First of all a shout-out to Matthew Sweet who had a heart attack on tour in Canada yesterday. I hope he can recover well. The article in the Independent referred to him as a “Nineties Musician”. How can he be a nineties musician if he’s playing in Canada in 2024? Joni Mitchell commented on her dislike of journalists – “They trap you in your era”. She went on to explain that she ‘knew she had done good work after her sixties and seventies periods but it was always about how great she used to be in that ten-year period’.
We had an electricity cut in the street one morning and when it came back on we noticed later that outside The Archive there was a wire shielded in a green plastic pipe stuck to the wall with yellow tape that went above The Archive window to Narciso’s pizzeria. Narciso has a pizza oven that needs three-phase power and the cut meant it wasn’t generating enough, so the electricity company had sorted it out temporarily (it’s still temporary). The reason there was a cut was because, wait for it, down the road near the subway station a man had tried to steal the copper wire in a main power electricity box, was electrocuted and killed – Darwin Awards.
I rehearsed today by myself as Olivia was not here and before the Champions League game, I went to Narciso’s and ordered a pasta dish. I brought it back, waited for half-time and heated it up. I watched the game Liverpool won in Leipzig (0-1) but to tell the truth, I watched the wrong game – again. Last night Real Madrid 2-0 down won 5-2 and tonight the mega clash between Barcelona and Bayern, they won 4-1. It’s not always about goals, you can have a great game with no goals but those other games would have been better.
The studio room is all wires, microphones and microphone stands, guitars and guitar stands, lyric books and lights, computer screens and speakers preparing for Saturday’s In Deep ‘fun razor’ livestream. Yesterday Jed was listening in to the rehearsal, today we had a Space Summit sesh and we listened to another new song for Space Summit 4, at some point when our French Guianan engineer comes back from being on tour in America, we will start looking at getting any remaining instrumentation down on Space Summit 2 and 3.
Music today has been Matthew Sweet and his latest album Catspaw (2024) – great cover art. “Velvet Crush drummer Ric Menck collaborates on the majority of the songs through the album”. (I met him in Minneapolis in a record store.)