New Patreon Account

Hi All,

Not a studio or tour diary this time but a little news. I have started a new Patreon account which houses all the projects I have running. The Patreon is the one stop resource for my music, archive and research, including my Clifftown Podcast and my creative collaborations. I want this to be like an old fashioned fan club where you get engaging and exciting material for your subscription. Every month I will be uploading new songs (either demos, cover versions, live takes, collaborations or even experiments) and an archive which may include essays on my musical experiences, tour diaries and explanations of the songs I am uploading.

This site will also be a great outlet for me to pursue projects in greater depth after the releases associated with them have moved on. I’m really looking forward to working on building The Clifftown Podcast bringing a select number of episodes out each year for you to enjoy. There will also be some typical fan club style offerings you will hopefully enjoy.

You can join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MGBoulter

Studio Diary – March 2023 – The New Album

Sunday 26th March 2023:

I awake to a raspy throat, my chest a ball of catarrh which sits at the top of my lungs – this is the one thing I don’t need, of all days and weeks. I haven’t packed as much as I would have liked and spend the morning rushing about my flat packing bits of kit, making split decisions about whether to bring a certain guitar, spare strings, effects pedals and the like. 

By 1pm I am on the road. The traffic is busy and I have to concentrate before I bust out the other side of the M25, avoiding the M4 closure which the radio is saying is causing havoc in Chiswick. Four hours later I tentatively climb up a mountain into the great green nowhere. High hedged lanes that I’m convinced are not much wider than my car take me round blind corners, deeper into tree lined tracks by waterfalls. Early evening, the road ends at a farmhouse overlooking a valley, our home for the week. Welcome to Red Kite Studio. 

I enter the cottage tentatively calling out a hello – I feel like Goldilocks. No-one is home but there is a note from the Studio owner, Martin, saying hi and asking me to give him a call when I arrive. Martin had engineered some fantastic records in the 1970s and 80s including John Martin’s ‘Grace and Danger’ and Iron Maiden’s debut album. He grimaces at that one when I raise it with him in the kitchen when he pops down – ‘It was very loud’ he says. 

Over the evening everyone arrives. Harriet Bradshaw arrives from the North East following some shows with John Bramwell. Harriet will be one of the key voices on the record alongside her cello parts. Next Andy Bell and Neil McSweeney pitch up from Sheffield. Andy is the producer and has been the captain of my last two records, ‘Clifftown’ and ‘With Wolves the Lamb will Lie’. Neil is our ‘utility man’ and is expected to lay down guitars, bass, percussion and vocals as and when required. Later Lucy Farrell arrives from a show in Dorset, she will be another key vocalist on the record. 

I plan to have an early night, eager to start fresh in the morning but it’s gone Midnight before the lights go out. 

Monday 27th March 2023:

Setting up mics and recording stations for most of the morning before starting a take of ‘City Map’ before lunch. It’s hard to get into the dynamics of the set up. I sit in an isolated booth with Harriet and Lucy in the next room which is separated by two double glazed doors and surrounded in their own booths made up of baffles. All the sound is fed through headphones. It takes a good ten or so takes to settle on something we like and it’s mid afternoon before we break for a coffee. The aim of the session is to capture the core takes of each song, working on getting my vocal and guitar performance just right alongside Harriet and Lucy’s vocals. The backing vocals would normally be added after everything else but we’re doing the opposite for this record, making the harmonies the key feature of the songs. 

By late afternoon we are onto a second track, ‘The Jaws of Nothing’. Lucy and Harriet both patiently waiting in their booths while my performance is developed and finessed. The track has a great feel to it when we’re done in the evening. It’s a good start but my voice is concerning, as it hurts so much. 

Aubergine and potato pie at the cottage for dinner before a board game and bed. 

Tuesday 28th March 2023:

Mornings are good for covering the more energetic songs. After breakfast and coffee everyone is more active and tends to play faster so its good to harness that early before you get jaded. We start with a song called ‘Quiet’. I have worked on this song for a long time and have never settled on a definitive version. I’ve rewritten the lyrics so many times and am not confident it’s a fully fledged song yet but we give it a go. It has odd timings and is not regular but Neil picks it up fairly quickly on electric bass. Like ‘City Map’ it’s hard to capture and it takes some time to finalise, well past lunch. 

It’s with some relief that ‘Days of Shaking’ is an easier song to capture. Down beat and intense it seems to be the natural mode for our state post lunch and we only play four takes before we have it. My voice is suffering but we press on for a third song this day. ‘Silver Birches’ takes a few hours to get right, I sing flat at a few key points of the song mainly due to a blocked nose. By this time I am well used to Andy’s voice in my headphones from the control room, ‘just do it again….one more’.

Wednesday 29th March 2023:

My voice is suffering today. I steamed my voice over a saucepan last night and I’m chewing so many menthol cough sweets my mouth tastes of medicine all day….but it won’t shift. We work on another uptempo track provisionally titled ‘Fox Running’ and we manage to get a take by early afternoon by which point my voice is gone. We mess around with ‘Peak Caverns’ but the swing of the track doesn’t feel right and we abandon it. We spend the rest of the day adding overdubs to ‘Quiet’. Harriet adds some clapping (we’ve decided there are going to be minimal drums on the record) while I add a high strung guitar. I go to bed early in the hope that some extra rest might improve the voice. 

Thursday 30th March 2023:

I wake up to a thick throat but it warms up enough for us to start working on some new songs. It feels high stakes having not been able to keep to our three songs a day output. Lucy and Neil take the morning off while myself and Harriet work on a sparse song called ‘The 10 Habits of Successful People’, Harriet lending a simple harmony. It’s quiet enough for my voice and it only takes an hour or so to capture. We then keep things uptempo with a song called ‘Blonde Pine’. Again, it seems fairly straight forward with Lucy and Harriet working on some harmonies. 

‘Blonde Pine’ was the last song written for this session and was one of those not necessarily written to order but certainly written to fill a gap in the range of songs we had. It is almost a centrepiece of the main themes of the album, a little like Clifftown was on the previous album. We get a take but my voice is shot so we add some more guitars and leave it for another day. 

The down tempo  introspective songs seem to go down easier and we spend the rest of the afternoon and early evening tracking ‘Masterless Man’ and then a redo of ‘Peak Caverns’ – we’re following it further down the hole! We replace the guitar with a nylon strung to see how it fits and change the strumming pattern, which makes the whole track bouncier. It sounds better but it could be on borrowed time. 

Friday 31st March 2023:

The last day. The last days of a recording session are always lighter affairs, there’s more laughing, more japing and jokes. Due to the problems with my throat earlier in the week there are lots of choices of songs to approach. I love all my songs but I know not all of them make the cut and I am happy to let them dwell in the background maybe to return at a later date or most likely, to never surface again. 

We decide to tackle ‘The Hotel at Midnight’ before Lucy has to leave for a gig she has. Then there were only four. After lunch we launch into ‘James Mason’, which was close to being scrapped. I am glad this one makes the cut although we have issues with the guitar keeping tune as I have detuned the to a C which the guitar struggles with. 

