Momo:lingo

2012-02-01T18:12:00.010Z

Blast.

AS A COLD WIND BLOWS UP A LATE SPOT OF WINTER,
MOMO UNVEILS SOME HOT NEWS ABOUT FUN STUFF.

And so there it goes. The toughest month of the year – January. Twenty-twelve is really on, people.

Actually, this first day of February is really where the new year feels like it's starting, here at Momo. An absence of pithy pointlessness on Lingo so far this year is down to one thing: puh-lanning. Which sounds buh-oring and certainly doesn't seem to produce much actual content other than reams of scribbled-on A2 paper. But February is where the planning has put first Actual Things To Do in the diary for us.

Things that stand a half-decent chance of adding up to something rather fun for Momo amigos. Namely, a whole New Tunes-a-rama publicity-ma-bob brand re-boof.

Which is a good thing. Just to be clear.

Because we can finally tell you when you can next see Momo live. And because we'll be unveiling a brand new single on the night.

---

Yep. That's what the schedule tells me. And it should know. It looks like some bloke spent a bit of time badly drawing it on a big layout pad, so it must be sound.

EASTER SATURDAY 7th APRIL 2012,
SIXTY MILLION POSTCARDS, BOURNEMOUTH.
THE RETURN OF THE MOMO:TEMPO ELECTRO-POPS ORCHESTRA.

Better believe it. Featuring the full seven-piece line up, we'll be unveiling the first of the new promo brand gubbins for Momo;tempo, ahead of the forthcoming new album launch – from which we'll be debuting the new single and letting you grab a free mix of it right then and there, if you bring your smart pocket telephone.

We'll be tickling around Momotempo.co.uk in time for the night too, and giving more details about a release date for the new album.

..Looks like I'd better get a shufty on, eh.

---

Ahead of all this, I'll be pre-empting the funny business with a first short series of iPhone flicks on the Momo The You Tube channel – showing behind-the-scenes clips of said new single actually being developed. Really. From first arrangement to different musician sessions, I'll share a little of the unqualified tinkering and posturing that goes into a Momo tune.

I shared the scratch mixes of new material with someone other than the lovely first lady of Momo for the first time a couple of nights ago. Mark The Drum. I wouldn't want to go into the details of a private hour between two chaps, you understand, but we did both emerge from the studio fairly light-headed from a goodly dose of OMG. I now have an ally in the excited stakes.

And so also, I can say that the first session of this brave new year of musical creativity is in the diary too. I believe another enthusiastic professional will be turning up on my door with two massive congas on Monday, expecting to flam them for me. How could a chap wait patiently for that, I ask you. Momo's percussionist, Simon, already sounds as enthusiastic even before he's heard anything. Let's see if he feels the same way afterwards, obviously.

---

My schedule is telling me I have a measurable ton of work and casually brilliant creativity ahead of me. My gut is telling me it's going to be a blast.

More soon.

---

2011-12-07T21:11:00.013Z

Between the ideas.

Well into December, this end of the year feels eerily still and uneventful. Like being between somethings. Not sure whats. But significants.

December traditionally goes raving tonto as deadlines crawl out of every crack in the floorboards in a scurrying panic before the year crashes into the buffers of Christmas. Which is why I had the new Momo studio floor tiled.

Now, I still seem to be problem solving and trying to pull brilliance out of the brain in multiple ways every day, of course. Don't get me wrong. And Lord knows, every day seems to want to present a new mini crisis to have to smother with an old tea towel. But I do feel a bit limboid.

Limboid, yes. All the running around seems to be happening at some slightly opaque arms length. I'm not in Limbo – far from it's soporific rest, sadly. But a bit spaced out.

A bit empty of witty punchline-outs.

---

Something I meant to post up weeks back is a debate that was going on last month in advertising circles, and I think of it again now after chewing through a little list of new creative work for Typo's clients. Whenever you're first at the layout pad, this issue should present itself rather pertinently.

What is the idea?

Now, though any proper ad man worth his salt will say: 'You gotta have an idea', I tend to think of it subtly differently. Slightly less scarily. And consequently more boringly.

What is the message?

Wake up. It may not sound as whizzy and artistic, but it's the more pertinent question for a paying client. Even if they don't realise it. Which they won't or they might not need you. The idea is really just the vehicle for delivering the message. So you'd better have a good idea, for sure. But you'd also better have the right message. Though everyone might take a while to notice you have the wrong message if your idea is really good.

I can't help feeling that redundancy meetings might go a lot smoother if management delivered them as part of a particularly theatrical standup routine, for example.

But anyway. The key thing there is THE idea. THE message. Singular.

The debate in question that some of us were tittle-tattling around concerned two high profile TV ads running more or less concurrently at the moment. Big budget campaigns by big name agencies for big name brands.

Müller and John Lewis.

You've seen the ads, right? Well, I think they serve to illustrate some principles of how to and how not to make a TV ad. As if you had so little going for you that you cared.

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Well, if you're in the business of blagging your way through making up stuff for a living and hoping to get paid for it, you might consider caring just a little. Because the job of advertising is, in a general sense, to reach people.

Both words need italicising – a blathering amount of cash being spent on TV time and production and creative thinking is all for the sole purpose of connecting with real individuals. Because a connection means stimulating some sort of response. Hopefully some embryonic version of the Ooh, I Identify With That response that eventually hopefully magically leads to the I Need To Buy Me A Bit Of That response.

The Müller ad is, in my humble and profoundly unqualified opinion a fine example of stimulating the What The Ruddy Hell Was That About response.

But not in a good way.

What is it saying, do you think? ..No, I didn't have the foggiest either. It was almost like a promisingly cryptic conundrum – guess the link between the car from Knight Rider, Dastardly and Muttley from The Wacky Races, The Mr Men, an anonymous ice cream van that Transformerises into an essentially terrifying and inexplicable giant walking grinning eating football monster, a suspiciously clean urban cityscape and… yogurt.

Now. I know. Hold your protesting. You and I both know. Saying this is like walking into Tate Modern and proclaiming your staggering, bum-faced cultural ignorance with the words: 'CALL THAT ART? MY RUDDY DAUGHTER COULD DRAW BETTER THAN THAT. AND SHE'S NOT OLD ENOUGH TO HOLD A SPORK. ART MY ARSE.'

I know.

Advertisers are going for Emotional Response. Famously. Apparently. But I ask sincerely, what emotional response are you supposed to give to this random soup of thrown-together things? Surely the obvious one is: What The Ruddy Hell's Just Happened? And possibly: Have I Just Suffered A Stroke?

I tried forming basic words after the first time I saw it, just to be sure.

And the sonic environment of the whole thing. The score. For it is a score, not a piece of music. A tightly to-picture bit of writing that takes particular clever skill on the part of a composer – sudden drama, quirky humour, suspense, action, happy resolve… all within 30 seconds. At what point am I supposed to care about these random things to 'feel' the sudden drama of a full orchestra? And at what time did ANY of these random items individually exist in the musical space of a bloody Hans Zimmer Pirates Of The Caribbean overture?

What, in short, were they thinking when they asked the composer to do this? Or the 3D animator when they commissioned the terrifying grinning eating football? Or the classic car company when they asked to borrow KITT and the voice-over actor who presumably lives in it? Or the Roger Hargreaves foundation when they asked to borrow the Mr Men? Or Hannah Barberra when they asked to borrow an athsmatic dog that can fly a biplane and NOT Scooby Do? Huh? What?

I mean, what?

---

I gleaned a little when I read ad agency TBWA's briefing notes. "People don't realise how much good stuff goes into making a Müller yogurt" they said. Good brief. Good idea to chase. People will have no freaking better idea after watching this.

Eating an actual Müller yogurt feels much nicer. Simpler.

I personally think it's an example of a whole team's-worth of fantastic talent being used to do great bits of work for something without a single idea. It's entertaining. But it's something that's weirdly hard to love. It's lots of random things tossed into a yogurt pot in expensive desperation. The kind of thing that a clichéd representation of a telly ad agency's clichéd creative-blind account handlers will rave about.

"Look!" these unrealistic cartoons will crow: "We pulled out all the stops. CG, KITT, BIIIIG music. Everything. That'll be a few squillion by the way. Nice one."

I have not bought any Müller yogurts as such since. Don't know about you. I'm sure lots of people think they love it. I doubt they really do. Or have bought any yogurt.

---

The John Lewis ad. By way of contrast.

Now, the point here is not to suggest you should be crying at an advert for a big shop that sells things for Christmas. I'd save your emotional energies. But it's interesting that a lot of people apparently couldn't.

Never mind that the corrosive fear and endless working hours of recession Britain has worn down most TV-viewing families' nerve to breaking point. This TV ad still connected with a lot of people.

I didn't cry. But the room of kids and parents I was in the first time we saw it did break out into applause and cheers. Slice it how you will, that's an emotional response. And a good bit of creative to prompt it.

Why? Because it is one single great idea. A very simple ad to shoot, but done nicely. Consistently. Blind-siding you into not caring about just another Christmas ad, but also wondering out of the corner of your bored eye what was going to happen – before a very cute swerve.

All, crucially I would suggest, setting up the last thing on screen; something I'd put money on them having written first, before any scribble of an idea for an actual advert. The message. An excellent tagline, delivering the brand's values and the point of the whole campaign beautifully at the very end: 'Gifts you love to give'.

John Lewis is for givers.

And isn't that kid adorable?

Clever. Single-minded. Not caught between the ideas; using what's between the ears to hit an audience right between the eyes.

Food for thought. Unlike a Müller yogurt, apparently.

The Müller ad.

The John Lewis ad.

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2011-11-11T12:00:00.004Z

11.11.11, 11:11.

Everyone's seen this number a lot today, but I'm a sucker for symbolism, so here we are.

There is something about collective moments. The liturgical silence of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month may be one of the few times the majority of Britons share a reverential two minutes. Apart from waiting for the final lottery balls, perhaps, dunno.

Challenge the nature of the defense industry, harangue politicians for their strategic double standards, camp outside the doors of dodgy embassies, hate the very idea of violence and destroyed innocence and feel a bit uncomfortable at too much flag-waving jingoism – very please do. But very please do also stand with everyone else nearby in remembering and recognising striking moments of service. Especially if those acts of service helped clear the way for you – you at least, if not everyone yet – to realise the whole point of hard-won freedom – to be able and happy to be yourself. You cool cat.

At times like this, I think of a marvelous moment that great chum Chris shared with me from his uncle. This venerable veteran was apparently in a pub enjoying a quiet pint with a fellow ex-serviceman when in strutted a mohawked punk, stapled and starched to within an inch of his social life – it being the late seventies.

"Good god, man! Did we fight in the war so that young people could do that?" sincerely scowled Chris' uncle's old friend.

"That," replied Chris' uncle, calmly draining his bitter, "is precisely what we fought in the war for young people to be able to do."

..Love it. And may we together continue to reverentially say amen.

---

In the spirit of this, at eleven minutes past the hour of armistice, I think it might be splendidly appropriate, precisely because it is so inappropriate, to declare the sessions for the uproarous, theatrical, undoubtedly camp, electro cabaret beats-and-melodies fest of Momo:tempo's new LP… officially open.

I hope I can make it a true celebration of creative freedom.

Watch this space. And start counting. x

---

Momo rambles and ponders and declares something exciting officially open. Or started. Or something.

2011-11-10T09:22:00.004Z

Adventuring by the book.

I wrote an album in the summer of 1991, just before I got married, called Tropical Thunder. It was called this, I think, because the imprint I 'released' recordings under at that time was called Rainforest.

Rainforest Studios was a shed in my parents' garden. It still just about stands there now, ravaged by an unkind, obviously temperate climate under a decidedly deciduous beech tree. While I continue to muck about with and daydream about making electronic musical epics in another, slightly more robust, shed in my own garden.

The point in mentioning it is not to get thinking about the very very old days or to wonder where my four-track is now or why I still don't seem to own a decent piano or where in the hell twenty years went in the blink of a bleedin' red LED, but merely to say that I have now actually heard tropical thunder.

And probably that, twenty years on, I'm not sure what practical advice I'd give that young daydreamer in a shed. The plan hasn't, ah, well hasn't much fleshed out from there. Really. Apparently.

Tropical thunder, I should say incidentally, sounds pretty much like thunder anywhere else. Except you're almost certainly sweating more when you hear it.

---

I've been interviewed a couple of times in the last couple of weeks and each time is an opportunity for me to refine Momo's elevator statement – the neat summation of all that you do in an easy, insightful, pithy moment in a lift. ..Should some weirdo ask you when the doors close what you like to do between floors.

When I get to hear or see the two most recent interviews in question, I wonder whether they will sound like the same person? If you ignore the sound of the obvious guffawing hoorayer doing the actual tedious talking, you understand – that idiot turns up everywhere. But the point is that the job description seems to sound different every time it comes out of his yawning great trap.

I think both nice journalists, Lenka and Jen, understood that I was claiming to be a music artist of some kind. Jen even called me out and told me, on mic, to compose a tune on the ruddy spot. I inched up to the keys, hands arthritic-lookingly tentative, played a Cmaj chord with a bum note and promptly ended the composition there, adding that the idea might need tidying up but that we could fix it in post. Or something.

The problem is my mouth. It lets slip anything in order to keep flow or to be funny. Sort of useful in broadcasting in a way, and sort of disastrous. No, I never actually let slip Anglo-Saxon profanities, even when they'd be the most precisely funny thing to say, though I did have to retake the odd 'arse' or 'ruddy'. But the main problem is sticking to story. The bits of it that should sound cohesive if carefully said together.

When Jen said to me something like: "So what have you been working on lately?" I blurted out: "I've just come back from Bali."

She blinked and said: "..Really? Doing what? An exotic musical commission?"

To which I replied: "No, no. >honking chuckle< I always do those from a shed in Southbourne. No, I was running an event for a petrochemical company."

..You see? How do I build a cohesive audience with that?

---

Well, I mean it's all part of Momo's remit, isn't it? Freedom. Or something. The reason I haven't taken on a permanent team and gone hunting for big game – the freedom to take on random creative work, join other people's worlds for a bit, and still be able to come home to a shed in the garden and scribble feverishly in a book of grand musical concepts and make electronic keyboard tunes like a twenty-year-old enthusiast.

Sounds quite good put like that, I guess. And it certainly doesn't sound harsh to say that I have been working in a five-star resort on the Indonesian island paradise of Bali, either. I can see that.

The point is probably something to do with being fully wherever you are needed in any given moment. Would that I was frequently needed to do good work with great mates for a client it feels a little honouring to be working with in an exotic setting. Obviously. I mean, just obviously.

I would point out, though, that this particular creative assignment still illustrated an ignoble truth of my work – namely, that there is no conceivable setting, or hour of the day, or place on earth in which I may not be expected to interact with a rollerbanner. Hashtag: livingthecreativedream. Glamour has never given to me with both hands. If she ever does to anyone, of course.

It's the issue of service that is always the most pertinent one for any creative gunslinger – are you being the practical use your client needs you to be, despite the background notion dawning on you as you look up from your To Do list that you're wearing a suit on a humid beach front resort under palm trees to the sound of gently shushing waves and warmly ringing evening cicadas in the warm glow of a postcard sunset? The challenge is always the same, even if the eventual sunburn – ah – the brief, isn't. Or the cost of drinks.

It is a challenge.

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I've long felt that Momo, even before it was Momo, may be a little ship – one small enough that breaking out the emergency oars and pulling for all you're worth can still make a difference in a high sea – but that it's with little ships that people travel the world. And found the New World. You can cover a great distance in a little ship, and discover some great things.

Of course, it helps if you have some great mates who are nice enough slash damn-fool enough to invite you on a great gig – and I owe an alarming number of these to the generosity of one of the oldest of friends, Julian. I think I still owe him for room service too.

The point may be, after all, that setting out on an adventure is not about getting from A–B. It's usually about surviving from A–Z. Your little ship will have to put into all sorts of unexpected ports and perhaps even get washed up on some very unexpected beaches. It doesn't necessarily mean that your story has veered off course. Even if chapters of it don't seem to fit the narrative you set out to explore. I'm sure the eponymous Odysseus would have something to say along these lines.

And so would a bloke called Homer, who compiled / made up most of Odysseus' epic adventures from the equivalent of a shed in Smyrna.

In fact, I think I've always instinctively known that, for many of us, it's the book of daydreams that inspires us to even try getting back in the boat each morning. Attempting to navigate. Hoping to survive. Fooling ourselves into trying to make it somewhere.

---

From behind her little video camera, Lenka asked me: "What are you doing next?"

Feeling a little adventurous twinkle in the corner of my eye, I said: "I'm starting a new album. And I'm SO excited – I've been daydreaming about it for, like, ages – I have this book of scribbles and…"

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2011-10-07T17:21:00.007+01:00

No script.

On the morning of my forty-first birthday, yesterday, I woke up to two things: A gift from the lovely first lady of Momo of a beautifully edited book of script typography and caligraphic design, and the news that co-founder and mentor of Apple, Steve Jobs, had died.

As John Stewart was to put it on that night's edition of The Daily Show, some industry leaders we seemed to wring dry, watching them die old and in increasing irrelevance. But it feels as if Steve had a lot more to share with the world yet. "Like a space alien landed and left us a new piece of technology and an instruction manual before shooting back off into space again, just as we're shouting: NO! WHAT DOES THE GREEN BUTTON DO?"

And you began to accept the idea that the iPhone was actually possible for humans to have developed. You gullible idiot.

---

It is said that he wasn't an easy man to work with. A man with a drive for excellence. All I can say there is that I've always greatly appreciated the excellence and humanity in Steve Jobs' work. And also that I am very easy to work with.

My whole creative career, wildly unremarkable as it's mostly been, has been equipped and enhanced very largely by Apple. I still have no proper idea how to operate a PC; they are clunky tools of a bygone age to me, and have been since they were new. Macs are human, and always have been by comparison somehow.

I feel sure that many tech heads and devotees will be snapping on WWJD wristbands with the Mac start-up icon on them and frequently asking themselves in tricky situations, What Would Jobs Do, but I think the most duh-obvious thing he did always was think like a human. Like a squelchy bag of fluids and hormones and skin and bone that wanders around getting damn-fool notions into its head and responding to any number of often illogical 'impressions' and 'feelings' and lusts and fears.

Traditionally, engineers and IT designers seem willfully able to leave any such awareness at the door of the germ-vacuumed test lab.

You see, good design, boys and girls, always articulates a perfect equilibrium between form and function.

An engineer, so tradition goes, will problem-solve a new bit of tech in a brilliant way under the bonnet. But probably won't then be able to close the bonnet. Not without sawing a bit off it, five minutes before the glitzy launch presentation. And never mind finding a place for the driver's seat.

A creative, meanwhile, will design something highly intellectual and possibly beautiful – so long as their own sense of aesthetics isn't too highly intellectual as well – but don't expect it to have an engine in the first place. And don't touch that bit, because it's just for show and it'll come off in your… and now you've ruined it, look. You sap.

A designer, however, is a zen guru of balance. He or she understands that the tool they're designing should be transparent in its function – that it should not get in the way of the job one iota. They will also understand, though, that the simpler and more elegant that design is, the more secretly pleasing it will be for the bag-of-stupid-fluids highly impressionable shaved ape using it. The task may need to be done for objective, spread-sheetable reasons, but if the tool puts some unquantifiable joy into it for the tool wielder, he or she will oddly enjoy his or her work rather more – and so undoubtedly do it rather better. An ultimately bankable end result.

And let's face it, it's hard to think of bits of product design that embody this ideal more than some of Apple's.

Has any industry giant created more emotional response from its product launches? More devotion in its fans? More sheer wow factor in its innovations? And has any international CEO worth squillions elicited so much respect and reposted quotes from his speeches as Steve Jobs?

Whether you love or resent the Apple story, you'd be pretty churlish and silly to deny he seemed to know his app from his elbow in business.

..And that Apple's influence in changing the way humans do some things is frankly remarkable. Clever ideas are one thing, but in terms of Making An Actual Difference, delivery is everything.

..Though you may have to wait a devil of a time for shipment.

---

Plenty of folk were reposting Steve's Stanford commencement address from 2005. Most of it is quotable, it seems. Stuff about following your heart and other guff you'll dismiss in a cynical mood… except it's coming from someone who's belief in the way everything in life can help you learn more and do better actually lead him to become, well, Steve Jobs. Near legend.

..That being diagnosed with untreatable cancer after espousing a Death Focuses The Mind, Man philosphy for years, actually helped him focus the mind enough to go on and develop the iPhone and the iPad and beat the cancer.

..That being fired from his own company as a success-legend millonaire when he was still only thirty lead him to wander the Earth looking for new ways to follow his heart and rebuild it from being basically broken by the experience and so along the way found Pixar, arguably the world's most original, warm-hearted, intelligent and successful animation company.

..That dropping out of college right back at the beginning of his adult life lead to him 'dropping in' on a calligraphy and typography course which opened his eyes to the beauty of letterform to such a degree that he built the concept strongly into the design of the remarkable little Mac SE that I first sat infront of with my mouth open in 1988. And which essentially set the whole tone for Apple's game-changing cultural attitude.

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At forty-one now, I may have demonstrated beyond doubt that I am not able to leave the lovely first lady of Momo alone long enough to bother with the sort of drive that will one day change the way humans do things, but Steve Jobs' attitude has helped to change the way I do things.

I shall look at my wife's inspiring birthday gift and remember him and his inspiring desire to make things better. More effective, because they are more elegantly human.

And I shall try to remain encouraged that when life seems to forever be deviating from the script, it may be writing a better, even a more beautiful, story.

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2011-09-14T13:20:00.007+01:00

Get out of the box.

I was intent on responding to something today that is oddly close to my heart. In that, this issue makes everything close to everything – the tiny state of British housing.

The RIBA has actually come out and criticised the design of new homes in the UK today, and it's surely about ruddy time. We are the only country on God's Earth, it seems, to value our homes on number of rooms rather than floor space, AND to have repealed the minimum standards for human living space in building control.

I've said it before, but the British can be a bloody backwards bunch of banana heads. We seem addicted to making life hard for ourselves. And to helping people make money out of substandard work.

There are at least a couple of essays in there for me, I feel – one about the eternal, instinctive clash of cultures between UK Planning and UK developers, and another about the whole point of design in everyday life. Something to do with human wellbeing or somesuch.

The thing is, much as I can only repeat incessantly that you should sit yourself down for three hours and watch all three episodes of charming metro architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff's wonderful, encouraging, wise series The Secret Life of Buildings, before preparing to rise up and take to the streets in very polite protest at the shocking shiteness of British policy towards the public realm… I'm now thinking about little boxes in general.

We seem to love them. Can't seem to think outside them, in fact. Something I felt again lastnight, at a little event in town.

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Did you know that there is a small ton of stuff going on in Bournemouth that's creative and forward thinking?

You did? .. No, I don't just mean whatever it is that you're up to. Though that would surely add to the south coast's cultural GDP on its own, I'm sure. No, I mean stuff outside. Out there. Where the others are.

You didn't? Not surprised. I mean, where would you look to find out?

Co-ordinating comms about anything in Bomo does seem a problem at the moment, and I've thought it for ages. But the truth is… well, the truth is two-sided, actually. One: there's a lot more interesting creative stuff starting to happen in Bournemouth these days than most people realise. And, two: most people still can't be arsed to make the most of it. But if there's a third edge, a rim, holding the two sides together, it is that truth about comms. I can't help feeling that if you build up the critical mass of publicity, it eventually fullfills its own prophesy.

But still. There's work to be done to really change the culture down here by the seaside in our comfy town.

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Lastnight I pottered along to the first of Strawberry Lantern's B:Reel events – a networking event for any creatives interested in film. And to pull together a decent excuse to get together, the chaps behind the initiative had also incorporated the franchise for Future Shorts – the now-international groovy short film screenings nights, of which we've enjoyed a few in Bournemouth over the years. You never know what's going to come on screen next, which is wonderful.

Interestingly, the setting for the night was the now almost-one-year-old Pavilion Dance, overlooking the lower gardens in the belly of the Pavilion Theatre building.

I say interesting, because for me the symbolism of having brand new creative space in the heart of the town is significant. Encouraging. Kind of exciting. And so is the news that Arts University College Bournemouth is taking over the next door unit to do something else interesting; they're refurbing it now. This seems like very good news to me.

Perusing the itinerary for Bournemouth Arts By The Sea fest as I drained a perhaps ill-advised free glass of Merlot on an empty stomach after a frantic circuits class, I was also reminded, as I reached for a chair, that Carol and Kerry and Councilor Lancashire have actually made an arts event happen all over town, with some mighty interesting things all over its schedule. Meant to say this to Carol, who was there, along with many other familiar creative faces and chums who I've been getting to know in a growing myriad of crossing-over arts and business events this year.

Thing is. I had two separate conversations with dynamic local creative forces lastnight, as we waited to wander into the auditorium. And they both made me think the same thing.

Each of them is in the process of bringing in to land a creative media event right in Bournemouth town centre. Both are about to happen at the same sort of time. And each one involves some really significant names in their industries – coming all the way to Bournemouth to share knowledge and insight about what they do. Coming right to us.

That these events are happening here should be big news on the local arts calendar. The crucial, if trivial sounding, credibility of them is a huge thing to add to what individual musicians, film makers, writers, digital creatives and performers are already doing here.

The problem is, we don't have a cultural calendar here yet. So almost no-one knows these things are happening.

And yet that's not the problem each of these good champions of art and business coincidentally relayed to me. The problem is with so many who DO know. ..They can't see the value in the opportunities.

And this is the real malaise of Bournemouth; the culture it has to overcome: Life here is too comfy for many people. It's sleepy and well fed.

Except it isn't. One of the problems may be an issue of diminished expectations. And Mark Kermode's blog post on the subject, taken from his new book, is as erudite a take on the issue as I have read, discovered only this morning. His passion for the problem of it all over the film industry is exactly the feeling I've had for so long. And I shall probably write about that separately too, crucial as creative conviction is over brainless business.

The point is, that people need to think outside their little box to make a difference. Or a dollar. And Lord knows I understand comfy little boxes; who wants to leave the warmth of the airing cupboard and the cotton wool bedding for the visceral uncertainties of the garden? I mean, it might be raining out there. And all I want to do is play on my wheel.

Maybe we're all safer and happier being hamsters. Or kittens. But I don't know about you, I feel the call of the wild every now and then. And I think most people do.

Shouldn't we want more – more adventure from our lives, more life in our comfy lifestyle town?

If we want to further our experience, our skills, our outlook, our reach as artists, we need get out of the comfortable little boxes we live in. Jeepers, our job as artists is to lead the way in thinking outside the box, in exploring, in taking risks.

But I can't help feeling that while kings and queens of innovation and encouragement feel discouraged by the same-ol' same-ol' of local lazy thinking, they are actually to not give up. There is something about building critical mass about this, I feel. About keeping going yet. About saying we made some shet happen.

I feel it for Momo. I feel it for Bomo: Too soon to give up, somehow.

Stepping out of things can require extraordinary amounts of faith, but I think we should demonstrate it. We should raise our expectations, and live by them.

Here, grab my hand.

---

2011-09-07T11:16:00.002+01:00

Off.

I think I am back. Back on it. The floor. The schedule. The lonely road. Whatever. ..But it took a while.

Because, though this is just a quick check-in and not a comprehensive account with diagrams and video and chalk outlines and holographic charts, I can at least report that Saturday night appeared to go actually, appreciably, right ruddy off. And it caught me off guard.

If you're going on at 11.15pm anywhere, I think it's fair to say that you'll have had a long day by the time you're sauntering into the lights with a finger-pistoling wink; how DJs get up to start sets at three in the morning I'll never know. I guess they are, at least, not expected to say much from behind the turntables or the Ableton screen. I was frankly a bit spaced out after a day of last-minute arrangements, and rehearsals and lugging things about and the general levels of nervous energy needed to be of any use on a live project day. I think we all were.

So I was, in the end, fairly disasterously wrong-footed for a few moments as I finally reached for the trackpad on the Macbook that night. A delirious state of mind is easily giddied further when two frames of reference suddenly jerk out of place around you. Two reasonably fundamental things for a performing musician.

Suddenly-screwy sound levels. And a suddenly-euphoric crowd.

What exactly happens to a sound set-up you leave in buoyingly good shape after a lengthy soundcheck with the very capbable, calm, likeable sound chap for the night, goodness knows. What we ask of a set-up – what we ask of ourselves – when Momo:tempo's Electro Pops Orchestra gets up to blast four-part brass and two-enormous-part percussion over a digital mix with a chap-rapping tit expecting to be heard over it all is not simple. So as we ambled off for a late bite that early evening with the sound sounding pretty great, I was a very happy bunny.

It is then that the pixies come and turn things off and turn things down and pull things out so they can ultimately dangle you in front of people helplessly like a time-filling talentless buffoon.

..And yet. Those pixies were, it seemed – certainly from where I was standing – shooed away rudely by the crowd that night at Sixty Million Postcards.

As the good people of Bournemouth's weekend reveling crowded right in and I was left, once again, struggling in my delirium and my sudden spinning gimbal of reference to not trip over, like, everything, and high-kick over the laptop stand and the keyboard and the monitors and the band… the noise in the joint rose absurdly. As each tune we belted out concluded, the place went, well… beserk.

It was a bit of a wild ride. I'm just not used to a room full of people who appear to be showing all the signs of totally getting what I do. I thought for the first twenty minutes it might be a crowd conspiracy to take the pee. I did.

But you have to admit, that band behind me is pretty ruddy awesome.

John, Pat and Dave were joined this time by Nick who together kind of blew the house away as the horn department at the back. When they jammed over Momo's new track, revealed on the night, and I impressively lost all frame of reference including my name and which way on my underpants were, they just made the whole thing sound Very Cool Indeed, while I mixed a drink and filled in the Times crossword at the front or something. Amazing.

And when Mark rolled in authoritatively with the live beats on slightly expanded Golden Age micro favourite Up in the party and Simon rocked in with the congas, the place just went wild. They greeted our playing and Momo's tunes and my berking about like old friends. I was hoarse by half midnight. The boys worked their talents and professionalism crowd-pleasingly hard that night.

It must be said too that the chaps at Sixty Million were very nice to us and thanks must go to Alfie for his hard work ensuring we could play and keep playing that night. Props too to Suzy for wearing down The 'Mill to let us in and for giving up the evening to helm the Momo merch stall.

But biggest thanks to you, if you were there and took part. Quite apart from all the lovely Momo amigos who made the effort to come out and stay up just to see us, if you'd not heard of us before that night and chose to encourage us by making very loud appreciative noises throughout our tiny show, you should know I am very grateful.

Ruddy nora, eh?

Still. Momo has me back at the lathe with no time to luxuriate in the success of one seaside bar knees-up, fab as it felt.

Time to get on.

---

2011-08-31T16:03:00.003+01:00

Shiny, dead good work.

Thought I'd check in as an excuse to stop, collapse in a chair, mop my brow, beg a cuppa, and fain looking dead busy and important. ..Any of this worked so far?

In the week running up to a little Momo show, everything does inevitably get a little telescoped into too little time, and Momo does tend to dish out various other random creative things to deal with at the same time. So that I have to pause carefully every ten minutes to think of my name.

Typical would be this afternoon's itinerary, I suppose. Starting with a precursory website design analysis for a possibly nice new client running a successful art gallery business, I am now prepping mixes for the show on Saturday. I shall then be popping to good ink management partners The Print Room to stroke some extremely, almost absurdly, nicely-specced print for a high profile international (no-pressure) mailer, before wandering the industrial estates of Walisdown to find The Bay 102.8 to possibly boob about on air for ten minutes aroud 6.00pm, talking about myself annoyingly. And at undoubtedly great odds with their normal playlist. Before then wandering the same industrial estates looking for tonight's rehearsal rooms I secured only this morning for a bash through with the beats boys tonight.

Don't think I'll get time to finish sanding that hall wall we stripped in a wild-eyed, unplanned frenzy at the weekend.

Of course, blogging out a list of pretty tediously small-time chores in an attempt to look busy and important so feeble that you might actually want to hold me and cry for me and then hold me out at arms length and look at me squarely and then through tears and with a shake of the head ask what happened to me and then hold me again MIGHT appear to be an un-smart choice on my part. Even reaching the FOOTHILLS of credibility has taken, like, SOOOOO LOOOOONG, Tim; stop acting like such a desperate loser. Which is sweet of you.

But have you stopped to think, eh, that MAYBE, just MAYBE, yeah, I couldn't help myself and then took such a long time to type it all out as I thought it / think it all through out loud on the keyboard here that by the time it's obvious and incriminating I have not only lost the time to go back and correct it and fabricate indifference but also the will and the memory of where this was going and of how to use punctuation Oh, >?<

Huh?

Well look. So I'm on the radio apparently. And then we're doing a live music show on Saturday or something and someone's told me that we're actually sharing a BRAND RUDDY NEW RUDDY TUNE at it and some very nice chums are actually traveling half way around the planet to be there and to fill our home and the little Momo studio with merriment at it all so, y'know… I'm just trying to keep up and keep enjoying it. Fnaffle condescendingly all you want. You can still come along. Like you have anything better to do.

