Up early for a 9 AM sesh with NJ Brian and back to bed afterwards with my alarm set for the Liverpool game, but I ignored it and woke for the last three minutes of the second half with Liverpool losing. It gave me the chance to get in the shower and be ready to watch them lose the game, 2-1 after 90 minutes. Sarah came and got me and we went to the studio where I met up with John and Salim for another jam session which spawned some more potential crackers. We didn’t have so much time, I was slotting in between Salim getting song demos on the computer and picking up his daughter from school. He was going back to the studio later and I was returning to the pad above the garage for a sesh at 7 PM with Mike and Paul in New Orleans.
It had been a while and we made plans to take the demos into the studio next year. After that, dinner and a movie sounded perfect, it’s been a while since we did that, so we picked the most action-filled sci-fi nonsense we could find and watched Edge of Tomorrow with Emily Cruise and Tom Blunt (somehow Tom Blunt doesn’t sound so famous). Netflix, no ads, and really high quality, why does Netflix work so well? Imagine what their computer room must look like.
We were sitting in the kitchen watching the film on my laptop, the window wide open because it was a little warm inside. Outside it was 60°F/16°C degrees at 10 PM, quite a change from Minneapolis, it’s even a little warmer than Porto, lovely in the daytime, and would be lovely for a walk, but it’s America, it would be weird, and walking around these posh houses might be seen as suspicious, haha, dumb tourists.
Music today has been 10cc and their second album, Sheet Music (1974). Clever, clever, intellectual pop prog with four singers and four songwriters collaborating in different formats and experimenting with sound at the famous Strawberry Studios in Stockport (where I was born, in Stepping Hill hospital, not the studio, although…). The album was engineered and mixed by guitarist/keyboardist Eric Stewart, who would later join Wings. The album reached No. 7 in the UK and No. 81 in the USA. There were two hits on the album – The Wall Street Shuffle (No. 10 in the UK, No. 2 in The Netherlands) and Silly Love (No. 24 in the UK, No. 7 in The Netherlands). Drummer Kevin Godley and guitarist/keyboardist Lol Creme left the band in 1976 to form the more experimental Godley & Creme, they also began directing videos for other artists including Every Breath You Take which I can no longer listen to because of the horrendous string squeaks in between the chord changes (as pointed out by NJ Brian after we discussed the phenomenon). The original four members made a half-hearted attempt to get back together in the nineties. Although the band officially broke up in 1983 bassist Graham Gouldman has his own version of the band (I saw them in Stockholm a few years ago). Gouldman famously wrote No Milk Today for Herman’s Hermits, Bus Stop for The Hollies, and For Your Love and Heart Full of Soul for The Yardbirds.