The last few hours are frantically taken up with layering pedal steel sounds on various tracks. By 5pm we’re packing up and we wave Neil and Andy off. The cottage seems quiet and faceless, everything packed and cleaned like we were never there. The next morning is heavy with rain, the waterfall chatters, the red kites wheel gracefully over the hills, the studio is dark and closed as we wind our way slowly up the track, back to the everyday. 

Tour Diary 2021: Part 2 – Leigh Library Gardens to Surbiton

The following days see gigs in Cranbrook (Kent) and Leigh-on-Sea at the Garden Gatherings. Oust houses, Kentish orchards, faces from my local community I haven’t seen for a year or more, a convergence of life and celebration, heat, more traffic jams. 

By mid-september I feel I have been racing through shows. I do a quick mid week turn for What’s Cookin in Leytonstone supporting the Dog Roses. I have played here so many times it feels like a second home. Ramblin Steve worries about the noise complaints they’ve been having from neighbouring houses. It goes too quick and I feel I haven’t taken stock of this lovely place which Steve creates.

The New Town Sounds Festival in Basildon is shoe horned in at the last moment. Paul and I play to four people at The Edge on a midday Saturday. One of them has their back turned to us. We love it and throw the set list out of the proverbial window and play lots of new songs to test them out. Basildon Library is slightly busier and we get the toddlers dancing with ‘Fan of the Band’. 

The home town album launch show at the Fishermen’s Chapel involves setting up the chairs and PA and door and tickets….the list is endless. It’s a nice night and it bowls me over how generous people are, returning each time to listen to us play. 

There are certain gigs which you know will forever stick in your mind. The Edith May is one such show. An historic sailing barge tethered to Chatham Dock is the most unique show of the tour. Rob and Clair, my hosts, take me on a tour of the town. So often dismissed it’s amazing to hear the depth of history that surrounds this town – the Navy, the Medway music scene, LGBT history, fires and Victorian theatres. The best food of the tour happens here too – I can highly recommend the burgers at ‘The Dead Pigeon’. Don’t let the name put you off – this is cared for food. The show in the bowels of the Edith May is a joy and every so often I feel the lurch of my stomach as the imperceptible sway of the boat has its effect. 

Hastings and London follow. Paul and I hastily eat chips on Hastings seafront before the show. A seagull and her young follow us around yelping for cast offs. I relent but Paul stays firm giving nothing away. In London I share the bill with my friend Samantha Whates. It’s a unique show, the audience, the set, the songs shared with Samantha, it’s everything I love about playing live, the affirmation that whatever happens you shared this moment with other people and it was wholly positive. 

Mid November and the last few shows rear up. I pray for good driving weather as I head to Northwich in the North West. After five hours I arrive at the hotel feeling jaded. My voice feels tired, I feel tired and I lie on the bed with the window open. I try to sleep but end up watching the rush hour traffic at the crossroads, which I can see from the window. The show takes place in the Davenham Theatre and prior to load in I walk about the village in search of food. I pass a house with the front windows ablaze with light, everything is in place; TV, pictures hanging on the wall and ornaments on the mantelpiece but the walls are entirely stripped to the grey plaster, pitted and rough. It’s the oddest thing. A woman sits on the edge of the sofa cross legged and we lock eyes, she holds my stare as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. She smokes a cigarette and her eyes pierce me, intense and emotionless….I hurry on. 

The show is a wonderful experience. I am afloat in darkness, one simple spotlight on me. I am suspended in time until it is over and I’m back at the hotel. The key card system is down and I am escorted to the building where my room is. Once inside the key card I’m given fails to work on the internal doors, I return weary to the reception and after two further attempts get to my room and sink into the bed. 

The following day’s gig has been cancelled due to the main act catching Covid. I drive to Todmorden to play a session for Andy Kershaw at his house. I could not be met with a kinder reception. We sit around his kitchen table eating biscuits and drinking coffee. I notice he has Warren Zevon book on his table and I casually mention I am a big fan. Andy proceeds to tell me he was good friends with Warren and they had planned to go to Haiti together, it’s one of many times I’m left speechless that day – Andy’s stories of where he’s been and who he has met are epic.

After the session Andy gives me some good tips to avoid traffic around Manchester and I make the long journey home. I’m losing my voice and by the next evening, playing an unplugged show in Southend for the Pin Drop Sessions, it takes all my effort to reach notes and project my voice. I recover in time, some weeks later, to play the final show of the year in Surbiton, south west of London. We play outside and despite the plummeting early December temperatures the audience stay with us. It’s a nice end to the year. Me and Paul talk into the night on the drive home, just like old times, like the world hadn’t been asleep for a year or more. 

Tour Diary 2021: Part 1 – King’s Heath to Suffolk

Shows didn’t get going until mid-summer. The end of lockdown, like one big expulsion of air from the lungs, felt like a release. It was with some trepidation I followed the slurry of lorries up the M6 to Birmingham. I hadn’t missed the traffic jams and long drives. 

The first show was the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King’s Heath. I had wanted to play this venue for a long time. Restrictions had been extended but the show faired well in that the audience could sit in the court yard while I stood on a mobile stage. I felt nervous and forgot the words to a new song called ‘The Jaws of Nothing’ twice. The old adrenaline kicked in and I welcomed that feeling, that kick, before you go on stage – it felt like the return to something real after months of living within a walking distance of my flat. 

Tom, the keyboardist who plays on ‘Clifftown’ graciously offered me a bed for the night and we spent the next morning drinking sour coffees in a soft play centre while his son charged around the brightly coloured foam pyramids and stalactites that make up a two year old’s world. 

I left them there and took my time driving back down the trunk of the country, over the glistening Thames to Otford in Kent. My grandparents had lived in the neighbouring village of Eynsford but Otford was as foreign to me as the heart of the Amazon rainforest. There was something deeply outer body being so close, physically, to a place I knew so intimately, yet in the car park of the Otford Memorial Hall I watched people walk their dogs on the adjacent field and felt I could have been anywhere. I imagined my grandfather doing his shopping here or running an errand, a secret life closed to a boy who only visited on weekends and holidays. 

The show was well attended and I sat backstage eating sandwiches and talking to the other act. They had driven from Bournemouth and we swapped motorway war stories. We were chatting so deeply that my stage time took me by surprise, I rushed to the stage, hastily tuned my guitar as the audience sat in silence waiting. The lights were bright in my eyes, I was lost in a sea of darkness. I found my balance about three songs in. Driving home in the dark the satnav took me through the winding high street of Eynsford, I passed my grandparents’ home, obscured by hedge and midnight darkness – lives, memories, a chronology of my entire childhood covered over by time , the house a slate wiped clean for someone else to write on. 

Naseby, the following day, was one of those endurance gigs. Paul, Bryan and myself crammed into the car with drum kit, double bass and all assorted merch to play a show we always enjoy. Green gardens, flint walls, the aura of civil war battles, the sulphur smell of musket shot, mead, homemade cake. 

Late July comes and the Folk on the Lawn Festival in Tintern celebrates its return after a year off due to Covid. The heat is unbearable. The Saturday is taken up with playing a show with my friends Julie and Mike. On the Sunday I lie in a sliver of shade behind the main stage, the Welsh flag flutters above me, the River Wye entices…if only I could jump in from here. I venture to take a snap of the abbey, as if it might give me a different aspect from when I photographed it last a couple of years ago. The five minute walk is too much, I retreat to the shade. My car registers 38 degrees when I pour myself into it to drive home. 