But while you're there, could you confirm that 'condescending' does actually mean 'ascending'? Because it should, come to think of it, shouldn't it?

But yes. A new piece from Momo if you make it down to Sixty Million Postcards this Saturday and are actually prepared to stay up for it. This is actually true. You WILL hear it and it WON'T be online any time soon afterwards.

The usefulness and scale of my creative career may be unbelievably limited, but I can at least promise something on Saturday night that will be dead good.

Especially if you're there.

Momo:tempo's Electro Pops Orchestra ride again

No Fun vs Momo at Sixty Million Postcards, Facebook event

PS: And all the more because some nice man has just delivered a very shiny new pair of classic Oxfords for my get-up. Good work.

---

2011-08-22T09:47:00.005+01:00

Red, white and blue.

I saw them twice this week. The Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, The Red Arrows. I must have seen them nearly fifty times in my life, of course.

I can picture a much littler me waiting on the clifftop somewhere along the long sweeping coastline of Bournemouth's Poole Bay, perhaps holding dad's hand or watching mum scan the skies impatiently – as least as much a child as her offspring in such moments. Waiting. Waiting for the minute-perfect arrival of the nine Gnats, then Hawks – WHAM! – suddenly streaking overhead in awsome precision and control, as their engines scream unrestrained excitement.

Or standing in the rain at one of the Hurn air shows, hoping the clouds would clear just enough for the chaps to do their magical stuff, hanging off eachother's wings with the most exacting trust, to show faithful crowds what human skill can do.

It's been said that the Red Arrows team have always enjoyed flying at Bournemouth. They're very polite chaps, so I doubt they'd tell us it was high time we got them a new portacabin to sleep in at the airport anyway, but still. I can say from various experiences that, at least from very very low aeronautical speeds and from the more reassuring vantage point of Always The Right Way Up, this neck of the woods is a pretty one from the air.

And this weekend it seemed to be a perfect amphitheatre for aerial action as ever it was. Unprecidented rain and flooding and terrible visibility broke dramatically after Bournemouth Air Festival's first apocalyptically washed-out day on Thursday, and Friday dawned bright and clear and warm – the bay twinkling blue from Needles to Old Harry's, and clouds receding to the very roof.

That Friday afternoon I watched the team from Chris and Laura's splendidly front-row vantage point in town, close to the very cross-over of the Lunatic Flying Straight At Each Other that they do, to bottom-twinging applause every time, and directly under the heart they draw a mile high in the sky for everyone with their smoke trails. Never else does burnt diesel bring a tear to the eye quite like this.

Then on Saturday, we took my aeronutty but currently house-bound mother out to our collective back garden on Southbourne Cliffs – on another day of impossible meteorological changearounds from miserable low cloud to glorious summer skies. And seeing the exact same display from the Arrows as the day before but from the edge of it was even more thrilling; when they peeled off across the town at the end of a wide manoeuvre, they were roaring right over our heads. Seeing the lead four start their Strip The Willow, or whatever country dance thing it is they do, from underneath was a lesson in flight precision – those chaps moved in such harmony it looked like CG. Unbelievable. Inspiring. Thrilling. Every time.

---

Someone behind us received a phone call. She was not the sort to hold in news, it seemed, and she leaned into our little gathering as we played festival radio and said simply: "One's crashed."

We looked at eachother. Then up at the clear blue sky again.

---

By now, you know the story. As much as we do. Red Four, Flight Lieutenant Jon Egging, came down in the pretty riverside fields along the Stour, just south of the airfield. Turning back off the runway as he peeled away in a final sunburst for the hardcore fans waiting to see the team land, his Hawk T1 just didn't stay in the air, losing altitude fast as it arced towards the ground. Jon didn't eject. He did put out a mayday, so he knew something was wrong. He appears to have instinctively stayed with his aircraft to ensure it went down safely away from the houses of Throop and Castle Lane.

The Red Arrows don't do crashes. Flying since 1965, there have been only a handful of fatalities – and only in 1971 was that in an actual display. The loss of a pilot at the controls of a Red Arrow display aircraft is a shocking piece of news. Across the UK people are feeling it, and here in Bournemouth, flowers have been left piling up against the lion outside the town hall. Up the slope in the entrance of the old hotel building, the council has had to double the number of books of condolence opened to Flt Lt Egging's family and to the Arrows' wider family. People care about these people.

And it's because they aren't simply entertaining, of course, they're inspiring.

What they do is about endeavor – about the pinnacle of human skills. We can't imagine ourselves doing what they do, even as we daydream about it. And, as the primary marketing front end of the Royal Air Force, they are impressively effective brand ambassadors – those red white and blue trails do more to make people feel quietly proud to be British than almost anything these days. They are, in short, a comfort.

What comfort there is for Flt Lt Egging's widow, Dr Emma Egging, must surely be partly found somewhere in that – in her husband's skill, professionalism and bravery. In his service.

Every time you hear of another young life lost in the front line of our armed forces' work, you probably find yourself thinking the same as me – why did we have to lose another life of that calibre? Of that self-control. Of that knowledge. Of that commitment to service. We need these people in society. Some might be tempted to say now more than ever.

We do need them. And no matter how bloody unjust their premature loss when it happens, nothing can stop them doing one of the most important things they do and can't help but do. Because it's precisely that calibre of person that will put themselves in harm's way in order to serve, and in order to live life to the full. And in so doing, they do indeed inspire.

It's cruelly ironic. Paying such a high price for being prepared to step up. But it's these people who we will remember.

Red Four, you have certainly made your mark. On the sky, and on the mind's eye.

Amazing. x

---

2011-08-15T08:21:00.011+01:00

Back to real life, please.

How are you feeling? Back to the same old routine? The comfortable numbness slowly warming back through you? Me too. Great, isn't it?

Only, I'm now not sure if you get it from keeping your telly box on or turning it off.

..I think maybe I'm a dispassion native now; I can Not Really Care About Stuff all on my own, with or without headphones in or TV blaring. Look at me, a media age child all grown up.

For a few nights last week, however, I fear I may have caught a glimpse of real life.

I know! Me! ..I confess it here because I trust that you're broad-minded and will understand; better out than festering away in, eh. But I did. Even as Twitter blazed away with hysterical headlines about London burning and I instinctively poured the cold water of anti-hysterical scorn on the dramatic language, I could not tear my attention from the live pictures of what appeared very much to be homes and livelihoods actually burning to the ground in London. For no apparent proper reason at all. Other than that we appeared to be all suddenly climbing into that handcart that we'd all been repeatedly told we would be taking to hell one day – like some prearranged geno-suicide signal had finally gone out. ..But, I mean, who sent that memo? Or tweet. I didn't get it. DId you? I'll bet you did. You get everything.

I wasn't ready at all. There was no orientation for this Armageddon team challenge – I had no idea it was scheduled for last week. Yet – bang! – last Saturday people were kicking things in in Tottenham and by the middle of the week England was apparently efficiently destroying itself, and dancing on the smoldering debris. All apparently gone like clockwork, just as in the practices. Which I'd also missed.

I felt like such a fool, not knowing what my tasks were. This is JUST why I always get voted off teams pretty soon after the jokes start to wear thin.

---

But ACTUALLY, it turns out that Mad Max: Beyond Millennium Dome is not reality after all. It is, apparently, too soon to tear the body panels off our cars and strap dead cats to our heads and start wheel-spinning in circles in the NCPs waving spears. Which seems a shame.

True, we can't seem to get our economy to grow at all, perhaps slightly because the world economy is shaking apart with tremours that just won't stop rumbling away underneath its current foundations. True, there is still a bigger gap between the wealthy and the poor here in the UK than anywhere else in the always-claiming-to-be-developed world. True, there are still groups of people all over the country that feel so disconnected from the idea of owning a part in the country's life that it looks like they feel disconnected from owning their own lives. True, no politician in Westminster seems to have words to come anywhere close to connecting those people back to the rest of us. True, this is true in cities all over the world. True, poverty eventually degrades dignity and hope back to animal fears – especially when it is also of education and mental empowerment. True, some people get very used to pissing about and taking stuff sooner than making stuff.

And true, when you feel that you have nothing to lose and nothing to work for, you find a certain kind of bitter freedom lurking in the limbo of it – one that might enable you to give riotous thanks when that limbo is actually at long last broken when something – anything – kicks off down the street. The thrill of change can be intoxicating. Especially when it involves free stuff.

But it's not the only truth.

What is hearteningly truthful is that most people in Britain do own their own lives. Of course they do. They do value their freedoms. Do pick up a broom to not just clear up and start again but to help each other clear up and start again. And you can bet your future on the truth that most young people get it too. In fact, an awful lot of them know the wisdom of the streets a lot more than you do. If you're tempted to use phrases like 'generational moral vacuum' you're not just a bit wordy, you've also been watching too much telly. It's probably you that's disconnected. And by you, I obviously mean me.

Because something else I've realised this week that seems to be unshakably true is that I am a reasonably useless arse who knows very little of the real world. It's no revelation, you understand, but a reaffirmation.

---

You may have done your own version of this during last week, but I spent much of it expending emotional energy pacing in circles declaring things uselessly at the TV, the computer screen and the radio. The riots made me feel a lot of stuff and think a lot of stuff and shout a fair bit of stuff but not do a lot of stuff. Which at least involved not nicking a lot of stuff either.

I want to teach some kid to read. Some kid who could end up leaving school without the ability to analyse themselves and their world if someone outside the self-defeating bureaucracy of the education system didn't step in and help. But who. And how? I'm no teacher. Teachers, I thought, would make excellent teachers.

I want to hug Tariq Jahan for appealing for calm mere hours after his son Haroon had been murdered by hit and run in the riots in Birmingham. And so do you, and so do so many people of all communities up and down the country – a fact that doesn't just validate his inspirational courage, it illustrates it. He shouldn't have had to demonstrate his character under these circumstances, it's clearly just who he is – as a man, as a father and as a British citizen. We cheer him on because he represents values that are important to us. Which is why we want to sob for him and for the family of the two brothers killed with young Haroon that night. But he doesn't need me echoing more empty praise when his son is dead. He needs the justice of free, peaceful streets where he lives.

I want to go to a police station and tell them they're bloody heroes for stepping up to serve their communities in the most thankless of roles, doing it so often as they do with such heart and intelligence. Even as I want to beg them to not give in to the emotional pressure to feel that their job is some sort of military front line – a place with the strategic imperative of Them And Us. Tottenham's gun crime might feel like the front line on some Tuesday nights I guess, same as Baltimore or who knows, but the army's terrifying challenges under fire are fundamentally different to those of the civil police service, even when you have to wade into petrol bombs and bottles and fight – with your life and all your wits and discipline to protect our free streets. But why would your average experienced copper need a flimsy-limbed oaf like me to helpfully point out any of this to them?

I want to go to every kid in the nick after the weekend and drag them by their prison tag to a mirror and shout over their shoulder in their face: 'Don't you realise what you're capable of? You're a freaking human being – you're amazing, you bloody idiot. You're unique in the sodding universe. Stop acting like you don't give a shit and that you're not part of the rest of us – own your own life. Stop acting like a victim everyone wants to punch'. But, as they might politely point out, what the flying fuck-a-ding-dong do I know?

Because I really most want to stand in front of that mirror alone and shout in my own face: 'And THIS is how you're going to make a practical difference to the people around you', and know what it is.

But I can't, it seems. Not yet. Can you?

I'll bet you can. You live in the real world. You're already doing it. But feeling a bit useless when you've already been given all the essential tools you need for independence and confidence that so many youngsters are fighting to find is also part of real life across the UK. Loads of us feel uselessly disconnected from each other. We don't know how to connect our values and hopes to people who appear to act so differently. So angeringly differently to us.

This feeling, in all its different expressions across the British classes, is something that unites our kingdom. But I think there may be a way out for every one of us from that entrapment of feeling:

True freedom is having the confidence to serve.

..I know this. I just don't know where I could or should serve effectively.

When you appreciate the profound value of service – the ultimate respect that it is – you are likely to love the person you notice serving you. And when you demonstrate that gratitude with returned service, they may love you back. Because, after all, love is service. It's something you do. Something you build society with. But it's only real and true and effective when you do it as an instinct, or at least decision, and an end in itself, expecting nothing back directly.

The geniously simple truth, though, is that respect, service, love, all start with the conscious use of two very powerful everyday words – powerful precisely because of their easily-overlooked modesty – 'please' and 'thankyou'. And don't you dare laugh.

This is essentially all I learned from my parents, boiled down into two words. And, as the riots unfolded on the TV in the background, my mother was having her knee replaced for free by the UK's National Health Service and was being calmly served by indefatigably caring professional medical staff, helping her to recover into a chapter of new freedom for her, after years of painful limitation. She spent most of her time in there saying thankyou.

The challenge modern Britain is really presenting us with, even as so many of us give thanks, is how to use our freedoms to serve eachother's.

I shall ponder this some more as I slip back into the comfortable oblivion of responding to my own life's little fires to fight.

---

2011-08-03T19:31:00.002+01:00

Du vingt.

Content.

An interesting word to see written down; how do you imagine I'm saying it?

As a noun its meaning can, in one very specific context, be strangely at odds with the same word pronounced as an absolute adjective – for when it comes to internet marketing, content may be king but it's also a killer for feeling content. Internet marketing is never content with the amount of content you feed it – it's voracious.

Are you in any way at all still with me?

My convoluted point is simply that Momo's marketing is basically starting to pile up an implied world of things I need to apparently start putting my back into creating. It's daunting. And every current independent music artist feels it. There's so much opportunity out there. But it is, as ever, opportunity to do, like, WAY more hard work.

I have most recently responded to this imperative in the only way I instinctively know how: By doing the opposite of that and clearing off – vacating the grid for a couple of weeks and creating very little content at all.

I have, in fact, been con-tent. Or avec tente, if you will – for we have been enjoying a few smooth roads, bon-marché campsites, and plus-swank hotel rooms of France.

---

The lovely first lady of Momo and I have been celebrating something special. But the ubiquity of modern news is such that we could not escape some awareness of events that were at the opposite pole of human experience to ours in that moment. Shocking, heartbreaking stories of tragedy. ..How are any of us to respond to such things? Ever. But especially when you are in mid-toast of something brilliant.

Perhaps, I think, with judicial use of sober reflection and mental compartmentalising.

If there is ever a time to give thanks it is the moment you are aware of just how good and how precious your current moment is. For wolves will steal it at any opportunity – even in apparently safe places. In the foothills of the Alps, or the island woods of Norway, or an expensive London flat.

---

We have been celebrating an anniversary. Ours. Twenty frankly gobsmackingly gone-fast years since our wedding day, on an August Saturday in 1991 in Sussex. Everything I do by Bryan Adams seemed to last as long that summer. And many of the friendships already so well underway then and showing support on the day, are still amazingly on-going today and supportive today.

I suppose a marriage is like any other business; you have to create the very best content you can for it. And guard it jealously. We reinforce the brand idea of our marriage all the time in countless goofy ways. Brands are, after all, built on behaviours. But we've mainly been very lucky. And the best thing I know to do in the face of another day of good luck is to be grateful. And to try to show it.

After twenty years of successfully convincing a frankly remarkable woman to keep living with me and being incredible nice to me, here at the little dawn of a new chapter of new opportunities for us both, I have felt okay about stealing a few moments together – to toast our current and past happinesses, to remember but keep at a sensible distance our sadnesses, and to feel, for at least a short while, something to be cherished indeed.

Content.

x

---

2011-06-24T08:27:00.012+01:00

After School Dance Club.

When I was fifteen, there was a place in town that I might well have considered a kind of mythical land of adventure; an exotic place of fabulous willowy creatures and strange ancient sporting customs. All for reasons that would have been obvious at the time, twenty-five years ago.

Sitting in Bournemouth School For Girls yesterday, however, I felt decidedly odd. Not because I'd blindly followed a faulty Satnav into the middle of the playground or anything – little as I know the backroads of anywhere north of the Cooper Dean, you understand – or because I didn't spot one lacrosse stick while I was there.

No. It was at least partly because when you don't have kids of your own, schools become weird places to walk around out of hours. ..Or any hours.

You know there's a whole industry of community normally swarming around the corridors of the place, swilling up the walls in sudden buzzing torrents of scruffily-branded pupils when bells ring out of the blue; a place as active and familiar to its thronging inhabitants as anything they've ever known of the world. A world in itself; self-sufficient and self-referential.

A ritual, diurnal chaos that parents navigate like harassed ambassadors of other countries – people who constantly roll their eyes and proclaim their adult homeland far away and how this isn't where they belong, yet move as fluently through the cultural rites as any four-foot native.

But by four in the afternoon, the same space is an almost-instant ghost town. Haunted by just the occasional uniformed small person, looking as spooked as you to find themselves in the unnerving netherworld of After School.

---

It also partly felt odd, as I sat on a very school-ish stacking chair in some new arts wing of BSG, because at four in the afternoon on a Thursday I should be making stuff I can sell. Not sitting in some new arts wing of something, listening to other people's kids talk about building 20-meter revolving mushrooms in the Lower Gardens.

Now. I told myself that Momo's whole remit is to be open to apparently-daft random opportunities and that the invitation from little local think tank Conurbation 2050 to pop along to their presentation to council members at the local girls' grammar was just such an on-brand random O for my business. Most especially because I do seem to have a thing in my bonnet about the town and its future, and the chance to shoot my mouth off about What I Reckon was too vainly tempting to pass up.

---

The first couple of hours saw presentations from two levels of ages from local schools about what we should do with Bournemouth. To anyone with any passing knowledge of the local press it will come as precisely zero surprise that every single project proposed for the future of our seaside town by its represented young people was to be built on the site of the Imax, or Waterfront building.

To anyone with a slightly longer knowledge of the local press it will come as no surprise – and, in fact, serve to illustrate well the likelihood of being able to build a metro system under East Dorset – to have heard one old town servant tell the room later that at the 25th birthday of the Bournemouth International Centre this week, someone actually turned up to complain that the BIC should never have been built in the first place. (I believe this chap's wise political response was something like "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET IT GO.")

The point in this time together was, however, really to see what the current generation of school folk really think of where they live. And I was heartened, as much as anything, by how much I recognised those young people. As cybernetic and otherworldly as media portrayals of post-internet age tweeners seem to be, I saw the same bunch of sincere and ordinary young humans I went to school with up there. Except the ones I went to school with were now sat in the audience, feeling as secretly bemused as me to be apparently responsible for everything now.

And I must say that one or two of those ideas presented by my generation's offspring were rather tempting to possibly just pinch.

---

Then came our presentation as a loose association of local ne'er-do-wells – or in some cases, rather-done-wells – to reps from the Bomo chambers. Most of whom had been inexplicably 'warned off' by the famously open-minded and community-spirited leader of Bournemouth Council for some political reason or other. "Will make for a slightly more interesting film version of this" said co-organiser Brian Jenner to me with a grin.

We would be sharing some essentially loony ideas about flying cars and space tourism or similar with a handful of weary, largely apparently elderly councilors – attempting to get chaps who have been serving the local community's pressing village green dog poo issues since the 1970s excited about the practical plans for Bournemouth's monorail system and hydroelectric offshore energy farm and sub-oribital space ladder attraction planned in earnest for 2050.

When I got up at the very end and, just slightly demented from fatigue, began to extol the virtues of community drumming and how dance can unlock business innovation and – most importantly – my Branded Bomo Artz! Smock For Every BH Citizen initiative, I could see I was possibly losing one or two of them. Which, in one or two cases would have had me feeling for my mobile and the emergency services speed dial.

---

No. Of course, distorted comedy vignette aside, these guys are committed public servants and have a thankless, gradually exhausting task. I get it. And lord knows I respect it. It takes a hardy and committed soul to step up to public life and the spread of members who gave up their time to listen lastnight included some personalities you'd be grateful to have on your side in any issue. It's just that some of them have been in the local political groove for a committedly long time and have certain peccadillos of perspective. Some of the fresher council faces who joined us in that half-empty school hall I thought represented some heartening new outlook.

I mean, I'm really only good for shooting my mouth off with no qualification. I get that too. But my hard-earned experience at doing anything whatsoever in public is the ability to do it with gusto to almost nobody in an empty school hall somewhere. Which must count for something, right?

Sometimes the creative road takes you to odd places and claps its metaphorical hands to get you to sometimes literally dance. And when it comes to the creative life of this neck of the woods, I am prepared at least to do the odd unco-ordinated jig if it will have some kind of effect as a fertility dance to the seeds we're trying to sow in people's minds about the possibilities around us as we ponder the future.

I think there's a lot of potential to unlock in this part of the world, and I'm happy to turn up and drone on about it if kindly asked.

---

Below is my little speech about the cultural hopes for the future of our inspirational but politically annoying part of the world. A very-much work in progress that barely touches the issues. I will write a full manifesto about it soon, no doubt. Mean time, many thanks to local innovation legend, Matt Desmier, for furnishing me with a few uncharacteristic Actual Facts and to Brian Jenner and local MP Tobias Elwood for foolishly inviting me along to hear a bad example of speech writing.

See what you think. And feel free to read out loud in my slightly pompous over-sincere faux-posh Southbourne accent.

---

Inspiration and innovation:
Re-imagining the heart of the south coast.
How arts and business can encourage a clear vision for Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth.

As we consider all these ideas and plans and exciting thoughts for the future of where we live, I often feel quite encouraged that so many people have so many big ideas for the place. Over the sumptuous breakfasts we've shared at Conurbation 2050 gatherings, I can feel quite inspired.

But I think there is one issue that ties all these different things together; that presents itself as a fairly immediate challenge, but also as a potential solution.

The one question that I believe hangs over everything we’re thinking about today is: What is Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth’s vision?

Now, to ask such a question is not to question all the hard work and ideas already going on in all our local authorities to address that every day. But, you see, I don’t believe that it is my local authority’s job to give me a vision. I think it’s our local authorities’ job to cleverly facilitate and focus and amplify and encourage my vision. Your vision. To tap into what’s already true about where we live – the resources, the people, the potential. To help it work better.

And I think the way to unlock our vision for the heart of the south coast is to champion ways to bring together business and the arts. And do it obviously.

--

The challenge I think we really face is one of branding. Now, branding is a fairly soulless media word that media types themselves shy away from because it can confuse – but branding is none-the-less the challenge we face because it is concerned with perception; how people see us. And how we see ourselves.

A brand isn’t a logo. It isn’t a typeface or a tagline or a tee shirt. It isn’t a product – it isn’t even an initiative. A brand is simply an idea in someone’s head about you. About your business. When someone says the name of your product, what’s the first impression to drop into the mind of the listener? That’s your brand.

So the question is: What do you think of when you hear Christchurch, Poole, Bournemouth? And just as importantly, what do potential customers hear?

..It matters, because it’s silly human impressions that guide our decisions. It’s my daft romantic notions about a place that make me want to go there on holiday, or not.

Our job as local stakeholders is to clear the way for the very best ideas and impressions of our part of the world to connect with its audience.

And I think the very best people to help us do this are the creatives.

--

This is already a place of great creativity and media work – did you know that? A place where arts and business are already working together. For example:

Right in the heart of the area, on the busy borderland between Poole and Bournemouth, we have two world class universities. Bournemouth University is home to the National Centre for Computer Animation which provided more CGI artists for the film Avatar than any other single country (54 in total). It’s also home to the Centre for Digital Entertainment and the country’s only Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.

Earlier this year, Bournemouth University and the National Centre for Computer Animation was held up as a prime example by Ian Livingstone OBE in the government-backed NESTA report into skills for the visual effects and computer gaming industry.

Last year the Academy Award for Visual Effects in a Motion Picture went to BU graduate for his work on the film Inception.

Meanwhile, Arts University College at Bournemouth graduate Simon Beaufoy won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire. One of Simon’s previous films, The Full Monty, was written whilst he was a student at the institute and only narrowly missed out on an award.

Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tilman is also an AUCB graduate, as is internationally renowned rock photographer Andy Earl.

Significantly too, the Academy Award-winning visual effects studio, Framestore CFC, who have produced effects for all of the Harry Potter movies, Avatar and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory amongst others and have studios in London and New York, are so enamoured with the graduates being produced by these two universities, they are opening up a third location here in Bournemouth.

And David Sproxton, Founder and CEO of Aardman Animation, employs more graduates from the two Bournemouth universities than any other location in the world.

Meanwhile, the more than 100 creative and digital agencies locally boast some of the best in the business – award winners in their fields, from web, to advertising, from games to marketing.

Dance SouthWest based their exciting new school, Pavilion Dance, right in front of the pier approach in Bournemouth’s historic Pavilion Theatre – creating a dynamic new facility drawing dance students and other creatives from across the south right down to our seafront to learn and share their art.

And while The Lighthouse attracts and encourages arts coverage to the area like no other venue between Southampton and the West Country, the BIC has placed itself firmly on the big name music and comedy grid, bringing audiences in to see some of the biggest names in pop and TV – even as the Christchurch Regent Centre does more to champion local theatrical talent and independent film throughout its packed schedule than perhaps
anywhere else in the region.

But besides the media talent here in Christchurch, Poole and Bournemouth, the area is also home to a burgeoning creative scene for practicing artists of all disciplines – painters, poets, writers, sculptors and musicians, with new bands and music acts searching for venues locally all the time. Between the music hubs of London, Brighton and Bristol – right in the middle is our conurbation. With a lot of creative people trekking past it.

People are meeting in upstairs rooms, cafes, empty retail space, small live venues and in front of big stages to celebrate and invest in the arts right here, where we live. And a lot of people from beyond the area already know this.

The trick is to realise its potential, and do all we can to make it obvious. To enable it to bring our brand alive.

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The practical truth is that brands are built on behaviours. If we say we are an area ideal for business, we must provide an effortless, well-connected transport and business infrastructure. If we say we are a tourist destination, we must provide the very finest hotels across the age and budget markets, and we must give tourists ample reason to spend time and money here.

But it is the arts and culture that hold the key to this. It’s the writers, designers, artists and performers who will create the buzz about being here – not simply by providing more of the attractions themselves, but by having the skills to articulate the idea of the area to potential investors – from family tourists, to international business. To help us speak in the right tone of voice to the right audiences.

If we realise this – and the potential of it – then we must behave accordingly. We must let it feed our vision, let it make our vision obvious. We must provide facilities that not only encourage big creative business to relocate here, but which encourage the creative individual to work here. And we must build those facilities in symbolic locations – purposeful, obvious and proud. A place very obviously friendly to innovation.

We have a vision for the area as the creative heart of the south coast.

A vision not for an elitist niche, but for everyone. A cultural reputation that would inspire business and tourism across the board. An eminently deliverable vision – because it would be tapping into something already happening here, already true. Built from the ground up – from the individual pixels of people practicing their art, being who they are, professionally and personally, right here in the colourful crossroads of the south.

A vision of our area as one where anyone can find ways to tap into their potential. Find inspiration. And more than that, something vital – encouragement.

We believe that throwing strategic weight behind arts, culture and media would bring the heart of the south coast into focus as internationally as it would locally – the outlook we should be aiming for as we look ahead to 2050. Or even 2015.

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2011-06-13T16:17:00.006+01:00

Showing off local talent.

It was a good headline from the Echo this week, as they previewed Tell And Show in Wednesday's edition. For, it seems, there was indeed a lot of local talent showing off at Champions at our little event lastnight.

Now, almost a day later – and already into rather different and pressing creative Momo challenges – I essentially just want to pass on much love and thanks to all for a joyful evening, and for how everyone's love for the vibe made a weirdly wet Sunday night very warm.

Firstly, to Suzy of Strawberry Fields Represents for creating such a madcap night. A highly original rosta of arts and music on one night's poster our seaside town has not perhaps seen before – and she made it happen for everyone. Her enthusiasm and encouragement for so many creatives seems quietly superhuman sometimes.

But a swiftly-following and sizeable thanks too to you if you made it down. Or even just made it obvious you wished you could have joined us.

The enthusiasm from everyone was immense and wonderful. I can speak for the whole gang, I feel, when I say that we loved giving you a blast – and that you felt it. To all the Momo amigos in particular who turned out to cheer on a chum – it's unlikely I didn't tell you in a soppy delirium that I love you at some point lastnight, but if I didn't, I meant to. ..Which doesn't make you less special than you thought if I did, you silly sausage.

Props too of course to all the artists I met and was able to introduce to everyone. To Sally and the big-hearted vowels of the Funky Little Choir; to demure young songwriting talent Adam Dupree and the immense family of his, believing in him so much they've secretly been building him a web presence to help market his obvious talent; to the consummate entertainment professional Ishmael and the thought-provoking word-dextrous talents of the Poets Republic, for opening up the night's imagination early; to the impressive, synth-geek brothers Newport, Neil and Dave, who felt like instant comrades, inviting us on stage to muck about all over a new tune of theirs – a huge, adrenalin-goggle-eyed, multi-drumming high for everyone to end the night on. Class. I must say thanks to Paul for helming the sound so coolly with a tricky mix to say the least, and to Tony at Champs for letting us in in the first place.

And a special thanks too to one of the key people in the line-up – Rupert Southcombe, for DJing just the right tone and segueing together the whole warm, groovy, quirky personality of the show from behind the decks. A legend.

Yet, among my sincerest thanks must go to the boys. The gentlemanly talent on stage with me lastnight was a humbling comfort for an undisciplined show-off:

To Simon Mellish – for adding an incomparable percussive extra dynamic to the whole groove of the show. A drumming legend, serving our sound on an exciting new level.

To Pat Hayes – slide supremo, for not letting his international trombone talent be phased by a fool flailing his arms just to his right.

To Tom Walsh – for making it through hail and storm and broken tree all the way to Bomo from the capital, to still blow the horn with such infectious enthusiasm.

To Mark Crowe - for stepping in on sax as a pro so seasoned, he simply rode with the madcap attempts to combine electronic daftness with real musical skill.

And then, of course, to John. Mr Herbison is the talent I lack – the horn band leader, not merely sourcing and then guiding the ensemble, but slaving over interpreting the parts – bringing them to life with the harmonies and dynamics of a world-class talent. A demur one it is a privilege to feel able to rely on on stage, and in studio.

But lastly, to Mark. If Mr Adkins were any more encouraging to Momo, I'd have to salary him to try to assuage my sense of grateful indebtedness to him. Over many years of playing together, I have always felt safe in his sense of groove and style behind the drum kit. That he and Sharon and Beth want to cheer on Momo:tempo quite so enthusiastically is just an honour. His excitement, as a cynical old brummie, is an essential fuel to my enjoyment of what we've done with Momo so far. And hearing those beats come alive… Amazing.

---

I said to someone lastnight that I think I honestly felt as much enjoyment having a legitimate platform to introduce and encourage other people as I did having one to introduce and encourage me. What a thing – to be handed the opportunity to stand in front of a few folk and say: Have you heard about this?

Forgive me for being an emotional booby for a moment, but how many times can any of us say that we find ourselves in the most natural of places – right where we are most being ourselves and feel most at home? In this life, perhaps not often.

I can at least say that I know what it feels like, however. Because, in our random little show on a rainy Sunday night in Bournemouth, I felt it lastnight.

And I think it showed.

---

BHBeat: Momo, Funky Little Choir and more of Bournemouth's creatives 'Tell and show'

Strawberry Fields Represents: Music, poetry, film and art – huge success for Tell And Show with Momo.

2011-06-09T09:58:00.003+01:00

Room for excitement.

It is little things that usually make a person happy. Don't you think?

A very well-timed cup of tea, or a nice word from a client out of the blue, or finally buying a new pair of socks. Or someone asking you all about you for an hour. Or having some of the finest local musicians surround you in a small rehearsal room playing your tunes and making them sound basically ruddy exciting.

Yes, all is very simply well in those uncomplicated moments.

Momo is actually in the middle of developing a global event brand – a great project opportunity that's affording us the chance to pull out some production stops for an international client. Good work for the more sensible end of the business.

Meanwhile, we're also putting the finishing touches to our Tell And Show event at Champions on Sunday night and it's a slightly different challenge. For one thing, as a neighbour said to me this week, the line-up sounds like a whole festival. And I have to stage manage it into an evening.

But yes, part of that particular challenge involves turning up in the local paper and doing the odd little interview all about Momo, and getting to rehearse with some real musical talent. To say that Mark The Drum and I are excited this morning after lastnight's full run-through is a bit of an understatement.

And I've just signed off the payment on the production copies of The Golden Age which should arrive tomorrow. And I believe Mark The Print is delivering me a large poster this morning too. In fact, I believe some new shoes are even arriving by delivery this morning – so vanity levels are up a bit chez Momo.

Still, as exciting as all this creative work is, it's still as much work as it is play – which comes with lots to organise and deliver well. I just hope I have enough mental room to do just that.

Will keep you posted.

BHBeat interviews some bloke from Southbourne

---

2011-05-26T10:38:00.003+01:00

Lyndey & Blair airs

In about twenty minutes from now, I'm going to miss a TV show. And it's a shame, because it's one I've worked on.

