I had a mad tidy up today, there’s still records piled up all over the place, but I was trying to put everything somewhere close to where it might actually live. It’s that ‘getting on a roll’ thing, as soon as I started cleaning things and moving things and sorting things, it turned into a vision of how much better the working environment could be, fewer things to trip over, less dust and neat piles of papers which might need sorting but at least they would be in a pile in one place instead of all over the place. It’s perfect Sunday work, in between the football (Liverpool won), otherwise Sunday is weird as if its vibe has been hijacked, returned on Monday morning for a ransom.
The street was surprisingly noisy for a Sunday, and at one point I looked out of the window and saw the ladies of the day laughing at a police car as it was pulling away. I missed the cleaning truck, or it didn’t come, probably the latter because when I took the recycling out, the street was a mess, weekend revelry = mess. Half a plastic cup of beer on our outside window ledge, with the tin buckled and left in the cup. Tins on the road, paper bags, cigarette packets, I have an urge to clean it all up myself, but then I don’t want to touch anything, I suppose I could make better use of my time.
I turned the stereo up and filed records away, with Houses Of The Holy (1973) and Led Zep IV (1971) blasting. The café outside the door encourages me to play loud music, it gives the place a vibe, not that you really need a vibe in a street like this. Having said that, music always helps, and Led Zep is a nice contrast to the reggaeton that constantly blasts out of the passing cars.
In the storage house the other day I found an old fountain pen. I remember the days of using it to write lyrics, and it made me wonder if you write different lyrics depending on the kind of pen you use. There’s something about having a fountain pen in your hand that the words seem to like. Having said that, there’s these nice ink flowing pens that you can buy these days that are nice to write with. I can’t get into writing lyrics on a computer.
We continued to watch Shogun over dinner and we are up to episode 9 of 10 so it’s all coming to a grisly end as a series about samurai from 1600 surely must.
Music today has been Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5:55 (2006), keeping it French with outside influences. It is in fact an album composed by les hommes (Dunckel and Godin) from Air with Jarvis Cocker writing most of the lyrics and CB singing. Neil Hannon contributes too.