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When I entered Brian Eno’s studio in West London on a sunny, early April morning, he was just working on an idea in his head (a special sound maybe, a rhythm, a melodic shape?). I was quiet for a moment so that he could make a mental note. – You look a bit Moroccan, I then said to him. I’ve never seen Brian Eno with a white beard before. He really was in the Moroccan hills a short time ago. What I didn’t know was that he bought a hat there – in that country that was once a “hippie dream world” deep in the last century, but which turned to hell for too many young people. I have known Brian since 1989, and when I’m in London, there are casual meetings once in a while. This time Brian and Karl would play a “concert for one”, happily for me, two days later. When I left the studio, with a copy of SOMEDAY WORLD, I saw Brian setting a pulsating electronic rhythm in motion. Always fun to hear a glimpse of a possible future. Hope he was able to – nearly seamlessly, return to the idea he had in his mind – meaning the completely different place he had been some minutes before!
On Feb. 28th Karl Hyde wrote down three sentences, entitled IN A TROPICAL COCOON: “Old man wheeled in a chair through the Aroma of exotic streets wearing a distant expression. The stories he has written slip away, will be forgotten. They lie behind him in a trail of ghost memories, in the market on Pagoda street.” An accidental observation, a dream sequence? Who knows? Karl Hyde has the knack of getting lost in special moments and sceneries of modern life, focussed on things that might otherwise disappear before you really see them. Brian Eno is his companion in creating disturbing, beautiful songs with a sense of wonder and wilderness in SOMEDAY WORLD. Brian (also fond of notebooks and diaries) knows how to look for exit signs on old, well-trodden paths. Getting lost is a heartfelt need. For both of them. Between the blurred edges of England’s old soil and another blue world “The satellites sing songs / The days run into one / I need the sound of cars / To drown the quiet sun”.
Michael Engelbrecht: In the 70′s one of your four so-called song albums of that decade contained the word “world”, “Another Green World”, a work full of exotic landscapes. In 2005, “Another Day On Earth”suggested a return to the real life on this planet, and your new collaboration with Karl Hyde, “Someday World” again seems to cover existential issues. I just have to look at the cover, a strange, kind of psychedelic picture.
Brian Eno: I think it’s an optimistic choice. It’s the idea of a world that might actually turn out to be okay in the end. To everybody’s surprise, it might be a good world, there’s still a chance. In fact the record started out with quite a different mood. It ended up somewhere much more positive and joyful than really the place it began. I mean we weren’t miserable when we started, but there was a sort of slightly angry energy, as we started working together, but, because we were enjoying the process so much, the record actually came out with a lot of that joy in it …
Michael: … that is often undermined with rather dark undercurrents, in the lyrics, for example.
Brian: One of the things I like about the result is that two different sets of emotions are stuck together, and they can actually coexist. I always like things when I think, when I feel they are emotinally complicated. I don’t really like emotionally simple art (laughs).
Michael: When moments of anger or despair are mixed with euphoria, you can call it “hysteric” in the field of Clinical Psychology. Here the songs all get a second or even third bottom. They seem to be alive and well, despite some of the more or less hidden shades of disturbance and sadness.
Brian: Yes, you’re quite right. You asked about the cover of the album, that’s very much the picture of the cover as well. It’s a picture of a bit of a railway line actually, and it’s a very industrial, not attractive landscape in a way. It looks like a vision of a place you wouldn’t want to live. But in fact by making that kind of false world behind it, it suddenly suggests that it might be a kind of utopia. And I think in that song the same thing happens: the guy suddenly realizes that he’s very happy, he’s very fulfilled. I have this experience sometimes when I remember times in the past, and I think, ah, that was a great time, I was really happy then … If I go and look at my diaries or my notebooks, I’m always complaining (laughs). So these times when actually I was really enjoying it, I thought that things weren’t so good, you know, my perception of the time was, this is a difficult time, my perception in retrospect is – that was a great time. Nearly all the times have been great, actually …
Michael: Nevertheless, missed opportunities seem to be one recurring topic of “Someday World”, for example in the song “Witness”. We can hear this frenetic singing: “Did you ever loose your faith for a day / Seeing everything slip away? / Did you ever take a bribe? / Or a ride, a ride, a ride along a road / You’d taken all your life / Only to find it didn’t go to the place you thought it would arrive.” Apart from that it seems to be a love song where someone is missed in the early hours after midnight …
Brian: I don’t think it’s about a romantic relationship, or at least it shouldn’t only be about that. It could be about that as well. It’s about a relationship. It could be friends, or lovers, we don’t know. The song doesn’t tell you, and I think it shouldn’t really tell you which one it is. What is exciting to me about that song, there’s a sort of yearning feeling to it … somebody wanting something so badly that they can’t see that it’s already there (laughs). Maybe that’s the feeling I get from it.