Yes, Lyndey & Blair's Taste Of Greece goes out on SBS One at 8.00pm tonight – but in Sydney currency. In UK money, that's 11.00am, and geo-blocked to foreigners like me. So, despite the show's entire focus being relaxing with good food and wine, I shall be psyching myself up to do the next job over coffee. But I shall toast, none-the-less.

As has been said in numerous places now, the show has naturally turned into a fitting memory of young Blair, who's sudden death in April still brings me up short when I think about it, despite the fact we never met. Felt a bit like we did. And it's just stomach-pit odd to think that he's gone. Especially when you see how full of sunshine and beans he and the whole show is.

I do hope Lyndey finds some joy in the screening of this first episode. But I'm thinking of her right now, and how broken hearted a mum will feel watching it, so soon after events.

---

On a personal note, I've loved developing the tunes for this production. Most of it was written in the dark dark months leading up to Christmas, in Momo's jumbled temporary studio upstairs, but they're pieces that rank amongst my favourite. So, understandably, I'm chuffed to be taking the wraps off them at last and sharing a first selection online from an hour-long bootleg album I'll be pressing into the hands of my poor chums.

To check out Momo's own news story on the show, with links to the official site and, of course, the new music on the Nuevo pages, just hop on over to the Promo story here.

Time for coffee, then.

Here's to the sunshine.

x

2011-05-20T17:56:00.004+01:00

Creative qualifications.

I don't have many qualifications. Not the sort that make me sound as if I've spent proper time really memorising some proper-sounding stuff. You know. Like English students do, to help them later in life in pub quizzes.

I have a bit of paper somewhere that tells me I have a full degree in graphic design, I know that. But I was never sure exactly what an academic badge in a subject so fluid it would let me write about Star Trek for a final year thesis would really do to impress a Cambridge don, for example. I think they're all more likely to be secretly into Doctor Who.

Going back to a place of learning today – and specifically the first place of learning in which I was exposed to the frightening possibility of being expected to look for professional creative work after my time there – I am reminded of my ignorance and inability to memorise stuff.

Anything.

My name.

What I'm supposed to be doing instead of this.

---

I've spoken at Arts Institute Bournemouth once before, at fine artist and fab tutor Sarah Grace Harris' request. It was a couple of years back at least and I think I presented diagrams or something. Confused us all. Today, I simply showed a lot of examples of something I do still drool over – pretty typography.

If you're a Foundation student just starting out on your creative journey of exploration, you might not have yet considered letterforms as gorgeous things to play with in your work. And after today's little rambling chat from me, you might well now know just why you'd not considered it.
But I hope I'd gotten just one or two type nerds hiding in the group just a little piqued with a sense of possibilities.

Thing is, as I sat in the slightly imposing, even academic-looking lecture theatre alone for ten minutes, I felt as unprepared and unqualified as I ever did back in the summer of 1989, getting dressed down by the course leader for mucking about with music instead of knuckling down with my studies.

Twenty-two years later, the vibe around the building – in fact, much of the paintwork around the building – hasn't changed at all it seems. Not for me, anyway – despite all the impressive additions and new cafe outlets. Sarah's office desk is more or less in exactly the same spot of floor as my desk was back then as a student. And not just mine, but that of fellow student and frequent critee, Tim – who was, all these years later coincidentally with Sarah and me and our other halves at her mum's house at the weekend. Gassing on with me about music. How things play out. And how some things don't change. Some quietly wonderous things.

But, though I still distract my graphic design work with musical daydreams, and music work with typographic daydreams, and though I'm still not sure what I really know about artistic discipline – I do now seem to have perhaps one important qualification at least. Experience. A bit of it. And it feeds my creative enthusiasm, at least.

Something I'd like to find ways to pass on.

---

Nice, therefore, to also spend time with Bournemouth Creatives on Wednesday night. A place of significant enthusiasm for the arts. And perhaps for that reason at least, I felt qualified to be there in the half light of the ol' Winchester, swapping creative stories with people a bit like me:

Playing about in creative matters and still loving it. And still learning loads doing so.

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2011-05-13T19:27:00.003+01:00

It's business time.

Can't be sure, but I think I was on the radio this week. Even more implausibly, on a business programme.

I know. You don't need to say it.

Of course, Brian Harries, on the very good-hearted local station Hope FM, had no idea who I was or what my credentials as a businessman were likely to be, as I perched opposite him in the sumptuous Romanesque marble-and-drapes surroundings of Studio 1 in the roof of the YMCA in Bournemouth. And after explaining it to him on air for a bit, I'm not sure he was any the wiser.

But he did kindly let me attempt to be funny for the shameless majority of an hour on his lunchtime programme, on Tuesday. You know, in that way of mine that would get you sighing: "Ah, Mo..." with a little empty look of pity, before you go get on with some real work. You know the way. You do.

Brian firstly introduced me as his long-lost twin.

"So, explain it to me, Timo," he then said, looking be squarely and beardedly in the the eye, "how does your business survive?"

Now, a lesser man in my position would have frozen like a severely under-RAMed PC being asked to suddenly process a high definition broadcast-quality final render of an entire Pixar movie. Not me.

I simply said cooly: "Some creatives feel that it's good to specialise and get really good at something. That's not me." And looked him straight back in the eye like this made sense. Holding in the strong urge to additionally blurt out: "Titting about on the radio like this doesn't help me knuckle down any, mind."

What a pro.

Despite this, Brian was generous in his warmth and welcome of my particular brand of unrehearsed 'personality'. And he described Momo's music as "stupendous", which I politely asked the work experience lass, Paige, to write down somewhere obvious.

So thanks to Brian and the Hope FM crew for inviting me on and not throwing me straight off, and to Suzy at Strawberry Fields for once again being my schedule's personal Shuffle function.

As I posted on the Business Show FB wall later, don't let Brian Harries' wan elfen translucency fool you, he is not so easily upstaged.

Listening as I type to Annie Mac on Radio 1, I don't know why I ever imagined that Momo would make more sense on a popular urban electro dance music show. Really.

---

2011-05-05T17:08:00.002+01:00

In words and tweed:
Sort of playing the Day of Hugs festival.

Well, when your publicist asks politely on Monday morning whether you can do a gig on Friday evening, you don't immediately say yes, do you? Not when you'd told the band we all had a couple of months before any live dates and we might as well all go for G&Ts at the Swell Chaps Dead Creative Bar instead of practice.

I wish band life was like this for the Electro Pops Orchestra. Lounging together everywhere in casual sartorial brilliance like an eclectic gang of hipsters in a series of knee-bucklingly-cool Mad Men social scenes. If I can muster the costume and photography budget for the boys, we will spin this fable in the publicity shots.

In reality, the boys are too cool to be just lounging around within reach of Kimmerage on Good Friday evening and I stepped into the fray intrepidly alone. Sans cool gang to do most of the work for me.

But yes, Momo:tempo did play an exclusive pre-season, out-of-the-blue, boutique set at the Friday night warm-up to Dorset's very friendly Day Of Hugs festival, Easter Friday night.

We didn't exactly bill it as a Berk & A Laptop set, but I shall be doing so from now on. Entertainment can, it turns out, sometimes be portable, even for an electronic musician.

What the punters made of Momo's assertive electro-pop cabaret at half-midnight in a blacked out tent in a heavily socialised haze, lord knows. But I'm well used to that look. Somewhere between What the hell is this happening in front of me and: Is it wrong or at least too soon to admit liking this? To say nothing of: Is it me or is that actually tweed?

I may produce a range of Momo-branded tees:

FREE
YOURSELF
FROM THE
FETTERS
OF
CREDIBILITY.

[Download Momo:tempo at…]

Best bit may well have been watching everyone try to process all this while I belted baritone Yiddish lai-lai-lais at them, arms flung wide over the relentless international theatre of The Travel Writer. Was worth it just for that.

Ah. Who wants to fit in anywhere anyway. Not when you're already having fun.

Look out for more live dates soon.

2011-04-18T20:26:00.008+01:00

The sea.

Sometimes life is like being afloat on a raging sea in a little rowboat, just trying not be washed overboard.

So sang Neil Hannon in a song that has always made me think of my father – a tune called Charmed life.

Dad spent much of his time living with the attitude of someone who considered their life to be a charmed one, and did it with a touch of theatrical cheek reminiscent of this twinkly Divine Comedy song. Shame I never got to play it to him; I remember him for that thankful, upbeat attitude more than I do for the slow debilitation of his last months, or the many trials he took on in his 74 years.

Of course, typical of his instinct to combine a little theatre with a little passion and a little pragmatic risk-dodging was his life-long affinity with tall ships and his apparently equally life-long avoidance of the sea.

---

Now, whether you ever set foot on a real boat or not, Neil's simple lyrical point rings instantly true. Metaphorical boats seem to have figured often in my private journals over many years – despite the fact that my own idle affinity is with flying.

I've spent some of the last few days, however, literally trying not to be washed overboard, somewhere off Plymouth. ..While taking careful extra risks to wash some things very definitely overboard, on the shameful occasions my brave belligerence with the methodical Cardinal Chunder briefly caved.

Four nights bunking in berths with some old friends and bobbing about with a couple of new ones was a healthy alternative to another embattled week in the bunker; I took my journal and jotter pad and didn't feel the urge to touch them all week. Hanging off sheets and hanging onto my breakfast filled each day's imagination sufficiently it seemed.

---

I'm grateful to the good skipper King and the rest of the gang for inviting me help crew a another remarkably organised demi voyage – this time aboard a beamy 44-footer. Because, apart from all the fun and fine cheeses, sailing reminds me of the need to feel a little pushed.

So much of our modern life is comfortable, even when we feel justified in moaning about it. Physical effort is a good perspective-giver – and, much like running, sailing cleverly uses the body to get to the brain. It hands out numerous contemplative life lessons in its careful risks and little co-ordinative demands.

Effort and teamwork dawn on you as costly concepts when a boat needs getting home safely in all weathers and all stomach conditions. If you don't stop mewling over the gunwale and start winching the mainsail to wind, who will?

Another kindly member of the crew, is who. But the fact remains, it makes you realise that you too are another member of the crew.

Naturally, much of the time British weather will pack in far more different life lessons afloat than life itself will dish out in the same time – stretches of plodding calm with little wind in the sails can last for a long time in daily life, but just a morning off the Eddystone lighthouse. And at the end of four days of bare-boat chartering, if you're able to afford it, you're highly likely get to go home to a stable bed and pull the warm sheets over your head.

When life breaks a wave over your bows, it's unlikely to be so easy to dry out, I think.

---

I'm prepping to steal one of the bank holidays to mix an album version of the tunes I've written for Rampage's last major TV production involvement – Lyndey and Blair's Taste Of Greece. As you may have heard me say, it's been a thoroughly positive project for Momo, producing some of our nicest little tunes and I hope the bootleg soundtrack to a few friends' summers this year. And part of the feel-good on screen was young Blair himself – Australian TV chef Lyndey Milan's charming, buoyant son.

An actor and voice-over artist and clearly fit young chap in his late twenties loving life – and bringing a very likeable amount of it with him wherever he goes, it seems. It worked nicely in the show and I've certainly been hoping to meet him for a beer one day.

Today I had an email at tea time that blew the wind out of my sails a little – for in the small hours of Sunday morning, Blair died in Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred hospital. Apparently of acute myeloid leukaemia, more or less out of the blue.

---

Not knowing Blair myself, I can say little. Other than that this is still shocking news. My heart is sincerely with his mother and family, which seems to have included a lot of people.

What can any of us do in our little rowboats, when all we want to do after some weather is get carried away by the tide?

With sadness, I think of Blair and trust that all those who have felt swamped by this week's sudden news will remember the life and the theatre and the fun he brought them sooner than the sadness of his premature leaving.

We make sense of the sea largely by sharing experience. And always we survive the sea by pulling together. Somehow. Despite how we're feeling.

A little helplessly, I say: bon voyage, to a bon viveur.

x

---

Blair Milan: Sydney Morning Herald.

2011-04-04T10:55:00.015+01:00

Whole minutes of heroic work.

55 of them. Or was it 53?

To be honest, I was concentrating so carefully on getting over the line without giving up and sauntering over to shake hands with the crowds, I forgot to look at the clock.

And this is how you can tell a winner. As I rounded the last corner and could see the pier, two kilometers in front of me, I realised that it should be just at this point that the instinct to Really Go For It should kick in. The winner would think this without thinking.

Whereas the average me, at this point, will think: "Oh, come on – we've essentially done it; let's give up" and go on to instantly think about cups of tea and a nice sit down. I had to fight this instinct right the way up to the finish line. Crowds leaning over the barriers cheering us all on for the last 100 meters didn't so much spur me on as galvanise the more motivational forces of pride and shame to stop me from pulling up with a sigh and wandering past the clock checking my nails to join the medal queue.

But, yes – on Sunday morning, I joined with a heartwarming Pier Approach-ful of other semi athletes and hobbled round with my gammy leg to complete 10K in 55 minutes. Or possibly 53. But without giving up. A personal best, from someone who hadn't run more than twice round a sports hall without stopping for fluids in his life, a week before the Bournemouth Bay Run. Can't complain.

---

Of course, as I carefully pointed out to Nick, co-founder of Team Daisy, I was clearly showing them some love of significant proportions by turning up and joining in.

Not merely by agreeing to run ten whole kilometers without pulling over for coffee at any point – only pretending to peel off and sprint oh-so-amusingly into Urban Beach as the masses thronged by the famously congenial seafront bar – but more significantly by agreeing to the team dress code. A tee shirt.

Wearing tee shirts with shorts takes me back to games lessons at school. This is not my best look. The fact that I will now be appearing in umpteen photographs looking, at least in my head, like I did in the famously incongruous photo of me sitting next to, I think, Daley Thompson in an inexplicable sponsored sporting something when I was 13 is an act of generosity indeed.

In this absurd captured visual moment, Daley looks muscularly bored and vaguely humiliated by having to sit anywhere in frame with a skinny sweat-slick-fringed sports-shy sweets scoffer who any legendary decathlete should rightly have despised. I'm pretty sure he could sense, with finely-nuanced instinct, the unmistakable presence of the haunted fear of balls and of catching and of winning.

How did an icon of physical prowess and country-representing determination find himself sitting next to the sort of despicable underachiever who would try to worm out of games at every opportunity, play talentlessly in the appalling school band just so he could use his 'music' badge to whiningly jump the queue for lunch, and who would go on to get Bs in Art and English Language O level and be too apathetic to be proud of the two feebly best grades of his life? I almost disrespect him for doing so, had he not had some contractural obligation with his sponsor.

Well, so I tend to feel like that guy on the occasions I'm forced into an ill-fitting tee shirt. And trying to compensate with charisma is an often ill-advised tactic, just making it all worse, somehow. Really, it's best you weren't there.

Still. Despite the inner demons and a dicky pull on the calf before I even crossed the start line, I'd say the chance to be a part of Team Daisy was a great honour. Nick and Emma attracted 20 runners to join in, from clouds of friends across the country who all swooped in to stand with them in their incomprehensibly hideous hour of need. And they've already raised over eight grand for their chosen charity so far.

Sitting in their sumptuous garden that afternoon, marquees groaning with friends and food and music and love, I felt a bit inadequate next to their decathletic-like heroic efforts. How anyone loses their first child in labour and turns it into an athletics team and a garden party and photos in the Echo and nearly ten grand's worth of giving is just humbling. And, in a way, empowering. If you have a will, life can always find a way.

So, as I start a new working week and attempt to scale the mountain again, I shall do so with a little more determination. And a few days of slightly fewer carbs.

And I will remember little Daisy. Lovey, though you didn't even get an hour to make your mark, you've still made a difference to lots of people. And lots of people will remember your name. I'm proud to have worn it on a tee shirt.

Good work, poppet.

---

( PS: Since discovered my chip time was 54:32. Climbed a mighty 18 places from the start to the finish, coming in 571st out of over 1300. ..And go on. Click to pics 1 and 2 on this page of thumbnails for the proof that we were actually there. I should have followed Nick's brother's lead by turning up in a comedy wig and moustache, appearing in the middle of all the team shots and not actually running the race. Seems obvious now. )

2011-03-28T21:44:00.005+01:00

QBST.

At last. Sound a little horn that sounds like a bee playing a swing number in a little bee big band that sprays multicoloured pollen from the brass – the winter is over.

Bloody nora. What a long one. How long ago do bright young days of summer seem? The clocks going forward on Sunday morning has given the evenings a properly surreal sense of light and spring jollity, distinctly at odds with all we've become meteorologically accustomed to and with just about everything on the news.

Blossom in the garden? Fragrant fecundity on the air? Grass clippings on the garden path? Has the world gone mad?

Maybe. For in these times of upheaval and change and shifting social points of reference, I may be adding to the entropy of comfort.

Sunday morning I ran eleven kilometers in about an hour.

Me.

I know. Apologies for continuing to upset your understanding of the world.

---

Don't feel too destablised. I plodded unathletically so you wouldn't for a moment feel you couldn't have done a more impressive job of it, had you seen me pass by. But, y'know – it's further than I've ever run before without wising up and jogging off left into a café.

The Bournemouth Bay Run is next Sunday, and at least I now know what the distance will feel like. Of course, I bet I'm the sap who stays back with the two slow ones in solidarity for the team, while the others pee off for the glory. But still, I'm hardly doing this for glory, am I. My surest way to sporting glory is the one I've always instinctively adopted: don't turn up in the first place. Lord, yes.

---

Still, the underlying nagging surreality of just about everything at the moment is there in the gorgeous weather too, it seems. For working here in the new studio with the windows and door open, birds twirpling and insects carousing and blooms swooning in the breeze, does all feel weirdly, oddly, disturbingly akin to working in the original shed – the one in my parents' garden – more than twenty summers ago.

Which doesn't feel much like having a job, it has to be said.

Sure, Typo has me busy with various honest bread & butter projects of graphic design and brand comms, while the wider creative To Do list includes some potentially groovy Momo-ey things ahead. So I am holding onto a sense of adult responsibility by confident fingernails, as always.

But… I dunno. The breeze isn't filling the sails sufficiently at the moment, somehow. I recline at the tiller with a beer and squint up at the masthead as the wind arrow swings lazily against the blue canopy of sky sweeping overhead and it's all very restoratively relaxing – but that drooping mainsail is a bit of a disappointment.

---

I think, in fact, it may turn out to be case of Quarter End Droop. Which there are sadly no mineral supplements you can take for.

What I mean is, that we have just three days left of the first quarter of 2011. Goodness knows why I now think in businessy fourths of the year, given that I work in the garden drawing boxes and playing the keyboard badly, but there we are. I am none-the-less psychologically at the end of a chapter this week. A pretty mentally full and, QED, tiring one.

And, as any professional athlete will tell you – and as I can now say from some experience – when a finishing line rounds into view you can basically start to give up.

Thing is, of course, there is much to be doing – Q2 is idly threatening to be a whole new tank of colourful goop to wade through, for which I must be prepped, trained and ready. Momo has gigs to prepare for in June, and sonic sessions are due to start on the great follow-up LP for Tempo next month – about which I am very excited, naturally. And along with all that hoo-hah goes branding development and video production ideas and band practice and costume hunting and… the whole bally shooting match, potentially. To say nothing of all kinds of other creative funny business to engage in while attempting to pay at least some of my bills with a semblance of dignity.

All of which really could turn 2011 into a slightly crazy year by the time the summer's been shooed away by the next bleak midwinter. Man. I'm tired just writing that paragraph.

But from here in the spring garden, all that seems a long way off and not quite real. As I look up at those sails again, I am reminded of the depressing thought that the only way they will be filled is if I take a very deep breath myself…

Well, while this is a dispiriting thing when you're only a quarter of the way into the course and you're already knackered, I am reminded at least that not only is the sun out and the days longer, my aerobic fitness is improving all the time.

>breathes in sharply<

2011-03-21T12:04:00.002Z

Comic Sans Relief

This is one of the reasons why I shall always love graphic design:

http://crmag.co.uk/hgAR3d

2011-03-21T08:46:00.006Z

Whelm meant.

How whelmed are you?

You can see where I'm going with this. Are you over or under?

I for one currently feel suspended in a sort of twilight world weirdness, by being a little overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. You'd think this might cancel out into a happy equilibrium of being comfortably whelmed. Well whelmed, if you like. But, ah, if only us human persons were simpler creatures.

Actually, give us a few simple things and I think we are simple creatures – a tickle behind the ear when we fancy it, a regular spot of tasty tucker and a new Ikea book case to doze in front of and many a human would be docile and complicit, I'm sure. Being fairly sure the house won't explode inwards on top of them might help the siesta too.

But right now, I'm caught in this nether world of mute stress. And I wonder if it's because I may be currently thinking about things at too many levels at once. ..See? There's another one.

Not clever levels, you understand. Even D:Ream's enthusiastic keyboard player could quickly lose me, had he gone too much further over the event horizon in lastnight's Wonders of the universe. Properly clever I am not.

But from pictures around the Pacific rim, to voices across the Middle East, to the backdrop of our national story, to the tapestry of our little town, to the seismic testimonies of the individual lives around us and the daily tasks ahead of us, I could easily feel so overwhelmed by the complex narrative of everything that I feel practically powerless. Reactively demotivated. Sofa bound.

How the hell would I cope with worrying about my children on top of all that?

Probably the same way I cope with worrying about my social life – by putting all my efforts into keeping the near-impossible equilibrium of trying to get them to laugh and trying to get them to stop laughing. That might keep me mentally occupied until they left for uni. Not that they ever would.

Honestly, I am considering never leaving my little creative bunker.

After all the talking and thinking and feeling and not feeling and making tea and humming and hahing and pacing and list-making and pencil end-chewing and hand-wringing and even bell-ringing – what to actually DO? Where, I mean, to start? ..With… everything.

Bah.

If anyone has any good ideas about where I can actually turn out to be any ruddy practical use, would they forward them on, please. Otherwise, I shall continue to stand back and do my bit by trying not to be some clumsy oaf in the way of all the real humanitarian talent. Ask me to pass something to you. I might manage that. ..So long as you explain clearly what it is and where I can find it and what the difference is between my arse and my elbow.

And this is probably what it means to feel whelmed. For the ancient word actually means to be capsized. Taking shelter under your upturned boat, in fact.

Except.

Except I have actually decided to cautiously crawl out from under my upturned life raft and be a bit Forest Gump about the whole thing – by mutely starting to run.

A little person called Daisy will be on my mind as I run, and though running is not much practical help for anything, it is at least a response that involves the heart as well as the hands and feet.

http://www.justgiving.com/timo-peach/

You know CPR, right?

2011-02-13T13:06:00.004Z

Taking the plunge.

I have, it seems. And only six weeks late.

Now, now – don't come over all Kevin McCloud on me; what's a few more days of going quietly demented in a cluttered upstairs room? Mr Rochester's misses did it happily for years without anyone finding out. I'm confident I had a good fortnight left in me before I'd set fire to myself in the attic.

But ring out the damp towels and perhaps a few bells, for I am in no need of being hosed down – I have taken the above mentioned plunge and am writing this from the glorious and modest new environs of Momo 2.0, with the first fresh cafetiere duely decanted.

The Momo Grados, the durbek I haggled for very ineffectually in Cairo and the old Illy tin of pens are all symbolically in place around the new working space – and I've played the first musical sounds through the studio speakers. I chose a little Horrace Silver, to make the place sound instantly cool and chic and sophisticated. In the forlorn hope that this will all one day rub off on the puttering boob swinging around in his chair in the middle of all this pre-ambling ambience.

I'm in.

Yep, the old desks will need replacing and we have yet to install the ordered chaos of a wall of shelves, to say nothing of anywhere for you to sit were you to drop in, or of any of the half ton of creative crap still strewn around the surprisingly large new bedroom upstairs. But still, like Flynn, I am in. And typin'.

---

If I don't shatter something expensive and somehow irreplaceable on this very sophisticated slate floor within the week, I shall ask someone high up somewhere for some sort of certificate of unbelievableness. And also for a few smart rugs, while I'm asking.

And I have yet to test the fortitude of the sound restrictive technology built into this little music fortress for the sake of the neighbours – tootling jazz tunes don't really push the bottom end. But here on a Sunday morning, I haven't the courage to take Deadmau5 out of the safe sonic confines of the little CD radio player we've had him in during decorating; the big monitors will have to wait for a dead Tuesday afternoon or something before being warmed up any.

Still, all this fussing and fuddling about aside, I shall be coming to work tomorrow morning for the first time in eight and a half years to a working environment that looks half way professional.

I do, yes, miss the bright orange room I played in for a decade. But don't kid yourself any more than I will be that this very slightly more grown-up-looking space will not be a glorified play room. On the contrary – stand back, this is what I do.

---

First bit of work won't be musical, however. If I can relocate my missing director from his lengthy travels around the globe, I believe we have a signature tune to finish for our new travel series, but otherwise the next important thing on the Momo:tempo agenda is… a new album.

Yes. Believe it, giddy fan. Have a sit down.

And yes. I. Am. Excited.

But… Before making a sonic start on all that, I suspect there is a bit more notebook-carrying & scribbling to do, as well as a spot of new-software-installation-nightmaring to do.

And besides, today I am modestly attempting to develop a proposal document for an entire arts festival.

I tease with this, of course. And yes, of course, it's an idea with such sizeable practical ramifications that the chances of I and the fledgling team gathering around it blanching at the delivery schedule of it at some point early on are very high indeed.

Yet. Sometimes you feel compelled to give up a few weekends to build an ark in the garden.

Nope. No bloody antelope usually turn up, I know. Which is usually a good thing if alligators and the entire arachnid family also follow suit.

Then again, whether it's been raining a lot lately or not, there is simply a time occasionally to take the plunge and dive right in. The time for piddling in the shallow end is over. It is time to jump over the side.

..Now. If someone would like to tell me what all this means, you shall find me in the kitchen making some more coffee and choosing background music.

Welcome to the future, gang.

---

2011-02-02T07:58:00.003Z

End of the beginning.

I am onto disk four.

Over the last couple of days I have, between working on comparatively noddy music cues of my own, been working through the quadruple box set of John Barry: The Collection.

Latter-day Bond composer and arch Twitter wit, David Arnold, referred to him as The Guvnor. Many called him a legend. His family and friends simply knew him, I think, as a very funny Yorkshireman.

I know him only through his music, as the bloke who first managed to intrigue a rosy-cheeked childhood Timmy with the idea of actually liking orchestral music. Took a long while, but it was John Barry's scores that helped sow the seed of understanding for me, I think.

And I guess, if we know someone only through their art, then their death can't connect too fully; their art is still with us. Still, the idea of such a character and talent and big name of British cinema gone through a heart attack this week is sad news.

---

What was it? In the cloud of acclaim that swells around many an accomplished obituary, what was it about John Barry's music that could stand a chance of connecting with a thirteen year-old filling his head with Street Sounds electro and Kraftwerk, for example? What made him 'great'?

Five Oscars, four Grammys, the odd BAFTA and Golden Globe, and decades'-worth of iconic film names against your own – including eleven Bond flicks - might make you feel pretty great. By all accounts, John didn't change with the success. Perhaps true Yorkshiremen don't, whichever part of the world they live and work in.

I think, trying to analyse it in the back of my head since Monday's news, it comes down to one very vague word: atmosphere.

John Barry did that magical, mercurial thing so essential to film music, and any affecting music – he created atmosphere.

---

Yes, but how?

I guess it starts with a natural and – if I dare say such a casually diffident thing about such an arguably beyond-angelic human gift – reasonably straightforward ability to write tunes. Barry always created very recognisable melodies and comfortably flowing themes.

Despite the 20th century's laudably conceptual efforts to bash a good tune to bits in the desire to see music, as everything, in a new way – and as much to simply overthrow the naff, I should think – the power of a good tune is as strong as ever. And crucially, it is often at its strongest in the context of a dark, flickering movie theatre.

There is something weirdly compelling and affecting about a ruddy great riff repeated uncomplicatedly or a huge theme turned over and over against pictures on a big screen in the isolation of I Payed HOW Much For This Ticket?! attention. It gets to you. And the simpler, the apparently often better. Weirdly, given how much you're giving it attention.

I suspect strongly that Barry knew this. And I suspect it was on instinct when he looked at a movie scene, as much as any conscious strategy as a composer.

His arrangements of his simple tunes are always elegantly calm. Even when making a drama. Everything sits in its place in the orchestral pallet in a very considered way. Everything feels reassuringly deliberate.

Perhaps you could argue that his music is a pleasing synthesis of old fashioned and contemporary, which to audiences in the late sixties and seventies worked a particular kind of magic – since taken a little more for granted.

His ability to create something musical you could take out of the theatre with you – a hummable, recognisable theme – is old school, but his lack of snobbery in the face of a consistent time signature or a repeated phrase, more in keeping with a bit of pop music, is of its more modern time. He may not have been drawn to make arch modernist machine-like music like a contemporary such as Philip Glass, but Philip Glass is an acquired taste to say the least. John Barry makes sense to everyone.

---

Melody, clarity, consideration, structure. Fine, fine and blah, blah. Composers stuff – excuse me while I YAWWWN. But where is the spark of magic? What makes it, if there is one? Where am I hearing it, at least?

I think for me it might turn out to be something buried in the man's psyche as a jazz musician.

Yes. Everyone likes to claim or demonstrate the understanding to bestow the influence of jazz. Everyone secretly wants to be a public clever-dick. Lord knows I do.

But it's simply true that Barry was, as a musician, a horn player. And no-one plays the horn without being surrounded by an awareness of jazz.

Interesting then, isn't it, that one of the signature sounds in John Barry's arrangements is the strings - it's those strings, baby. They speak for him all the time. He puts those big tunes right up top in the mouths of the strings. Not the horns. Not usually. Why?

It comes back, I suspect, to his presumably innate sense of atmosphere. Strings are the orchestral cat-gut short-cut to atmosphere and emotion. They just are.

But when you put that together with a very calm clear structure of sound AND an understanding of how jazz harmonies zing like no others, you have the ingredients for some true cinemagic.

---

Though I risk boring you sideways with the little 'knowledge' I have on any technical subject whatsoever, it is worth noting that jazz likes things to clash. Notes in particular. Personalities often. Budgets and expenses almost always.

But on the piano keyboard at least, you can see the energy a clash of notes creates. A typical 'jazz' chord essentially shoves in a fistful of notes in the middle. But it's because those notes in the middle, making a brain-tingling something are actually notes at the top, but dropped down into the energy of the chord.

Whuh?

Scales. Doh Rey Me Far So etc. A musical key has eight normal notes in it from one octave up to the next. If you number those notes, a typical pop music chord uses notes 1, 3 and 5 to make a basic, essential harmony. Ta-daaahh. Music. Harmony. The very outer gates of writing a tune.

Now, up top, notes 6, 7, even 9 – yes, 9 – start to add a weird flavour to the harmonies. They don't play ball with the main notes. They sort of subvert them. Accent them. Annoy them, but tickle the brain. And they unlock different progressions of notes and harmonies that start to do arguably more interesting things than safer pop harmonies.

There's a whole debate there. And ultimately, you're sometimes in a conspicuously jazz mood – say, when making a cafetierre and reaching for am intellectual-looking book… as if you ever get time for that – and sometimes you want to be able belt out a karaoke chorus. It's all good.

The relevance of all this unschooled music waffle is that John Barry took some of those troublesome, jossly, Jolsony, clashing jazzy notes out of the scrum of a smokey piano chord, scrubbed them off, suited them up, smartened their hair, straightened their bow ties and placed them elegantly into the mouths of the strings.

When everything is calmly, harmoniously structured, to very deliberately and with no fuss have the violins descend semitones or sustain the minor seventh, creates tension. A very controlled, deliberate kind of tension.

It creates atmosphere.

Jazz, respectfully subverting the mainstream.

And just occasionally doing something bare-facedly sassy with the horns section as well. I mean, come on – James Bond's own theme is a sudden riot of swing chutzpah. It's bonkers. And it grins from ear to ear.

And, though Monty Norman's name is against that particular piece of legendary music, I suspect privately he simply wrote the almost-naff guitar riff. I'd put money on the belief that it was John Barry who wrote the swinging blast of horn section finery that kicks in after it.

Masterfully instinctive. Warmly clever. Reassuringly witty. Universally likeable.

What a legacy to leave behind.

---

As I consider all this at the start of a new creative year for me, I am beginning to wonder whether my own staggeringly more humble musical abilities and achievements are facing an end too. The end of their beginning.

Or are we ever past the beginning of our work and learning?

I don't know. As a musical great closes his book of work, I feel like I've barely opened mine, even after all this time.

Or maybe it's just that listening to his music makes me feel as excited as a kid all over again. I can certainly feel quite an atmosphere.

John Barry – a creative inspiration and example. Here's to the future.

2011-01-20T21:45:00.002Z

Take the A game.

I did my best at circuits tonight. Made a bit of effort. Gently pushed myself to reclaim some of the positive mental altitude after a slough of December.

I came home and gave a little speech, inspired by a gently inspiring chum in a quiet, bohemian pub lastnight, about bringing my A game to things from now on.

I received a phone call less than five minutes later asking why I wasn't at a meeting. With the minutes from the last one. Everyone was there. Waiting.

