Friday 14 June 2002

On the bus home from Dundee: I had another two RSNO gigs there today, but I had the afternoon off, so I spent it at the Wighton Collection in front of a microfilm printer, and now have copies of some more Earl of Kelly material, a fascinating Glasgow book of Scots tunes arranged for harpsichord in 1730 by Adam Craig, and some other bits and pieces, including the Caledonian Muse arrangements of The Gentle Shepherd. I also bought Janice Galloway's new novel about Clara Schumann, which judging by the first 40 pages is completely absorbing. If my eyes were less tired I would be reading it now. Jamie was presenting this evening's concert, so we had time for dinner beforehand. 

Incidentally, the Caird Hall's Steinway was beautifully polished on the outside, but the keyboard itself was absolutely filthy, as though whoever played it last had been simultaneously servicing their car. I set to it with some toilet roll and soap before playing a note.

Well, here in the south of Scotland the past week's been characterised by unremittingly foul, wet and heavy weather. It feels like October. Monday was the worst - it was as though everyone you met had their own personal black cloud hovering over them. Of course Monday was the only day I had free to deal with my computer hardware problems: I spent a whole afternoon on three visits to the shop and various adventures with a screwdriver. 

On Monday morning Marie and I had a strategy meeting - a bit of long-term planning never hurts once in a while, and since then I've been working on the technical and musical arrangements for our open-air gig in August (now on the events page at last), and refining and circulating the plans for Roots in Suits, which now include Andrew Lawrence-King's wonderful group The Harp Consort.  Mr McFall's Chamber are going to lend us their Accusound clip-on mics for the upper strings in August, but I still have to purloin some lit music stands from somewhere. Oh yes, and we might be about to change our name: I'm sick and tired of apologising for the cumbersome and frankly forgettable name we have at the moment. But I'm not telling you its possible replacement yet.

Marie has kindly gifted me her vinyl collection, or rather allowed me to intercept it and swipe the best bits en route to the Oxfam shop, and it includes many great treasures: some of my favourite 1970s early music records, and the first 35 volumes of the Teldec Bach cantata series with Leonhardt and Harnoncourt. I don't know where I'm going to put them all though: my own vinyl is still in crates in the back porch.

On Wednesday night I had a genuinely unforgettable concert experience at Brian Wilson's gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse. He was on stage for nearly 3 hours with interval, played songs from every part of his career, including wonderful sequences of Smile material (a perfectly re-structured Heroes and Villians), and of course the entire Pet Sounds album in sequence. Then as an encore they all came back on, played 'Darlin' to get warmed up, and then stormed through all the classic Beach Boys hits: Help Me Rhonda, Fun, Fun, Fun, Surfin' USA, I Get Around ... , as if to say 'OK, we've done the serious stuff, this is what Brian could do with a 2-minute pop song'. It was a bit like being hit very hard by someone's genius over and over again. As I left, I was thinking, 'no-one can have written that many absolute killer tunes, as well as all the clever stuff': the emotional range of the evening was enormous. Then I realised 'No, that's Brian Wilson, he did it, and all by the time he was 24'. The fact that his personal life's been such a catalogue of disaster, and he has what you might call developmental delays in communication, just makes it all the more remarkable that he's there on the stage enjoying his own music. The guy sitting next to me turned round at the end with a look of astonishment on his face and said 'I've seen them all, I've seen Dylan 3 times, Neil Young ... [I'll omit the list as I've forgotten it] ... but that was ...' and he couldn't finish the sentence.

Well I'm too tired to write any more, so it's time to reach for my Walkman. The two CDs I bought this week are both retreads of records I have already (why am I so unadventurous?). One is the stereo version of Pet Sounds, and the other a newly released CD of John Zorn's Naked City playing live in 1989, with most of the tunes (tunes??) from their first album, one of my all-time favourite cheer-up records. The extreme virtuosity and devastating musicianship put to occasionally childish use, still thrill me every time I turn it up loud.