Michael: Karl and you have both shared the writing of the lyrics. Nevertheless certain motives do appear or reappear during the nine songs. Stars and cars particularly. In “Daddy’s Car”, a dreamy evening atmosphere of playing children and the speed of a car on a highway are set against the tremendous speed of the North Star. Did you plan certain leitmotivs?
Brian: (laughs) Cars and stars, that had been another nice title. But, no, I’ve just noticed it now you say it. But it’s certainly Karl’s subject matter. The kind of things he likes to write about. Ordinary things, things that you see in your life, people you hear on buses, a lot of the text comes from him listening to people having conversations in buses or shopping centers, and he just writes down what they’re saying. He got hundreds of those books. He just takes lines and fits them together, and sometimes I add something in or write some parts as well.
Michael: That look at these ordinary things is quite surreal at times, for example, in that song “Mother of a Dog”. The first line is: “I was raised by the son of a mother of a dog”. (I wave my hand to Karl who’s listening to something on his headphones, repeating my remark and the first line of the song.) Is that a fragment of a dream?
Karl Hyde: I was raised by the son of a bitch.
(A moment of silence)
Michael: Ohh. But this was not meant to be autobiographical?
Karl: Barely. The more you find words the more you find ways of painting the same picture. I’m not interested in painting the same picture with the same words. Actually I’m not that interested in writing something that is ugly for the sake of it. There’s a way of making something beautiful out of things intrinsically ugly. At the root it can be quite violent, but there’s a way of finding beauty in it.
Michael: This song really seems to be a great example for that. In the intro I’m hearing – for the first time in my life on a record with the name “Eno” on the sleeve – a short appearance of a harmonica, like in the old blues songs, and then all these scenes – like childhood and teenage memories. And when you think everything comes to an end, with Karl’s tender singing that somehow blows all the harshness away, the listener will be surprised by a beautiful long instrumental passage.
Brian: So it goes of into a different world really. That is a characteristic of a lot of these songs of being both on the Earth and in touch with it, not pretending that you are somewhere else, but also being mentally at another level that you might call a transcendent level, and trying to be both at the same time. I’m sure that’s what all spiritual and religious disciplines have been about, the idea of being in touch but not being trapped by the world.
Michael: The last song of the album, “To Us All”, is so dark when you hear the lyrics: it could be written by a soul mate of Samuel Beckett, there are lines like “From the blood that we just we couldn’t spill / From the ones that we just couldn’t kill / We spin a world in a dizzying fall / To see the things that will happen to us all.” But the sounds and the melody have an incredibly warm, embracing quality. it sounds like a lullaby for the end of the world, or, to our endlessly numbered days.
Brian: That was actually a much longer song earlier, there were four other verses, and I took them all out. Just left that bit. And the four other verses for me painted the picture too fully. They filled in all the details, and it wasn’t so good then. So I emptied it and was just left with what had actually been the climax. So the song had built up to those two verses that exist. As a sort of climax, but then I thought: get rid of the build-up, just have the climax! I’ve never really done a song in quite that form except it’s slightly like a song of my very first album, called “On Some Faraway Beach”, where there’s a long lead-up, and there are three short verses that sort of just sit there like a little island in the song.
Michael: Yep, I was thinking of your first song album, “Here Come The Warm Jets” once in a while when listening to “Someday World”, because of that exuberant energy, the sudden changes of mood and atmosphere. You quite often look for a last song that functions as kind of release at the end of an album. Think of the pure melancholia of the last song, the title song of “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”, a deep sadness that is sort of balanced by a melody that could go on forever …
Brian: Just talking as a composer, one of the things we were really spending a lot of time thinking about is structure. How can you make things that have unusual and different structures, rather than “here’s the verse, here’s the chorus, here’s another verse, there’s a chorus, then there’s another bit, a middle eight or an instrumental”? We just thought: let’s just start off in general with unusual structures; let’s see what happens. I had this phrase in my head all the time: cities on hills, ‘cause a lot of the cities I like best are built on hills. And so the houses, the buildings have to kind of mould themselves round this complicated geology, and it always seems to create lovely buildings, interesting buildings. So we decided to start off not with a flat plane but with hills. So we just made rules that this is gonna be the structure of the song, we don’t even know what the song is gonna be, but we’re gonna first of all define a structure, and we did it using dice on the table there, anything, just to push us into a place where we were a little bit more lost.