What we've learned from all this: Bring your A game or don't bring yourself. And don't be a natural and complete bum head.

Good work so far, 2011.

---

2010-12-31T18:33:00.000Z

Big life.

On this morning’s Desert Island Disks, the very last one of 2010, Kirsty Young asked her castaway, shoeless sixties pop soul singer, Sandy Shaw, whether she considered herself to have a healthy ego.

Sandy replied: “Oh definitely. My husband says it’s the size of a good few solar systems. But I prefer to call it my big life.”

Having finally caught up with the last ever season of bonkers science fantasy TV convolution, Lost, the night before leaving to spend new year with loved ones in Sussex, I wonder if any ponderings of my own life on a desert island – whistfully wandering barefoot along the beach when I should be fashioning something vital, probably – would turn out to be not so much black smoke and broken mirrors but a realisation that a lot of pointless running around disappointingly wound up with me simply being dead for a lot longer than I’d realised.

If so, can I state now that I’ve long had my suspicions.

Thinking of loved ones who’ve said goodbye to other loved ones this Christmas, however, quietly asks the question again: How big will your own life adventure have turned out to be?

How big will you have made it?

---

Those important figures who’ve left some people who figure pretty importantly in my own life at the end of these twelve months happened to demonstrate something of a smallness of ego, actually. Without diminishing the complexity of the stories they left behind. You don’t always have to belt out a show tune in a spotlight to grab the emotional attention. A quietness falling silent can leave a deafening emptyness.

At the end of a difficult year for countless people in as many different ways, I wonder how easy it will be to party tonight – the turning of it from an end into a beginning.

Considering 2010 here on the last day of December, I’m not sure how much the Big Society has changed modern Britain for the better yet, for example. We’re only six months into our bold coalition vision, but I think our annual dream of a Victorian-looking Christmas comes complete this year with the added realism of many of us pulling suitably austere expressions of repressed misery as we consider the workhouse and child labour and dying of something ghastly in a bitterly cold room.

Though you can take an analogy too far – the UK is currently doing all this without the backdrop of a burgeoning manufacturing base.

No, I think what we all desperately need now is a more precious comodity; a spot of sunshine. After starting and ending 2010 with blizzards and closed roads and heating bills we can’t afford, it’s surely time for some metaphorical and literal sunshine.

And I’d like to help.

---

Do you remember what happened this year in between all the freezing fun?

Go on, think. Bet you’d forgotten.

A summer. One of the best we’ve had in the UK for a decade at least. Really. We did.

Back in June I wrote that we were in the middle of:

“..a summer so hot and sunny and summery, it’s blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. ..Now? How long ago does that feel? We’ve been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There’s a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks’ takeaway Chardonnay glasses.”

Now? How long ago does that feel?

Thing is, as I end the year, I am straining to inhabit a creatively summery vibe – which I hope to be able to pass on to you soon. For I’m writing the little score to a TV show set in a part of the world I now feel astonished to have never visited – Greece.

I mean, why have I never seen this ancient heart of Europe for myself? How have I never pottered from the Parthenon to an Athenean taverna, or driven the meandering hills of the Polipanese, or dozed on the beachfront of an Agean island?

Well, musically, I sort of have now. Without leaving Southbourne. Thanks to Benny and the gang at Rampage, who’ve been making this little odyssey for an Australian production team. And I wish I could post up some of the results right away, to warm your winter blues. Try to hang on until the end of January if you can.

---

Ending the year on such a musically sunny note forces me to remember through the murk of a chilly first winter in a new home that still feels like someone else’s domus and into an anno-more-positivus-than-I-may-compos. ..Though I think I may be getting my cod ancient Greek muddled up with my cod Latin there. But run with the philosophy of the precarious segue, polit.

For I should remember that for Momo, 2010 has been significant. I confess to ending the year too pooped to party-pop, after twelve months of draining the emotional batteries a bit, beaving away in a dark room alone rather far from sunlight.

But if I can steal two seconds over the To Do list-heavy Christmas week to consider what’s happened this year, I should possibly feel nothing less than excited.

For, though my little creative life looks no bigger than it was twelve months ago, with no killer punch breakthroughs to headline a Christmas letter with, I will wake up in 2011 not where I was.

Momo:tempo – music – has filled most of my agenda since January. If not my wallet. Though it’s contributed to that too.

And the real contribution I should understand it’s made has been to the rather more valuable treasure pocket of my soul.

No one may be listening, but I am doing what my soul has told me to do all my adult life – make sweet little tunes. I’ve made a lot of them this year, as I listen to a bootleg compilation of some of the sweetest moments to my ear, as I continue to search for that musical sweet spot. I can’t quite imagine our home without so many of them that didn’t exist as we celebrated Christmas 2009. Ask me for a secret copy if you fancy.

But perhaps the thing to most treasure is that I no longer need to worry that ‘nobody is listening’ or ever say such a thing. For a handful of people who mean a great deal to me now are listening. Intently. And I’m not sure what else might matter to a creative than that; one or two of you will ask for that bootleg Momo:tempo 2010 sampler, I know you will. And I can’t say thankyou enough.

---

2011 will be another hard working one for Momo. But as we finally paint the walls and plug in the electrics of a symbolically brand new studio this week, I can’t help wondering if this new year that we’ll be hugging in tonight won’t be a big one for our household at least. One with adventures in it we can’t foretell.

As I think of those who won’t be with us this new year, and hold tight for a moment those who will be, I hope to say with spotlight off and ego sensibly compact and travel-sized, that I am looking forward to doing something partly inspired by them all which makes life as big as I know how to make it – create a little sunshine in the gloom.

I wonder if 2011 will be, in some new ways, about bringing people together to make a little sunshine.

I can’t say I’d ever wish to have romantic notions about being marooned. About being deserted inescapably. But getting washed up on a foreign beach with eachother is something quite different. The start of what the process of living life is really all about – so raise your glass to them with me:

To new adventures, gang.

x

2010-11-12T08:46:00.006Z

Not a Christmas album.

Mid November, then, and the year is running away. It has clearly had enough. It is upstairs now, stuffing things into a case with as much hurried dignity as possible. Of course, as it rushes around the bedroom trying not to freak out completely in front of you, you might be able to stall it with some Can't We Talk About It line. Or an instinctive Baby, It Will Be Different This Time, even though you've no idea why it will be different this time. But essentially, the writing's on the calendar.

A Dear Jan, if you will. Hand delivered.

The point is, 2010 is soon to dump you. And you had such plans.

I certainly had some plans. But I didn't imagine that one of them would be to decide in mid November to write an album in time for Christmas.

---

Something has dawned on me this week with a little extra clarity. Not the fact that as the year approaches its end I am still inexplicably an idiot and not a sudden clever person. I have this written over my desk in case I should forget. Simply says: 'You're an idiot.' I find it relieves the pressure.

No, this dawning realisation was about the job of writing music, given that I've written a fair bit of it in the last eleven months.

Catching up with director Ben and nosing around the cool new offices of Rampage Studio in an impressively central bit of London town on Monday, our conversations left me with something to think about. Namely, that I'm not writing two telly scores for him – I'm writing a telly score and a fully-fledged, sun-drenched, deep-vibed chillout album.

Ah.

What's the difference?

We have two little TV shows on at once between us, to say nothing of any other work, and I marvel that Benny boy is still functioning with such customary politeness, having had about eight hours of sleep since May of last year. I'm not sure how he's able to stand. Or blink.

But in discussing the two projects, I began to see something of why he was yet to fall in love with the tunes I've been writing for the second show, a travel doc around Greece. Given that a couple of the first tunes out of the box have me smacking my lips with vain pride and foolish ideas of blowing the whole budget for bazouki and flamenco guitar on them. ..Why the 'meh'?

There is a subtle difference between the two in the way they use music. One uses it like a TV show score – snapshot atmospheres to place you in various different locations emotionally. And I have been having some loosely chaotic fun with penny whistles, mandolins, tambourines and ukuleles over the past few weeks as this first project is set in the UK. The almost dozen tunes written for that edit are finding homes fast.

The second show, however, uses music like picked tracks from existing artists. The Oh Good It's This One approach, showcasing slick shots of beautiful Aegean scenery.

The upshot realisation is this. And I think you'll find it a profound one: This second approach takes sh**loads more work.

---

Now, of course it's all work. And it's all fun. And what I've just said there isn't really true. But a very great deal of screen music has to be deceptively simple.

I mean, a very complex mix of sounds and rhythms can't half get in the way sometimes. I'm a big fan of Less Is More to picture anyway – and not just because it makes you look a lot more egotistically restrained and intellectually creative just by getting to spend a little more time in the local caff. I like this.

Very simple tunes can still have a magical effect on screen. One big riff with a beat feels fab in the cinema. One hummable string line from the orchestra repeated enough times pulls at the tear ducts in a very satisfying way.

Of course, where budgets are bigger, the composer has more work to do to create the atmosphere an audience may be expecting. As Bond composer David Arnold recounted, a sound engineer once told him he should hope not to write any more machine gun chase scenes; The orchestra has to make a very involved, big noise for minutes on end just to sound appropriately like a big budget action film, only to be almost drowned out by explosions and gunfire and metal screeches. But that's what's needed.

With budget telly, however, you're not getting to score umpteen parts for an orchestra. It's you and a box of tricks and a little sweat and half your fee going on a clever soloist of some kind that delivers. And typically, the work is in sheer numbers of cues per half hour, rather than depth of arrangement in each tune. Often, TV will bounce from one mood to another to segue through the time cheerfully – up to 40 bites of music in 22 minutes of screen time in some cases. Eesh.

When you're talking travel docs in particular, the most vital job you'll do is make sure the viewer feels very instantly like they're in Hong Kong, or Marakech. The really obvious thing to do is, in some clever way, what you do. You just do. And I find working up a local flavour like this great great fun; writing simple atmospheric tunes rather suits Momo, as you might imagine. But it's not the place for production as deep and laboured as a Momo:tempo album. All those complex beats and layers of production would just get in the way.

..Except, I may now be wrong on this. Cranking out tunes to a deadline and a budget is one thing. And I've rather loved the work that's come out of doing this all year.

But our Greece project is, it makes me realise, different. What, I dawningly realised on Monday, walking through London's chilly evening lights to the Tube, Ben wants me to do… is write a new Momo album, from which he can select tunes to showcase.

Deadline's mid December.

I am now, as you might imagine, sitting down with a layout pad and a keyboard and a gigantic pot of coffee and a prayer cushion.

What I am not doing under any circumstances is writing a Christmas album. Just an album for Christmas. One that sounds like a big bath of Greek sunshine.

Feeling the heat a bit here. But no running away; just a spot of sweat.

---

2010-11-01T10:44:00.009Z

The launch of a grand expedition,
without the fanfare.

Well, so, here it is. Embarkation day.

Amid a flurry of... one bit of local publicity, and no oompah band on the quayside, the Momo:tempo debut LP sets sail today. Flourishing its topper to a tiny but appreciated handful of enthusiastic well-wishers.

For The Golden Age of Exploration has been released today. Into the wild.

It's out as a download initially. Physical copies are still rather rare preview animals but proper CD editions will be available in due course, most notably to be picked up at live events.

Which, speaking of, no – didn't happen this week as hoped. So we're looking towards Christmas for a local live blast of some tunes from the album, plus one or two other treats we have in mind... if we can find a ruddy venue in our own town that's suitably salubrious and happy to host a noisy horn section and an unfunny faux posh tit for forty minutes.

---

I'd like to say that I spent today doing press conferences and a glitzy launch do somewhere, or at least having coffee in a favourite civilised haunt, but I am, alas, tidying the temporary studio enough for a tech chap to find his way into it later. Bet Duke Ellington didn't let printer problems slow him down. Never mind.

I'm also doing a few less than exciting-sounding administrative things and some little jobs for Momo clients that have been piling up after a couple of weeks of laters and earliers that have left me with more character than normal around the eyes.

Still, November 1 dawns as a good day, I must say.

Sunny and bright, with exciting early progress on the development of the new studio and some very nice early cuts of things to a couple of scores for the telly I have on at the moment. Pete the string pulled a blinder on Friday in particular, getting a session back to me for a couple of cues in time to make a first full episode cut to the client. Sounds sumptuous, and I wish I could post it already.

In the spirit of Russell Cotes

Meanwhile, the very nice Pat Gough from erstwhile local publication, The Daily Echo, was kind enough to take me to coffee one morning recently, and wrote up his impressions publicly right here. Lord knows why he and his editor thought it worthy of space on the flatplan, but still.

Very kindly too, Kerry Curtis, marketing manager of the Russel Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, allowed us to do our photo shoot in there.

It's not explicit in the article but I was expressly keen for the chance to do so for two reasons – firstly because Mr and Mrs Cotes' beautiful house is such a suitably sumptuous repository of their own mementos of exploration, but also because I so love the place as an icon of Bournemouth.

..And, okay, thirdly because I've long had a soft spot for the elegantly saucy statue at the top of the grand staircase. Girls in their knickers can be art, everyone.

I shall wax lyrical about the museum more in future, but I am humbly chuffed to be associated with the place in any small way. Go there, if you haven't lately.

So. On to new adventures now? Definitely.

---

2010-10-31T09:03:00.002Z

Jean and Michael.

How do you judge the impact of a person's life?

..Why not ask an impossibly broad question? I know.

I ask because it's a question that never really goes away when you work for yourself all day, doing very little to do with disaster relief say. And also because two particular people have posed the question to me anew lately. By dying.

They didn't die together. They didn't know of each other at all. And, in truth, I knew neither of them really at all either – one of them for many years, and one of them since the Wednesday before last.

---

There is a brutally efficient way to measure a life's impact. Efficient because you can simply count it – and it's the one we all feel the pressure to add to from time to time: Numbers Of Units Shifted.

You can fairly simply consider the influence of someone's life by that reckoning. Which is, presumably, why Rupert Murdock is a hero to some.

He turned a fledgling British satellite broadcast business with a handful of staff into a business empire large enough to bias the entire media political debate of the most influential country on Earth. The self-proclaimed Reasonable of America have had to rally on Washington DC this weekend to try their best to be even noticed by the US media, such has been the glare and noise of Murdock's sensationalist influence through Fox News over years.

But if that's the measure of a human life, then most of us will never flicker the scale of impact, will we?

And if it turns out that those who have seemed to shift enough units to make the impact-o-meter make a sudden oofing noise actually find the experience of shifting those units pretty empty and meaningless in the end anyway, then what's the point of that exactly?

No. If all you want to do is add to a balance sheet, you may find in the end that it's equally taken away something from another column – the one snootily marked Your Soul.

I suspect that making a meaningful impact has more to do with being prepared to stand up and be counted. As you.

---

Michael Larsen was young when he died, just over a week ago. He was 28. He grew up in Downtown Minnesota, a very ordinary city in America, and went to the local high school. But, though I had never heard of him, a lot of people in the Hip Hop community certainly had.

Under his stage name Eyedea, he'd built an impressive reputation over ten years as a freestyle rapper – a champion of underground verse. Rising up through Emcee battles and taking prizes at prestigious competitions like Scribble Jam, he showed a formidable confidence.

Young Michael could pull rhymes and thoughts out of thin air with effortless dexterity.

I heard about his premature and unexplained death from UK rapper and writer, Scroobius Pip. Pip's own credentials were there in his impassioned blog post about just how much Eyedea's talent and attitude had affected him.

I then clicked to a YouTube link of Eyedea freestyling on the influential Wake Up Show. What a watched dawned on me as something very sobering – natural talent. Undiluted, unselfconscious – if that doesn't sound ironic when describing a freestyle rap battle champ – and challenging to all pretenders. This guy didn't have to spend hours labouring over verse, he just tapped into the ether and pulled it out of the air.

It reminded me of the early days of Hip Hop that added something to my young teenage years, and how much I marveled then at how some guys could just do such things with words without chewing a pencil end and practicing.

And it was clear he'd been loved for his gift. Now, inexplicably, that gift was gone. And for many people, it was obviously leaving a big hole.

---

Jean was someone I knew through our little local church. She must have been, I should guess, somewhere nearing her 80s when she died, but for the last 20 of those at least, she was a regular supportive face at the various incarnations of the little Southbourne fellowship we so often found ourselves turning up at.

Some people seem to become old people. Any old person you don't know is just an old person when you're young, I guess. But there are some who defy the aging process in your mental image of them – perhaps because you simply know them as people and are as baffled as they are that the numbers on their clock have apparently added up so much, or perhaps by sheer force of their personality. Some people appear to get comfortable acting old, despite all the discomfort. And some people have a light in their eye that marks them out as a person, not a type of person. Some people look as if they still get it.

Jean still got it. Or at least, my impression of her when we occasionally swapped greetings was that she still got it. Whatever it was. She was funny. She had a sharpness of witty response that showed self awareness. And when someone looks like they are aware that they are in the room, usually, other people are too. I always was.

Which is why, perhaps, hearing that she was no longer in the room left a proper moment of absence in my mind. As little as I knew Jean, that twinkle of hers was the spark of life itself, and it immediately left a negative shape by going out.

I would judge that by simply being herself, Jean made quite an impact with her life. Perhaps the most crucial kind. An encouraging one.

---

One commentator on this morning's A point of view described the loss of her school art teacher. She was, to over-simplify an eloquent ten minutes of heart-felt description of this creative woman, an obvious force of nature. The sort that often finds it hard to find stability in their private life, and hard not to influence everyone they meet publically.

And perhaps a former art teacher who enthused about how to see the world in every colourful sense is the perfect person to illustrate the best way to measure a life's impact.

Inspiration.

If you can generate even a little of that in someone else, you are perhaps adding in microcosm to the greatest impact the universe has ever felt.

Life itself.

Here's to Jean and Michael. They will be missed.

---

2010-10-05T07:13:00.003+01:00

Renuisance.

And so here it is. The last day of my thirties.

I'd like to say that I'd given this significant calendarial moment some weighty emotional consideration as I watched it march toward me out of the diary, but the truth is that I've spent so much of this year either waiting for files to upload to music websites or waiting for unforeseen problems from solicitors or waiting in queues for telecom call centre operatives that I've kind of backed into it with a little surprised yelp. This big yeti of a date.

However I'm supposed to be feeling about it, decade number five does indeed begin tomorrow.

And they're telling me it's when my whole life will begin.

This first bit doesn't count, apparently.

Thank crap for that. Because everything will be different this time, baby, I promise.

---

So how will I be reborn, d'you think? In this whole new life?

Well, it is true that I have already been radically re-cast as a house owner. Like a terrible format change to court a whole new audience. It's not realistic. The characters just wouldn't do that.

I mean. Me. Living in a whole bleedin' house. I've been a flatlander all my life and now I get to both go up to bed AND just outside to the garden. Weird. I sometimes have to go up to the bedroom just to look down at the garden before going down and out to it, just to feel normal when taking the bins out. I'll acclimatise, I'm sure.

It's true too that, though the Arnewood studio is now gone, with a must-be-admitted moistening of the eyes, the forthcoming weeks will see a less romantic-looking but worryingly proper-looking new studio take shape. Momo 2.0 is on the way, I can say. Though you can bet your life that while it will involve a spot of nice re-badging, there will be little fundamental overhaul of the basic operating system.

And, dare I consider it, I have slightly more work lined up for Momo:tempo in the coming weeks than Momo:typo, as I write. That's new.

I even have an album coming out officially. November 1st, they say. That too, is conspicuously new. Even if the tunes aren't. Or the continuing lack of launch gig venue.

But maybe, if some whole new 're-birth' is meant to kick in on Wednesday morning, I need to make it happen. By levering open the little-accessed maintenance panel that adjusts the attitude matrix.

Not that I'm not sure I want to go tinkering with any matrices. This is all very cosy, this Doesn't Really Count life so far. Wouldn't be pleased if I woke up in a blinding glare with a black Charlie Brooker leaning over me in a terrible pullover, mumbling that I've never used my eyes before and that I'd better get used to hard bunks, strip lights and hand-pumped toilets. And giant metal spiders trying to kill me with lasers.

No, maybe it's simply time again to go find out some shet.

---

Every now and then – I think it's happened once before – my personal ignorance reaches such conspicuous levels that I start to notice it. Find myself saying garish faux pas like: "Who's Justin Beiber?".

It's then that I need to Go Find Out Some Shet.

Now, anyone normal and lucky enough to live in the information age would simply flick to Wikipedia and momentarily find some made up facts about the subject in hand, easily sufficient to satiate the vain impulse of ignorance, and so move on. I do this too. But I'm wondering whether it's time for something more. Something a little more deliberate. A little more studied. Determined. Goal-minded. Something a lot more branded.

A renaissance.

I am thinking it's time I filled in some more blanks. Found out who this Justin Bieber really is. And Che Guavara. And the president of Belize. Or Belgium, come to that.

I am thinking of going so far as to use the ol' online mutterings here to post the results. A kind of selectively educative journal. But don't hold your breath. Not until I've found out exactly how long the human respiratory system can let you do that for, anyway.

Of course, the pressure to do this regularly could just be annoying.

Mean time, I need to pull some trousers over these pants and write a piece of music for a commission given to me lastnight – by lunchtime.

Not sure a convincing way to renew my whole life is with another last-minute deadline.

Creating new music for cash. How annoying.

Happy birthday.

---

PS: Some chap from the local paper's Society magazine is wanting to interview me this week, so perhaps I'll ask him as a professional journalist and news hound if he can think of any interesting and unexpected ways to start my forties. Given that my life so far apparently needs rebirthing.

I'm not sure this will start the interview in an interesting way. I may have to take some props. And some made-up facts.

2010-09-15T20:00:00.006+01:00

Last waltz.

You won't have seen it. You're too young. You're too lofty. You're too intellectual and just too cool.

But my studio looks just like it.

The last episode of Blake's 7.

Budget for special effects is about right.

Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.

Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.

---

With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.

Tomorrow we move.

And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don't know whether I'm about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.

---

Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.

Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo's phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.

The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.

Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.

One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.

One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.

For new adventures await.

Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.

As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home's comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.

The many instances of dad's practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.

For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.

But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.

x

2010-09-08T16:55:00.007+01:00

Blitz and mortar.

It's a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you've had it up to.

The 'time-out' signal.

I've been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.

I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn't care less.

Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don't care.

And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.

Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.

---

The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can't abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.

Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.

And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.

---

One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: "Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country's run by 'em."

And I heard a little penny drop.

Now, it's worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.

But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.

---

As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.

Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.

But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.

Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.

---

To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties' responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.

Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.

If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol' Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar's arse is going on.

Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation's economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.

Estate agents can START everything.

Solicitors can STOP everything.

No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.

Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.

Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.

Like Brits in the blitz.

Jeepers we just love all this, don't we?

See you round the corner. I'll have the kettle on.

2010-08-25T21:25:00.002+01:00

Unpeeled.

Have you heard of it? Music review site, Unpeeled is, by all accounts, rather credible. Properly so. It's read, for one thing.

But it's unusual in one respect: It has reviewed Sweetseeker by that bloke from Momo:tempo.

And it appeared to like it.

---

I've had a fairly jolly morning, I should say. I spent it with one new piece of music ringing around my head on loop as I finished a mix for a radio ad for Thinking Juice. An almost daftly happy, breezy, borderline-camp affair, full of rich swooping strings – courtesy of Mr Pete Whitfield once again, who has brought the whole thing to life with his spot-on-first-time takes which I was dropping in over breakfast.

This put a huge jolly smile on my face. When you hear some version of Third Floor, Love Department posted on the Momo site, you'll know why – as Caroline deftly put it earler: "It's a sort of cross between Are you being served and Love Boat".

Well, quite.

I should feel some shame about this I suspect. But instead, of course, I think I nailed it.

Thing is, something else dropped in over breakfast which also put a huge jolly smile on my face, which the jollyness of Third Floor, Love Department seemed simply to score aptly.

It was an email. From Shane O'Leary, erstwhile proprietor of Unpeeled. Giving me the heads up on his review and pointing me to his site. I learned later, from new Head Of Music PR at Momo, Virginia, that this is something he only bothers to do if he, y'know, really likes what he's reviewed.

Yes. Likes it.

My work.

And there I am while reading his über-hip missive listening to a cross between Are you being served and Love Boat.

But let's hope the good Mr O'Leary never hears that, eh. He currently seems to be under the impression that…

[I can't bring myself to type it. It makes such little sense…]

..Momo:tempo is credible.

..!

You can see the review in action here (scroll down a bit) or read the body of it below.

Jeepers, Misses. Read those words.

And yes. I have a PR department. And so far, she's made this happen already. Fill you in a little more soon.

---

UNPEELED.NET

MOMO:TEMPO: "Sweetseeker" (Momo Creative)

RELEASED? 13th September.
SOUNDS LIKE? There are parts of London populated almost entirely by people who believe
that Nathan Barley is a drama series. These people will believe that Momo Tempo looks great, but sounds like crap. We, on the other hand know that Nathan Barley is an underrated slab of irony and that while Momo Tempo looks pretty rough, he sounds gorgeous. This is a sonic manifesto that boldly announces an intention to deceive, "I'm feeling sly" is the drawl of the micro second for the batteringly busy 'Toffee Mix' of the jazz-funk reconceived by the dancing robots of "Sweetseeker". All, you may think, very nice, but "The Golden Age Of Exploration" grinds it to dust with a cybernetic Stevie Wonder workout.

IS IT ANY GOOD? When passion, obsession and sheer, fucking naughtiness collide with tip-top clever bastard business, it's going to be great and it is.

2010-08-23T08:12:00.003+01:00

Nomardy.

A week in France can be very good for the heart and very bad for the arteries.

What's bad for both is attempting moving house.

Back from hols in the good Gallic countryside, in a friendly corner of extended Normandy called the Mayenne, I am facing a new week that I always knew could be a bit of a mardy / merdey one. For, in principle, this is the week we move house.

In principle, it will be the first time that Momo has ever been unplugged and relocated. In principle therefore, it is the week I say goodbye to the blessed Arnewood Studio.

Ripping the needle from the swelling Elgar as heartfelt reflections rise on this matter, I am instead facing the tiny and desperately boring matter of whether I should or should not book people to help us stand an earthly chance of moving our entire worldly life to a new space on Friday.

On FRIDAY.

And still we don't know if we can exchange.

Oh dear Lord how can something so dull be so freeeeeaking teeth-grinding?

Never mind a week of smelly Camembert and two bottles of fab French blonk a night, my heart's more likely to arrest trying to stay chilled about HOW BLOODY LONG ALL THIS IS TAKING WITHOUT US KNOWING IF WE REALLY ARE GOING TO MOVE BLOODY HOUSE OR WHETHER SOME FREAK BLOODY THING WILL STOP US AT THE LAST BLOODY MINUTE.

Readers in Pakistan may wish to send me, by return, letters and messages of perspective-giving, to help take my mind off the sickening introspection.

Meanwhile, I am apparently charged with being creative today. Retakes for a couple of score ideas and a magazine and some websites or somesuch to be looked at.

Think I might just get back in the car and keep driving.

Because if people call me back today and say we're actually completing our ruddy Vente on Vendredi, then the semaine's insanity will really begin.

It's 8.30am and I think it seems reasonable to have a drink to help my mental santé.

---

2010-08-03T17:36:00.002+01:00

19.

So here we are. One short of a very full sounding number indeed.

An ignoble digit, you might say; how do you celebrate it? I don't think a romantic anniversary dinner for two would be enhanced by Paul Hardcastle's 1980s pop oddity about the Vietnam War. Though I think some mix of it or other was probably still in the charts when the good woman I now live with tied the knot with me that day in the summer of 1991.

For yes, today is our wedding anniversary. Bless me, but how young were we?

Not young enough to be stopped, evidently. But I still don't feel old enough to know better. It still seems like it was a really very good idea. Perhaps my last one.

I can live with that.

---

2010-07-28T08:50:00.008+01:00

Bo-muda Triangle.

I think it's time to have lunch with my wife.

Not just any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop, you understand. Though we might be actually eating any old limp triangles of pappy bread and filling from a corner shop. No. The ingestion isn't the point. Even if it has three. The real symbolism about this lunch will be its location.

The lovely first lady of Momo once said to me that she rather envied the fact that at the end of my working day I can often hand her, or make her read, or firmly encourage her to interact with, or basically force her to listen to an actual thing. A something. A product of some tangible kind. Whereas she, she often felt, couldn't exactly bring home a portfolio of decisions and discussions and demonstrably dreary but confidential reports for me to pin to the fridge.

I'd always point out that I loved her for her all the things she naturally brought home with her every day. Most pertinently, the wage.

But, once we are enjoying that lunch I'm thinking of, it will be churlish of me not to point out then and there that we will be actually, tangibly, most definitely making use of something that she has most certainly made. We'll be sitting IN it, in fact.

A very real thing. A very affecting thing. Rather more so than your average website.

A space.

---

I remember Day One of Year Two of my three-year degree in Graphic Design. It was, I could sense, very possibly the beginning of my redemption from a Foundationy, fantastically arty-farty first year that saw me nearly thrown off the course for blatant, balsa-wood-boring creative ineptitude. Don't judge me. I'd done a BTEC.

Salvation glimmered for me, however, that morning. Sitting there, the Veteran Lovely Chap Proper Old School Designer who then ran the course – or at least, the much neater, cleaner, second two years of it – held up a piece of A4 paper and gazed around the classroom at us in a drawn-out, expectant silence.

"What is this?" he then asked imperiously.

All barely-post-adolescent eyes flicked from him to each other, wondering how to play this obvious duffer trap in a louche, cool way.

Silence hung theatrically. The bit of A4 seemed to fill the room.

Someone cracked. "It's, ah. Well, it's a bit of A4 paper."

The tutor's eye's twinkled with the casual joy of an easy pounce. "No, it isn't."

"Yes it is." we all thought in unison.

"No it isn't," he countered intuitively, pulling a large lever to collapse the trap door underneath the cretin who gave in to blurting out the obvious, "not for you. Not if you plan to be designers."

("Yes it is. It's a bloody bit of A4 paper…" said an echoey voice through cries of bone-broken pain from somewhere beneath us.)

"This…" our wise old tutor continued mystically, waving a hand portentiously around the dimensions of the bit of A4 paper like Paul Daniels in a Saturday matinee on the pier at Great Yarmouth.

"..this is a field."

Silence fell. Noisily.

"Ah." I thought, with some dawning relief, "I may yet be alright on this course. I can do pretentiously ponsey."

"IT'S A BLOODY BIT OF A4!" shouted the voice in the pit below, but some of us were no longer listening.

---

If there's one thing I've learned, and one thing I've banged on about since my clever wife completed her training as an Urban Designer a couple of years ago, it is how universal are some principles of design.

Understanding how to make use of that space – that field – is as important to putting print on a bit of A4 as it is to putting people and buildings on an actual field. Except a bit of A4 comes ready cow-free. But you're missing the point.

Dynamics are all. How things work in the space.

---

People are funny creatures. Like cows, but sometimes nimbler and more complexedly stupid.

We most instinctively respond not to logic and wisdom and clever ideas but to feelings. And I don't just mean obvious emotional theatrics like jealousy, rage, fear, inadequacy, nausea and Jeremy Kyle – which is really all those feelings in one half-hour TV experience. I mean the sort of feelings we spend most of our day being steered by, below the radar of awareness.

Vibes.

Yes, get hippy with it, man. Vibes. You might be a pretentious boob like me and imagine yourself able to analyse your environment at every step like some artistic Terminator and so fancy you'll never be caught unawares by the subtle schemes of discomfort. Or you might just pop to the shops every now and then. But either way, you'll be responding to a thousand secret stimuli between here and the chemist. So deal with it, organic boy.

When things are blatantly awful, they raise above the threshold of subconscious and we may actually notice ourselves reacting. Bad breath. Radio One daytime presenters. Terrible road accidents – that kind of thing.

But most of the time your and my day is affected by stupid things we don't notice are attacking or adding to our wellbeing. And you'd be amazed how stupid these things are.

And how stupid are many of the decisions made by the chief catagory of human supposed to tackle these daily injustices and save us from inexplicable daily misery – designers.

---

Designers are our defenders. The guardians of space. They are the people that are hired, like a SWAT team, to go into a bad situation and basically shoot everybody.

Except they're not. They supposed to ask questions and analyse the situation and come up with a clever plan based on the evidence and brought to life with a little aesthetic flare. They just like shooting everybody.

Whether you're screwing up a flyer before it's even hit your post mat because you can see from the upstairs bathroom that it looks about as reassuringly professional as a Victorian pick-pocket trying to land an airliner, or you're walking into your work environment and suddenly thinking about jumping out of the fourth floor window despite the good night you had lastnight with Dave and all the crazy cats in marketing and the good chance that the window won't open any more anyway, design is the thing at fault. At fault by being absent.

Websites are one of the most effective, efficient and well-practiced ways to destroy large parts of your soul, for example. Try setting up a MySpace account. Now, in 2010. Try it. But do so only with a friend in the room who has sworn to never look over your shoulder and to pull you roughly from the screen when the filthy expletive count rises to one in three.

