At least twice a week I walk to the village. On Wednesdays I pick up my order of bread and a newspaper. On Saturdays I get a newspaper again and a large bottle of whole milk. I generally buy other stuff as well. Eggs. Matches. Maltesers.
It’s a good village shop. Non-profit, run by volunteers. It’s very small but it has a lot of stuff. In summer my sister needed a protractor. They had one.
Some days it’s raining and I delay my visit. Some days I go and it rains. It can be pretty miserable.
As a kid of 11 or 12, I used to have a radio just above my head where I slept. It seems funny now as I’ve barely listened to the radio for more than ten years but back then I used to be lulled to sleep by the relaxing sounds of HARDCORE PIRATES.
I used to put a tape in the box, turn the dial to 92.3 FM and listen to The Weekend Rush, broadcasting from Hackney’s Nightingale Estate. When I was getting tired, and assuming the signal was decent that night, I’d press play and record and fall asleep. On a monday morning I’d have three or four sides of C90 to keep my walkman warm for the week. At the end of the week, I’d probably tape over them again, unless they were particularly good, in which case they’d get a numbered label in my best 12 year old’s handwriting.
The above tune is the original white label version of the Nookie track “Gonna Be Alright” which is often known as “Sound Of Music”. In my great love for cheesy chords, no keyboard line means as much to me as this one. Utterly sentimental. Simplistic. Played on a cheap piano synth. It couldn’t be tackier but it hit me as a kid and has stayed with me. I still have the tape that recorded the first time I heard it. I sellotaped it back together a couple of times but it still plays.
Years later, I now own this original mix, the famous mix, the Foul Play remix (very good) and maybe a couple more mixes, and find it doesn’t really matter what goes on around the keys, as long as they’re there in all their simple glory. You could probably sell me a Robbie Williams song with that piano line.
Thelonius Monk it is not but it is as important to me as anything else put to wax and I’m very grateful that those pirates weighed anchor in my neck of the woods when I was growing up. They could have been at sea, hijacking oil tankers but they chose to share the music with London. Ta.
As Beyoncé once sang, “Shoes on my feet, Alf Garnett”.
It is with those words in mind that I have been fiddling with the sidebar of this blog and integrating all kinds of peripheral schitt. The blog software I use, Wordpress, has become a bit of a shitbag to work with at times but I’ve now got it under control by upgrading to the latest version and using tons of widgets. This is the bit where my dad would chip in with the history of the widget in Economics and how we use the word all wrong now. This isn’t his blog though. This is.
I was in London mainly for his “retirement” party. The idea of him doing any less than seven days work a week is ridiculous and the party would better be termed an “end of contract party” or something. Anyway it was great to have an excuse to tell people how proud I am of him, and to see him in his natural environment, working a slide show off his laptop and ad-libbing. I’m also proud that his blog makes the first page of google for the ridiculously commonplace search terms “michael” and “edwards”. Jeebus.
Most photographers are pretty precious about their photos of Jazz musicians. They won’t let anyone use them because they’re saving them for a coffee table book to retire on. The problem with that is that the world of the internet needs pictures of Jazz musicians. Tom Marcello is one of the few people with excellent photos of great musicians who is happy to put them up on flickr with a creative commons license, so anyone can use them. He has some superb pictures.