During August the shows come in fits and starts, a local show at the Temple Cafe is a delight as I share an outside show with local friends and musicians. FolkEast in Suffolk is an early start. Bryan and I wander the abandoned mid-morning backstage area in search of coffee. We’re the first act on the main stage and we play in the muggy misty rain as people gather. David Eagle from the Young ‘Uns invites me to play a song on their live podcast. It’s really good to see him – it’s been too long. As I hack through a song they all join in – they’re so intuitive and play the song as if they have heard it a million times. I envy that ability. I mooch the stalls and find some food. We watch a few acts before heading home. 

Early September starts with a show in Corby. It’s my first time in the town and the satnav takes me to a huge 1960s shopping precinct. I’m reminded of a J G Ballard novel, it looks like some sort of futuristic space colony building. I wander the shops looking for something to eat but there’s not much choice. I settle for a sandwich and sit in the car before searching for the venue. Up a single set of steps to the roof, across a courtyard full of abandoned air conditioning ducting and concrete tiles, I find the Arts Centre. Pigeons gather in queues on every discernible ledge eying me. I feel I have entered their domain. The Art Centre is housed in the abandoned library. The bill is busy and I play to a friendly audience and hang around until the end of the night before slipping onto the motorway home. 

The next afternoon myself and Paul are off to Swindon to play Blind River Scare’s night at the Beehive. A quick meal and a show to a small audience. We’re on the road around 11pm but they close the M4 just before the M25. We drive endlessly around Maidenhead and country roads, M40 closed, M25 closed, we end up driving through north London, Finchley and Tottenham accompanied by low slung Golf GTis with darkened windows crawling at the speed limit. We’re both desperate to be home, quiet the last hour, both willing this to end. Bed by 3am. 

Up early the next morning to prep for the Maverick Festival in Suffolk. It’s almost Deja vu driving up the A12 as we had done a month previous for FolkEast. We’re on first again so it’s early load in, check the merch in at the stall, sink a coffee, soundcheck. It’s an enjoyable show and we get a kick playing to such a nice crowd. The festival takes place on a farm so I watch goats rutting and talking to each other after my show. Around 7pm I play a special live set for Richard Leader’s radio show. The set up is housed outside the bunny barn and as I softly play a man quietly turns off the lights and shuts the door to the barn – it’s clearly their bedtime. 

The Clifftown Podcast – Tour of Hamlet Court Road

For this note I have created a walking tour of the Hamlet Court Road, Westcliff-on-Sea, mentioned in the fourth episode. I hope you enjoy the built heritage which Andy Atkinson of the Hamlet Court Conservation  Forum showed me. Enjoy.

Location: Hamlet Court Road, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, SS0 7DD

Directions: Ample parking at Hamlet Court Road car park, SS0 7UA. By train, the Westcliff-on-Sea train station is 50 minutes from London Fenchurch Street. Hamlet Court Road is a minute’s walk from the Southend side.

Duration: Less than a mile’s amble, approx. 45 minutes.

Start at the north end of Hamlet Court Road where the London Road runs. Start walking on the left hand pavement heading back towards the estuary and Westcliff train station. On the opposite side of the road to your right, above the shopfronts, are superb examples of  Edwardian architecture (Edward VII). These are the best known heritage buildings of the area and create an elegant curve down into the road.

Continue walking and when possible cross the road to the right hand side of the pavement until you reach the intersection where St. John’s Road feeds into Hamlet Court Road from the left. On that corner, adjacent to the Post Office is a fine example of early 1900/turn of the century building that is highly decorated with white dentals and red brick. The turret is a regular feature for Southend properties of this period and the number of windows suggest the desire for optimum sea views. The style of the building  reflects London and other city architecture of the period suggesting a high status or prestige area within the town.

Opposite this building on the side you are standing and above the shopfronts is highly decorated Romanesque embellishments from the Edwardian period. Looking slightly tired now you are still able to see the high decoration and dormer windows.

Staying on the same side of the road walk to the corner of Anerley Road and again look to the opposite side of the street where you will see the unique Havens Building. Designed in the early/mid 1930s this building is currently listed and represents one of the first open floor department stores in the country modelled on Heals of Tottenham Court Road. Hamlet Court Road was known as the ‘Bond Street of the east’ during its inception, showing it’s importance to the region but also in relation to London. This is confirmed further with the knowledge that the original train station was going to be called ‘Kensington-on-Sea’ rather than Westcliff-on-Sea.

Havens is covered in glazed terracotta tiles called faience and was a department store until 2017. It still retains it’s original decoration, double height glazing, including bushels of leaves falling down the columns. The canopy over the windows is suspected to be not original

Continuing down the road you will notice the Thames estuary coming into view as the road widens at the junction where the Savers shop is. The widening is due to the original Edwardian houses having front gardens that would have taken up the wide pavement you see now.  You can still see these houses above the shop fronts leading from the ‘Ramen + Chill’ restaurant onwards. These houses are situated on the southern corner of St. Helen’s Road leading down. The Savers shop is housed in a new build which was designed to replicate the original Art Deco building, which burnt down in a fire.

Cross to the left hand side of the road so that you are on the corner of St. Helen’s Road and walk past the Shagoor Indian restaurant and stand outside the Tara Thai restaurant next door. Look to the opposite side of the street to view a recently renovated Edwardian building which boasts one of the finest examples of that era’s shopfronts in the country containing curved glass and wooden framing. This is truly a special property to view and cherish.

Continue to the Hamlet Court Pub on the corner of Canewdon Road and face the opposite side of the street. Here, above the shopfronts, are examples of 1930s properties, some of the later buildings to be erected in Hamlet Court Road. This was the site of the the Hamlet Court or Hamlet House, which in the nineteenth century sat in sculpted gardens. The property was once home to Victorian poet Robert Buchanan who lived there during the 1870s, writing poems and plays which were popular in the West End during the 1880s. Buchanan wrote to a friend saying that there was no ‘no finer place to be when spring becomes a certainty’.

Other famous residents of Hamlet Court included Edwin Arnold, another poet who also became the Editor in Chief of the Daily Telegraph in the later nineteenth century and Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, the curator of the South Kensington Museum and a grand exhibition organiser of the Victorian age. Harriet Jay, sister in law to Robert Buchanan and Victorian polymath in her own right mentions the Hamlet Court in her biography of Buchanan from 1903 mentioning that it was ‘a paradise for the poet to dream in’. She laments the loss of ‘Lover’s Lane’ (an avenue created by ancient elm trees) and the  meadows around the Court in the same book. The Court was demolished in 1929.

The 1930s buildings now standing are referred to as reduced Art Deco and show unique features of waterfalls cascading from openings in the parapet wall down the central pilaster columns. There is also green roman clay tile coping on the parapet, which references the Art Deco building Sunray House around the corner in Canewdon Road.

As you are standing outside the Hamlet Court Pub look diagonal to you on the opposite corner where you will see a row of Edwardian buildings bookended by a magnificent former bank building built in a style known as ‘bank baroque’. Featuring a turret crowned by a cupola this is an exuberant building demonstrating the common practice of banks in the Edwardian period creating ostentatious and highly decorated buildings.