But anything in print can do the same. You might not know why you're getting a headache while reading a book, but it could be that some fancy-pants designer has set the measure too long – too many words on a line. Or it could be that you're reading a Dan Brown. Either way, your day is made rather worse and you may not know why.

And so it is true of any space at all. Even a public one. If the space isn't working well, it's your autonomic vibe detection ability that will sense it and your wellbeing that will suffer. Either because some engineers have systematically 'worked out' how the space should operate – or more likely, how it is allowed to operate – or because some designers have decided to conceptualise a bold new aesthetic for it.

Brilliant. Hooray for our brilliant space guardians.

---

Enter then, centre stage, the oil-stained, concrete joy of Bournemouth's Triangle.

Here is a part of this gently feel-good seaside resort that is almost smack-centre of town and yet spent 30 years devoid of any pedestrians other than people who got lost coming out of one of the car parks. Haunted and frightened, these creatures never stayed out in the open for long.

But here too is a south-facing open area, lined with shops on all three sides, including a design award-winning new community library, and with an established grassed area with trees in the heart of it. In, may I point out again, the middle of town.

So why were the local traders so grumpy with my lovely wife when she first walked in to their meeting 18 months ago?

Because this space – this daily definition of their working environment – just felt so wrong.

Felt so wrong, and left for so long, that they were ready to pounce on just about anyone from the council foolish enough to walk into their discussions about it.

Lastnight, however – 18 months later – when I picked up Caroline from a sort of official jolly they'd all thrown up there, she was wide-eyed with feel-good. Because all the locals were, those same local traders. Wide-eyed with feel-good and effusive with gratitude at what she'd ensured had happened to this sick space.

---

The design is not flamboyant. It's not tricksy and the team worked hard to spend a minimal amount of council tax money on it. But they focused that spend. And thought about what was wrong. And went with the simple and obvious design solution for the space – and crucially did everything to ensure, through all the very many technical and political possibilities of the process, that that simple and obvious design was not diluted.

Gone is the bus lay-up. Gone is the crumbling high wall to a green space out of reach. Gone is much of the clutter of old street furniture. In its place is another simple green triangle with three new trees on it, but accessible from all points, visible, readable, from everywhere, which accentuates the clean lines of the new library and creates a public space facing it with simple seating steps that is simply pregnant for things to happen in it.

As a result, people can now be seen in the Triangle. And some people are suddenly discovering that Bournemouth has a very nice new library, some ten years after it opened.

---

That so many people had to be involved in making it work is a given. That so many people had recognised that there was a problem beforehand is interesting too. That so many people began to see how to put it right is even more interesting. The Landscape team, Transport guys, town center management people, local traders, local politicians, external contractors and internal specialists. They all helped to realise the new space and all began to see what would work about it.

But I think that the Triangle redesign's apparent success is down to two things; indeed a vindication of them:

Good design, and good diplomacy.

---

Understanding how people ACTUALLY work is crucial to designing something well. Where will they really walk, how will they really 'read a space'? And crucial to understanding how people work is understanding our need to feel placed.

Where am I? What is this place? What am I dealing with and how should I interact with it?

It's as true of a website, or a poster, or a magazine article as it is of a car, or an apartment or a whole part of town. Or any relationship.

Does it put you at your ease? Does it make you feel comfortable? Because if it does, you'll want to hang around it. Whatever it is. At least for a while.

Lastnight, as we drove away, Caroline and her Urban Design colleague Catherine – both playing such crucial roles in co-ordinating everyone's thoughts on the Triangle project – seemed pretty alive with encouragement. Not simply from all the people who'd asked them up there to say thankyou to them quite so enthusiastically, but perhaps most by one final bit of evidence that summed up the success.

Like a scene from an unbelievable 80s movie, a group of street dancers had moved into the Triangle's new open space with a ghettoblaster and were practicing their absurdly cool moves for an hour. Without prompting, these people had walked out of an Urban Design textbook and into the space, owning it without even noticing themselves doing it.

I mean, honestly. I didn't even know Bournemouth HAD any absurdly cool street dancers.

---

The lovely first lady of Momo is not one to make a fuss. You should, and probably do, know this. She is more of an unselfconscious street dancer than a show-boater. Really, you should see her move. So she is insistent on not dwelling on kudos – especially that of a large team of individuals. Many talents renewed the Triangle for many more people.

But I am proud of her as a husband that she is so particularly good at pulling all those very different groups of people together. And I am impressed with her as a designer that she understands the way that well engineered design can change something pretty fundamental to people – their day.

She and Laura and Catherine and the other members of her team are showing some remarkable skills and aptitude between them, across the many projects they're currently working on. But I'm not sure she will pursue my suggestion that the three of them do a photoshoot for BH Life in manner of Charlie's Angels. Which is a shame.

But they certainly are in a remarkable position. As Caroline said to me lastnight over a glass of cheap red and frozen pizzas, "Who gets nights like this in their job? Who gets people saying thankyou to them like that?"

It's been a long time coming for her, you might say. The lovely first lady of Momo has served in very many places and roles that don't get seen or appreciated. But ultimately, lastnight's celebrations are really about the power of good design.

In all matters creative – everything designed for other people – you have to try to hit the sweet spot. To sense what resonates best. Because if you bring the vibe waves into phase, everyone will feel it.

While we are sitting there – there in the middle of the Triangle, in this summer's fortuitously gorgeous weather, eating our limp triangles of pap and sandwich filling, and despite whatever pitfalls and problems that lie ahead – I will point out that the splendid person beside me has certainly made something she can show people.

She has made that crucial thing that is the point of all design.

A difference.

---

2010-07-17T17:13:00.003+01:00

Love the spinner, hate the spin.

Hands up if you're secretly sick of the media.

C'mon. Think about it.

All that shouty personal space invading – it adds up. All those pixel missiles fill up your brain like a rapid-fire Tetris. I'm getting shouted out.

Which is probably a bad sign for a person working in the Media.

Okay, so it's very definitely very loosely 'working' and it's obviously only in the provincial shires of the Media where none of your clients are names you've heard of and budgets are at least as ignominious. But still, there I am. Spinning for a living.

So, am I turning into a miserable spinster?

---

..Back from the ad break: No.

I've just had a realisation today, as I've been lounging around with the papers and French music and generally contributing nothing to the nation's economy and cultural wealth but the price of a side-bowl of olives and a slightly fnawing opinion or two on a couple of articles in the Guardian.

Namely: Making art = fun and inspiring. Promoting art = grim and demotivating.

---

Watching the Tour De France as daily as I can this year, I am as inspired as ever by the spectacle, challenge, culture, technicality, scenery and sheer theatre of it all as ever I was. I still want to drive one of the team cars or fly the TV coverage copter all over those crag-staggering Pyrenees peaks. Were I able to stream it into a womb tank I would weep with joy at it all, I'm sure.

But I can't. Never mind the room those things take up, or how hard it is to get the water to a truly neutral temperature – man.

No. It's the enthusiasm with which ITV4 has embraced its enhanced coverage that is trying very shouty pissy-offy hard to ruin it all for me. If the coverage can only be paid for by 50% of the broadcast time being given to advertising – long, frequent ad breaks and dementedly-repeated sponsor spots – then is it worth watching?

I'm really not sure.

---

I like articulating messages for my clients. I like mucking about with pixels and words trying to help them talk a bit betterer. I've always been a reasonably applied and practical creative – as much as you may snort at the idea of applying those words to me in general. Cynic.

So, with practical head on, treating me as my own client, I knew that 2010 would be very much about setting out Momo:tempo's little stall, fairly unflamboyantly. No sweat. All the business tools need putting into place if your 'art' is to be a tangible enough product for folks to grab hold of and take home to place in an intimate spot in their bedroom. Or wherever. Mantelpiece is fine. Next to the kettle wouldn't be a bad spot either when you think about it. Anyway.

My point is that I am now officially sick of uploading songs to different web portals and wondering how to get anyone 'useful' to listen to my bloody tunes.

It's all the worst aspects of the music business – the business. Sheesh.

When I talk to humans who've actually listened to something I've written, they usually seem strangely animated and upbeat about the whole experience. This is nice. Sending out jolly nice press packs to strangers who have hundreds of these things land on their mat every day and so will not respond or be moved to elation and a life-changing new viewpoint after soaking in your sound for half a day is not nice. It's depressing. And pointless.

Ah, but you never know. Do you. You have to WORK. NEVER GIVE UP. BE REALLY CLEVER.

Oh bleedin' heck. That's the bit I'm CRAP at – don't you see?

The bit I like is the whole making music thing. I'm not half bad at that. Would have spent rather more time than even I have this busy year if I hadn't been trying with tears and hot forks to WORK OUT HOW TO MAKE MY MYSPACE PAGE NOT LOOK LIKE THE DESIGN POOP OF A TOTAL RUDDY AMATEUR.

Honestly. I know anyone 'serious' needs to appear in all these places, but do you really think those wan, young, borderline-gormless young things all over every Flash web banner you've ever seen have the faintest idea about online strategies and maximising targeted market share? Of course not. They, like me, are too busy being casually groovy to give a shite. (Run with it, okay).

At last count, Momo:tempo now appears on:

Facebook.
MySpace. (*@x!!**x!!)
iTunes.
iLIke.
Twitter.
Blogspot.
Soundcloud.
E-Music. (Whuh?)
Napster. (Allegedly.)
Deezer. (Now, made up. Surely?)
Last.fm.

To say nothing of my own designed-from-the-ground-up website. And still I'm told I should be on Bandcamp. And Beatport. And I'm not even sure if I'm on Spotify or not but I know damn sure I really should be.

And never mind all the niche websites for electronic music and wotnotsuch. Yet I don't even know exactly what niche I should be IN. My own, I always thought.

This is so much easier when it's for someone else.

It is indeed, as some hitherto-unheard-of cool young thing called Brett Dennen is currently singing at me – from his obviously-successful bid to at least get on FIP's playlist – "Enough to make you go crazy." My point exactly.

---

That's when it dawned on me that when I think about all this, I get pretty deflated. Just want to read the paper and pass derisory comments at the trendy bastards in all the culture sections of the weekend papers. Give up and get a w**kacino. Sod trying to come up with targeted rich content for the fanbase. I don't have a fanbase. I don't even have a fan. I just open a window.

When, however, I consider the next creative adventure, I feel kind of oddly excited. Bless me. It's sweet. You might know it – that irrational fluttery feeling in the tummy that makes you actually bother to get out of bed and which fancifully intoxicates you to one degree or another into believing you can actually add something to the cultural human landscape. Which is the only way I know of that one can. It's clever, that feeling.

So I think I've decided. I shall now attempt very seriously to remain completely hidden from the cultural mainstream. Or sidestream. Or muddy rivulet. I shall launch a bold ad campaign consisting of this almost universally unread blog post declaiming my intention to NOT sell any records or secure any gigs in venues where actual people are likely to be or to do anything other than really rather enjoy the occasional stranger telling me to my face that they irrationally really rather enjoyed something of mine they once heard.

This seems real. Not spun. Some sort of genuine spun gold, in fact. All the finer treasure because it isn't shouty or preening or desperate to be 'somewhere nearer to all the action' as one columnist in a trendy newspaper put it today.

So excuse me while I disappear for a while. Sorry – still don't appear in the first place for a while. I shall be off enjoying myself privately. Spinning a magic tune somewhere.

----

(PS: I forgot Sonic Bids. See? Never heard of it either, have you.)

(PPS: Oh, and YouTube. Ever heard of that?)

2010-07-15T17:12:00.002+01:00

Momo:limbo.

Oh, for Pete's sake. Sometimes you just can't get anything done.

I mean, how do high-flying types ever get off the ground? There's always a complete tool box of nuts and bolts to sift through before you can seem to find even two things that fit together. And anyone who ever visited their dad's garage and tried lifting that old tool box of stray nuts and bolts will know what a dead weight that is. Think I've pulled something just sitting here thinking about it.

And so there's the truth of it – I have nothing interesting to report.

I am mainly just watching the Tour de France and daydreaming about driving one of the team cars – or better still, flying the TV chopper – while responding to all manner of vaguely paid, vaguely creative work. That's about it.

None of it onerous, really. Some copywriting, some event branding, a couple of regular magaziney things, the odd emaily thing, a few advertisementy things. Plus, there are a couple of new telly-tunery things on the horizon too.

And all to a backdrop of largely very sunny stuff outside the window – and certainly where last weekend was concerned, some four days straight of driving between very jolly social engagements, seeing all manner of new and long-standing nice people.

..But oh dear. Still feels like a bit of a limbo.

Except, why do they call it a limbo? Being 'in Limbo' is surely nothing like doing a rum-induced stunt of freakish flexibility to the sound of rampant Cajun beats and a backdrop of excessively groovy people clapping and grinning rhythmically.

Languishing in the nether world is meant to be dull, isn't it?

Unless I've gotten completely the wrong end of this particular sentence of Limbo.

Jeepers, while I'm dozing into a torpor waiting around for all these stray nuts and bolts to magically screw themselves together into something brilliant, perhaps I'm actually expected to be trying to liven the place up. Mix up some cocktails, turn up some beats, chop up some coconuts, I dunno.

Well, if I had the energy and clear head to piddle about with all that, I wouldn't be DOING that, would I? I'd have my chuffing album out already and glittery showbiz launch gig in the diaries of the rich and famous. Woudn't I. Dippy.

Mind you. All this while I've been telling people that 2010 is just about Momo setting out its little musical stall in a largely empty church hall on a rickety trestle table at a poorly-advertised village jumble sale, I could have been telling people it was more like a Caribbean beach party.

Yeah, I could have done that.

Similarly low-tech metaphor. Apart from the sound system.

Way sexier.

Right. So something else to put on the interminable To Do list.

Hate the nuts and bolts of all this. I just want a nap.

2010-06-28T21:05:00.003+01:00

Sumhead.

Have you known a year like this in many an English year? One where we actually get seasons?

A summer so hot and sunny and summery, it's blotted the memory of a winter so long and snowy and wintery it eventually blotted the will to live. Even I was getting tired of the definite barometric work when May had a nippy wobble and made me get out my long coat again.

Now? How long ago does that feel?

We've been taking beachy bike rides and seafront strolls every damn evening and weekend we can. There's a permanent dusting of sand on the hall carpet. And on Saturday, we just sort of camped out in Bournemouth lower gardens with strawberries and Marks' takeaway Chardonnay glasses.

The summer's a funny thing, though. All the feelgood makes you want to down tools and say Sod It. And this year is probably exaggerating the thing.

The new chancellor's ball-punchingly painful budget has cemented the idea of a Tory outlook in Westminster, with poor people and those daft enough to be on benefits of any kind whatsoever sort of casually cuffed about the head, while bankers smugly tell us all and any hope of legislatively toe-punting their crown jewels to go do the necessary to ourselves.

Meanwhile, a decent toe-punt would have been nice to see from the desperate shower we sent to South Africa to represent us to the sporting world this month.

And did we bother to say the words: Afghanistan, or: Gulf Of Mexico? No. These too seem like gigantic, insurmountable things.

So a bit of lax summer heat is enough to make us all down tools and up tumblers.

---

So blessed indeed are the moments that restore hope. And music is so often the mysterious magician that will do it, against all the logical odds.

The Glastonbury Festival is forty this year. As will I be. And as cosmically resonant and harmonious as it would have been to see posters all over Michael Eavis' good farm this summer emblazoned with the words: MOMO:GLASTO – Tempo Takes To The Pyramid or similar, alas my interminable efforts to set out my little musical stall have not so far led me to the mainstage at the country's favourite music festival.

For some reason, they got in some soul singer. Wonder somebody? Steven Wonder?

Catching up on the iPlayer from lastnight's concluding headline set, I spent this afternoon trying to concentrate on some magazine type changes but was finding it hard not to just sit and soak in
some legendary and strangely spiritual soul music, expertly executed by a stage full of sobbingly good creative talent.

Higher Ground made me want to throw myself out of the window with funky joy. Stevie's preach before Living For The City had me cheering and looking for someone to hug like a moron in the crowd who'd not slept for three days. And to pick Human Nature from Thriller to cover as one of the most poised, pretty soul songs Jackson ever did... man. Just, man.

God has this guy on his iPod.

..God has a lot on his iPod.

I think everything, in fact.

But Wonder At Glasto Forty is on repeat, believe it.

(Okay, so Stevie felt he had to do I Just Called To Say I Love you as well, but hey. Turn a blind ear for a far-sighted legend.)

---

It was sublime musicianship and soul. And it made me want to forget about any work plans and dogged, sensible ambitions and just go write some tunes and words that no-one may ever hear without any worry about it.

Who cares? God has your tunes on his iPod, man. Including all those even you didn't realise you'd written.

And this is one of the coolest things about lots of sun: It eventually gets to your head.

---

For us, I might say that the summer is another limbo time – albeit a hazy warm one between the positive ideas of new musical experiences and possibly moving on to a new chapter.

There is a certain sadness and worry for many people over this beautiful spell of weather, and I would say that the muggy wait of it is having the same effect on us in the background too.

And there's that weird thing about too much summer – it is meant to be a limbo. A heat-haze-blurred, hammock-lulled limbo. A wait for the chill bite of change. A recharging of want. A lazy hang-around built about the understanding that eventually, however warm and splendid the present, there comes a time when sanity is almost crying out for change, for an autumn breeze.

When you are wishing you could get out of the hammock and get on with something fresh.

..All of which is something I will get to just as soon as that kicks in. Really. You'll be the first to know.

Still half hoping it's not just yet though, eh?

Top up the Gin tumbler, mother.

2010-06-10T11:52:00.005+01:00

When the last vuvuzela sounds, only the posh will survive. Apparently.

Do you have any idea how much oil has been pumped into the Gulf of Mexico?

Do you? Well, I’ll tell you – I have no idea either. I can’t count past a squillion. They’re telling me it’s reached some new, invented, numeric milestone; perhaps one spillion.

Which I think simply adds up to: We Might As Well Stop Counting And Start Sobbing. Or Possibly Drinking.

Such an unimaginable quantity of toxic vomit rupturing into the environment is exactly the kind of thing that especially environmentally-minded souls have been warning us about in tones of doom for 100 years. Because it is, they say, exactly the kind of thing we would go and do – we being shaved apes shown the possibility of a dirty great supply of free bananas. We’d, y’know, go bananas. And start slipping up.

We have, as it turns out, been prat-falling through recent history in a distinctly un-funny manner since we first discovered the goopy black gold. Only this time it feels that little bit more apocalyptic. As if any oil spill doesn’t look like some dark, viscous end to part of the world.

---

With “austerity measures” very in vogue around the world at the moment, the planet is not feeling like a jolly place. At least to those foolish enough to ever turn on a broadcast reception device.

As BP’s executive, Tony Hayward, vows to “get his life back” as soon as he can, stockmarketeers have noted that the international oil giant can basically afford the odd global catastrophe, it is that wealthy. Something like one in six share dividends paid in the UK are BP’s. One in six. Of the entire FTSE. That is a truly giant business. That is mind-boggling influence.

The thing is, giant business is, we are gradually being reminded, the bedrock of the modern world. It is the wealth creator that sustains whole countries. Has been for that same century.

Only, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but giant business has a poor safety record. Giant business likes to do deals at parties with governments to avoid safety inspections, in fact.

Giant business also does rather like to borrow money to bet on things, and lend money to people who technically can’t afford it at all to create something else it can then sell and make more money on – some ingeniously sensible thing called debt assets. And with all this apparently easy money, giant business rather likes to make giant promises and get everyone all excited – about jumping into a river of wealth that gets only wider and deeper as you swim harder.

Giant business likes to encourage you to stop worrying about the details in life and instead envision a bigger better picture of life; something in a glittering future. Something better than what you have now. Which must be good indeed, given that for an ever-widening strata of middle-class earthlings life has never been so conceivably good.

---

Essentially, giant business might say, it likes to find resources of any kind and put them to good use – animal, vegetable or mineral. Build something bigger from what we have at our, ah, disposal.

Yeah. The teeeeny tiny floor in this plan is that it is built on a promise that is nicely, temptingly, beautifully simple… but unhelpfully, and fairly obviously, bollocks. Growth. Growth alone.

Only growth adds up, says big business. Only, it doesn’t. It subtracts: Check the column marked: ‘Duh’. There are only so many resources, it turns out.

If only consolidation sounded sexier to share holders. If only survival did.

Thing is, while giant business keeps implying that we should stop worrying about the details and think big, it can be easy for everyone tempted by this idea to miss a fairly crucial point that it’s really making about its most valuable resource: individual humans are mere details.

Damn right we are. And where is that Devil.

---

Simplistically cynical view of capitalism? Of course; this is a stupid blog, fuelled by latés and G&Ts bought with some of the money of the giant wealth creators. But you try talking to anyone who's worked for, say, one of the massive international banks. Ask them how valued they feel in their glass hutch.

---

Anyway, with economies teetering and whole eco-systems taking a pounding around the world, an awful lot of us are desperate for some good news. Or some immersive distraction at least. Which is why world economies are unlikely to gird their loins any time before the merciful summer distraction of the World Cup. And why most of us watching it will be doing our best to blot out the thought of the Tick-ravaged townships and fear-soaked poverty cluttered around the perimeter of Johannasburg’s glittering new international football stadium. We feel depressed and helpless enough, chaps. Now blow that vuvuzela, someone.

Y’know, it must be tempting for escatologists to flip to the back of their bibles and wag a smug finger at the rest of us. Given that people obsessed with the end of the world can find a way to crow about all the death and foolhardyness at any time, they must be whipping themselves into frothing frenzy at the moment. We are reaping what we are sowing – we are naturally greedy, vain, short-sighted creatures and the end result will imminently be a fallen world finally flipping into the abyss.

That vuvuzela is probably the last trumpet. Wouldn’t be surprised.

I have found, therefore, a weirdly deep sense of comforting distraction from a little bit of television drama that is based on just such an appaulingly bleak and human historic possibility.

It’s a television drama based on an appaulingly bleak and basically apocalyptic possibility that will, however, probably have you laughing when you first clap eyes on it. Before you realise that it, like the death virus it’s narratively built around, has gotten under your skin.

For this is a very conspicuously, amusingly old bit of TV, populated by flares-wearing Rada-trained upper-middle-class people acting their socks off in rain-sodden, un-CGIed Hertfordshire in 1975. A programme surely impossible to find seriously thought-provoking in this day and age.

A programme called Survivors.

----

It’s taken us most of the year to date, but we’ve just finished watching the final episode of this three-series BBC production and I feel two kinds of subtle grief about it. One, that it’s finally over and we’ve had to start catching up on the slightly less amiably ambling Season 7 of Spooks, and two that these plucky posh people won’t be there to turn to, when the vuvuzela of armageddon blares.

It shouldn’t be affecting. The acting is often am dram church hall stuff, driven by wooden scripts that seem only written to ram home plot points, the camera work is wobbly and uncompromisingly un-post-productioned, the fashions are absurd, the weather is awful, the budget is utterly non-existent-looking and you spend most of the time distracted by wondering what all the actors are doing now in their late nineties.

But, so help me, it IS affecting. And it’s many of the technical shortcomings that help it get into your head. Dare I even say it, your heart.

When Jenny and Pet are slopping out pigs, that uncompromising 70s VT stock and reluctance to cut away and reduce the effect of Real Time doesn’t half make it real. Un-dressed-up. In some cases, apparently unrehearsed.

The wonky dialogue and stumbled lines and goofiness of it all can just be annoying, of course. Characters appear and disappear with sometimes no reference to the fanciful concept of continuity at all, and it does seem that egos and amateurish bickering wrecked any remaining hope of production consistency, with actors, writers, directors and managers routinely fired or stropping off. Chaos.

But I just know what the recent remake of Survivors will be like. All helicopters and running and shooting and shouting and jittery action camera work and beautiful direction of photography and worthy attempts at real human dialogue and barely any screen time that isn’t orchestrally saturated. Y’know. A proper bit of production. With little chance of penetrating all that slick-hard entertainment gloss.

Meanwhile, in 1975, Terry Nation was dreaming of something properly bleak to cheer everyone up during the winter of discontent: Hideous Death Virus escapes from Chinese test lab and kills 95% of people on the planet. Which seems to have included almost anyone working class; one of the first people you see on screen is Peter Bowls, which should set the scene for you.

Fun. And added to the production sensibilities and possibilities of pre-Thatcher, pre-digital, pre-ironic British television, by jiggery is it bleak.

It’s also fast apparent what it’s motives are. It wants to teach you about survival. Like Lord Baden-bleedin’-Powell. It wants to sit you down and make you think about what the utter collapse of the modern world would really mean. From sanitation to sewing needles. In the style of your favourite 70s geography teacher.

And it’s precisely this academic premise, adhered to in every single one of it’s nearly 40 modules, that is the best bit, the reason you love it. So help you, you ARE made to think.

You’re made to think that no-one will have complete mental breakdowns at the sheer sudden torrent of incalcuable death, loss, horror, fear and psychological ripping away of fundamental context, true. Everyone gets on with stealing old Bedford vans to look for guns and tins of beans immediately, and at no time stops to think for a moment and then flee screeching into the woods tearing their own eyes out.

But Survivors does swivel its little spotlight of attention onto every implication of human annihilation it can think of, from learning to grow food and form communities, to considering eventually how to rebuild the infrastructure of society.

And perhaps, only by ambling around the countryside haphazardly with these characters can we get a sense of the empty reality of trying to actually survive under such circumstances. It is the understatement that creates the tension. And reveals the humanity. I’ll bet no-one on the new cast of Survivors has become an accomplished horseman as a result of the job. Everyone in the old series looked comfy on a shire horse by the end. Trotting around.

That’s sort of lovely. How bored would everyone one be after a single episode of that now?

---

As a result, I feel two challenges.

One, it’s obvious that if we are to survive, it will be together or not at all. Resources have to be valued and every detail of life counted like last pennies, not taken for granted. More than that, survival means understanding the invaluability of every single individual. Every skill counts. Every heart adds to the beat. A concept blurred away from your field of view by the giddy heights of teetering giant business.

And secondly, I really should be developing some practical skills of some kind. Instead of standing around watching the action and periodically blowing my own trumpet.

My one hope is that the well-enunciated posh-sounding will, in the end, be in with a chance.

Think we might all need to clean up our act, though.

2010-05-27T14:19:00.006+01:00

Simple life.

I found myself watching my good friend Laura's 'pin-up vicar' again this week. Peter Owen-Jones. There is something very comforting about this chap.

It's not simply his calm, almost langourous air, it's actually something to do with his earnest kind of mis-placedness. He doesn't seem to completely fit in this world, and he half knows it. And only half knowing it seems to keep him half searching for something.

His latest three-part doc, How to lead a simple life, is a fairly mis-placed-seeming affair itself. It's almost like three hours of extras, for fans who really wanted to find out more about the charming, interesting chap who went Around the world in 80 faiths, being hardly structured narratively at all. It's almost a video diary of this Sussex C of E minister, bimbling about a little haphazzardly, having a stab at living like Francis of Assisi in the home counties. You can imagine the incongruity of this. Especially with a film crew in tow.

You could argue glibly that villages in the sumptuous Downs are actually kind of cloistered themselves – from the real bits of Britain.

Rural parts of the UK can seem like sacred spaces set apart from urban realities and the most cosy of places to attempt to give up the cloying anesthetics of money and consumer sustenance. And sure enough, Reverend O-J has to rely on the steadiness of his parishioners' incomes in order for him to hand away his wallet. They all turn out to be kindly local community members, able to spare their barmy vicar lifts, chickens, lamb, walnuts or cakes. It didn't exactly blow wide open the Vicar of Dibley myth of the countryside, or expose the poverty and hardship of many rural livelyhoods. And it wasn't attempting to.

Ultimately, it was one of the many bleedin-obvious component parts of the average 21st century life that made the wheels come off. When push came to shove, the three-parish vicar's down-at-heel Vauxhall Astra would have been towed had he not caved in at MOT time and reached for the plastic, renouncing his vow of fiscal abstinence. Dropping a few walnuts in a wheel trim were not to be enough. The experiment could not have lasted for ever.

And you can imagine the cynicism of many commentators afterwards.

Yet there it was; the comfort. Watching this ex ad-man ask fundamental questions, apparently naiive questions, about how the modern world makes us feel and think was oddly encouraging. If you were watching for it, he unearthed some simple but profound truths – about how much we need to rely on each other. Giving and sharing, needing and admitting, spending time, inspiring kindness in eachother… profound human life-givers of behaviour that seem as relevant to us as at any time that Franciscan orders have practiced austerity to highlight them.

Prophetic living, I think.

---

Don't you wish you could get off? The pressure to be obviously good at something, to keep your lifestyle in its best shape, to reach that bit further. Cliches of modern living that still seem to smother us with a subtle kind of fear.

We're looking for a new place to live at the moment, and this seems particularly relevant. On the one hand, a home is a tool – for helping others, and for recouperating yourself, to keep in shape to be of use out there somewhere. On the other, a home is a thing you can't properly afford.

---

Momo keeps me at that grindstone, even as it appears to offer me an alternative. It's not hard to feel busy or to feel fullfilled by a varied-looking itinerary in the studio. I love it. But if you are as concerned about your portfolio as I am, you can end up working very hard for little more than vanity. I don't remember renouncing money officially. But some jobs are too good to turn down, even though their budgets look decidedly Franciscan.

That portfolio might feed your soul, but it can clog it up too. Straining to do the next good thing. I'd like to give up on it and go get an easy, dull, regularly-paid job. Wouldn't you? Something with an obvious point and an obvious reward. Something simpler.

For, fitting in is the truly simple life.

And I'd quite like to.

---

The question we all have to answer periodically is: am I wasting my time? Is this thing I'm toiling at worthwhile? Because, it had better be.

I like to imagine that with some things, it's still too soon to tell. That way, you can keep having a go until someone blatantly screams at you that you're an idiot. I am still waiting for someone to do this to me, in manner of Mogatu to Derek Zoolander.

Until this happens, however, I am likely to keep going. Like the charming, comforting Rev Peter Owen-Jones. Searching and trying and looking a little lost, but still having a go.

You never know when you might suddenly, like some old prophet, barking in the wilderness, have some crumb of encouragement brought to you by the birds.

---

"Momo is shortlisted for the Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip Great Britain remix competition"

2010-05-10T08:33:00.004+01:00

The dark celebrity barge.

There is something darkly positive about the UK election result. It actually reflects something of what's going on in the country – confusion. And dissatisfaction.

Something openly negative about the UK election result is that I have rediscovered my prejudicial, biased, reactionary old anti-Tory self. I thought it dead. De-evolved. A childish past. Turns out it might be a childish future.

I'm not proud of it. It's not pretty. I am a neanderthal Liberal after all. Hoorah to Ya Boo politics.

..And >pthllpppthllpppthllpppthllpp< to all you fat Tory swines with your snouts in the trough of the poor working man, shouting for more baby to go with your venison. Boo yeah. If you wanna be da man, prepare to have it stuck to you.

Yes. Welcome to tonight's edition of You're Not Helping.

---

Anyway, the pressure is – to understate it just a yellow smidge – on Nick Clegg.

What can he do? Electoral reform is actually on the table. Lots of tables. It's now or never, Nick. But how could he persuade the Conservatives to go near it?

Can we get a new Britain out of this exciting mess? Or just the same old long, brown, slow-moving British politics?

I think a nation of cynics knows. But for a weekend at least, this mess created a breath of fresh air.

Read Armando Iannucci's take on election night, including the symbolism of a power-less BBC barge full of celebrities.

2010-05-07T01:30:00.006+01:00

Well hung.

"This election has been the most exciting since we first had the idea of doing one on the moon in disco costumes."

Or something.

People have been telling me for three weeks now, mainly through the famously level-headed, objective medium of the telly box, that the UK's 2010 general election has been the most exciting in a generation / since records began / since [see above]. But ever since Cleggmania hit after the first 'x' factor debate and everyone claimed to be suddenly so 'excited' by the pedantic pantomimes of the square mile, I have held my nerve on getting worked up myself.

What I will say by now, at 1.40am, alone here on the sofa with the BBC News Eternal Election Coverage, is that it does feel like we're facing an unknown. And facing an unknown is a reasonably definitive scenario for some sort of excitement.

I guess. If you like staring into an abyss.

---

Brown has just given his acceptance speech in his constituency, returned to him again as a place that wants him to represent them in Westminster. He is still an MP tonight. But his speech sounded a little like it was accepting, at last, something more. An end, not a beginning. It seemed sad.

And by that I mean something genuine. Some real bit of emotion or meaning detectable there in that scene.

And this reminds me why I've kept my own emotional powder dry while following the political circus. The issues that unite the UK at the moment are all too real, rather like Gordon's brave face – the future of our economic stability is as sobering as modern peace-time gets, perhaps. As I type, the American markets are crashing in fear of a domino collapse of confidence in major European states. Greece is the word on Wall Street, even as the streets of Athens are full of protesters and tear gas. The bond markets here are open now. Now, 1.30am. That's pretty serious, I think.

An election campaign is, however, a big show. A dance, painfully over-choreographed and rehearsed. And it's no dance-off between competing candidates – it's a tango between politics and the media.

