Did I go out today? I don’t think I did, but that was hours ago and yet I remember that yesterday we went to the alley at the back of The Archive and wondered how we could make it a nice alley instead of a grubby hangout. Discarded cigarette packets, old plastic cups and clumps of unmentionable, unrecognisable, unsightly detritus. We talked to Sara whose house is opposite The Archive’s back windows and we discussed cleaning it up, getting rid of the weeds and planting flowers in painted boxes, this alone will hopefully stop the night pissers.
We had a fake camera at the back, but someone had snapped it off its bracket and it was hanging there like a dead sloth. We need to replace it and make it higher so the guilty arms and fingers can’t reach it. We have bars on the windows for security, but I really want it to be pretty out there in the back alley, too. In our street, we see everything, the ladies of the day, the tourists, the traffic and the easy breeze of Southern Europe and a beautiful city on the river and close to the sea.
I had a sesh with NJ Brian as we continue to work on finalising two albums that he has recorded. Mixes on the second album, cover art and sleeve notes on the first and then figuring out how we find an audience for projects like these in a climate like this. It’s progressive, it’s conceptual, it showcases Brian’s compositional skills and his great guitar playing as well as the skills of the musicians involved, the engineers, and hopefully me as the producer. Olivia is working on the cover art details with our friend Reid. More details to come as we figure out when this music will be released, how it will be released, where it will be released and on what formats.
I’m carrying on with putting records away, finding better condition versions of some as well as records that were new to the aisles and a whole lot of duplicates to use as swaps for records that The Archive needs. Occasionally I find a record in worse condition, but it still has the poster which I can remove and put it in with a better-condition copy – that’s if a giant poster of Rod Stewart is your thing.
Music today has been Genesis – Trespass (1970), their second album and the start of the run of the classic Peter Gabriel albums, I like the first one too, but it lives in the sixties, these seventies albums are a new era. I saw the The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour at the Liverpool Empire in April 1975.