Michael: By the way, both your voices have some fine affinities. On one song, “Who Rings The Bells”, Karl sings with a vulnerability that reminds me a bit of Morrissey’s singing on the verge of vanishing, on the first Smiths album which in fact was the only Smiths album I really liked. With your voices you cover a wide terrain …
Brian: Our voices really work together very well. That was just a lucky accident. We don’t have the same sound speaking voice at all, but when we sing our voices really come to pretty much the same place. And I think on some of the songs … there’s that song “Witness” for example, where I’m singing in parallel the whole time, I’m just singing one note, he’s moving in the melody, and I’m just keeping one note all the way through, and I think that’s also an unusual effect: it sort of sounds like my voice is a shadow of his voice. It’s as if his voice is casting a shadow. I’ve never really heard that effect except with our great heroes, the Everly Brothers. We can’t refer it to the Everly Brothers, ‘cause we like the way those two voices are so joined: if you try to sing an Everly Brothers song, you very often find yourself singing one line of Don’s part, and one line of Phil’s part. There isn’t like a lead voice, and a secondary voice. They’re both as interesting.
Michael: There’s a raw energy, not only in the dark corners of the songs!
Brian: It was really exciting, the singing part of it, because, as you know I haven’t done any recording singing for a while, but I love singing. I have this music group every week, and we sing for three hours or more. So that’s how I keep going, I think. If I didn’t have the group, I’d probably do a lot more singing on records (laughs).
Michael: So, please stop that a cappella thing now! In the penultimate song, “When I Built This World”, you’re adopting the voice of an evil god who brings with all bad intentions, guilt and sin into this world. By heavily treating your voice, you’re continuing that “theatre of voices” which we talked about around the time your last song album, “Another Day On Earth”, was released. And then the music sounds highly energetic in the long instrumental second half …
Brian: I should tell you the original name of this project. I started some of these pieces a long time ago, and it wasn’t really until I started working with Karl that I realized there was a way to finish them – they were just pieces of music that were sitting on my shelves that I had taken to a certain point and didn’t quite know how to finish. I had this idea of making a kind of music where Fela Kuti and Steve Reich would meet, something that was half way between them, and other things of course, but that was the point that rhythmically it had the intricacy of Fela Kuti, but it had the sort of persistence of Steve Reich, and the refusal to stop. And actually what we’re working on now is much more in that direction. On Someday World the things turned into songs rather unexpectedly, so this record wasn’t the end of the “Reikuti”-project, anyway, “Reikuti”, that was what I called it in my mind, and on that song, the last section was the place where we decided to try to do that. I said we’ve got at least one bit of where we do what we originally intended to do.
Michael: When you started a long series of public talks, two prominent words were “perfume” and “haircut”. Nowadays the central word is “surrender” though this concept leads back a long time to the early years of your “ambient music” in the 70s. The artistic response to that was somehow reluctant. Maybe groups like Duran Duran or Depeche Mode sang about haircuts and perfumes, but without getting the point. Now, artists seem to relate to the ideas behind that word “surrender”. To my delight, you’re singing, too, on the new albums of Damon Albarn and Owen Pallett. Both albums seem to have a knack for “surrender”. Owen’s work is about addiction in all its apparitions, and he even sings the s-word (here I’m laughing). Damon Albarn has done a kind of quiet work …
Brian: A lot of Damon’s album is quite reflective. It’s not melancholy, regretful, or: “Oh, those were such wonderful days”. It’s more like thinking about your life and thinking: “Oh, yes, I wonder what I was really doing then, I see, yes …”, because your life is a story you keep retelling yourself, and you keep suddenly realizing that the story wasn’t quite like that. As I say, when I look back in my old notebooks and even when I listen to recordings I’ve done in the past I think: who was the person who did that? If you don’t have any way of looking back, you tend to think that your life is a sort of continuous identity. But if you have a way of checking that, it isn’t true. You’re absolutely changing the whole time, and you know, if I didn’t have a diary or notebooks or recordings, I would probably have stitched together a story of my life that made perfect sense. It’s only that I have all that evidence, that it wasn’t making sense at the time, that I really didn’t know what was going on.