Turn left into Canewdon Road down the side of the Hamlet Court pub and walk to Preston Road. You will notice the road is lined with elm trees, some of the first and last remaining original features of this Edwardian suburban planning. The road contains many fine examples of Edwardian arts and crafts movement properties. The brickwork and wooden edging of some of these properties is beautiful. Number 35 Preston Road you will find an incredibly rare example of architectural design from Herbet Fuller Clark, an arts and crafts architect most famously know for designing the magnificent Black Friar pub in London. This property in Preston Road is one of the very few other properties he designed. It’s a unique and arresting.

Return to Canewdon Road and walk back up to the Hamlet Court Road and over into the other side of Canewdon Road. Walk past the ‘Bank Baroque’ building on your left and directly behind it on Canewdon Road you will find a fine example of the Art Deco building known as Sunray House with it’s curved windows and distinctive ‘Crittall’ window frame design.

Continue walking down Canewdon Road until you reach the corner of Ditton Court Road. If you look right you will see a fine example of very early grass and tree lined verges, built in 1904.  It has been speculated that these are some of the very earliest street layout designs in Southend and not only inspired layout in Thorpe Bay and Westleigh but also inspired the eminent Victorian town planner, Sir Raymond Unwin, to use some of these ideas in his own designs, most significantly in Hampstead Garden Suburb. The belief is that Unwin, who also designed Ozone Cottage in nearby Pembury Road, was close to the Victorian developers of the area and owners of the railway  line, Lord Brassey and his sons. It could be speculated that Unwin was inspired by the layout of Ditton Court Road for his own designs published in the seminal 1909 book ‘Town Planning in Practice’. If you look left you will see some of the original holly bushes remain, set at three foot intervals. These would have been chosen for the ease in sculpting and maintaining.

Turn right and walk up Ditton Court Road until you reach a magnificent brick building with small windows. This would have been built by local craftsmen and inspired by designers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It is an incredible piece  of architecture.

This brings you to the end of the tour and you may wish to refresh yourself at the Hamlet Court pub or try the superb coffee and homemade cake at Frank & Luna’s on Canewdon Road.

M G Boulter 2021.

The Clifftown Podcast – The Estuary

Half way through my interview with Iain Keenan of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) we paused for a coffee. We walked a short distance from the station house to Rebecca’s Cafe in the small parade of archway shops opposite the pier head. As the man was making our drinks Iain commented offhand that for a seaside town Southend’s community was not very connected to the sea. No-one looks outward much here.

I agreed with Iain on this statement. You get no strong sense of maritime history in Southend, it’s more about all the fun you can have on land. I think this occurs because Southend is a relatively new place and has never relied on the estuary for it’s food and livelihood, other than the beachside fun for day trippers. Southend was named in the middle ages because it was the ‘south end’ of Prittlewell, the Saxon village which is now simply a large crossroads to the north of the town and a suburb of Southend town centre. When Southend developed in the nineteenth century it, like many of its kind, became a destination resort for Londoners not a working fishing town. If you go further along the coast by a couple of miles, to Leigh-on-Sea, you get more of a sense of a maritime town. This is where Paul Gilson, the Dover Sole fisherman I interviewed for the episode lives and works. There are a few boat chandlers still and the cockle trade is still extent there but this too does not define Leigh as it once did. This is all now commuter town. I wonder with the pandemic and the potential for people to travel less to London less whether this area will change once more. 

Iain had a wealth of information about other topics I didn’t include in the episode. I’m naturally curious and will route out any hidden story I can but I felt it important to focus on the modern day role of the RNLI. I wanted to give the listener a break from my own personal obsessions about the town. 

One of the stories Ian told me was how the Palace Hotel, which is a grand white Victorian edifice that sits on the cliff overlooking the main seafront, was used to house wounded soldiers during the Second World War. He pondered openly about how those men had spent days, months even on boats and ships and when they were finally home they had to endure watching the sea while they recuperated. He supplied me this photo of men standing on one of the balconies. You can still see this balcony today and barely twenty metres from here, on the seafaring side of the hotel, Laurel and Hardy had their pictures taken….but that is another episode to come. 

The Palace Hotel could tell a few stories I am sure. Since starting the podcast I have walked past it many times as directly behind it sits St John the Baptist’s Church where, in its graveyard, lay a number of people I will visit in forthcoming episodes. It overlooks the pier where I met Iain and where the Olympia, the building on the front cover of my album is. It’s this interconnectedness that calls me. This is but one piece of ground but layers and layers of human experience lie on top of each other. The buildings hold ghosts  while the air forever changes. 

The most enjoyable aspect of this episode for me was another of Iain’s discoveries, that of the Chapman Lighhouse. An isolated tripod lighthouse which, as Paul Gilson told me, protected boats from a submerged ‘sea cliff’ that could pitch a boat over. The solemn ringing of a bell across the desolate Canvey marsh was something straight out of ‘The Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Great Expectations’ (both of which start in the boggy  ethereal Victoriana of the Thames Estuary). I relished looking into the lighthouse and there is a bonus episode out there on it, which I am very proud of. In a story I uncovered for the bonus episode there was the start reminder that the tides here can creep in and take a man unawares, the water gathering around you before you yourself know you have been cut off from the main land. Thankfully we have Iain and his colleagues at the RNLI to help us in those times of need. 

 

 

A Guide to Clifftown

Front Cover:

The front cover of the album shows the Olympia, which is one of the arcades on the seafront in Southend-on-Sea. It is a typical British seaside strip of neon lights and competing buzzes and theme tunes from hundreds of games machines. Most local people won’t recognise the building because who really looks up when they’re having fun in the summer?

Seafront icons you need to know:

“Peter Pan’s” by far the biggest feature of the seafront is the permanent fairground sprawling across the beach with such delights as ‘The Pharaoh’s Revenge’, ‘Rage’, ‘Mighty Mini Mega’ and my childhood favourite ‘The American Whip’. Officially branded as Adventure Island Southend these days all locals over the age of 25 will refer to it as ‘Peter Pan’s’ after it’s old name Peter Pan’s Playground.  

“The Pier” – Any Southender will tell you we have the longest pleasure pier in the world. People seem proud of it. It’s long because the tide goes out a long way. The pier has burnt down numerous times and in 2005 I watched it burn from Belton Hills like a torch in the night. 

“Never Never Land” – refers to the now obliterated theme park attraction on the cliffs where as a kid you could follow a path around dioramas depicting magical worlds. They had the entire collection of He-Man toys displayed in one case which seriously impressed me in the late 1980s. The only remnants of it now is a large fairy castle complex which rises out of the shrub. 

“Fantasy Land/ Waxworks” – Another abandoned theme park that was locally famous for having a waxwork of a man being carved in two by a swinging blade. It was the wonder of Southend when I was young.

Midnight Movies:

I walk around the streets of Southend and its suburbs at night. It’s a sprawling network of suburbia with each part having its own unique character. In the summer the seafront is alive with people and in the 1990s boys used to descend with their souped up cars and bumper kiss each other as they slowly went around the loop of the esplanade. It used to feel so dangerous driving down there with my dad when we were kids to drop relatives off on the other side of town.

“Bumper Kissing” – trying to touch your car’s bumper with another while slowly making your way down the seafront in a queue of other highly altered cars. 

