,
Be said to weep when weather howls?
Shall rainbows be their tunics' colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?
Shall it be said they sprinkle water
From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,
An old god's dugs are pressed and pricked,
The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.
Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground,
Flung gravel chime? Let the stones speak
With tongues that talk all tongues.

Just to be alone

Chris and Kim have decided that 'Thump the Clouds' are belatedly famous, so I guess that the world might be able to stand the lyrics to another old song.

Looking through another window, at another view
It's so long since I've done any more than pass on through.
Ever changing, never changing faces old and new,
Looking for another me, perhaps another you.

Why would anyone come so far
Just to be alone?

Reach out for another glass or pop another pill
Its been so long since I really felt the first night thrill.
Maybe now the time has come to say I've had my fill
Always moving feels a lot like always standing still.

Why would anyone come so far
Just to be alone?

In my craft or sullen art

Writing alone late at night, I can't help thinking of Dylan Thomas.

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Come to think of it, spindrift pages would be a much better subtitle for what I do here than commonplace book. I think I'll change it.

I've always loved Dylan, "Thump the Clouds" my erstwhile music project was named after a poem of his as well.

He categorised himself as follows:

One: I am a Welshman;
Two: I am a drunkard;
Three: I am a lover of the human race, especially of women.

A Welsh Born Icon, of course, but often a contrary bugger to read. The Prologue to his Collected Poems is 102 lines long and has an insane rhyming scheme in which the first line rhymes with the last, and the second with the penultimate etc. until the two halves meet with a rhyme between line 51 and 52. Its a bit like the legend of the code that proves that the bard of Avon wrote the English version of the 42nd psalm because the 42nd word from the beginning is shake and the 42nd word from the end is spear.

Oh, and Paul is the Walrus.

Thump the Clouds

I thought I had summoned the lyrics of Shield Hill up from my memory earlier this week, but I have just remembered that there was a middle eight.

There's different kinds of natural wastage
And voluntary redundancy.
I've seen enough people wasted and, my Lord,
It don't seem so natural to me.

Oh dear me. Time has not been kind I thought the ersatz Bruce Springsteen of the verses and chorus were bad enough, but that is ersatz Billy Bragg.

Strangely enough, I could have sworn that I saw Phil - who played bass on the song - in Charlotte Church's band performing "Crazy Chick" on Top of the Pops at the end of May. I've Googled up a solo of his from a Sax Appeal song called, but of course it is, "CHEE-O-WA-WA CHA CHA". Press play and listen while you read the fine joke I have put below it.



A missionary goes to the most remote part of jungle. As soon as he arrives in the village he is to visit, he hears drums beating wildly in the distance. He asks the Chief what the drums mean. The Chief's reply is "Drums play, good. Drums stop, bad."

During the missionary's entire month long stay he frequently asks the Chief about the continuous drumming. The Chiefs reply is always the same. "Drums play good. Drums stop bad."

Finally as the missionary is leaving he asks the Chief again about the drumming. The Chief says "Drums play, g..."

"I know, I know" says the missionary. "Drums play, good. Drums stop, bad. But why is it bad when the drums stop?"

The Chief shakes his head and says, "when drums stop, bass solo."

Shield Hill

I'd call my old man a fool,
I'd say that guy knew his place.
I'd tell you, when I got out of school
They weren't gonna step on this boy's face.

I've got dreams but I had plans.
I'd take on a whole wide world.
That was me, my guitar in my hand
Standing up square my flag unfurled.

Just sitting out on that old Shield Hill,
Wrapped in a night so black and so still.
Drawn by the lights, the refinery,
Knowing there's nothing there for me.

Things can change as years fly by,
Take a drink or even meet the girl,
Though you try and keep your hopes up high
You can get mixed up in this world.

Lose the nerve to look so far
No one else will ever ask you why,
As night after night you still strum your guitar,
Pretending you missed your chance to try.

Just sitting out on that old Shield Hill
Wrapped in a night so black and so still.
Drawn by the lights the refinery,
God knows there's nothing there for me.

(Thanks to Chris and John for reminding me of this 1985 Thump the Clouds song on Saturday.)