Michael: You’re singing on “Heavy Seas of Love”, the final track.
Brian: Damon asked me if I would help him on it, and in particular with that last song of his album. He had only written the main part of it (Eno sings “Heavy ways of love”), and he said I want another part in that song. So I wrote something completely separate, it doesn’t flow with his song, it’s a deliberate change of scene like you might do in a film more than you do in a piece of music. In a film it’s quite acceptable to suddenly switch location, you don’t do that very much in music.
Michael: Okay, now I’m switching location – different time, different place. A personal thing. Some months ago I met a woman. After thirty years I saw her coming back on stage with the old band. When their record came out, many people were blown away by the strange nakedness of the music. A cheap rhythm box, a sparse input from guitar and bass guitar, an old primitive organ – and this voice of a woman that sounded like she would be singing simple melodies at a bus stop. A dreamlike atmosphere. I always thought you must have loved their album. And Alison Statton didn’t see herself as a singer, as she told me, but as a vocalist. By the way, she told me, too, that at the time of the production of their one and only album, they had listened to “Another Green World” in the morning, in the evening… that music was a dear companion for them.
Brian: Ohh.
Michael: It’s “Colossal Youth”, by the Young Marble Giants.
Brian: Gosh, I’ve never ever heard of them!
(Another moment of silence)
Michael: No, I can’t believe that … Really?! This was a record I could get lost in like … like in “Discreet Music”. It came out in 1981, it’s today regarded as a classic. I think it was even then regarded as an “instant classic”, and for all the good reasons. Let me think: by that time you would’ve been in New York. I mean this all must appeal to you.
Brian: Definitely.
Karl: (in the background) I have a story! (Karl’s switching location, too. Brian stands up, listens closely to what Karl’s saying) Allow me to guest in your chair, this is a very nicely warmed chair by Brian. Well, we all came from Cardiff. They were in Cardiff, we were in Cardiff. So it was a sort of crossover time when power pop and new wave was making waves as something else. And there was this little group of artists in Cardiff that were making some other music. It didn’t make any sense at all, but it’s a little bit – there’s a film I’m trying to think of now where I’m reminded … where you go and see something and you know it’s the broom that’s sweeping you off the streets. There was a couple of groups at that time, who were doing things that were kind of Gang of Four-ish, and then there was the Young Marble Giants, and we went to see them one day, my band and I. We went to see them in this little cafe, with maybe a dozen utmost people in this cafe, and they had this little cassette-machine with this rhythm on it, and a bass player, and a guitarist, and this girl’s singing lalalalaa (Karl imitates a naive way of lalala-singing), and every song was like that, and I just remember guys crushing cans with extreme boredom, and frustration: when is it gonna have a crescendo? When is there gonna be some passion? And it was so restrained. We all came out of it and went: “Oh my god, if I never hear that again, it will be too soon”. And at the time, I remember saying, thinking, mmmhhhmmm, mmhhmmm, may be that’s just a new music that we’re not prepared for yet, were still focussed on being pop stars and trying to be Elvis Costello, and all the other people. And the guys come along and have done this thing. And they were the first of the new wave of artists that came out of Wales. We got others … they were kind of based in Rock’n’Roll, or guitar-based rock music, and some great players, but they were the first really in a long time to do anything that meant something special. They really tapped into something, and I like the album now!
After the interview, the “concert for one” started. Brian warned me that it could become, in parts, an absolute mess (and Karl added: “I’m doing the messy parts”). In fact, in the beginning it was, at least, weird. But then, suddenly, the programmed beats, Karl’s guitar, Brian’s “arabic” singing style – all fell into place. Another entrancing piece sounded like something Embryo might have dreamed of in 1973! Everything was improvised. From one moment to another, they were “in the zone”, and I was “in the zone”, too. Later on, Karl told me that he rediscovered his love for playing guitar, when they had started working on “Someday World” – because of the “funnily tuned guitars” in Brian’s studio. After weeks of this special experience, Karl returned to more “classical” tunings and felt to be no longer trapped by old patterns. A week later, I bought Karl’s record “Edgeland”, and then sent him a list of questions. Meanwhile Brian got a copy of the Young Marble Giants record, the record he had never ever heared, the “pop” record of that era around 1981 that was, in some ways, close to Brian’s idea of “ambient music”. Naked music it really was! Karl’s solo album is ascetic, too, never trying to fill holes, never going straight ahead, never afraid of getting lost.