“The Braken” – In Leigh-on-Sea, leading from the train station across the hill towards Hadleigh Castle are thick bramble and blackberry hedges, sprawling wild. As kids we called this ‘The Braken’ and was where we built our secret dens and the like. In this song I enjoyed name dropping it. 

Soft White Belly 

This song references a number of personal local experiences. The old lady referred to at the beginning was someone I had observed back in 2014. She had stood in an empty arcade in the off season and with a small plastic tub of pennies she was methodically feeding the ‘tuppenny shoves’. It looked like an Edward Hopper painting, something comforting and tragic in the same moment. 

On the opposite shore to Southend is the Hoo Peninsula and the Isle of Grain in Kent. It is dotted with vast silos and chimneys which have been a constant backdrop to my living here. In 2016 they demolished the power station chimney on the Isle of Grain using explosives. Everyone came out to watch and people sat on the hills with champagne and gramophones like the Queen was about to visit. I watched it with my friend Lucy Farrell and we subsequently wrote a song about it called ‘Explosion Day’.

“Tuppenny Shoves” – The glorious term coined (excuse the pun) by the legendary local comedic poet Simon Blackman to describe those games machines where you launch pennies onto moving trays in the hope that once accumulated they will push the cuddly toy or poor quality watch into the receiving hatch. 

“The Casino” – The Westcliff Casino sits on the foreshore and is a vast lit up plexiglass and steel cube. Open until the early hours it is the go to place for the 1am nightcap. London biographer Iain Sinclair referred to Southend as ‘Casino City’. 

“Ship Full of Bombs” – Refers to the SS Richard Montgomery which grounded off Southend in 1944. It is packed full of explosives and is cordoned off by the MOD in the middle of the Thames. A local radio station if named after it – they have some great specialist shows, check them out. www.sfob.co.uk

Clifftown

Southend is a place where kids grow up and then 90% of them flee for London after working the menial jobs at the co-ops and curry houses. They then return to raise their own kids here. It’s the natural cycle like salmon swimming upstream. Southend is also a commuter town where the commuters have their own code and community. You become friends with people without saying a word to them simply because you both get on the same carriage at 7.38am from Leigh Station every day for the last eight years. 

Southend links direct into Fenchurch Street, which is overlooked by the Tower of London, and when you leave the City at night the Tower is lit up (ominously I think) just to remind you that there were once kings who would kill and maim all sorts of men, women and children within those walls. Anne Boleyn grew up near Southend in Rochford. The Boylen residence is still there and is now converted flats (expensive ones) and a golf club. 

“Southend Airport”   This is where all the planes are flying from and to in the song. Neil Young shipped his 1930s Rolls Royce from the airport in 1974 and then stayed in Westcliff for a day or two (see my song ‘Westcliff’). They also shot the airport scenes in Goldfinger here. 

Nights at the Aquarium 

All seaside towns have an aquarium. Southend’s aquarium sits at the east end of the seafront. It emits salty mudflat smells and is usually full of excited and noisy kids. The cafe has porthole windows and it’s nice to sit there at weekends and pretend you’re out at sea. 

“The Three Shells Restaurant” – is a cafe on the seafront where you can go for all your candy floss, donuts (as spelt), hot drinks, buckets, spades and ice cream. It has an iconic roof shaped like three clam shells. For great coffee try Roberto’s a little further near the casino. A favourite haunt of mine and Paul Ambrose who plays bass on the record. 

Icy Paw

Kids jump off the quays and jetties in Old Leigh during the summer. It’s a dangerous pastime as many harbour stumps and fishing detritus lie just beneath the water.  I was thinking of the jetty on Canvey island when writing this song. It’s a huge finger pointing out to sea and was used for pumping oil into the nearby Shellhaven. Local heroes Dr Feelgood named their debut album after it and sang about the oil refinery, its flames burning in the night: ‘I’m going down by the jetty/ Tonight the tide is high/ It’s tankers in the channel laying/Flames up in the sky’

The heron who flies from the gables is a nod to the local heron who I watch from my living room window. He comes when the Prittle Brook is high.

“Prittle Brook” – The Prittlewell Brook is a stream that winds all the way through the suburbs and courses about seventy metres from my house. It’s named after the medieval village of Prittewell, which was the big smoke here until Southend developed in the 1900s. Two blocks away from my house, in 1926, they found bronze aged offerings buried in its banks.

The Slow Decline 

This song starts in Peter Pan’s Playground where there is a small stage under the rollercoaster. Presenters take to this stage in the summer and over blaring music they pump the children up into fairground ecstasy.

The man dying on the headlines was a catch all phrase I read when I was in my early twenties, scribbled on an A board outside the newsagents. The seafront used to have lots of first floor nightclubs – Mr B’s, Bar Bluu and the legendary TOTS (Talk of the South) where I heard once, during dropped conversation, the owner had boasted in the 1970s he had secured an appearance by Elvis (it never materialised of course). The man in the song had fallen (or was thrown) from one of the nightclub windows. There’s an undercurrent of East End gangster here and they made a film called ‘Essex Boys’ about the Rettendon Turnpike Murders. Less said about that…..

Southend has a superb homeless charity and sadly in the summer months, some years back, homeless people were making makeshift camps on ‘the cliffs’. I reference them here standing under the Arches, which is a nod to the row of beachside cafes which are housed in the arches under the road that leads up the cliff. It’s referred to locally as the Essex Riviera in July and August.

“The Cliffs” – can refer to the grassy upland between the Cliff Lift and the Pier/ Never Never Land. It can also mean the Cliffs Pavilion which is a concert hall where I once saw Willie Nelson play. 

Simon Of Sudbury 

Simon of Sudbury was the Archbishop of Canterbury during what was commonly known as the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. The revolt was largely led and instigated by the men of Essex and Kent and was ignited when people in nearby Corringham, Stanford Le Hope and Brentwood (now famous for TOWIE) refused to pay a poll tax. Wat Tyler was potentially from Basildon and after Simon of Sudbury was beheaded by the rebels the revolt was suppressed with Tyler’s murder at Smithfield and the subsequent Battle of Billericay. Simon’s head was saved from the spike and kept in a church in Sudbury where it still sits. This song is about my quest to find it. 

Fan of the Band

Southend was once packed full of venues where music was played most evenings. The current go to music pub is The Railway Hotel but here are some others (RIP) that were special for me and many others:

The Ship, Leigh-on-Sea: I’ve played here more than most other places I reckon. The Pink Flamingo Club used to be held here every month and it used to attract musicians from all over the world. It’s currently boarded up. 

Bar Lambs, Westcliff-on-Sea: Famous for having giant piano keys painted on the floor this basement bar was odd but special. Not currently open to the public. 

The Grand, Leigh-on-Sea: Packed full of musical and entertainment heritage. Four bars with an upstairs room where all the Southend pub rock bands played in the 1970s, Dr Feelgood, Eddie and the Hot Rods etc. Lee Brilleaux’s local boozer and also where Frankie Howerd performed stand up when stationed in the nearby barracks in Shoebury during or just after the war. Currently closed being turned into flats. 