They're like mad dogs howling at each other. Getting each other all worked up and over-excited. Hyperbole and overstatement and over-simplification are the only rules of the game. An obvious game that almost everyone in the country is not invited to. We are simply expected to watch and, I guess, be entertained. Lucky us.

Given that this particular high-point in the game happens only every five years, you can see how feverish and primed and droolingly anticipatory the news agencies are before anything's even started. Their highly-amplified, super-sensitive mics are thrust in all directions, ready to make earwigs and flowers sound deafening.

These two world views do not go together; the real and the plastic. And I think it's been especially obvious to everyone this time.

Which has, in turn, given me my own sort of duality as I watch it – I am feeling both a bit depressed and a bit elated by it.

---

As I've watched the coverage, it's struck me that there are two main forces at work on us, the UK electorate, in this election.

One is the long-developing fact that politics in this country have converged somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. The other is that politicians are so versed in message manipulation and the sacred rule book of How Voters Like You To Talk To Them, that they all act and sound the same.

Together, these factors render our politics and politicians passingly indistinguishable. At least to those of us only showing periodic interest in the political circus rather than obsessing over the minutiae of it all like love-lorn nerds. Which is just about everyone outside Westminster.

Journalists and politicians alike seem to be especially out of touch with the rest of us on this. They all seem unable to stop the language and the moves of the game, supposing they do actually even notice that almost everyone else in Britain Does Not Give A Shit.

The net result for the gameplay is that the politicians are forced to bicker over any points of difference they can find. Like fighting over scraps of food. It's almost pitiful. And the media fill our screens with tedious details. WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT LABOUR INHERITED IN 1997 NOW?

That's the depressing bit. In a weird sort of way, though, the obviousness of this irrelevance to the rest of us might be what's making me feel distantly hopeful.

It's like the politicians are all blah-ing away emptily, somewhere in the midrange, while the sobering breadth of the country's thoughtful mood is expansive enough to make the scuffle of tumbleweed seem a fuller sound.

The tragedy of Gordon Brown trying to smile is painfully obvious to everyone. We don't want him to try to bend his bulk around that BS. We like a grumpy sod, if he's truly being himself and if he also appears to know what he's doing. Shouldn't his spin doctors know this?

I've shouted at the screen many times in the last fortnight "Stop smiling, all of you. Stop talking to me personally down the lens. Stop obeying the public speaking rule book. STOP AGREEING WITH ME. SOMEBODY TELL ME TO F*** OFF!"

But the thing is, really and truly, I've been watching three men who are sort of being themselves. Going through the motions of the game to do their job. I don't see any villains there behind those three podiums. I see a few behind them, of course. But I think the three party leaders are secretly as daunted as we are. And maybe that's kind of unifying.

Oh dear. Are things so bad that that seems like a positive to me now? That we're all clueless? Sheesh.

---

But the reality of the country's circumstances seems to have lead to so much turn-out today, that all over the country people have been locked out of polling stations, queuing up until 10.00pm when they legally had to shut. Putting aside the fact that we really should have gotten our backsides out of bed earlier, it's a heartening picture of Britain taking part again. People actually want to vote.

Extraordinary as a result is the possibility of a hung parliament. The markets are mooted to be scared of this, heightening the sense of impending doom. But I think this would be an honest result. We all had our say and showed that no-one won our mandate sufficiently. That's democracy. That's us telling the politicians what we think.

That's us screwing ourselves, probably. But hey.

---

What I think is what I've always thought. I've been on the losing yellow team my whole life. The nice but uncool lot. I'm a liberal. I love the word and hate the fact that so many good people are scared of it. I voted Lib Dem.

Upping the basic rate of income tax to £10,000, for example, to me seems like a bold move towards getting people working again. Not renewing Trident would honestly make me nervous as a PM – a certain amount of swagger is what leadership needs behind it – but it's probably the gutsy-wise thing that needs doing in our defense strategy. Investing in science and green economies are surely essential to building a sustainably strong future Britain, and no-one seems to have been championing this more. And trying to take a practical, realistic look at our current state of immigration is what it will take to actually sort it out. Tub-thumping jingoism isn't enough.

What will a Tory government do to local services? Are we really ready to have a right-wing government in again? Thatcher made more of us rich and dragged the UK out of the post-war dark ages. But she did it by selling our soul and tearing the heart out of the UK community. We are still reaping the chaos of this now, even as we spend more on Amazon.

And Labour? Surely so many good-intended things turned sour alarmingly fast. Accountability and measurability became the scourge of modern working – target culture. The inhuman hell of it for teachers, doctors, policemen. Slavery to the word Choice is driving us all mad with selfishness, being fed into our children's lives – "what do YOU want my darling three-year-old?" And can-do, make-a-change decisiveness lead to reams of poorly-thought-out legislation and a wildly monitored, control-freaked high street.

We need some properly fresh thinking. And here's an interesting testimony: Lib Dem support is geographically evenly spread, much more than the traditional Labour and Conservative heartlands. The clear implication being that many of their ideas make sense wherever you are. Whoever you are.

Holy crap in a breadmaker, do we badly need some of that right now.

---

No party podium pumping for me, though. The Liberals have been a bickering, petty lot too often. And party politics is a donkey. But it's what we have to work with.

Whoever can manifesto it up, what we need is a society that creates, sustains and defends freedom.

Freedom to fly as high as you want to – or not. Freedom to be vulnerable – because we understand it is fundamental to being human. The freedom to be you – and to choose to contribute all you are to those around you. Little or much.

We need a culture that believes that anyone can make more of themselves and anyone can really f**k up. We have to plan around these two possibilities.

The only way to do this, I think, is to build a society that inculcates responsibility; I must defend the right of the person next to me to be who he or she wants to be because I recognise that I need them. Nature's great survival secret is diversity. But the person next to me has no rights – only those I bestow upon him or her. Only those we fight together to defend, through education, art and building a joint identity.

---

In the end though, have we chickened out of change? Been typically British?

I don't know. I know what I'm feeling increasingly as I prepare to go to bed; no-one can call it yet. No-one seems to know where this night is going. And as I consider the very real possibility of a hung parliament, I think we would be doing democracy well in its event.

And I think that gets me feeling a little excited. Even as we stare into the unknown.

2010-04-30T18:03:00.004+01:00

#ashtagged:
Planes, trains and souzamaphones.

You’ve heard of that bloke. Homer.

Came out with some profound stuff. Apparently very memorable.

And it is of just such profound narratives and timeless tales of human perseverance that I am thinking now. Of high adventure… and low expectations. Of acts of God, and… more desperate acts.

Of passenger ships and… one-liners.

Anyway, whether you’re now thinking of the mythical bloke from Springfieid or the one from Smyrna, my point is that, long ago, I wrote a tune. A simple little bit of electronic sing-songery that made it in some theatrical incarnation to Momo’s forthcoming debut LP; a tune called Asylum Seeker.

Its slightly karaoke New Romantic chorus includes the lines: ‘I am the refugee, come and rescue me; I am the lost at sea, send a boat for me’.

I’d always rather pictured any accompanying video to this showing middle class business men and trendy metro dandies looking displaced and uncomfortable, lost and sockless. Barefoot in the urban jungle, or somesuch. Artistic social commentary if ever there were such a thing.

Yes. So. Funny how a spot of cheesy keyboard pop can turn out to be prophetic.

---

We set sail in the spring of 2010. A simple Sell Your Soul For A Quick Break Abroad cheap flight from dear old Bomo to Palma de Mallorca. Nothing complicated. Shouldn’t be incidental, we thought. Cop a feel of some nice Mediterranean air and Eurozone splendidness, saunter around the old city, loll in a few leafy coves, and restore the ol’ S. Possibly fitting in a few s-bends in the precariously new little Fiat we plundered locally.

With all these simple aspirations comfortably present and correct nearing the end of our sojourn to the good Bally-Es, we tripped on the hotel room news box one languid afternoon, post obligatory siesta, and saw an item of passing interest:

UK AIRSPACE CLOSED. CLOUD OF LOOMING DEATH SPREADING SOUTH FAST. FOR GOD’S SAKE, SIT ON THE FLOOR AND PRAY.

“Uh… huh” we mused. And opened the mini Pringles.

---

Well, you know this story. You may well have been caught up in the ash cloud of doom yourself and know it first hand. Bit of a bugger to say the least. And not just the ruddy name. But also because there was, it appeared to clouds of British holiday makers all over the continent, absolutely no-one to blame.

This left everyone strangely subdued.

---

Standing in Palma international airport, I began to feel a niggling doubt, that Saturday morning, that my cavalier plans to be canny were unraveling.

Unencumbered by the patter of tiny feet, the lovely first lady of Momo and I were possibly about to be treated to what we might later privately end up admitting was a jolly wheeze; a game of Get Yourself Home Without Flying. Why, what a simply novel idea, darling!

I’d looked at the maps and felt informed and equipped. I’d looked at the queues of the forlorn and felt the sobering warmth of pity. I’d looked into the middle distance with a flinty glint and said quietly: “Let’s lose these saps.”

We’d find a last flight out of Spanish airspace. We’d make it to France and be in with a fighting chance. We’d get a train. We’d hike an Alpine pass. We’d hitch-hike. We'd mule trek! We were never going to hitch-hike or mule trek. Just sounds like the sort of thing we would have considered from the point of view of spinning the yarn over-confidently in the pub long afterwards. But one way or another, I figured we’d get back to Blighty with our wits and wallets intact.

Then the alternative airlines one by one stopped their flights to Germany. Then France. Then almost anywhere. Then the price of their few remaining seats across the water to Barcelona seemed to be the only things taking off.

The ferry didn’t seem bothered about leaving for the mainland until midnight, or about making landfall until breakfast time, and the trains in Cataluna were rumoured to be actually evaporating in the sheer heat of demand.

So it was that, crestfallen, I found myself actually joining the queue to talk to the one and only human working for Ryanair on Mallorca that morning.

I felt bitch-slapped into submission. Still, if you’re going to drink from the devil’s cup.

---

We made friends in the queue, obviously. We were there for a few days. I think we were on the point of going out for dinner with Pat and Veronica from Dublin as we approached the flimsy booth, understanding by then that there would be no hope of flights resuming to the UK for at least a week. As if anyone knew anything at all.

Then, like stumbling out of an amazon jungle of stiff legs into the seductive sheening glow of Eldorado, we found ourselves actually at the head of the eternal Ryanair queue.

“We can get you on a flight next Saturday” said the remarkably composed and cheery sounding woman inside. It was almost as though the air in that booth had clouded her sense of reality. It would be the full week then. A full extra week late home from holiday. And she didn’t seem to think this was odd.

Now, at this point, it’s worth bringing back into view the only imperative we really had on our time – and it was hardly imperative at all. In fact, despite the weird series of fortunate events apparently impelling me towards it before our hols, I had by this stage comfortably given up on the idea.

Momo’s first ever gig.

As Caroline had said to me there in that four-hour snake of lost souls: “Of course. Of course it takes a volcano to stop you getting back on stage after ten years!” And I had simply nodded.

It was Saturday afternoon by this stage. More or less exactly 48 hours before we needed to be casually strolling into the Troubadour in Earl’s Court with our down-at-heel flight cases and world-class horn players. I looked at the booth woman.

“Are you flying anywhere else?” I said quietly. She frowned in thought at her monitor. We waited. Time slowed down. Clocks started ticking loudly at low pitch.

“Well… there is this little flight to Madrid” she said diffidently.

“Madrid!? You’re really flying to Madrid?” I perked. “When?”

She paused again, uplit, staring. Taking her time.

“Now” she replied.

I leant forward into the booth, straining with restraint, torpored brain cells suddenly buzzing with realisation.

“Can You Get Us On It?” I breathed.

---

When an airport is essentially empty, but for lines of sleeping refugees, you can really see where you’re going much easier when running.

We collapsed into the check-in desk in a flurry of English and luggage and stood panting in front of the huddle of bored women still manning this last outpost of hope, far away from any booths. They made a very slow phone call. We watched their every move. We think we understood them saying the polite Spanish equivalent of: “The bloody plane’s gone, hasn’t it? Two English jokers here want to get on it, can you believe it? HAHA! How is your sister, anyway? Really? Yes, her legs are very bad now..Oh, you’re running late. Sure.” >click< “You’re through.”

And minutes later we were watching Mallorca slip below the windows. We were, fairly randomly, now on our way to Madrid.

I looked at Caroline. “Of course, you realise there is suddenly the preposterous possibility that we can still make the gig now?”

She adjusted her eye mask calmly. “Oh yes” she said.

---

Hitting the tarmac running, we managed to pull out our heavy Dorling Kindersley Didn’t Realise How Much You’d Need This After All Did You Guide To Spain at a steady trot, losing only a few strewn items of worn underwear, and planned our route across the Spanish capital. I confidently identified the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and planned the Metro journey to reach it accordingly, as we haired past a suspiciously conspicuous tourist information booth. We hairpinned back to this instinctively for some reason and learned, while jogging on the spot, of the actual location of the correct rail station we’d need to reach Bilbao and not northern Portugal. Thanking the amazingly calm, pleasantly attractive young woman in the booth, and jogging on the spot there for a barely noticeable minute longer than the lovely first lady of Momo, I took off again to catch her up, stopping not at all to rescue the socks, hairnet, hotel slipper and assorted Hotel Jaime III-branded souvenirs spilled from our luggage. “Casualties of war, darling. TO THE TICKET MACHINE” I boomed authoritatively, sprinting past.

---

Each stage of the journey was like adding another bit of Lego. But proper Lego, old Lego, that didn’t come in very specifically designed model packs that more or less neutered the whole POINT of Lego which is imagination, but magically materialised in your toy box in random combinations. We knew what we were trying to make alright, but each time we reached into the Lego box we had no idea what shape brick we were about to pull out.

So far, we’d found the bit to stick onto the rare and idea-creating flight-shaped bit and reached the Metro successfully. Would we find the crucial train-to-Bilbao-shaped bit?

---

Madrid’s north-serving rail station was muggy and and weirdly post-trauma torpid. Middle class refugees were strewn quietly all over it’s gently bustling Saturday night movement, like a crisis was still going on in transport somewhere, but everyone was a bit too tired and disheartened to still be in a frenzy about it.

We joined another queue, like hard-core patienteers. We swapped and overheard stories from various English speakers and gleaned the essential theme of them all – namely, that ferries and trains and buses and hire cars the world over were basically booked to buggery.

In the end, stepping up to the head of the Travel Information queue, we learned that there wasn’t another train to Bilbao until the following afternoon. Simply because it was, of course, Sunday.

“Thankyou” we said politely and retired to a seat.

“So that’s that” I mused, emptily. “Well, so here’s what we do, “ I then said, not yet feeling fully defeated. “Let’s go check out the bus terminal, just for a laugh. Then go see if we can find a hotel with a room for tonight.”

I stood, pulled on the suitcase handle again and trudged off. “Just for a laugh.”

---

It’s worth pointing out that the whole idea of making for Bilbao had struck me as a bit of a stroke of genius in the first place, a few of hours earlier. There I was, trying to hire a skiff to make for Marseilles to seek passage north in the opium dens of the old city or somesuch, when the sudden option of going to Madrid negated the need to reach Paris at all. Paris may indeed have seemed much nearer home than Palma, but it would still be essentially Not Actually Home, with plenty of miles of road and queue and grumpy French between us and passage to Blighty.

Bil-frikkin’-bao, on the other hand, like a light from heaven, would mean passage on a single boat all the way from Spain to the good waters of the blerry Solent. Now that really was home – I’d been chucking up in those good waters barely a fortnight before.

But what of those ferries? Just how many other people would have thought of that clever, secret route out of the ashcloud?

Really? I mean, how many people really use the Bibao ferry terminals? Eh?

Eh? Huh. Cuh.

..Yes, you can see where this is going, already.

---

Wending our way back across the city’s Metro and emerging into some fake version of daylight, we found ourselves clouded by the hopeful sound and smell of diesel thrattle.

We scanned boards quietly, trying to find signs of north-bound life. More refugees with luggage built for floorless-smooth airport surfaces huddled everywhere in the yellow light, yellow skin and sallow eyes and sorrowful boredom dressing Madrid’s Estaçia de Nord bus depot like the Martian colony of freaks in Total Recall. After they’ve turned off the fans.

Then the lovely first lady of Momo made a little sound. That silent sound she makes when her tenacious brain thinks it’s on to something.

“Queue.” she said, pointing without looking away from a screen, and then surreptitiously marching off.

Clutching our four bags, murmuring Spanish, glancing at blurry screens without my ever-more-needed glasses, I scooched forward into the queue of nonchalant ticket buyers. Most of these characters looked like actual Madridians, not gringo desperados from the Costa Blanca. And they all looked like they were still going somewhere. My heart quickened. Not knowing why.

Then came the tap on the arm.

I turned. With hushed urgency, my resourceful wife simply said: “Get the bags, we’re going to Bilbao” and moved off.

Watching her with steely pride as she slipped through the crowd, I snapped out of my reverie and got moving. Over my case and onto my face in a flurry of passports.

No I didn’t. Not quite. But it’s a funnier punchline-out of the scene.

---

Ticket machine. She’d navigated a blessed ticket machine and now we were here – sitting on a bench, circled by buses in a yellow light, unsure whether we were supposed to be under or above ground exactly, but sure as sure we could be that we were going to bloody Bilbao.

1.30 am overnight bus. We had four hours to rest up and wait.

Delighted, we set out our little stall right there, picnicking one of the best picnics of our lives, taking humble essentials of sustenance, and elevating them to the ennobling status of triumphant feast. For we were going to Bilbao. You suckers.

And there, surrounded by travelers coming and going, we did feast indeed, eschewing any meagre appearance of whatever packed supplies we’d been able to lay our hands on in our desperate flight, and eating heartily. Simply giving thanks for small but crucial mercies. Olives, pate, pesto, assorted cheeses and a full French baguette would have to tide us over.

Caroline tutted and stopped unwrapping her smoked chorizo.

“What?” I asked, concerned.

“No wine.” she said flatly through a mouthful.

We shuddered and held eachother for a moment. Yet, d’you know, I think we still counted ourselves two of the luckiest, richest people in Spain that night.

“Wouldn’t have been room temperature.” I reassured bravely.

----

I didn’t seem odd to us to sit in a corner for a couple hours after that and watch the bleak, cardboard, brilliant original 70s version of Survivors on the laptop. Perfectly normal. The time spooled by comfortably and soon we really were on route to Spain’s famous Basque port, never more grateful to sleep on a bus. And not having had to fight for petrol or steal an old Landrover.

---

I looked at my watch.

6.00am Sunday.

I looked at the map.

“Can’t see the port. But you should know that the Gugenheim is just up the street” I said forlornly.

“I’m thinking Metro” said Caroline, as the bus thrattled into life behind us and pulled out of the dark bus depot back into the dawn.

“But it’s just round the corner…” I said quietly, looking over my shoulder with large, sad eyes as we staggered down some steps.

---

The chap stood for a moment, rubbed his eyes and expertly communicated in just a silent look that he’d only just gotten into his booth here on this Sunday morning. I stood back, allowing my wife’s deftly understated charm to work it’s magic on this kindly middle-aged man.

“Go all the way to the end of the line, the port’s there” he said, handing us tickets. And then we were on an empty Metro platform. In Bilbao. Going to find a ferry to freedom.

“Of course, you realise…” I began, voice echoing around the vast scale of the lonely station.

“Yes,” said Caroline a full minute later, “we could still make it.”

We both continued to sit there, staring forward.

---

Light finally began to creep out of hiding behind the hills and rooftops of Bilbao as the carriage slid along the estuary to the end of the line. Silhouettes of cranes and other coastal industry emerged and passed us. As it came to rest, 20 minutes later, we slipped out of the shushing doors into the delicate quiet of first light and padded out of the station.

Not a sign.

“Ah. Where do you think the very big boat is hiding?” I asked carefully, spaced out beyond emotion.

We stood there a while longer.

“Must be this way” I then said with the utterly uninformed idle confidence of a man, but without the reassuring theatre of being properly awake.

“How do you know?” Caroline said flatly.

“Stands to reason. Or something.” I said flatly.

Whatever our half-hearted conversation there in the pretty desertion of early morning, we began trundling forward, little airport cases still rumbling behind us.

The empty streets were bereft of signage to the town’s principal passenger connection with the outside world but we trudged without emotion along a main road and followed the sound of gulls until we saw one eventual sign, limply hanging from a lampost. Said simply:

“Ferry”.

We dutifully followed its vague direction but began to wonder whether an industrial estate was really going to house something as hard to hide as an umpteen thousand-ton, lorry-swallowing boat built to survive the violent distempers of Biscay. Yet on we trundled. Faith blind, but belligerently in place.

And then we turned one more corner, past one more block of empty offices, around one more empty car park. And there it was. A small portacabin in the distance. And humble but visible was a little sign above its door.

“P&O”

Not a queue in site.

---

There wasn’t a queue inside either. There were only about three other humans in there. But thankfully, at least one of them was behind a booth.

Now, thinking back, to imagine that this poor lady was looking and sounding defeated and frazzled already, is remarkable. Because I don’t know where she felt she had left to go after playing her full emotional hand at seven in the morning, given the particular morning that was, she would discover all too soon, still ahead of her.

“We, ah, don’t have tickets” I opened, perhaps unwisely. She sighed immediately and spoke as if to a crowd.

“ALL THOSE WITHOUT TICKETS, I AM SORRY BUT THE FERRY IS BOOKED. NO TICKETS LEFT.”

Helpful as this cutting to the chase might have been to any waiting crowds, I looked over my shoulder briefly at the empty room and then continued: “So there IS a ferry today?”

“Yes. Is booked.”

“And, the next ferry?”

“Wednesday.”

I felt a little final breath escape me, there at that booth.

“Wednesday?”

“Yes. Is booked.”

I tipped my head and stood there. Just allowing the reality to sink in. Of course. Of course it had always been this.

“I take your name” she said, as if to get me to go tip my head and sink in somewhere else, “but really is futile. Look: I can’t find pen. Look: I talk to colleague as if distracted. Look: pen I find doesn’t work. Look: I eventually write your name in distinctly token manner on scrap of paper that looks like was pulled on bit of elastic from bin. Look, I’m sorry.”

I nodded. We went and sat down.

We stared at the floor. We felt nothing.

And then I thought of something.

“Know what I’m going to do?” I eventually said to the faithful one beside me.

“What?” she said without moving.

“I’m going to have a wee and get myself a coffee.” I said with flat conviction. “Then I’m going to sit here and see what happens.”

“Good plan” she replied quietly as I walked off. “Toilets don’t work.”

---

We sat there in time-lapse. I slowly finished my coffee and watched the little ferry reception fill like a forward bulkhead of the Titanic. By mid morning, children and other loose items were floating on the surface of the humanity bursting out of the building’s seams. We simply sat and watched.

I turned to the window. A vast rust-spewn wall of white grumbled slowly past and halted.

I looked. Blasted out were the words Pride Of Portsmouth. Bolted underneath in their place were the words Pride of Nantes.

“Bloody nora” I said, as it dawned. “ Do these people realise they’re going to the Bahamas?”

And then it happened. As it was always going to happen.

“MEESTER AND MEESES PEACH TO RECEPTION BOOTH PLEASE.” scratched a tannoy.

I turned round again. Looked at Caroline.

I stood. In a dream. I glided past the throng waiting agitatedly to get to the booth, walking straight up to the window, past them all.

I looked calm. I looked serene. I looked like bleedin’ Keanu right near the end of The Matix; the forces of travel calamity could grimace and flail at me all they wanted, I would fend them off with a surreal single hand as I looked with gentle enlightenment at the woman in the booth.

“Eees NOT my responsibility.” she frowned. And pointed to a chap in front of me, I hadn’t seen. He was holding a green ticket. A boarding ticket. He looked at me.

“You agree and is fine. Between you. We just try to help out” she scowled.

I looked at this stranger beatifically.

“Hello, “ he said simply. “I’m Pete. I have a four-berth cabin. And there’s only one of me.”

The sea of humanity around us fell silent.

---

“Really no, you’re very kind!” said Pete as we fought our way out of the riot inside, “But it really wouldn’t be right to accept such a thankyou” he insisted as I tried for a fourth time with piercing stare to simply frenchy his face off. My wanton gratitude was not quite the right currency, it seemed, and I eventually gave up the struggle and let him go. Currency was, in fact, the right currency.

And so we sat on a bench outside, with two new suddenly-firm friends, which included the equally bemused and grateful Paddy, and allowed the truth to sink in. We would be home in time. We were on the ruddy boat.

“We’re on the boat” I said vacantly, as another fight broke out inside.

“We’re on the ruddy ruddy ruddy boat” I uttered, as an old man punched a six-year-old boy in the face somewhere nearby.

“We... we’re actually going to make it” I distantly began to smile, then chuckle, then laugh with maniacal comprehension, long and loud, head thrown back with joy.

“Yep,” smiled Pete good-naturedly, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.”

I fell backwards off the bench, choking on something apparently suddenly caught in my throat.

----

Funny how things can stick in your mind so you don’t notice. Like the idea that the sail from Bilbao to Portsmouth would take 12 hours. No idea where this fact had alighted in my head from. Had no thought of checking it out for accuracy. Didn’t occur to me that the trip would, in firm fact, take 30.

---

So the question. That bloody question.

Could we still make it? Could we make the gig? And increasingly to the point – should we?

Firstly, was it doable? Well, reluctantly, it wouldn’t be completely impossible in theory, as I did have the laptop with me and it had backing mixes in there. Just not refined ones. But they might still serve. And we would be tantalizingly close to London as we stepped off the ferry with still two hours to go before the doors of the Troob would open. But really, how would we soundcheck?

But secondly, would it be right to ask so much of the band? To get them to travel to London when the band leader is still technically, if you want to be picky, not actually in the country but in fact somewhere off the west coast of France is to create a little potential concern, I would say. Should I push ahead vainly?

The thing is… bloody yes. How absurd would it have been to land at Portsmouth that Monday night after ALL THAT and say a simple “meh” and turn left for home?

So, it was that I began the process of begging by text.

---

As the hour to embark approached, it became clear that the broiling sea of hopeful humanity now frothing out into the car park was not going to blithely part to allow green ticket-clutching tosspots like us to sail smoothly past into the security check area. No Mosaic special privileges for us. We would have to plunge in and swim for it.

Limbs writhed around limbs. Bags bobbed and yanked. Old folk were passed overhead to be claimed by their families. Stray animals appeared here and there, pushed to the surface briefly with surprised, mute looks on their whiskery faces. Waves of scowling tossed over eddies of indifference. Great swells of drowsiness lifted and dropped the phlegmy surface. Birds dropped to pick off a small current of rubbish vortexing itself steadily larger amongst us.

Our team bravely swam. Which is to say, politely pushed, in a distinctly English manner – scorning the impatience of the few opting to openly grow narky and shovey, while all the while secretly screaming OH COME ON YOU RUDE BASTARDS – WE HAVE BLOODY TICKETS.

Across Europe, though, it should be said, the English really showed their continental family members a thing or two about queueing. Our patriotic moaning was almost absent, everywhere that we went at least. A dirty great volcano leaves you with no option but to draw on the last essential cultural arrow in your quiver and wait your turn implacably. Bravo us.

Even in this melee, the predominant English may have let go the reigns of queuing, but total anarchy was kept at bay by our inability to complain directly. Common practice in the face of someone pushing in, is to tut almost inaudibly and then bang on about it loudly long after you’re on different continents.

I caught myself being particularly English as we made it to about half way across the hall, mid-sea.

One ballsy chap came at the crows, at what must have been a calculated run-up from the car park, brandishing two huge cases and a phalanx of family moving in tight formation at his back.

“Let me through. Let me though!” he boomed authoritatively, “I have tickets. LET ME THROUGH PLEASE” push push.

Before I could stop myself, my Uptight was out.

“N..No. NO.” I said firmly, instinctively – and before I could show myself in a better light, my wounded sense of fair play had me reaching out an effete hand to pat him back. “NO. N..NO” was all the words I could muster in my panic.

“I have tickets” he mantra-ed again, cutting a bit of a swathe.

“NO. BUT SO DO WE.” I insisted in a squeaky, less than masculine voice, actually stopping him.

He stopped. His family stopped. We looked at eachother. A moment’s pause passed.

“What the hell am I doing?” I said, “You’re doing bloody well there. Go, man – GO! FOLLOW THIS GUY!”

“I hate people who push in, don’t you?” he said with suddenly slumped shoulders and a smirk.

“I hate uptight blighters – NOW GO!” I said pushing him on.

---

Sitting in the bar, an hour later, looking down on the chaos far below us, I stared into my sparkly, prissy European beer and counted every last blessing, knowing they added up to more bubbles than were bursting at the bottle neck.

I had wondered about whether we should give up our tickets to people more deserving; I had accepted the tickets initially in a bit of a daze. To my guilty relief, and by what miracle of administrative sacrilege I dread to think, but P&O found a way to get every last straggler on the boat. They cleared the terminal. Somehow.

I resisted the urge, you understand, to telephone the captain and tell him to “leave those bloody losers” because we were already an hour behind schedule. Phileas Fogg, under similar pressures, would never stoop so low as to abandon his fellow Englishman. Wager or no.

“Stoopid English” I muttered into my beer as we finally pulled away.

---

Then the fog really fell.

Our immediate route home that day is known for something. Something a bit technical and meteorological, so bear with me if it goes over your head. For the bay of Biscay is known to be a bit of a bastard.

Only a week before, friends of ours had been hanging onto the stern rail as the very same boat plunged nose first into great canyons of swell, spraying as much passenger vomit over her sides in all directions as breaking waves. A more grisly, Dantesque vision of humanity on a booze cruise to the Basque hypermarkets you couldn’t picture, by all accounts.

Leaving port this time however was like some sort of surreal cruise. Clear skies. Flat seas. Sunshine. And against all likelihood, we kept these conditions all the way home. It’s just that, along with these conditions, we kept internet silence and near total phone coverage all the way home too. Obviously. When you think about it.

So I had to sit there. Strolling around the deck. Or lolling in the cabin. Or strolling around the other deck. Or avoiding the ‘entertainment’ theatre. All the time wondering if my band would make it and if I would make it and if I would be in any fit state to climb onto a stage if I actually really did make it. And unable to organise or practice or arrange a single bleedin’ thing.

The 30 hours passed steadily. And, in truth, oddly pleasantly. Pete and Paddy were entertaining company, making it feel more like we were off on some wheeze with chums, and the restaurant did us a good steak and an even better bottle of something red and French. To my head’s chagrin, come Monday morning.

More to the point, we got to rest and even shower.

But really. I felt helpless.

---

Somewhere, mid glassy channel, I had managed to squeeze out some texts. The game was, apparently, on.

The balmy weather had created a haze over the dear old south coast, obscuring everything of home until we slipped past Gunwarf Quays in the evening sun, and we knew it was time to queue one last time.

We packed. I changed into a suit. I prayed for phone coverage. We headed for the muster points and disembarkation.

And then, a chink of English daylight to the huddled masses below. We staggered out, like homecoming soldiers – minus the acts of bravery or service or the snappy countenance, okay, but stop picking holes – onto the gangway and down to waiting terminal buses. We had made it as far as the UK. We were on home turf.

My phone picked up a bar. Then it pinged with excitement; a text. I read.

“We have a drummer.” I said firmly. “The drummer is in place.” A few weary souls around me looked up and wondered why I was announcing this to them with such conviction.

The Lego model of our journey home was looking impressively, improbably close to completion. But still, we crucially needed a taxi-shaped brick, a train-shaped brick and an underground-shaped brick – to say nothing of a dirty-great-amount-of-wits-about-me shaped brick. Oh, mother.

I began to not notice myself joining queues. I snapped out of my automatic stand-and-step mode when a taxi driver took my bag and bundled me into the back of his car like a getaway driver handling someone being papped. I caught a glimpse of a long silver eel of taxies lining up to the rank behind us, glinting in the tea time sunshine to swallow more vulnerable boat people as the saloon pulled sharply away. I eventually noticed that the lovely first lady of Momo had thankfully been bundled with me successfully. As had Pete.

Downtown Portsmouth was groaning as much as every other port in Europe that afternoon. Traffic was thick, but our driver seemed happy to treat it like a scene from a Luc Besson film and we were soon at the rail station. More refugees stood in a gaggle on its steps, perplexed.

“No taxis in town today” the driver grinned, hurling my bag at the entrance and wheel-spinning back into the traffic.

“HOW MUCH?” I heard Caroline’s voice declare.

She pushed a ticket into my hand. “Costing us more to get to London from here than to get to hear from Mallorca via six modes of transport” she muttered, marching for the turnstile.

I looked at the ticket. I wouldn’t be in Waterloo until gone 8.00pm.

My phone pinged.

“We have a sax player.” I said, a moment’s read later, and racheted through the turnstile.

---

We bid a quietly sad goodbye to Pete. His company in particular had been most entertaining, civilising the last chapter of our epic adventure very nicely. To my delight, after 30 hours of amusing re-enactments of scene’s from The Blackadder’s many incarnations, like some kind of post-modern traveling am dram society, Pete was to prove his worth a week later by sending me a random text in the middle of an Amanda Palmer concert that simply said, in quotes: “One more thing: don’t get drunk and let him try to shag you on the veranda.”

