Big World

My friend Tim Guy has just finished a new video.  It's really good, and you'll probably like it; I know I do.   He shot the video, I'm pretty sure he said, while he was on tour around New Zealand in the summertime. If you've ever been on tour around New Zealand in the summertime I urge you to have a look at it - you'll recognise a lot of the places you drove hundreds of ks on windy roads to play shows at.  There's that sweet gig you can do at Milford Sound where they take you out on their boat in the morning, and then on the way home you can listen to Kashmir the way it was meant to be heard - in a van full of amplifiers driving through the Homer Tunnel, which looks very much like it was hewn by Dwarves with two-handed axes.  There's the pass at the top of the Cardrona road, which isn't the quickest route to Queenstown, but if you have to play there you might as well go the pretty way.  There's someone's house near Invercargill or somewhere with a cat and a dog, where you had a ridiculous party after a show where the drummer in the support band was probably dressed like a pirate and you woke up on the couch. Then there's the Wellington motorway just before you get to the ferry to play what is often the most hilarious set of the tour: 10 a.m in a fake Irish bar on a half-empty boat crossing one of the most notoriously choppy stretches of water in the Southern Hemisphere.

I like this video it because I've been on tour with Tim, and being on tour with Tim was pretty special. He didn't do any of the driving - I can't remember why - but it was cool with me because I like to drive.  He would be in the back of the car, often keeping quiet, and he shot videos on his camera.  Sometimes I'd sneak a look at them and there was something about each of them that made them better that the videos that people often shoot on their cameras from the backs of cars, like he would have noticed the way all of the windmills were turning at the same speed as they came over the horizon, or he'd be mumbling something hilarious and barely audible into the mic.   When we were in Paris we walked for a couple of hours from where we were staying at the confluence of the Marne and the Seine, along the banks of the river and all the way into the city.  I can't remember what we talked about but we talked the whole way, and when we got into the city we found just about the most expensive bar they had and got tall glasses of beer for around ten euros each.

In Berlin we stayed with my friends in a room with white walls and concrete everything, on the ground floor of a building that seemed pretty old.  It was a good room with a big oak table and mostly we just sat around listening to the way our guitars sounded in the room.  In Hamburg the show was just off the the Reeperbahn and Tim was looking for the ghosts of where the Beatles put in their ten thousand hours or whatever it was, but all we found were packs of Englishmen with loud voices and lots of hookers who frankly terrified me.  In the countryside outside of Stuttgart we spent some nights in a barn made of stone in a compound on an old vineyard, and everything was solar-powered because the people who lived there were photovoltag engineers at the solar plant down the road.  Power was supplied by a complex web of cables connected to a bank of batteries hooked up to solar panels in various stages of brokenness, and the lightswitch in the room where we slept was nowhere to be found as far as we could tell. We didn't want to bother anyone at night and during the day we would forget to ask about it, so we slept two nights with the fluorescents on.

The whole time, I listened to Tim play his songs most nights and sometimes we'd do some songs together because his songs are a lot of fun to play on.  A lot of people's songs you'd get sick of after hearing them night after night, but Tim's just grew on me.  When he came through Auckland a month or so ago it was a good feeling to sit down and play some of his songs together, and I got that feeling again when I saw his video just now.  Go on, have a look:

Now We Are Twenty-Eight

A while ago, actually last year, I turned twenty-eight.  Twenty-eight isn't really a very advanced age I guess, but at the time I was tutoring at the university and my cohort of students hadn't even been born yet when C+C Music Factory's seminal track Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) reached number one on the U.S. Billboard hot 100 chart, so I was feeling old. These kids thought Robin Hood was Russell Crowe not Kevin Costner, and the scary movie that gave them nightmares when they were ten?  That was The Fellowship of the Ring.  So I was feeling old.

So of course I did what anybody would do in my situation, which was shut up and write a song about it. The song I wrote is called Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and it deals with, you know, issues.  Like the feeling of feeling old.  Issues and feelings, in one single song - that's value for money. What's also value for money is that you can actually download this song off my bandcamp site and stick it on your ipod or off-brand portable mp3 player for free, and here's why: it's the lead single off my new album, and we've figured out that secret about economics where you make money by giving stuff away.* The album is called Spring Summer Awesome Winter, it's out it June on Monkey Records/Banished From The Universe, and don't worry, we'll talk about that later.

The thing that's quite exciting about this song is that as well as giving it away free to the good people of the internet (that's you), Ms. Millicent Crow and myself have also done a limited edition hand-printed run of actual physical copies, handmade on this nifty little screen-printing machine called a gocco.  I can't remember why we decided to do this, but here's what we did: each of us designed a cover based on pictures of a petrol can and a pile of books (which are kind of in the song), and then we printed up fifty of each of them, making a total run of 100 copies.  These are available exclusively at shows until they run out, or if you see me in real life you can ask me for one.

What I will do before I give you one, though, is get you to look at both of the designs and make you tell me which one you like the most. I've been doing this to people for the past week or so, and the results so far confirm what I suspected, which is that I'm not as good at drawing as Ms. Millicent Crow is.  So far 100% of respondents have said they like hers the best, but on the plus side they've given me feedback like 'Your one is actually surprisingly OK,' or 'that's not bad  for someone who doesn't draw much.  You don't draw much do you?' Which is pretty encouraging.  I mean yeah, I don't draw much. I'm kind of an outsider with this drawing thing.

 Millicent Crow's one

  My one.  I think mine has a naive charm.