Night Worker 

I could write a whole album worth of songs about the things I’ve seen on commuter trains; it’s human life in microcosm and there’s distinct comradeship among those who find themselves on those busy trains that mark the very beginning and end of the day.

When I first began gigging in London I often found myself running down Fenchurch Street for the last train home. The cabbies would always be there having a smoke and waiting for those who missed it so they could get a fare for the way home. The City is gloriously empty at night and in the foyers of the huge glass towers of insurance companies and banks you will often see lonesome security guards whiling away the night.

“Neptune, high on your wall”: The Neptune refers to the vast building that is known as 10 Trinity Square just off Fenchurch Street. Once the home of the Port of London Authority. A figure stands proud on the ramparts surrounded by clam shells and pointing out towards the River Thames and the world. 

“Drunk girl, Leaving too soon”/“The Vomit Comet”The term affectionately used for the last train home to Southend from London Fenchurch Street at weekends, which is often full of drunken revellers, tired shift workers and party girls. Imagine a house party on a train carriage with people rolling down the aisles, lovers’ tiffs, boys shouting tall stories and generally missing their stops. Those who don’t want to participate can be found staring intently out of the train window with earphones on. Multiply atmosphere and intensity by 100% at Christmas and bank holidays.

Pilate

“The Mermaid under Carnival Lights” – In victorian times some travelling carnivals would display wonders of the sea including real life bodies of mermaids which were often remnants of fish and monkeys stitched together to make a grotesque mannequin of a dead mermaid. The lyric refers to these seaside carnival grotesqueries. 

The Clifftown Podcast – Hidden Histories

I was sitting at a kitchen table in Sheffield with my friend (and the producer of my new album) Andy Bell. It was a washed out late summer day in-between the various lockdowns we had all been weathering in 2020. The rain was falling heavy on the garden and a squally breeze was ruffling the flower beds. I had come up to spend some time with him and generally talk about how we were going to get people into the album (which is called ‘Clifftown’ by the way and was born out of a desire I had for some years to articulate my experiences in my hometown, the seaside suburbia that is Southend-on-Sea). 

“You should make a podcast about all the stories and characters” Andy said, or something to that effect. He’d visited me numerous times and knew how colourful an area it was. Inside I recoiled – the thought of interviewing people I knew about the things that went unsaid between us felt like prying, or worse making something grandiose out of the ordinary. But, I said I would try. I drove home days later plotting how I could pull this off…and then thought became research and I sent a few emails to people and some of these turned into interviews and then it happened, The Clifftown Podcast.

I wracked my brains for themes and ideas that wouldn’t be too obvious that would be interesting not just for me but others too. I kept circling back to the hidden histories and tall tales I had heard growing up here, romantic tales of smugglers and fleeing royalty and the grittier (but equally compelling) tales we heard from the old boys that used to prop up the bar in the Grand Hotel, stories of petty criminals trying to kill cows near Hadleigh Castle in order to sell the meat illegally but being so drunk they ended up shooting crossbow bolts into a tractor mistaking  it for a sleeping Frisian. I’m obsessed with finding traces of past lives so this topic felt like a good place to start – I felt comfortable with what I was talking about and it seemed apt to start at a point where the place existed but I did not. 

Brian Denny was an obvious choice for my first podcasting attempt. A naturally affable and warm man Brian is great for stories and local lore. Over the years we had regularly met to walk around the more desolate places of the county including the Dengie Peninsula (the site of one of the oldest  largely intact churches in England, St Peter’s by the Wall in Bradwell-on-Sea, built in the 690s by the patron saint of Essex, St. Cedd) and the shores near Canewdon trying to picture the Battle of Ashingdon, which took place nearby and where King Cnut was victorious over the Saxon king, Edmund Ironside. 

For the interview we met up in more anodyne surroundings on the edge of the suburban Highlands Estate in Leigh on Sea. We started talking straight away about the common myths of these parts – the highwayman Cutter Lynch and the Sea Witch Sarah Moore. In the podcast I gloss over the myth of Cutter Lynch simply because the wind ruined the quality of the recording. So, maybe it’s good summarise it here –

There’s a block of flats from the 1970s on the main London Road called Lapwater Court. In 1750 it was the site of a dilapidated and expansive residence called Leigh Park House. It was bought by a mysterious Mr Gilbert Craddock who subsequently visited the site and ordered renovations to take place. Towards the end of the renovations the local workmen were expecting, as was local custom, to receive ale from Mr Craddock for their work. Mr Craddock stated in no uncertain terms that if they wanted to drink rather than get their work finished they could ‘lap water’ from a nearby horse pond. His new house was dubbed locally as ‘Lapwater Hall’ and carries that moniker to this day. And what about Mr Craddock? Well, in some sort of karmic fate he was discovered to be the infamous highwayman Cutter Lynch who gave his earless horse, Brown Meg, prosthetic wax ears when holding up stage coaches to disguise his very unique and recognisable horse. He was shot by the Bow Street Runners near the house and died of blood loss and possible drowning in shallow water thick with reeds. [Source: ‘Legends of Leigh’ by Sheila Pitt-Stanley 1989, who gives a much more thrilling account] 

In the podcast Brian mentions a few times the character Goldspring Thompson in relation to the Nore Mutiny of 1797. Goldspring had supposedly escaped the mutiny when events looked like turning against the mutineers and I suppose he saw what retributions might be meted out to him and others if he stayed on board. His story of jumping overboard and hiding out in the reeds probably survives because he lived such a long life, dying in 1875, and no doubt he told his tale many times in the local pubs of the old town.

Thinking about the richness of these old stories about mutineers and highwayman around the old town of Leigh-on-Sea seem understandable to me when you think that nearly all of these tales derive from the late eighteenth century or nineteenth century; old enough to be mythic but young enough to be part of an oral tradition passed down through 4 or 5 generations.  Southend did not really exist in any extensive sense at this time, only growing in the later nineteenth century as the train line expanded eastwards from London and Leigh was the hub for boats from across the world. I think this explains the reason there are less tales of high adventure from Southend itself. 

The John Constable tale that forms mine and Brian’s quest in the podcast was one I had known for some time but there had been little attention on it. Constable had painted the nearby Hadleigh Castle, first in 1814 when he sketched it and then the actual painting in 1829. The Sketch resides in the Tate Gallery, London while you would have to visit the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conneticut to see the finished painting. I had read in several references that John had stayed with his uncle Thomas in Leigh-on-Sea when he came to make the sketches.

John Constable’s ‘Hadleigh Castle’ (1829) 

This didn’t seem far fetched at all so the hope was that finding some remains of the original Juniper’s Cottage would give us some spiritual closeness to it all. The day we chose to visit was in early December and without my gloves it became painful holding the recorder to capture our journey. You may be able to hear me gasping a bit as we walk and talk, it was that cold. I should have taken my warmer jacket.   

Juniper’s Cottage doesn’t exist any more and Brian later discovered through his research that it was mostly demolished in 1952 but you can see the rough shape of the building still. I tried to get a photo of the building that day and then subsequent days but it was always so busy and in winter lockdown it felt a place to steer away from. I managed to get the shot on the left in a very cold and bitter early January evening while to the right you can see how it looked, most likely in the 1930s or 40s. It was named after Joe Juniper who turned it into a fishmongers and tearoom some time in the nineteenth century. 

