Friday 16 March 2001

Got back home eventually on Wednesday, and headed off to the studio in the afternoon for a session.  There was a nicely set up Fender Strat lying around, and a Pod, a great little device that simulates guitar amplifiers, so I spent an hour getting a lesson on funky rhythm guitar from Stuart the engineer.  Listening back to the track now, it’s better rhythm guitar than I’ve ever played before, but it’s still pretty duff.  Robert Fripp had a League of Crafty Guitarists, but I’m a member in perpetuity of the League of Crap Guitarists.

I won’t be doing the gig next month with Alistair Anderson after all, for the rather tiresome reason that the promoter wouldn’t come up with a decent fee – it was a Radio 3 broadcast too.  Ah well, win some, lose some.

But I had a great musical experience today in the local fruit shop.  They like to listen to cool music in there, and while I was in, Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women’ came on.  Suddenly everyone in the shop just seemed to mellow out a bit, and when it got to the end of the first verse, all these voices joined in, quietly: ‘Everybody must get stoned’.  I wandered back into the street grinning  – why bother with drugs when you can have just as good a time singing about them in a fruit shop?