Michael: There are, for sure, connections between your album “Edgeland” and “Someday World”. “Edgeland” evokes unfamiliar areas of citys, the outskirts, forgotten places, topography …
Karl: The process for creating, writing, recording, composing ‘Edgelands’ came as a direct result of my experiences during the ‘Pure Scenious’ sessions which Brian invited me to be a part of at the Sydney Opera House in June 2009. Those sessions were a turning point in my life, when I decided I wanted to explore writing, composing, recording through improvisation, hence, all the songs on ‘Edgeland’ were improvised and most of them were left with the original ‘first take’ vocal unchanged. Equally Leo Abrahams’ (whom I had met through his role in Pure Scenious) parts were also left exactly as they were recorded in the original improvisations. It was important that I move away from traditionally structured ‘songs’ and allow song forms to assume unpredictable shapes through the live interaction of musicians recording together in the same room. This is how we had recorded & performed as the Pure Scenious ensemble & I had enjoyed the thrill of having to react in front of a live audience (as a singer) to music I had never heard before – to be ‘in the moment’.
Michael: There are, for sure, connections between your album “Edgeland” and “Someday World”. “Edgeland” evokes unfamiliar areas of citys, the outskirts, forgotten places, topography …
Karl: The process for creating, writing, recording, composing ‘Edgelands’ came as a direct result of my experiences during the ‘Pure Scenious’ sessions which Brian invited me to be a part of at the Sydney Opera House in June 2009. Those sessions were a turning point in my life, when I decided I wanted to explore writing, composing, recording through improvisation, hence, all the songs on ‘Edgeland’ were improvised and most of them were left with the original ‘first take’ vocal unchanged. Equally Leo Abrahams’ (whom I had met through his role in Pure Scenious) parts were also left exactly as they were recorded in the original improvisations. It was important that I move away from traditionally structured ‘songs’ and allow song forms to assume unpredictable shapes through the live interaction of musicians recording together in the same room. This is how we had recorded & performed as the Pure Scenious ensemble & I had enjoyed the thrill of having to react in front of a live audience (as a singer) to music I had never heard before – to be ‘in the moment’.
Michael: How did your interest start in these outer city zones and remote landscapes that also lead to the film that was issued with the music, on “Edgeland”?
Karl: Since the beginning of the ’90s I have ‘collected’ most of my words whilst mapping journeys through inner cityscapes. These places contain rhythms I love, sounds, smells, architecture, light & in particular – overheard conversations, all these things contribute to the words I find, collect & and am inspired to write. I continually return to cities because of their dynamic rhythms & the ease with which I can slip un-noticed through the streets with my notebook and pen. People talk loud in cities, their words freefall through the air, I catch & sing them – their rhythms & syncopation’s are more interesting than the poetry I used to write in the 80′s & by singing ‘conversational English’ I am taken to different places than my old school traditional writing used to lead me. Having written most of my work for music, books & the daily text I write on underworldlive.com (every day since 1999) I was looking for a new territory to wander in & the edges of cities have for many years been a fascination to me. They are places filled with outsider art, idiosyncratic architecture & outsider cultures who wish neither to live in the city nor in the fields, here there are tribes which choose to live on the rim of the city – permanently just outside the castle walls. They are a neglected, forgotten tribe & the landscape the inhabit is considered ‘run down’ – these are sometimes overlooked places which for me are filled with positivity and a dynamism unlike the inner cities. They are places where new rhythms are to be found, so I focused my wanderings in these areas on the Eastern Edge of London where it’s not so easy to go unnoticed if you carry a notebook and pen and where you are likely to be approached by people asking what you’re doing – unlike cities you quickly engage in conversation with other people, like improvising with other musicians in the studio.
Michael: Brian and you are working with notebooks. Can you say something about the way you’re using them?