                            

People in Leigh are very proud of these stories and there’s lots more of them. The pirate’s grave  at St. Clement’s Church, the near death of Henry IV as he crossed the Thames to Leigh from the Isle of Sheppey during a storm and the oyster wars with the men of Kent in the early eighteenth century. These are not stories that define national identity or inform this island’s greater heritage, it’s parochial and light but what it does show is that there is a desire to keep these small events in the lives of those who lived here a couple of hundred years ago alive today and to keep a thread to an older, perhaps less cluttered, era in an area that is continually being developed and added to as the need for housing to accommodate the growing overspill of communities from London grows. The Government’s ‘Estuary 2050’ scheme plans to significantly develop this part of the Thames shore (and others) for housing and economic growth. 

This desire for a personal and local history that can be publicly owned and recounted by the community was very evident in the Joscelyne’s Beach story which I discussed with poets Jo Overfield and Ray Morgan. I worked in an independent bookshop in 2000 and remember Arthur Joscelyne’s daughter coming into the shop with the book. We sold lots and people would come in for years afterwards wanting copies. Those who bought it knew Arthur or his family and always wanted to impart to me their own experiences and memories of the beach and the area. 

I collected a lot of stories that way, listening to people in the bookshop and some made their way into my songs. For example, there was one elderly couple who came in with their son, Michael (who must have been in his fifties and suffered various health issues). They would recount stories about using the Medway Queen, a pleasure boat over in Kent and heading over to Margate from Southend Pier. Michael’s father was drowned in World War II. I thought  this incredibly sad and I recall they said something about the Captain in charge being a man called Boutwood. Having just looked it up I wonder whether his father died on the HMS Fantome which was mined in 1942 off Bizerte. It was this story that inspired my song ‘Night Water’ from the album, ‘The Water or the Wave’.

Sadly booksellers in Leigh-on-Sea have dwindled in recent years, although Leigh Gallery Books is a must for your secondhand needs. The personal and hidden histories remain however and there’s still more to uncover. With Clifftown I suppose I have laid my own little history down by these silver waters, maybe to be retold by the next person along. 

 

Tour Diary: Newark, New Jersey to Oxford, England: April 2012

Monday 2nd April 2012

Simone and I catch an overnight flight from Newark to London. Aurora is on a different flight and Art is taking a few more days in New York to meet with friends. Newark looks like a dark kingdom in the dusk, something akin to Mordor, all jagged towers and plumes of ominous smoke. We had returned from New York City on the Thursday, stopping briefly in a car park off the motorway in Poughkeepsie to drop an LP off for Nate (Conor Oberst’s manager and CEO of the Team Love record label). This was followed by a show in Woodstock on the Friday.

Over the weekend I had the barn to myself as Art had stayed in New York after our Mercury Lounge show. As a result I had let the fire in the stove die, a role that Art had fulfilled manfully during our time as barn mates. I recall the immense cold of the night, the pines sentinel outside while icy fingers reached into my soul. The next morning I awoke to a malady that I have since referred to as ‘barn fever’. I could not get warm, I had lost all appetite and it hurt to move my eyes. I spent a lost day huddled by the rekindled stove, Indian rug about my shoulders reading Julian Barnes’s ‘Arthur and George’.

It was with this growing fever that myself and Simone found ourselves in the departures lounge, me with this raging fever and Simone reading ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel and fielding emails on his phone. An Englishman sits alongside us and introduces himself as a friend of Jeremy’s. The English guy is pleasant and says he plays keys in a band called Brakes and was once in British Sea Power. He now lives in New Falls, New York. He makes an effort to light a conversation but I am barely keeping hold of my vital life signs and Simone is adrift on a sea of emails and administration.

I haven’t slept for at least twenty four hours and this is added to by the five hours fifty on the red eye to London. I don’t eat and drink little on the flight. I try to fall asleep in various positions but only manage some quiet shut eye when my head is resting on the seat in front. We arrive at Heathrow and are met by an eastern European chauffeur. He’s not big into talking or helping with our bags. We head for the flat of Simone’s literary agent and I manage to grab two hours rest on a mattress on the floor. I hope for the sweet and blissful release of sleep but I find I simply cannot drift off, which makes me feel worse than ever. I shuffle around the flat fearing that I may never eat or sleep again.

We get a cab to Portland Place. I buy a snickers bar and a Lucozade from a corner shop. They are the first foodstuffs through my mouth for at least two days. They taste sour. On arrival we are shown up to the Radio 2 studios. We set up. Bob Harris comes in soon after and shakes our hands. Simone heads off to the toilet leaving me with Bob in the studio; he behind the gargantuan radio console, me pale and confused with lap steel.

 

Bob is a very pleasant man and we chat about the numerous differences in language between English and American English. I want to say how much I admire him and that I used to listen to his show when I was a student, late on Saturday evenings but I can barely make any sense of my brain. Simone takes a considerable time deciding what songs to play and when he does, they are ones I haven’t played lap steel on or the keys have changed.  I look at my hands and ponder whether this will come off good or not. I am going to have to work hard. During the last song Bob leaves briefly to move his car so as to avoid getting a parking ticket- I thought the BBC would have a secret car park somewhere for the likes of Whispering Bob.

The recording is hit and miss. I look up to the producer, PR rep and label man in the control booth. They put thumbs up so I accept it as OK. We walk out into the corridor. I glimpse Steve Wright’s shoulder through a door as he broadcasts his afternoon show. He looks a big guy.  All I can think of is home and bed and the few days rest I am going to get. I manage to navigate London for home and that night the fever breaks after a marathon fourteen hour sleep. I am a new man by morning.

Friday 6th April 2012

Jack picks me up early, having driven from the Gower at dawn. Our first stop is Heathrow to pick up Simone and Simi from the airport and then onto the old capital of England, Winchester. At the venue, The Railway, I instantly feel at home mainly because I have played there so many times before with the Lucky Strikes. Oliver is the promoter and our host. He does an excellent job of both and looks after us. The Railway is decked out with plastic seagulls and homemade portholes – a theme for a club night later on. The gig is good and we stay at Oliver’s house, eating cheese and putting away a prodigious amount of whiskey and coke. Oliver and I talk a lot about the Southend music scene and Dr. Feelgood. We retire late.

Saturday 7th April 2012

The next day is very relaxing and  we are taken on a countryside walk into Winchester via a route starting at Twyford and then across to St Katherine’s Hill, which affords us views of the cathedral and its associated ‘hospital’, where the pious practitioners of the Middle Ages would offer free sustenance to poor and needy travellers. Word is that you can still get a portion of beer and cheese there. At the top of the hill, through a dense copse of trees, there is a ground level maze. The grooves seem to have been worn over centuries and the information board links it to an assize ritual of a bygone age.

We follow the path down across a field arriving at a church where we sit under an ancient tree for a while, its sprawling branches providing us with shade. We follow the river Itchen (which Oliver tells us is one of the clearest waterways in Europe on account of its short length) and play ‘pooh sticks’, which is a game enshrined by A A Milne in Winnie the Pooh whereby you pick a stick, drop it on the flowing water from a bridge and then race to the other side of the bridge to see whose stick is fastest. Simone and Jack are the most excited to start this game and it releases the inner boys in them. It ends with them swinging from a rope above the water further along the path.