Class Englishman.

For yes, we were to survive and get home and resume our old adventureless life later that week – but not before the following few hours had done their best to string out the story.

---

Here’s a truth. Two truths. Perhaps two sides of the same truth.

In a crisis, it is the tiniest things that will unearth your true metal. And there is better mobile phone reception in the Bay of Bloody Biscay than there is anywhere near Guildford.

Chewing chunks out of my fist with delirious frustration, as two dappled hours of trundling train-play trundled past, it was only as we neared Waterloo, that I finally knew.

“We have a trombone player.” I said, looking up. “And a horn player. We have the full band.”

“Minus you, you tit” said my wise companion, throwing my bag at me as the platform slid past the windows.

Except she wouldn’t say something exactly like that. But those were none-the-less true sentiments as we pulled on our bag handles one more time and tottered out into the London evening.

---

Earl’s Court isn’t all that far by tube from Waterloo. But it was enough time to wonder what on earth I was supposed to do when I eventually staggered into the Troubadour, assuming we found it, two hours into the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party.

When I finally saw the legendary pub’s name, there on Old Brompton Road, and fumbled with its shabby door, and staggered down it’s windy little staircase, and exploded into Sebastian’s moody book reading in a shower of tumbling cases and expletives, I was beyond caring about making a tit of myself that night. We’d bloody made it.

We’d actually bloody made it.

WE’D ACTUALLY BLOODY MADE IT!

And, as if in a movie about an unknown but plucky but poorly-hair-styled musician, battling the odds to make it for his big night, his big coming out, everybody actually cheered. The place went wild.

…Or as wild as about twenty people can go in a small cellar bar. But you’re missing the point.

To my disproportionate delight, Sebastian – compare, talent and event organiser – had been reading out my Tweets. I had been expected. Our story had been followed. And we had brought the story alive by actually ruddy, bloody, chuffing, sodding-well making it.

---

Conclusion.

You’re going to ask me about the gig, I suppose.

Did it go passingly well?

Did I pass out before or during my performance?

Did I, in fact, make a right royal tit of myself?

Well, you ask a good question. And I would begin my answer by saying that, trust me, you never ever want to do “live soundchecking” ever. Not when you are a band of noisy horns and souzamaphones and drumamabobs and a speaky-word titamaboob on a teeny tiny stage, trying to play to a bleeping computer mix. No.

But, opening-number-wincing apart on my part, remarkably – nay improbably, absurdly, ridiculously – the first ever line up of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra appeared to make a walloping great crowd-pleasing ker-thwallop of fun.

Which ever way you look at it, apparently… baby we’re back.

“We floated into its land-locked harbour silently by divine guidance, right up on the beach: and disembarked to lie where we had landed for two days and two nights, our hearts devoured by fatigue and pain.”
Homer, from The Odyssey.

“Rock stars ... is there anything they don’t know?”
Homer Simpson.

---

To see a few pictures and a couple of videos from the show, click to momotempo.co.uk
or momo:tempo on Facebook.

#ashpendix:
The Tweets

Me llamo Momo. Y at this rate I may be doing my London gig live via satellite from the Balearics.

#ashcloud So then Europe is spinning its wheels furiously. People sleeping on terminal floors everywhere and we’re stuck in the bally Erics.
9:10 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Monday’s gig aside, the staying/trying to go spend ratio here is compelling. Doing nothing is not spending nothing.
9:12 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud So we are attempting to catch the last plane out of here, off the island. So to speak, anyway. We’re packing as we speak.
9:13 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Should we be hanging around – comfy room, WIFI, nothing to do? Sounds like more of a holiday than a holiday. Perhaps, yes.
9:17 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Going to try to catch a plane to somewhere in France. Failing that, even Barcelona. Then hunt for local trains.
9:18 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Tomorrow is Sunday, of course. Will anything be operating? It would be easier if we weren’t out here in the middle of the Med.
9:19 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Well, best pioneering foot forward. Let’s see where the airport and our wallet are prepared to take us. If anywhere.
9:20 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Putting last things in the case now. About to check out of the hotel and make for the airport. Here goes.
9:30 AM Apr 17th

We have checked out of the nice hotel. We now currently live on a bus.
10:31 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Hah! In your FACE fellow European nations - the Brits know how to queue in a crisis; look at that ordely snake. No clumping here.
11:16 AM Apr 17th

#ashcloud No flights from Mallorca to virtually anywhere in Europe. Flights to Spain clogged and expensive. Trains, roads, ferries - eesh.
12:03 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud “It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation! (with orderly murmering) DUH-DUH DAAAH!” They should tannoy War Of The Worlds.
12:12 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Genius. Just heard that the French railways are on strike today! Tay Jay no Vay. Gotta love the Gaul.
12:17 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Forced to queue in Ryanair queue now for hours. Feel my ingenuity bitch-slapped into submission by dwindling options. Am a drone.
1:13 PM Apr 17th

Wait. I have the backing beats with me in the case. WE’RE DOING THE GIG RIGHT HERE IN DEPARTURES.
1:16 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Has it come to this? Hugging a pillar because our arrival at it in the queue represents genuine achievement?
1:59 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Getting a booth swoon on; it’s suddenly so close. Booth, don’t tease me drunk with your utterly false sense of purpose.
2:02 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud If booth rumours are to be believed, you’ll never believe what they are about to tell us.
2:07 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud We were offered a seat on NEXT Saturday’s flight to Bomo. .. OR a flight to Madrid NOW. ..NOW! GO!
2:37 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud We are apparently getting on a plane to Madrid. Right now. Then we are trying to find a train to Bilbao. Then a ferry home?
2.45 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Momo is in Madrid! Just getting off the plane now. Random. Are we back in the game, gang? 4:47 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud The art of the queue is being learned all over Europe this weekend. Is Saturday night in Madrid always this sweaty and slow?
7:10 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud May take a while to find out if any trains are even going to Bilbao tonight. Or if we’re in the right estacion. Doh!
7:14 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Tired interaily group of youths ahead have hopeful but feeble sign limply strewn on their bag pile: “France! Por favor”.
7:18 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Everyone is still queueing calm, but all think all is bust. “You in the green number streams - what silly sod broke the matrix?”
7:24 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Denied. No train to Bilbao until tomorrow afternoon. Checking out buses. Also thanking God for Haribo, with no guilt.
7:40 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Madrid train station was like last plane out of Casablanca - middle class refugees everywhere.
8:25 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Now at Madrid bus station. More refugees but a bus to Bilbao at 01.30? Really? And space on it? Soon find out.
8:33 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Get in! Caroline shoots and scores from well outside the box, bypassing the queue with a nifty ticket machine shot. Bilbao bound!
8:45 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Can you believe - odyssey continues! Coffee from the nice lady at the kiosk in the middle of the chugging bus terminal. An oasis.
8:49 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Set up camp on a bench surrounded by buses and commuters - have all the essentials, like olives, baguette, pate, pesto, Dairylea.
8:52 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Very happy. But Caroline’s face drops suddenly, middle of decadent feast: “Nuh,” she scowls, “no vino Tintoretto”. Rats.
8:55 PM Apr 17th

#ashcloud Surrounded by other refugees, waiting for the bus to leave, we’re watching 1970s’ Survivors on the laptop. Brilliant.
10:56 PM Apr 17th

#ashtag We are on and we are off. Looks like ours is a specially-laid-on second big bus to Bilbao. What fates await us at sunrise?
12:39 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag It’s still dark. But they are turfing us off, the heavy implication being that we are IN BILBAO.
5:16 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Bleerily staring at a map, I see that the Guggenheim is a mere potter along the road away from the bus terminal. So near.
5:38 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Instead of art, culture or bed we are once more underground; nocturnal mole people, seeking the one true light of our people’s quest
5:40 AM Apr 18th

- the correct train to the P&O ferry port. >yawn<
5:42 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag So, half six on this Sunday morning, as we wait for our connecting train we ask ourselves: how fat is the chance of finding a ferry?
5:44 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag As dawn rises over the ferry port close to Bilbao, we sit and ponder; there IS a ferry today. It is booked up to buggery.
6:44 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag The next ferry is Wednesday. It too is fully booked. Only a miracle will get us out of Spain soon; have we used up too many already?
6:47 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag The shabby ferry terminal fills up with more families of holiday refugees, all imagining there would be more ferries. Ah, no.
8:00 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag We sit, exhausted. What next, then? >sigh< “Meester en Meesees Peeech to main desk please” the tannoy suddenly barks. Whuh?
8:03 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Feel free to utterly disbelieve this. I am in a daze. At the desk is a chap with a four-berth cabin. He is alone.
8:06 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag in front of a weary throng of queuing hopefuls we are offered two tickets. Place goes silent with the concentration of all eyes.
8:08 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Am I Charlie in the chocolate factory, or a heartless bastard? A kid whines. An old man looks at me with watery eyes.
8:16 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag I take the bloody tickets in a swift snatch. WE’RE ON THE BOAT.
8:18 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Can it be true? Are we really going to make it? We sit in fatigued dilerium with our two new chums. The second bloke is from Bomo.
8:54 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag I can’t believe it; we’re going to make it. I laugh an empty little laugh. Momo will make the gig! I lean back, beginning to relax.
8:57 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag “Yep,” says one of the chaps with a grin, “by 4.30 Monday afternoon we’ll be in Portsmouth.” I fall backwards off my seat.
8:59 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag How? How did we not know this is a 30 hour voyage, not a 12 hour? 4.30. Now look at the gig event page again. Now do the math.
9:02 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag I have a LOT of calls to make on that bloody boat. And some pants to scrub out.
9:04 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Sitting here waiting, I think: “Sheesh, where can I get a piano?!” Then tannoy woman barks: “Come to the piano desk!” OH STOP IT.
9:28 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Realise momentarily she said “P&O desk.” Ah. That makes more sense, yes.
9:30 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag I appear to be sitting in front of a bottle of flimsy European beer on board a dirty great boat. I’m on the ruddy boat.
11:13 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag We are aboard - but is this the Pride Of Bilbao or Thunder Child? Might hear a cheer as we get a blast of heat ray trying to leave.
11:27 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Carnage in that little hut, trying to board. People tried hard to keep nice. Ferry just not big enough. How the hell did we make it?
11:30 AM Apr 18th

So, gang - the gig. Can it yet be done? After all that, can I make it onto the Troob’s little stage wih something worth showing and telling?
11:35 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag If we CAN find a way from Portsmouth to London fast-as-arse on Monday and I run out into the spot, will I STILL be in THESE PANTS?
11:42 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag I still need a piano. And a tamborine. And a funny-voice harmoniser. And the rest of the band. And this boat NOT to be leaving late.
11:46 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag The boat’s leaving late obviously. But, thanks to the prayers of this guilt ridden man, it IS leaving with the watery-eyed old man.
11:48 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag Have to say, huge props to Pete and Paddy for becoming our bunk buddies. Pete’s had thankyou offers from all three of us.
11:58 AM Apr 18th

#ashtag BA announce no flights tomorrow. The cloud is over most of Europe now. People are doing amazingly at coping with eachother.
12:04 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag Meanwhile, we ARE pissed.
12:05 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag No we’re not; we have souls. Itchy knickers make you say impulsive things. Someone hose me down in the yard.
12:07 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag Pete: “On the whole, I think I’ve enjoyed being ashed.” Momo: “That’s just the boat talking.”
12:10 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag Paddy’s asked the skipper to get me to London pronto. I believe the skipper said: YOU’RE NOT HELPING. HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?
12:13 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag Of course, I do know that the money I’ve spent doing this roaming nonsense could have flown me home on a private bloody chopper.
12:17 PM Apr 18th

#ashtag BACK! WE’RE BACK! Aledgedly, through the thick haze in front of me, is the blessed Isle of Wight. And that very nice lobster cafe.
3:31 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Biscay was inexplicably flat and sunny the whole way - no swell at all. Channel was like glittering glass this morning. Sweet.
3:33 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag A boat full of passengers have been jolly and bonkers for 30 hours, forgetting their discomforts fast. But everyone is delierous.
3:35 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag No 3G or other Internet for 30 hours. Almost no phone nets either. Quiet. Odd. We’ve spent most of the time dozing and drinking.
3:37 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Approaching Portsmouth. Unbelievable luck to be here. Gunning for the gig still, insanely. I have at least half a band promised.
3:38 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag So. Have to go below. Have to berth. Have to get off. Have to find taxi fast. Have to find train. Back in a bit, gang - here goes...
3:39 PM Apr 19th

@johnmclear Bilbao and Santander only have sailings 2 or 3 times a week. We cheekily just turned up but all is officially booked out.
4:17 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag A throng is waiting at the passenger doors to disembark. More queueing and crossing of streams and Excuse Mes and sudden standing.
4:22 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Someone’s having a last laugh with us vulnerable middle class refugees by standing up decisively with their bags. So did we all.
4:32 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Denied. Pushy bunch on a boat from the Channel Isles get to ‘discharge’ before us. Rufians. Bounders. All the nice people here sigh
4:36 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag ..and then sensibly squash forward a little more. ‘15 more minutes’ be hashed, skipper - WE’RE STORMING THE BORDER. RIGHT EVERYONE?
4:40 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag The lifts are beside us. The doors forlornly open and close periodically on the stuck throng. One bloke has appeared three times.
4:44 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Conspicuous thunk-rumble below; his was the car right at the very front, presumably.
4:47 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag A rumour flashes round: the doors are open! A rumour started by the skipper on the tannoy. We surge.
4:52 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Off. Air. Daylight. ..More queueing.
5:01 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Just heard from the drummer. He’s at the Troubadour and set up. That’s one of us. We have one.
5:03 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Clutching passports and bags we emerge, blinking into the evening sun. And a cue for the taxi.
5:17 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag TV cameras roam. People thank the god of phone network coverage. Others suffering a touch of the Stockholms sit where they are.
5:19 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag In a cab. Queues of them flank around Portsmouth, crawling into the port. Can’t get one in town apparently. More refugees then.
5:23 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Portsmouth, like ports across north Europe, is clogged. Driver said he saw Gatwick yesterday - “ghost town”.
5:31 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Have train tickets, sitting on the platform in the evening south coast sunshine. 17.50 train to Waterloo.
5:43 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Commuters are stranded on the steps of Portsmouth & Southsea station. Cabs are obviously ditching those regular losers.
5:46 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag We’re on the train. We’re going to London. Dawns on us that we are going to LONDON not HOME.
5:52 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag After however-many hundred miles of trapseing around Europe, why the hell are we now going to LONDON? Momo’s set is only 30 mins.
6:21 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Now heard from both the sax player and the trombone player - they’re nearly there, WITH the stand-in horn player.
6:23 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag I’ve never met the stand-in horn player. I am turning up to a gig to go straight onto a stage, without soundcheck, with strangers.
6:27 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Let you know how that works out for me then.
6:29 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag So Mark, Dave, Patrick and Tom are there. We have the talent. Just need the prat at the front. And the laptop at the back.
6:31 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Incidentally, network coverage loss in middle of Biscay = understandable niggle. Near Guildford = last straw. >picks up chair< ...
6:48 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Approaching London town. How clear is my head going to be by the time we bowl in to the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party?
6:58 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag How demented is this? All bets are off on demented levels after this week; warships are dispatching to get holiday makers. SN=AFU.
7:01 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Said goodbye to new chum Pete. The British can keep themselves endlessly amused in adversity with queues and quotes from Blackadder
7:05 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag I can see the London Eye. I can see us actually making the ruddy gig. Actually.
7:24 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Waterloo. Need the loo.
7:29 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Better reception on the District line than all bleedin’ day.
7:51 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag We are at Earl’s Court. We are walking out of the station. We are turning right and hoping we saw the map up the right way.
7:56 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag We can see the Troubadour!
8:25 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag We are SITTING IN THE TROUBADOUR.
8:25 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Chilling at the Unofficial Book Fair Fringe Party. Sublime sounds, friends all around. All is good. We are actually here.
9:13 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag The horns quickly found the Fabulously Cool Booth to hang in. Look like a Miles Davis album shot or something. Somebody smoke!
9:18 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Tonight, I all of a sudden appear to have a band.
9:19 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag Hello. I am on the stage of the Troubadour.
10:44 PM Apr 19th

#ashtag We are going home. The first ever incarnation of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra was brilliant. Much love for all support.
12:17 AM Apr 20th

#ashtag How the hell did we make it home? Thoughts to all who are not yet home. Hope you at least get a good story out of it. Godspeed.
12:20 AM Apr 20th

#ashtag Keep an eye on momotempo.co.uk for the sordid video evidence sometime soon.
12:22 AM Apr 20th

# #ashtag Ruddy nora, I’m ashed. Ciao for now. X
12:23 AM Apr 20th

2010-04-16T19:46:00.004+01:00

Titanic.

So, you know the story. The huge ship that couldn't possibly sink hits something pointy in the dark and the upper classes put off allowing their true situation to dawn on them by opening drinks cabinets in the bar and scoffing at all the bleddy commotion in posh voices. Only after about an hour of this do they notice the drinks trolley skidding across the tipping floor.

So here I am in the Balearics. Lovely. Smashing break. Due to come home two days clear of the legendary first ever outing of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra at the actually legendary Troubadour in London town. What, as you might ask, could go wrong.

An unpronouncable volcano in Iceland. That's obviously what.

I have been wandering around in the balmy Palma afternoon, mentally clinking a G&T and assuming I'd find some way home in plenty of time, of course.

Yes. I now realise I have 48 hours to get from an island in the Med to the south of England with no planes in the sky and all the trains and ferries between here and there booked. To say nothing of the hotels.

Right. Well, I have had to accept already that I will not be making it back to watch the epic local production of bemusing musical Titanic tomorrow night, which my mother has been musically slaving over for months. This is a great shame.

I have, however, decided what to do tonight, in our last civilised night before a weekend of lost horizons.

Don a suit and go out for dinner.

Follow my antics on Twitter tomorrow, I shall attempt to keep you posted on the Great Race-type shenanigans as I try to get to the gig.

Here goes.

2010-04-09T21:44:00.002+01:00

Narcilepsy.

[ nar-sil-ep-see n. ]

I think I have now developed this condition.

After some concentrated weeks of staring at pictures of myself, I now spontaneously collapse asleep with boredom at the sight of my gurning phisog.

Think I'm quite ready for tomorrow's holiday. Though by 'ready' I don't remotely mean 'ready' I mean 'wanting it'.

What with goofy publicity shoots and remixes and press packs and Facebook pages and goodness knows what else, it's been all go with Momo:tempo these last few weeks. The new momotempo website is also up and I've been shaking it into acceptible shape. Looks rather nice, but needs all the music and pictures adding still. Don't nag.

And none of this is mentioning perhaps the most pertinent fact here in the studio. Namely, that the very first outing of the Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra at the Troubadour has now had two band rehearsals – most notably with the brand new Horn Department.

To say we are excited is to discretely downplay how undone we look in the trouser department at the moment.

Plus, of course, up on stage I won't have to look at me at all. You'll be stuck with that.

Hopefully then, I at least will stay awake on the night.

Right, off on hols. See you in a week. Look after the place.

2010-03-13T17:26:00.010Z

Momo, but no longer in mono.

Now. You may, like me, imagine yourself to be so used to ploughing the romantic lonely creative furrow that you've not only long stopped noticing the babbling noise coming out of your mouth somewhere off in the mental distance but you've also long since forgotten to turn around and come back and repeat this process enough times to actually finish the rest of your field and sod off to the pub. You've just kept on going. Ploughing that wobbly, wandering, meandering groove off into the distance, far far away from any memory of what ploughing is for or of owning a field in the first place.

That's fine. You can sort of lose yourself in the quiet pointlessness of it. It may, after all, be no less pointless at least than sitting in the pub.

And then you notice a disturbance in the force.

A weird new noise, upsetting the dreamlike equilibrium.

It occurs to you distantly that it might be someone from the Highways department of the local council come to tell you off for just ploughing across a main road. Have you? Oh. Right.

But it's not. It's some other guy. Someone conspicuously Not You. But walking beside you.

As you come to your senses a little more, you stop the plough and look this weird stranger in the eye.

"Bog off! And what do you want? ..Tell me what you want before you bog off. But be very ready to bog off the nano second that you have." you say with a cheery frown.

"Well, I'm just interested in what you're doing, is all" the stranger weirdo replies nicely, before adding casually: "Plus you've known me for years, you idiot."

"Oh. Right." you say. "Well get off this ruddy metaphor, it's built for one and is likely to come apart with your goofy great weight on it. It'll either leave us in some featureless limbo or turn into a ruddy cider advert. Go on. Clear off, whatsyername."

"I think," says Whatsyername, "we both know this metaphor is coming apart even as we speak, leaving us in..., yes looks like a featureless limbo."

"Oh well bloody thankyou very much" you blurt coolly, as the plough gently evaporates. "I was really enjoying that leafy summer evening country lane."

"..With you carving a dirty great trench down the middle of it."

"Alright, well, get to the point so we can thoughtful-punchline out of this scene and start a less rambling new paragraph." you pout.

"The point," says your generic friend, "is that when you realise someone else does actually get the direction you're heading in after all these years, and joins you on the walk a little way, it doesn't half make it all seem suddenly real and exciting."

He/she pauses, before adding: "Of course, it's a shame the metaphor did come apart there; there was going to be a whole party of us cheering you on to a nice big marquee at the end..."

"You idiot. What kind of end-of-scene point is that?"

---

I think, if I can remember back to the start of this journal, that I seem to have spent rather more of 2010 making music than making money or making sense. The first bit at least is remarkable.

And, on top of the various projects that Tempo seems to have on in the studio at the moment, I can only say that after a morning alternately in the company of drumming maestro Mark Addy and Sweet Strings Marshall himself, I am becoming increasingly powerless to avoid noticing a gnawing, growing sense of something adding to the whole remarkableness. I believe it might be called excitement.

About exactly what, I don't know. Excitement is a delightful but flimsy creature, kept aloft by fanciful vagueries, so I'm not about to make a life plan for the next two years or anything. But, as Kev strummed a couple of chords of Golden Age track Just Passing Through, while I quietly sung along and plonked a couple of piano chords with him, I could suddenly imagine my ruddy navel-gazing music production work existing in the real world. Nowhere grand or silly you understand. Just somewhere like Radio One's Live Lounge.

Well, excitement really only needs the idea of possibilities to make it and you feel quite nice, so forgive an old man his fancies. The real practical point coming home to me over the last week is that the secret to making things happen for real may turn out to be this: get some dead talented people on stage with you.

Who knew?

---

So let's do a little list here. Hokay...

Laptop – check.

Really very good and enthusiastic drummer – ooh, check.

Really very good and enthusiastic guitarist, ready to learn my three repeating chords and join in – er, check.

Horn section. An actual ruddy horn section – poss-ib-ly… check?

Gig.

>PAUSE<

Check.

..Nerve?

Not sure.

But I'd better find some. For, yes – the list there is correct. The Troubador in Earl's Court appears to be booked. And some incarnation of the bleating, blaring, burbling Momo:tempo Electro Pops Orchestra is going to have to turn up and do something to fill that PA stereo output.

Fill you in soon.

2010-03-11T14:44:00.004Z

Dark rise.

"I canny change the laws of physics." It's a clearly apocryphal quote from Scotty there.

Why? Because by the 23rd century, a starship chief engineer would know very full well that you certainly can change the laws of physics. If you're a theoretical physicist you can make up whatever the heck you fancy.

While artworking something lastnight, I watched a programme on the telly viewer gizmo that I was clearly never going to understand much of. Horizon: Is everything we know about the universe wrong may have spent a very great deal of its screen time cutting away to boffins slo-mo drawing inexplicable Greek hieroglyphic maths on blackboards, but I came away from it with a very clear understanding. Namely, that I am a dumbo of amoebal proportions and theoretical physicists are brilliantly clever.

They are. If nothing else, they have invented a way to simply invent stuff they can't find but really need. How Star Trek is that?

You can make up whole chunks of stuff apparently – but the trick is, I've learned, to make up stuff that can't be disproved – because it can't be proved. Genius, eh? And believe, me, dirty great swathes of the universe are, it turns out, totally made up. Like gobbledigook is made up. Like blehbleblehbleblehbleribblesnood is made up. There. Just like that.

Well I mean, really.

There in the theoretical physics canteen it's all: "Ooh, we have a great mathematical model of the universe" one minute and then: "But we kind of need, like, WAY more gravity to make it work so we'll, um... just, like, make up some – some invisible undetectable, ah, 'dark' matter that will balance the books. Sweet."

But then it's: "Ah. Oh. Er. So we also don't really know why the universe is, er, not expanding and moving quite as it should be, according to our really great model of the universe. It should be slowing it's expansion. Like a normal bang, only bigger. It's, er, not. It shouldn't be doing that. ..So we'll have to... ah, make up some more stuff. Some undetectable, invisible, unknowable stuff... Stuff in the gaps. Stuff that IS the gaps – which, as those gaps grow, it grows (obviously) and so keeps feeding the expansion. Like a kind of... 'dark energy'. (Phew. That oughta do it. Yeah. Dark energy. Nothing is nothing, baby – nothing is always something! Little physicist's joke there, doll)."

...And THEN it's suddenly: "Sh**. We need a whole 'nother universe."

What? Do we know anything anymore?

Right. So it's 'dark flow' now, is it? Rummaging in our pocket universe and making our galaxies spin very unscientifically, apparently. Like the laws-of-physics-and-the-whole-theory-of-the-big-bang-model-of-the-universe says they shouldn't be. But are.

Oh, which means there are inestimable numbers of other universes out there in the multiverse, by the way. Just so you know. So the very end of Men in black was right.

Sheeesh. Theoretical physicists. Wish I could just make up stuff for a living.

---

As I climb down from my soapmox in reverence for the fine minds and likable people I saw on this little foray into the far reaches of reality, I am reminded by a chum on Facebook that theoretical physics demands the same levels of faith in bald-faced absurdity as any religion you care to name. Which gets us nowhere practical but I guess at least proves that humans rely on their imaginations to map out the universe. We're all people of faith and we're all heretics, you might say.

Of course, in answer to this, I'm sure a benevolent theoretical physicist would adopt a kindly tone when pointing out that he and his colleagues are not falling prostrate before golden calf statuettes in the desert and praying for rain but in fact feeding spectacularly complex and brilliant mathematical models of otherwise ineffable things in order to arrive at sound scientific theories of how stuff works.

..To which, I suppose, a person of strong faith might kindly add: "Don't worry, mate – you'll catch up."

---

I really have no idea how people do the maths to work out the universe. Or how just about anything around me works – if I hadn't been taught to expect the iPhone from an infancy in front of science fiction, I might be persuadable that it's fallen from heaven.

All I know is, these guys keep us all dreaming as much as they keep our feet on the ground. As one of them said with a grin: "I dreamed of going into space when I was a kid. Other worlds and far flung adventures. It lead me to do this job at a desk."

Damn right, mate. An act of service and faith.

It may not be the job of theoretical physicists to help us find the light, but they're certainly doing something rather more inspiring than just scratching about in the dark.

2010-02-17T10:44:00.004Z

Full Circle.

I’ve done an album. You might have heard. I appear to have been going on about it somewhat.

But, as part of ‘doing an album’ – which I hope does not become known as ‘doing a Momo’ or anything like that in the future, implying as it does that completing another epic and completely pointless creative project has finally turned my name into a verb for folly – I have also ‘done an album cover’.

On this album cover is a circle. A thick circle like a perfect letter ‘o’ with an icon of an aircraft in the bottom of the ring. It’s a kind of logo, really, in homage to airport signage and travel iconography, all of which has long prompted me to feel strangely rude.

Now, it was only after I’d taken delivery of the printed preview covers that I realised how jolly clever I’d turned out to be.

So clever, I’d not noticed myself planning it. Though I have vowed now to tell everyone it was indeed a very consciously planned bit of symbolism, obviously. Because this little logo does rather represent the fact that the music itself comes full circle, starting and ending on the same little riff of music.

See?

>TAPS FORHEAD<

Jolly clever.

Interestingly, after almost two weeks of this little musical round trip being out there among its very first reviewers, freed from the bonds of the studio and taking first skittery Bambi steps out into the jaws of the wild, I find myself pondering the idea of coming full circle.

---

I watched a BBC4 documentary yesterday. The kind that stops me in my tracks when I see it on the iPlayer – and which makes the lovely first lady of Momo glance heavenward and leave the room.

I scooched into bed with the laptop to indulge myself for 80 minutes, during a lazy Saturday recovering from staying out way past our bed time – watching the blessed Annie Mac DJing in town. I can’t imagine that we didn’t just blend in naturally with everyone else there at the Orange Rooms, you understand, but I now wonder with hindsight whether being old enough to be everyone’s parents does, in fact, show. Especially if you’re a parent that really gets off on black and white archive documentaries about Zeppelins.

D’you think that stuff shows? Okay, so I’ll admit that tweed was probably a little hot for the occasion anyway.

Yes - Zeppelins. Or, in this case, one particular Zeppelin.

Airships are another weird fetish that I suspect more people share than I once knew. I have said many times, and you have probably heard me do so wistfully yourself, while you left the room, that I have a memory of the old Goodyear blimp droning over my primary school in Bournemouth one summer.

It haunted the south coast that year I recall, and the balmy evening when it actually slid very slowly behind the trees in our back garden was like some kind of moment of worlds meeting worlds – where heavenly creatures reveal themselves to little boys and descend into their little fenced existences for a fleeting, orb-eyed moment, exhilarating their little legs into carrying them indoors shouting: “Mummymummy! You’ll never guess what’s in the garden Mummy!”

I wasn’t dragged through the catflap in an orange hue, thankfully. And Mum didn’t have to run outside and scream at a Wyoming skyscape and then climb Table Mountain to get me back. We went outside and looked up and the sheepish blimp took an underpowered age to move off, I seem to remember. Which was just fine.

Which was, in fact, just wonderful.

---

The hook is, I guess, that airships are a giant, floating, looming, spellbinding reminder of a different age – an age that had technology we now don’t. Like the seventies and Concord, or the sixties and the moon rockets. Or the eighties and Betamax video recorders – we used to be able to do this amazing stuff and now we simply can’t. Isn’t this a bit remiss?

Isn’t this a crying shame, in fact?

Or were these things all gigantic, indulgent follies?

Well, the ardent pragmatist in you is protesting that no it isn’t a shame and yes, these things were a waste of rich people's money. So boo hoo. And you're right.

But. I will have to bind and gag my lefty self here and say something awkward. Stop squirming, lefty self.

Some of the coolest things Personkind has ever actually built could only have happened thanks to the vanities of rich people. Stinking rich people.

The Renaissance may arguably have been started by a local chap called Frank, pulling on some humble hessian and popping out to the job-seeking poor massing outside 12th century Florence to lift their spirits with a few creative skits but, let’s face it, the whole idea would basically be nowhere now without your Sistines and your St Peters and your dirty-great statements of power and cash.

The Uffizi and all the galleries of Europe would be two-thirds empty today, had it not been for bored rich bastards calling over the casually creatively colossal talents of Michelangelo and the gang and asking them to spruce up the back bedroom.

And St Francis himself was, after all, the bored son of a wealthy cloth merchant. How else d’you think he could have afforded all those pets?

---

The pyramids. The palace of Versailles. Jay Leno’s car collection – so many wonderous testimonies to human ability were actually built on the backs of slaves by rich men showing off.

The problem with stuff built for rich men showing off – apart from the whole slave thing – is that a defining element is always key: economy. These things invariably need impractical great glumps of cash pumped into them to keep them afloat.

Hydrogen certainly did not bring down the Zeppelins. Heavy money bags did. Or, to be more precise, the market for very expensive, very slow air travel very quickly sprung a leek and shriveled.

Really, did you need to spend all that extra time and airfare dragging a lounge pianist and a baby grand to Rio with you?

---

Ditteke Mensink’s film isn’t about airships. It’s about one particular airship and one particular journey it took – perhaps the spiritual daddy of them all, the Graf Zeppelin and her circumnavigation of August 1929.

I’ve read about this epic tale before. I remember Hugo Eckener laying his reputation on the line by trying to prove that one of eccentric old Baron Von Zeppelin’s weirdly compelling aeronautical grandchildren could even make such a trip. Eckener was a journalist on Friedrichshafen’s local rag, when he was sent to interview the crazy bloke who kept testing giant floating sausages over the lake.

Slowly captivated by the clunky poetry of the technology, young Hugo kept hanging around the Baron’s workshops, getting to know how to pilot these giant silver fish. Twenty years later, he was himself the face of the Zeppelin corporation and, in a way, an ambassador for his tentatively re-asserting homeland.