Karl: The previous answer explains a lot about my process, inspired by hearing Lou Reed’s ‘New York’ album which blew me away, because of his use of ‘Conversational American’ as lyrics. I imagined him sitting in bars and cafes writing down the conversations he overheard and then singing them word for word. This was a totally new way of writing (collecting) lyrics for me. I completely abandoned the traditional approach I used through the 80′s (I was rubbish at it anyway) and focused on mapping journeys through cities by writing down everything I saw, heard, smelled, tasted & thought as I walked the streets. Having amassed a considerable number of notebooks filled with these journeys through cities, they sit on shelves waiting to be re-explored in the studio & applied to music. I listen to a piece of music, it inspires me to feel a particular mood, I go to one of the notebooks, open a page & if it connects with how I feel about the music I start to sing the words directly from the page, sometimes modifying them as I sing, sometimes adding new words on the spot. I write every day, it is my discipline to always be collecting words. some of the words we used on Someday World were collected on the daily journey to the studio and then sung straight away, some were written into my cellphone then mailed to Brian as I was travelling to the studio, for him to sing or modify or become a part of a ‘pool of words’ for us to draw from.
Michael: “Mother Of A Dog” has a kind of “snapshot” style. “Who Rings The Bells” is anorher strange beast, at one moment I thought or felt it as a kind of death experience.
Karl: I believe we all see the world as a series of fragments. When we think back on our day we recollect ‘book marks’ in our day, signposts, images, smells, sounds which rekindle the experience of a moment in our day. What I do is to try to document as many of these fragments as possible (I always carry a camera with me on these journeys & ‘curate’ found objects as markers on my path – these also find their way into the daily reflections on underworldlive.com). Both Mother of a Dog & Who Rings the Bell were inspired by hearing the music, soaking in the pointers given off by the sonic architecture within them. After years of applying the notebook process to song construction I have developed an intuition around which notebook to pick up when a piece of music inspires me to sing. Sometimes I don’t completely understand why I’m drawn to specific words, often I skip pages & link words from different parts of the notebook as if they had been written in one piece originally. I believe this was the case with Who Rings the Bell & the beauty of working in this way is that sometimes (and this would be one case in point) I listen back to the song as if for the first time, a member of it’s audience hearing the music fresh, surprised to find the words have assembled themselves into a sense all of their own making, revealing a story line I had no idea was there until we listened back to the finished recording.
Michael: What is working with Brian like?
Karl: Every day was a really interesting experience, every day a joy, an exploration, ego less, generous.
Michael: How is the current studio work procedung in London, any plans for 2014?
Karl: Going well … never dull … we live with the curve ball …
Michael: Can you name three records that have blown you away recently?
Karl: Piramida – by Efterklang – l … I was introduced to them by John Peel (legendary BBC radio DJ), he gave me their first album just before he passed away. I loved all their records this being their last as the ‘Efterklang we came to know’ (I attended their farewell gig) has a particular resonance for me. METZ by Metz – heard in Rough Trade West – full on noise rock – joyous liberation! ‘BALANI SHOW SUPER HITS’ – Electronic street parties from Mali – heard on a drift through Rough Trade East – machines fuse with rolling Malian vocal grooves the second it came on in the store my whole body got happy – had to buy it there and then – great lo-fi cover …
On April 24th I found this, in Brian Dillon’s essay “Gone To Earth” (being part of Christopher Scoates’ book “Brian Eno – Visual Music”): “What is striking, though, in Eno’s own descriptions of the relationship or relay between system and surprise, or between figure and ground, is the extent of unease involved – it is not simply a matter of placid, abstracted drift with occasional vistas of emotionally heightened content, but of a kind of topographical panic. In his biography of the artist, “On Some Faraway Beach – The Life and Times of Brian Eno”, David Sheppard recounts a story that Eno liked to tell of a holiday in Scotland in the summer of 1974, “During a long, solitary hillside walk he had become severely lost. Increasingly anxious in the gathering gloaming he stumbled on a bank of wild flowers and was suddenly overcome by their spectral beauty. This, he seasoned, was evidence of desparation sharpening the aesthetic sense.””
On April 26th Karl Hyde wrote in his diary, entitled WALKING WITH GHOSTS: “In a multi story carpark where Dad used to park the car on family trips to 60′s London I saw an installation by Richard Mosse, disturbingly soundtracked I enjoyed by Ben Frost. Great venue for art & just up the same street Tomato sailed it’s flagship in the 90′s. The ghosts of our past lives wandered dazed in slow motion, caught in the flickering light of the screens as I leaned against the flaking concrete to watch and turn them into lyrics. Walked through friday night Soho whose revellers, subdued by rain, crowded beneath awnings and branded umbrellas smoking cigarettes with hangdog eyes & hunched shoulders. All the bars knew my mark, the security guards nodded as I passed, up Wardour Street, the Ship, turn right, Oxford Street & the Tottenham Court Road Tube. These feet could do it blind.”