We arrive in Winchester feeling exercised but spoil it all by eating pastries in a deli that sits across from the cathedral and is owned by TV chef James Martin. The day is fine and crowds mill about the terrace outside the cathedral. The building itself is subsiding and we walk its perimeter, through the herb garden and around the buttresses. We have no time or money to spare to go inside. So, with bellies full and legs stretched we leave Winchester to its sweet waterways and cobblestones. As we try to find the route to the motorway we find ourselves driving straight towards the giant statue of Alfred the Great, sword brandished in one hand. I wasn’t expecting it to be so large. Simone jokes about pledging one hundred Catskill swords to him.

Our next stop is Oxford, which today is fairly unremarkable although strangely I feel close to home and untroubled. The venue is a wine bar come pub. The gig is the best so far with the band in light and comedic mood. I even get chance to catch up on my reading. We stay in a Travelodge near Oxford. As all travelling musicians know, there is a degree of order about hotels. Travelodges are OK but Premier Inns are the next step up. Beyond that, you’re kings of the road.

Tour Diary: Stockholm and Uppsala, February 2018

3.45am, 16th February 2018. I’ve been unable to sleep and have been awake for twenty one hours. I’m outside my flat leaning on the front wall. A badger bundles down the street away from me, a cat arches in surprise when it rounds the corner. This is not a time for men. It’s cold and the neighbourhood is hallowed quiet, the deepest of dark starts. I’m travelling light; a change of clothes, a novel (a Tudor whodunit), notebook, comb, toothbrush and passport. 

Will’s car glides down the road. He moves fast. I picture him barely fifteen minutes earlier cutting through the suburbs of Westcliff to pick up Dave and then over the main road past Chalkwell Park (empty of dog walkers at this time) and along the seafront to Paul’s flat; then the three will go up and over the railway track and turn back on themselves to my place. Everyone is bleary eyed but excited for the journey ahead as we cut through Essex countryside to Stansted Airport. Yesterday Paul crushed the index finger of his fretting hand in a car park barrier so we inspect it on the shuttle bus into the terminal; it’s twice the size of its right hand counterpart and is black and oozing.

Hours later we enter Stockholm over a bridge. The city, spread across a series of islands divided by frozen lakes and tributaries, hosts no high rise leaving the sky wide and inviting. All the buildings have Art Nouveau style balconies and are mustard yellow or peach in colour. We take a short walk from Citytermalin to T-Centralin train terminal where we take the escalator down to a plush shopping mall style concourse. This is the main station – no-one rushes and there is a sense of calm even in the busyness. King’s Cross it is not. The Metro, green line heading south Hawk had said, any train going to Hågstra, Skårnpack or Farsta Strand. Four stops to Skanstull – count them off – Gamla Slan, Slussen and Medborgarplatsen. 

Then we are up and out onto the wide open street. Snow is falling in big flakes but it does not feel cold. The city seems alive, I feel alive.

In Hawk and Sofia’s apartment we eat chocolates and strong coffee. I feel elated to have arrived at our destination, safe to be directed and organised by a native. We’re all too exhausted to go out, it is just enough to look out the window (being warmed by the radiator) and watch the Stockholm afternoon go by. The street is a wide boulevard, cars swing past with their wipers on, people are going about their daily lives, it’s the same as home over a thousand miles away. I’m a time traveller. I get lost in the busy vignette. 

Stage time 10.15pm, I’ve been awake forty hours. My body feels wrecked, Paul with his crushed finger is screaming behind me every time he forgets and uses his mushed digit on the fret board. We are collectively medicated by booze, caffeine or pain killer. Words hang in my brain my mouth just a fraction slower to get them out. People dance and people have fun. We finish and drink ourselves stupid.

Amongst the pounding music of Oasis and Dave loudly ordering beer after shot after beer I fall into conversation with a man who quietly exclaims, ’Why? That is the question of the artist and you must keep asking it for everything as you get older, why? Why?’, he pauses and looks to his wife, ‘The blood must continue to be heated even as you get older. The blood doesn’t have to boil necessarily. It is not always about passion but the growing companionship between a man and a woman’. It made sense to me in my inebriated state.

4am: back at the apartment and we are still talking with Hawk and Sofia about social media, the show and the state of Swedish and British politics, something about their king stuffing a microphone down his throat at a university presentation while drunk. There’s one bed and Dave is too big for us both to share. I try to sleep on the parquet floor but my head is full of bad dreams and I wake before 9am my hip and ribs burn from the tiles. Coffee.

Saturday is the day for exploring. Ann and Hasse have offered to show us the town so we walk to the very edge of the island we are on and from a snowy peak we survey the black tiled roofs of Stockholm, the yellow and orange plaster of the old town and Knight’s Island. The Stockholm Concert Hall where the Nobel Prize is awarded stands proud on the bank south of us.  A walk along a tow path and into the streets again for a coffee at Tårtan where we are told a famous comedy sitcom about retired sailors was filmed. Our Swedish companions are chewing tobacco gum called Snus. I respectfully decline. 

Back to Hawk’s flat before the tube and double decker train to Uppsala. Forty minutes through snowy hinterland. The cold feels bitter here and we leave the square brick train terminal following a wide boulevard and along a canal towards the HiJazz Club. Away from the station Uppsala seems empty of life, snowflakes occasionally fall, the wind slight but biting. Doors closed, curtains shut.  We stand outside the club, barred windows, the crunch of snow under foot, everyone’s face wrapped up silent and focused on getting into the warm.

Jilal the owner of the club cycles towards us and opens up. Inside the bar is small, shop like, with a small counter serving bottled beers and an array of CDs stacked on shelves. We are directed to an English themed restaurant/pub called Sherlock’s for dinner. The pub is dark with anaglyptic wallpaper and nestled amongst tower blocks. It reminds me of parts of east London. Fairy lights hang off most balconies, their pre-set patterns twinkling on and off being the only signs of life. It’s quiet, a commuter suburb deep in the delight of a Saturday night in. I am later told by a member of the audience that there is a Eurovision heat on and the Swedes take their Eurovision very seriously so were all most likely glued to their TV screens.

The show is good, a massive challenge physically, but a few students dance towards the end. I feel sad that we are leaving tomorrow, leaving the Plastic Pals who we have only just started to know. We’re all tired, Will and Paul especially. They sit in the front row hollowed and empty. The gig gets them back into the land of the living though.

Post show we return along the canal to the boulevard and the station which is thronging with young people heading back to Stockholm. Boys with tails and white bow ties, medals pinned to their jackets. They are too young for the military. It’s a tiring journey back to Hawk’s place and another late night.

 

Rolfe, Sofia’s Boston terrier meets us back at the flat. By 3am he is prized from his bed in the living room and relocated elsewhere so that we can sleep in peace. Another night on the parquet floor for me. Hours later I find myself staring directly into Rolfe’s eyes. In the pale morning light he has liberated himself from another room to find me using his bed for a pillow. Sorry Rolfe. An hour’s sleep at most before Dave’s alarm goes off. I feel neither alive nor dead. I am in the in between. And so, with a note to Hawk and Sofia hastily written saying heartfelt thanks and love, we creep out of the flat and into a bright Stockholm morning.

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