An interesting dynamic for the tireless Eckener turned out to be how his passion for this mode of travel – which may well have ended up as much a passion to see Germany symbolically reinvigorated and freed from reparation – found itself at the mercy of rich, powerful men. A few years later, Eckener was not happy about having to put Nazi swastikas on the fins of the mighty Hindenburg – and in 1929 he was not happy about having to shift the centrepoint of the Graf Zeppelin’s epic circle of the globe from his little Bodensee town to New York, at the behest of William Randalf Hearst. But the newspaper mogul was now paying for this adventure – and for a lot of global exposure. So Hugo sucked it up. Like a sensible old hack.

What I didn’t know was the too-good-to-be-true Hollywood human dimension to the trip. Lady Grace Drummond Hay.

On a trip that was entirely a PR stunt for various posturing chaps on a giant sausage, she was the only chick on board. And like a typical chick, she missed the point and spent the whole time mooning about an ex boyfriend. Cuh.

Of course, it didn’t help that he was on the bleedin’ blimp as well.

---

Grace was, of course, the meaningful heart of the expedition by the end. I think she made the most of those windows. And her telegraphed articles back to Hearst and the NYT turned out to be newspaper gold, transforming her into a star by the time she landed back at Lakehurst.

Her frank personal memoirs, ably voiced by Poppy Elliott, structured Mensink’s film and told of a young woman determined to be strong in a man’s world, but torn by a love that could never fully be. Which you are not to dismiss as soppy narrative slop there, I should say.

There this woman was, poised to be the first to circumnavigate the globe and to scoop her own story as a journo, and at the last minute, good old uncle Bill Randy wheels in a ‘mentor’ to go with her. And, pausing not a grumpy old bastard’s moment to reflect on how dispiriting, sexist and patronising this is for the girl, wheels in specifically, the love of her life – Karl Henry von Wiegand. A man with a troubled marriage, with whom she had had an affair a while before. And over whom, she had been struggling to get ever since.

Go figure. Poor thing. Actually, poor things. Locked up in a balloon for 21 days, trying hard to both be stoic and good, but breaking apart inside as the world slid by silently underneath – this wouldn’t be a Club 18–30 holiday for anyone. Tensions of many kinds stretch tautly across the story.

And, in fact, I wonder how he felt in the years afterwards. For they continued to work together, weirdly, and were even interned in a Japanese war camp together during WWII. She subsequently died of something tropical when they were released in 1943. He brought her ashes back to England after her funeral. And went on to live with the memory of this beautiful, eloquent, famous woman, the unattainable love of his life, until he was 84. As he said to her at the end of the Graf Zeppelin trip: “My dear trust me, you’re the lucky one.”

---

Looking through two different ages of image degredation – bleaches, speckled film and low bandwidth pixelation, the images are still moving. But it is definitely another world. A world of lobsters over Siberia and of a privileged, Modern world, slipping over the real world at a safe, well table-serviced altitude.

Still, it’s quite a story. Against the odds, and despite a few hairy moments, the Graf Zeppelin slid into Lakehurst, New Jersey after 21 days. She’d circled the Earth and made it back in one piece to a hero’s welcome.

She went on to have an unblemished service record across the Atlantic, as all civil Zeppelins did for that brief interwar period of history that is now gone.

---

This is a film of 80 minutes about a trip of 21 days.

I picked up a copy of The Golden Age of Exploration afterwards and looked again at the logo on the front, of a big circle round the Earth, and I wondered if I have come full circle in my thinking about this 80 minute record of 21 tracks.

Putting yourself out there is risky. Embarking on an adventure of PR can wind up with you looking an idiot. Or looking dead, if you’re really flying a home-made balloon contraption over the Himalayas.

I’d not remembered what it is like to put out a creative statement – to step up and have the nerve to tell people you’ve made something. Something of and for you. Just you. Not for a client, to fit some brief. Just, y’know, an exploration of your soul, ‘n’shit.

I had not, I should say, taken note of how much opinion I myself have on everything creative I’ve ever bought and loved. Turns out lots of people do this. And it’s harder to take than I remember, despite being apparently mentally prepared before hand that I walk a lonely creative road.

When young Calvin Harris blared in capitals all over Twitter that reviews of his new album this summer were all done by rich kids and idiots and that they should try putting two years of love and heart into a thing and then have rich idiots stamp all over it casually, while texting their rich mates about where to have lunch, I felt his pain. And I replied in Tweet by telling him he should try putting seven years of love and heart into a thing and then have “no bastard to listen to it”. Think that helped the boy calm down.

Hearing a good number of reviews from good chums honestly giving me feedback over the last fortnight, I have honestly wondered what to change about the record. Is the mix, after all, too rich?

I’m not sure what’s tougher to suck up – that one person says “blimey, it’s just too long, mate’ or that another doesn’t mention it at all. A surprising number of chums have, it seems, lives of their own to get on with, rather than a burning desire to call the bloke who works from home and thinks too much to tell him his home-made record has shifted their view of the universe on its axis. Funny.

Bless me, I’d hoped that more of them would feel excited enough to let me know either way, though. Or it may be that some can’t find the words and are hoping I’ll never mention it. Either way, I didn’t think for one moment I’d be up at night worrying about it.

But here’s the thing. Underneath the shock of completing something and having loved ones actually get to hear it and form a passing opinion on it, even one of indifference, I think I am back where I started. Back to thinking that the record I made is, um, almost exactly as it should be. I think I do know my creative mind. Even if it turns out I'm trapped in it.

Feedback has been so far very mixed on the negative front, and pretty universal on the positive. I can’t yet say for certain that I haven’t embarrassed myself – the real hope and fear – but I strongly suspect that I haven’t. No more than ususal. Not in the music, anyway.

I think... it’s good. And deliberate sounding. And likeable. And distinctive. And very 'me', apparently. And for whatever flimsy or solid reason, some at least seem to just love it.

You have to set out, in order to arrive. Adventure is risky. And I am a total idiot. But even if your passion is for a thing that ultimately has no sustainable future, that can't ultimately stay afloat, you have to follow your heart and take a risk.

And so you learn. And hopefully enlarge your view of the world.

Maybe I’m right back where I started. But maybe that’s okay. I feel fuller.

I may be fool. But I think I can’t wait to set out again.

2010-02-03T08:51:00.002Z

600.

Years of solitude?

Reasons to give up and go home?

Pounds heavier?

No, tweets. I posted my six hundredth tweet this morning. ..Passingly interested in what it said? Thought not. Here it is:

"DID YOU HEAR? IT'S CHUFFING DONE!"

Let's just wait a moment there.

>WRY STARE<

Yep?

>MORE WRY STARE<

Yep. Really.

I have burned the first complete and approved preview copy of The Golden Age of Exploration. It is, indeed, chuffing done.

Wanna copy?

---

2010-01-29T08:32:00.009Z

Label gun to the head.

I've tried to develop a rule. A rule about getting angry with people. One that sounds nifty and sensible, but which I find falls over immediately when it comes face to face with a particular group of people. Or my actual moral capacity.

Bankers.

Now, before embarking on my rank banking rant, the real detail of interest here is that, whatever I may think, I evidently feel the need to deploy the phrase 'group of people'.

Ah, nothing feels better when you're on your inexplicably high (and presumably wobbly) horse than to herd a group of people together and jab a finger at them repeatedly.

"THERE! THERE they are. THEY. THEM. OVER THERE. LOOK, LOOK AT THEM, all there with their, their... bloody whassnames and their, their... ruddy THINGS. JEER. JEER AT THEM."

>CONTENTED SIGH<

It's just so much simpler.

---

Somewhere in the honest light of this, my clever and upright-sounding rule about losing one's rag with someone clears its throat and meekly says this: that I should, in the heat of disagreement, take care not to label the disagree-ee with my accusations and colourful judgements.

Whuh?

I mean, to me there's a difference between shouting at someone that they have been acting like something unmentionable, and shouting at someone that they are something unmentionable. Despite the fact that you've clearly mentioned it very loudly.

Really?

If you've gotten to the stage where you really are actually shouting at someone, then you've probably already entered the taped-off room labeled Academic Arguments, when it comes to exactly how you're framing the tense of your abuse as you pick up the chair.

But it's a detail of internal perspective that seems important, because it may govern how you or I see and therefore treat those around us.

..And then. JUST when you think you have those around you treated jolly well – with a friendly hello in the baker's (if you're in the mood), or an occasional Big Issue purchase (if you haven't already crossed the street because you didn't want to break a tenner), or an effusive thankyou to a friend who's just cooked you a free slap-up meal (after moaning before arriving about having to turn out that night) – along come some bloody, ruddy, depraved, soulless, evil, murdering bankers.

Arrived with the sole purpose of upsetting your nice moral equilibrium. The bastards.

---

Why I'm so hot under the collar about the banking system I have no idea. I can barely work Sage or send the occasional invoice. It's not like I understand a thing the markets are going on about. And our household and business has fared okay over the last year. I have not a thing to actually complain about.

But really. With so many millions of people across the world in debt up to their receding hairlines because we've all been encouraged to keep spending like the dialysis machine will implode if we don't, the corporate banking sector seems willfully disconnected from the rest of humanity.

Ah. And there. How stealthy is the private human urge to segregate – to create Them and Us. We can so nearly blame The Bankers for segregating themselves. Can't we? Can't we?

In a year of calamitous financial cock-ups that bared to all the wildly childish level of responsibility that the current, laxly-regulated global banking culture seems to stimulate, the Clever Chaps At The Top Who We Desperately Need To Retain With Reasonable Incentives – and who incidentally CAUSED the apparent near-collapse of all we pinned our fiscal hopes to – decide to keep paying themselves EXTRA payments on top of their bulging salaries. In the full glare of the media. Of us little people judging them. Jabbing our bony, underfed fingers at them.

They don't appear to care. Or they really don't see. Which are sort of the same thing.

Or, I suspect more realistically, none of the people closely involved in this whole tedious drama quite has the courage to challenge things so fundamentally. I'd be nervous. And selfishly so.

I mean, here's the point: Mercs are like, really comfortable in the back. And nicely soundproofed. You can really feel lulled to slumber in there. I'm not sure I'd want to be woken up. Would you?

---

I found myself ranting on Twitter this morning in the sort of annoying way that ruins your followers' feeds with endless repetitions of your tedious icon. For the record, here are those tweets:

I'm not in Davos, just to be clear. Much as the banking heads of Earth implored me to come and tell them again how angry they make us all.

Eloquent as my Davos speech would have been, peppered with colourful oaths and gathering purpleness of face, I fear pearls to swine.

If a group of vulgarly well-paid adults with saturated access to 24hour news media can't sense the need for SOME symbolic gestures...

ONE year. Just ONE year without bonuses. Everyone in banking - one year. The one where people are losing jobs and businesses are folding.

Is it so hard – to give up one year of EXTRA money? Is solidarity or just seemliness incomprehensible to senior banking culture? Apparently.

Use one year's bonuses across the banking sector to wipe the debts of others. Go on. Try to get your heads around that. Just ONE year.

"We must retain the brightest talent with disproportionately, offensively large additional payments." Really? Go on, really?

Banks want to attract and retain soullessness, do they? What else would a clear dependency on bonus cash at any cost do to people?

Sack the top tier of bankers. If they can't function for a humble year – a year now gone already - without bonus, lose them. Why not?

Well, yes – why not? Have a spring clean. Promote from within. Warn the new guys not to break the banking system this time, but let them have a go. A healthy step up for these chaps could still cost way less than the bloated funds pouring through the coffers of some top individuals at the moment, and they might have a few new ideas. Make the generation above sweat a little. That's capitalism, baby.

I'm an idiot. Which means I not only do not understand these things, I am also far too comfortable with failure. So, y'know – do not take my advice about anything.

But a wise-sounding wit I used to work with once said something to the effect of this: When a task you're hopeless at gets taken from you, it's just a relief, isn't it?

Ah, how I sit in the studio and soberly ponder this every day.

Anyway.

Don't strike the Banking Bastards from society. Don't write them off as humans. Invite them back into the group. Coax them back from There to Here. Relabel their foreheads from Them to Us. Then lower the label gun.

Just, for the love of all that's sensible, make some of them stop banking.

2010-01-23T17:17:00.005Z

The Trojan white elephant in the room.

It's getting rapidly to the point where I can't turn back. There will be no hiding. It will be out there. It will be exposed.

Now, they say that when something giantically obvious but awkward exists between people, their mutual or group instinct to not mention it to eachother is like having an elephant in the room. But I doubt this. I think it's probably a poor analogy.

I think that even if you and your fellow awkwardees did instinctively swear an unspoken pact to not mention the inexplicable presence of a three-and-a-half metre tall, eight-ton African land mammal in your kitchen diner, as it casually overturned your pine dresser with an inadvertent tusk swing, the direction of your conversation would eventually slide.

I think that your noble English understatement would be somewhat undermined by the fact that your floor's integrity suddenly would be.

And anyway, I think that the elephant would be too smart to play along. I think it would politely but firmly clear its throat. And prod a trunk at the pile of letters from the WWF asking you how you intend to look after it.

---

It makes me wonder though. If the ancient Trojans had adopted this marvelously oblique and English attitude, would Troy have turned out differently – "What big horse?". Or is this attitude exactly how Troy was allowed to be finished and put on theatrical release in the first place?

I mean, surely only an unnaturally developed ability to ignore the bleedin' obvious could have gotten some of the film crew through some days of that film production, screened again lastnight on Channel 5.

You can hear the execs talking about the idea in pre-production meets and all slavering in agreement: "a huge cast of absurdly pretty, famous people, supported by a secondary cast of respected elder voice-over actors, all dressed to the nines in ancient world finery, with a bunch of epic battles and a couple of shots of Brad Pitt's butt – what's not perfect? What?"

Yeah. Right. Nothing. Except for the small detail that the whole thing's a stinking embarrassment of an idea.

Really, it's a howler. Watch it again sometime. You won't make it as far as the ruddy horse. We didn't. It's clearly a very slow horse.

And what we've learned is that the easiest elephants in the room to ignore are clearly the white ones.

----

Now. You may be wondering why I'm pondering the subject of epic ineptitude.

Well. Glad you ask. And you're there ahead of me, obviously. Because it won't be long before I'm quietly rolling out the red carpet to the premier of an epic production of my own.

Inviting the stars along. Gurning smugly at the paps outside. Winking at the reviewers. Straightening the sleek bow tie. Making the lovely first lady of Momo slip on some preposterously expensive evening wear. As if that's different to usual.

Because I have begun the final, unnerving, dispiriting process of doing the final mixes for The Golden Age of Exploration.

And I'm wondering if it's possible to hide behind the massive bulk of a white elephant when the rotten cabbages start raining onto the stage.

---

Now, now. I'm not being disingenuous. As I step back in the studio and try to take one more honest look at the canvas, like most artists, I vacillate between thinking I'm looking at a masterpiece and wondering if I'm actually staring blankly at Aphrodite at the waterhole, by that famous Parisian sculptor, Tony Hancock.

It's neither, of course. I'm exaggerating for comic effect. Really – I do that from time to time. True story. It's a collection of tunes that are, I suspect, cheekily likable.

But, as someone of a more effortlessly hip demographic might put it with withering efficiency, likeable ≠ credible.

The last time I rolled out the red carpet for a production of mine was August 2001. Just a couple of weeks before 9/11, I happily invited all and sundry down to Cranleigh's church hall for the launch event of a little 'space opera' all about an unexpected terrorist attack on an Earth of the future. Whole thing starts with a massive explosion sound. Friends came. A handful stayed and listened to the whole darned two-and-a-half hours of electronica and drama – a kind of loving cross between Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds and Blake's 7. Which, be honest, you secretly think sounds brilliant. And if I'm secretly honest back, I think was kind of groovy. It was also, after four toiling years of my life, essentially a very long bedroom demo, featuring many of my mates in lead roles, and a lot of very inadequate recording techniques, plus a number of shaky moments in the script.

I had a blast, of course. And was crushed because Chaser was basically pointless, of course.

Well, I wasn't really. But imagine the pressure now, after seven years of prep. Especially given the fact that I'm claiming The Golden Age of Exploration as more than just a worthy creative demo this time, but in fact A Musical Product That Will Actually Be Released For Purchase. All be it via iTunes to a fan base that doesn't exist beyond the Thinking Juice studio and a single inexplicable but friendly chap in the Czech Republic.

I've mixed three tracks so far. Spent most of Friday working on one enormous song near the start of the album that I'm trying to convince myself is not a wildly ill-advised bit of pop melodrama.

Dear me, three tracks in and I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time. Or whether I'll do what I always do and press on, finish it, invite people and pray they don't mention the giant white elephant in the room.

Thankfully, most of my close friends are English. Doubt they'll have the heart to say anything.

2010-01-15T08:37:00.011Z

Thaw and theodicy.

Fifteen days in, as the snows at last begin to subside across the treacherous, inconvenient winter wonderland of the UK, it's still hard to accept the fact that Christmas really is over and it's now 2010. After all the digging out and mucking in and helping hands and freezing feet, it's the future. We're here, living in it. Officially.

This week, however, the people most on our minds must surely be those in the Caribbean who have been blasted back to the middle ages. Of all the places to suffer a natural catastrophe of such magnitude, Haiti was perhaps the least prepared in the western hemisphere to cope with Tuesday's earthquake.

With at least 50,000 people dead as a result of that 30-second 7.0 magnitude shock, horribly close to the centre and surface of Port Au Prince, further millions have been practically displaced around the dense capital.

Think about those figures. That's like half the people of Bournemouth gone – just gone. And at least three or four times as many people who live in the entire Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole area made homeless. Imagine every street around you shaken apart like that.

Well, you can't. Probably. Either because you don't live in Bournemouth or because you do and all you can think about at the prospect of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hitting the town is that at last the bloody Imax might fall down. Or possibly the BIC, if you're still holding that grudge.

And I'm certain that you're unlikely to be reading this from a city with most of its inhabitants living in shanty shacks trembling their way up the surrounding hillsides in the hope that one day millions of jobs will magically appear for everyone who moved there from the deforested, flooded, wrecked economies of the countryside.

So we can't realistically imagine what's going on over there, despite all the footage. Bodies piling in the street do not look the same on the telly as they do at the junction of Arnewood and Paisley Roads.

---

It's been a country of poverty and revolution, of sorts, for centuries.

The island now divided into western Haiti and eastern Dominican Republic was 'found' by heroic imperial land-nicker himself Chris Columbus in 1492 – a year in which he seemed to pack an inordinate amount in, given the woeful lack of international travel and broadband speeds at the time – and became a Spanish settlement. Everyone in Haiti today speaks French you'll notice observantly, however, because the Spanish sort of gave away the mountainous end of the island to the French near the end of the 17th century. Probably lost it in a card game or somesuch over coffee.

Interestingly, it was the first place on Earth, it seems, to have been overthrown by black slaves and to have subsequently abolished slavery. Napoleon's own brother-in-law couldn't retake the country and it became fully independent in 1804. Though why being Napoleon's brother-in-law should be any gauge of military competence is anyone's guess; Lord knows what some blokes have to do to keep their wives happy. Especially potty, pint-sized despots – they're bound to attract some high maintenance skirt.

The sad truth is that Haiti seems to have been defined by dictatorship, coups and political instability ever since. And that ALWAYS leads to financial stability and a healthy middle class, right? Especially when there's American money sewn up in the interests of the country somewhere too.

After some twenty years of military take-overs vying with fledgling democracy on and off, Haiti was famously hit by a particularly severe hurricane season for the island in 2008. Floods killed hundreds. Mudslides from the bare hills and mountains stripped of their meager wood value just slooped into the roads and towns, wrecking infrastructure. The DEC and other overseas aid agency alliances together raised some $1billion-worth of support at the time.

And today they're launching another appeal. Because today, Haiti is on its knees.

---

Interesting turn of phrase that.

It's not long before you hear the G-word somewhere in the face of such rampant, apparently very precisely unfair suffering. God. And two and a half centuries ago was no different, with one particular debate about divine purpose and suffering flaring into comedy. With absolutely no reference to Dante.

Rapier French wit, Voltaire – so cuttingly funny the French kicked him out and sent him to live in the more satirically-minded London – lampooned and lambasted Enlightenment-tinged theology of the day in his bawdy tale of Candide, published first in 1759. The absurd Dr Pangloss in this rip-roaring cross between Tom Jones and Private Eye was famously a caricature of Gottfried Leibniz – a right brain-box, polymath and contemporary rival of Newton, who also rather smugly invented the word 'theodicy'.

Nice, isn't it? Theodicy.

I imagined it was spelt theodyssey and pictured a glittering, disco gospel supergroup. Google thought I was looking for information on Homer.

Most appropriately of all, perhaps, it doesn't half sound like theo-idiocy and it's not to be confused with theodolite which was then an emerging tool of engineering, of sorts. Which is interesting because theodicy concerns itself with divine engineering, of sorts.

Put overly simply, it's the idea that God – if he is, after all, God – must know what he's doing and that therefore: "if you think THIS world's shite, you should see the ones he discarded, mate. Sheesh."

In other words, as Dr Pangloss keeps saying throughout Voltaire's biting little book, we are, dear fellows, living in the "best of all possible worlds."

..It's an argument from a very different age to ours philosophically, of course. It has, I suspect, rather lost its debatory heat for the average Celebrity Big Brother watcher.

But it still resonates a theme that is, I think, eternal – ie: "God, WTF?!"

---

As I've sat and watched the inconsolably hard images from Port Au Prince this week, lost for words, a detached, academic little part of my head has imagined countless people of faith this week trying hard once again to, as Voltaire often put it, 'let God off the hook' on this one.

The 9.0-factor Lisbon earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1755 was the disaster that resonated for him; how could God allow such carnage? And how could posh blokes in Europe straighten their wigs calmly and try to explain away the theological injustice of it?

Interesting then, that so many of the top UK aid agencies, represented by the DEC, are faith-based, like Christian Aid, Cafod or Tearfund.

I don't know about you, but I wonder whether a little bit of anger about such horror is sort of the point. I wonder if the person who wants to shout at the sky and to prove their concern gets on a plane and goes to pull people out of the rubble and clear away the countless dead and feed the countless hungry and try to find out what human cock-ups made the situation far worse, is actually articulating God.

As perverse as it sounds, while we're sincerely tackling the intellectual pain of being alive in radio studios and online forums, God may well be out there with his sleeves rolled up, tending to the survivors.

It is perverse. In my head. But something about that idea warms the freezing cold idea of suffering in my heart. ..Which still misses the point if it doesn't warm all the way to my hands and feet; they are, I suspect God might say, the best tools to articulate love with.

And how many people need that of us today, whatever we believe.

2009-12-31T18:17:00.005Z

Fin. And Vin.

No, now I've been thinking about this and I don't believe it. I'm going to put my foot down this time. This time it's pushing it. Someone has to take a stand.

I flatly don't believe it's 12 MONTHS since I pressed Play on the Paradiso new year's epic iTunes playlist. It… can't be.

>SIGH<

>PAUSE<

>SIGHHHHHHHH<

Rubbish too, because I kind of feel I want to really, y'know, own the idea of tomorrow being a new year. A new start. A Day One. ..A Tomorrow I'm Going To Be Dead Good sort of day.

Oh don't snort. You're not helping.

>BORED FIDGET<

Ah, well. I currently have FIP on, playing some random Cuban-sounding thing by a bloke apparently called Oran Oran. Just so you know. I'm tempted to put on my last-minute-possible-favourite tune of 2009 on to make it seem more like a party – Lindstrøm's Baby Can't Stop. It's disco heaven. Very groovy. Will really get the party going. Yeah.

>EMPTY MOMENT'S GAZE<

..You, ah... you doing anything tonight?

>SUDDEN FLOUNCE TO FEET<

Oh that's it. I'm going to go and find the Adam Ant costume I was wearing this time ten years ago.

>THOUGHTFUL FREEZE<

Ten... years.

It's really ten years since the millennium started?

>SLIGHT SHOULDER SLUMP<

Well, I can hardly complain. The last ten years have been ten of the most formative and vital of my life. A fair bit of cool stuff has quietly happened in that time. Momo, for one. So perhaps the ol' Adam Ant outfit will work its charm again tonight. Even if I'm sitting on the sofa with a mug of bleedin' cocoa while wearing it, things will still seem more rock and roll as we start the new decade.

And so here's to it. Here's to turning the last ten years of learning stuff and mucking about into ten years of finally becoming a properly useful member of society.

(I said don't snort.)

Happy New Year, with important capitals, to you and the whole bally family. See you in 2010, inshallah.

Break out the cheese and wine, I feel a middle aged new year coming on. And someone PLEASE turn up that there ruddy disco...

xxx

2009-12-30T12:13:00.002Z

Cold.

Of course, one of the best things about Christmas is the appearance of unexpected gifts.

In that respect, tussling with the small army of nephews and nieces that one always does at this Yule-ish time of year should have rendered the element of surprise moot in the case of this particular gift – but I was none-the-less wrong-footed by the joyous outbreak of colds chez Paradiso, just a day or so after returning from the bosom of the rellies.

I am now a bit fed up with sitting about on the sofa, ashamed as I am to say such a reckless thing.

But a raspy-arse throat and sniveling, sniffing, dripping, pounding head do rather combine to lay out a chap uncomfortably. And even a chap has his things to do. Like shopping for shoes; I had not the fortification for this important task in the front-line affrontery of sales crowds yesterday. Too much. I feared the need for smelling salts as I giddied through the throngs of John Lewis.

And this nasty nasal adversary even floored the lovely first lady of Momo too – which is unfortunate, since our remarkably compatible constitutions helpfully tend to pick up different sicknesses, on the perhaps unfortunately-rare occasions we have legitimate medical excuses to bunk off a decent day's work.

Last time we were sick together was food poisoning – I remember one of us lying on the floor of the lounge and one of us on the sofa, but I can't remember which was which as we limply held pale hands and periodically made little sorrowful noises to eachother. I do remember thinking that that would be the last time I had fish pasta at Casablanca airport.

---

But today, manfully, I'm back at work. And womanfully, the lovely first lady of Momo is actually back at work, while I do this.

Can it really be a year since the spectacular Paradiso new year party, which rocked the neighbourhood with my 12-hour iTunes playlist and to which about five people came, including my mum? Can't believe it.

And what kind of year has happened in between?

Well, I'm not about to try to review it in any detail. I'd say that I'm left with a bizarrely positive feeling in the ol' gut regions about it, and about the impending new year, even though much of 2009 on paper was not an easy one.

Simply surviving the recession for another 12 months makes one feel profoundly thankful – we both kept earning this year, while others have lost work or been unable to find it in the first place. But it should be said that Momo:typo did see more than its fair share of inefficient or awkward jobs and working just as hard as normal seemed to yield less impressive full-time scores on the books. And all that went hand in hand with a surreal year for us personally.

Still, it feels as if a new road lies ahead of us beyond Thursday night, wherever we can find to spend it. And that's at least partly a simple relief. And beyond that, I can't help but feel a growing nodule of something that feels remarkably like excitement about what Momo:tempo might get up to in 2010. I should be working on skits for Sophie in the Orient instead of doing this, for example. And the preview edition covers to The Golden Age of Exploration are waiting for me at the printers.

It will be a year of change, 2010. For us. I expect to be saying goodbye to the blessed Momo Arnewood studio and trying to find another one, for one thing. And that could be the experience that breaks the Momo stiff upper lip, I imagine.

I hope, as much as anything, that it's not a year where friends drift apart. Rather, I hope we as a family will find new ways to grow together – I certainly know how much we going to need them, if not the other way around. Celebrating birthdays with conspicuously round numbers is on the cards again in the coming weeks and I know how easily life can take us away from eachother. Though I'm very aware this Christmas of how often it also gives us reasons to really need eachother.

So I'm thinking warm thoughts, not chilly, about the next 12 months. Even if I don't know quite what to do first. Apart from wipe my chuffing nose again.

Wish the kids had given me a bumper box of tissues for Christmas. That might have been a useful gift.

2009-12-14T10:48:00.002Z

Idea.

Very nice little print campaign here.

In the car back from the MIN awards the other week, I asked quiet advertising legend, Steve J – whose first ever advert was signed off by Charles Saachi in 1975 or something – what was the one thing his years of advertising experience had taught him.

He paused thoughtfully for a heartbeat and then smirked.

"You've always got to have an idea" he said.

http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/2009/12/sooruz-merry-christmas/

Sage advice; nail the idea, and the ad will ride itself.

2009-12-05T09:52:00.004Z

Moral drilling.

If ethics or politics tutors wanted to make up a conundrum for their students, one to really bend their beans around like a kind of Kobayashi Maru No Win scenario, they'd be hard pushed to make up anything as effective as one particular one-word agenda item looming over the Copenhagen climate talks like a giant bovine methane cloud.

Brazil.

I mean, this one's like some sort of twisted boardgame for Geo-suffix nerds.

If you are one – sitting there, getting off on your global issues and your impossible political predicaments and your sickening, cynical desire to make an actual difference to this world we share with tomorrow's children and all the little woodland creatures – then you'll really be rubbing your thighs at Brazil's current teaser. You probably already know about it. You're probably writing a bloody 'blog' about it right now. You lefty, conshy pervo.

Now, I won't pretend that my own knowledge of Brazil extends much beyond the two most pertinent facts of the place – namely, that the country's cultural GDP ballooned in the late fifties with the invention of lift music, and that the female population's freakish levels of natural beauty are apparently genetically inverse to the male's – but I do know that they really have it in for Wales.

As every schoolboy knows, Brazil has been destroying areas of its rainforest that are specifically the same size as Wales since, ooh, the late seventies.

Why, is anybody's guess. People have been asking for it to be verified in double-decker buses, elephants and football pitches for a long time, but nada.

I digress.

The moral condundrum in question is this:

Brazil, right? Largest country in South America, fifth largest in the world and fifth most populous to boot – some M192 people spread unevenly over more than three million square miles of diverse geography, from Atlantic coastlines to mountain peaks, by way of lots of scrubland, low plains and altitudinous highlands. Though not the sort with tartan kilts and swearing.

Oh, and the single largest tropical forest in the world of course.

Now, if you're as ignorant as I am, you might be forgiven for thinking that a Latin American country will have its work cut out to keep its head above the Third World waterline – what with all those cocaine-filled, twin-engined planes crashed in jungle trees, and militias in the hills and what not. Right?

But Brazil is something like the tenth largest economy in the world. And, lest we forget again, it's the country that invented culturally sublime things like Bosa Nova, chic-sharp space-age architecture, football as a creative genre of ballet and all manner of spectacular ways to keep girls from Ipanema and everywhere else just about in their famous carnival outfits. It's a country of a very great deal of groovyness and even, reportedly, happiness. And it's in the middle of spending a fortune in improving its infrastructure.

The thing is, of those almost two hundred million groovy citizens of said Federative Republic, more than fifteen per-cent still live below the poverty line.

As with many countries juxtaposing fast-growing post-modern parts of themselves with almost pre-industrial parts, Brazil as a whole is made up of all kinds of parts that don't all fit together comfortably. The cities grew so fast in the late 20th century, that people flocked to them from the countryside – and found themselves living on the urban periphery in favelas. Today in Rio, for example, it's thought that one in five of the city's residents now lives in of of its six hundred police-no-go slums. Favelas represent the fastest growing populations in Brazil still.

Meanwhile, people in many of the inland areas are facing poverty that so many others left behind when they headed for the cities. And climate change predictions threaten to make some of these dry parts of Brazil uninhabitable by the end of the century.

And then there's the key factor with Brazil as far as the geography schoolboy is concerned – the rainforest. If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, how can the country find a financial way to stop the loggers, ranchers and miners tearing it apart? How do you fund such a fundamental shift in cultural finances locally – and how the hell do you police an area so utterly vast?

It's going to take more money than the middle classes in Rio or Brasilia have got, right?

Now, let's add two facts that turn this interesting but largely academic study into a right bloody moral conundrum.

Firstly, and randomly, I think, Brazil currently has a world-leading status as a green energy provider. Almost all its cars currently run on bio-fuel. A country struggling to catch up with the 'developed' world is actually leading it in eco-economic vision. A recognised pioneer in its field, renewable energy is becoming a key part in Brazil's future.

Secondly, it's just struck oil in the Campos Basin. A staggering shite-load of it.

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So now what?

What the arsing hell do you do, when you have a green agenda pressing down on you from the rest of the world that will only dramatically hasten the swelling economic pressure from within, just as you feel your country might stand a chance of taking a more important place at the global table – when someone pipes up: "Ah, you'll never guess. Funny thing, but we've discovered enough black gold to pump a world record-breaking 100,000 barrels of crude a day into our economy. Eh? Cuh."?

Chew on THAT Copenhagen hopefuls.

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It doesn't get us anywhere, sitting in our lounges across the UK, but watching Channel Four News' week of special reports from the balmy waterfront at Rio last week was inspiring. I have no idea what else to do now, but I can only hope – as I did with such teeth-gritted conviction about Spitting Image, 20 years ago – that some politicians were watching and feeling challenged.

If there are still journos with enough vision to turn their caravan 180° from where everyone else's lenses are currently focussed and get to the heart of an issue's impact, then maybe these people can also give the politically powerful, the scientifically informed and the financially invested a right bloody drilling about what should be done next by all of us.