The other quite fun thing about this song is that Nigel was apparently shooting video on his little camera the whole time we were tearing around Europe in an A-class mercedes on the tour with Tim Guy last year, and he's put together a video for the track using footage from that time that features me looking reasonably classic with my touring beard on, driving quite fast, sleeping in cars, talking to geese and so forth, which is a fair summing-up of what went on on that tour. Like the best music videos, the pictures don't have a lot of connection to the song, but it does feature a guy nearly setting his face on fire and it's definitely worth a look for the waterfowl alone.



And just in case you were thinking that there isn't another thing about this song - wait, there's another thing about this song: it's actually three songs!  So both the free download and the handmade CD include the title track Now We Are Twenty-Eight, and also two more tracks from the Spring Summer Awesome Winter sessions.  The first, The Old Place, is about accidentally telling the cab driver to go to the house where you used to live instead of wherever you live now and then rambling at him about it, which I think is something that most people do at least sometimes.  For various reasons that song won't be on the album, so I guess its official status is 'outtake.' The other one is a complete reworking by Nigel Wright of another track off the album and one that he's been doing with me in the live set lately, and it's a totally unrecognisable and very beautiful reverby drone piece that makes me think about falling asleep in a long-range nuclear submarine, or maybe inside an empty grain silo on a hot day, and having a dream about alien monks chanting in slow motion, which again is something I think will resonate with a lot of people.  So: Content! For you! Hope you like it.


--------------------------------
*If I tell you how it works, economics will stop working, money will become worthless, and we will all starve.

Melbourne

The Shot Tower - a building so good they put it inside another building.

Last weekend Ms. Millicent Crow and I went to have a look at what Melbourne's been up to lately.  We like to keep things authentic when we travel, so we were pleasantly surprised when we arrived at our hostel and discovered that, due to my reluctance to read fine print and general lackadaisical approach to booking things, it appeared that we had inadvertently availed ourselves of an opportunity to celebrate Australia's convict heritage by staying in accommodation that painstakingly recreated the conditions in one of the earliest European buildings in the Port Philip colony, which was of course a manky old jailhouse.  Since it was me who booked the 'room' (and I don't use inverted commas lightly, so believe me when I say this was actually a 'room,' rather than a room) I got to be the one who slunk down to reception to have a chat with the night clerk, a man who turned out to not be my best-ever interlocutor.

Note the grimy curtains, concealing the horrors within.

"Um... mate?"
"Ungh."
"I was, that is, ah, we were wondering.  Ah...  What are the chances that we could maybe change our room, would you say?"
"Huh.'
"It's just, do you have any that have, like, windows, at all?"
The man just did a sort of grimacy eyebrow-raise.
"Or even one where the walls go all the way to the ceiling?  Ours don't seem to do that."
"You on level two?"
"Yeah, level two."
"None of the walls go to the ceiling on level two."
"No?"
"Says on the website."
"Ah. OK. What's the, ah, the window situation then? Is there any chance of a window, would you say?"
"Mate. The Grand Prix's on.  We're full up all weekend."

After having spoken to several native Australians and a few foreigners who have been there long enough to learn the culture, I now understand that the correct thing to do at this point would have been to offer the man a bribe.  Apparently this works for all official functionaries from Night Clerk right up to State Premier level (with the exception of sworn-in police horses, who are incorruptible) and is a cornerstone of the Australian way of life.  All I can say in defense of my failure to uphold this custom is that I'm bad at picking up on social cues, I suppose - and besides, if I was into paying extra for things I probably wouldn't have booked the absolute dirtbag-cheapest hostel in all of downtown Melbourne in the first place.

Police horses, Swanston St: The last honest public servants?

In fairness, though, it's a bit inaccurate to compare our hostel to an actual prison.  In prison, for example, they usually have delousing protocols that take care of the vermin, and you don't have to pay a key deposit.  And, while the strange odours, noises in the night, unsanitary blotches on the flooring, and the casual racism of the other inmates may have put us in mind of old Sing Sing, we should remember that in western democracies at least, prisons are generally expected to adhere to certain minimum humanitarian standards that just don't seem to apply to hostels. The real-world outcome of this is that, while in both types of institution you'll see bossy little signs on every available surface laying down the law on a whole range of human behaviours, only in a hostel will the signs be laid out in that least humanitarian of fonts, Comic Sans.  That is cruel and unusual and it will not stand.

 This bossy sign is actually from the train station - in our hostel, spitting on the walls, floors or stairs was one of the few activities not expressly prohibited.  Although by God it should have been.

None of this was a problem of course, because we didn't go to Melbourne to sit in a hostel reflecting on our life of crime.  Having lived in that town for a little while a few years ago, we mainly went back there to look at bats and ride on trams, both of which goals we achieved early and in abundance. We also wanted to find a statue of a giant owl that had been making us feel mysterious for the past four years or so, ever since we glimpsed it on a wintry morning from the window of the train that hauled us and all our bags and boxes out of the city and away from our insane flatmates and jobs in call-centres, to deliver us to Sydney and sunny points beyond. We wanted to see if the owl was as awesome up close as it was in memory - or if it was even actually real, because you know how sometimes when you've got all your bags and boxes on a train and you're leaving town early in the morning, you might accidentally makes things like giant owls up in your head? Well it turns out that it is real, and it lives on a traffic island on top of a big concrete pillar, and it might actually not be an owl, but a parrot. It looks very ancient, like it's been there a lot longer than anything else around, and it's as if maybe they found this giant owl statue perching there on the Yarra floodplain and said Bonza mate, let's make the town right here. Anyway, owl or parrot, it is just as mysterious and wonder-inspiring as we had remembered, and I'm not too sure but I think it was happy enough to see us back in town.

 

This is what calm and mysterious looks like.