Tuesday 27 January 2009

After spending the morning pursuing and eliminating what had seemed like more practical options, today I found myself booking Abbey Roadstudio twofor a session next week. Well, if you're going to book a studio, it might as well be the most celebrated studio in the whole flipping world. I'd better do some practice now: it's all very well expecting some of the magic to rub off on you, but you also have to do the preparation. When I mentioned to one perfectionist engineer colleague that I'd eventually just given in and booked Abbey Road, his text response was 'Should be just about usable, even if their experience is a bit limited', and it took me a clear two seconds to realise that this was a joke.

As I write, Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s truly bizarre sitcom The High Life is being re-run on BBC4. I make a very brief non-speaking appearance in the final episode as a hippy student type (I had long hair at the time, that’s how long ago it was) stranded in Prestwick Airport.The last time I saw it, it appeared unexpectedly on the TV in a hotel room in Copenhagen …

Today I had a long overdue read of Hugh Trevor-Roper's famous 1980s essay on the invention of Highland culture, and have been gleefully consuming Ben Goldacre's riotously cheering and educational Bad Science, which I can happily recommend to all intelligent people working in the arts, who like me have in the past been taken in by spurious pseudo-scientific garbage. I remember an early music colleague once explaining to me very seriously in my kitchen about how important it was to have oxidants and antioxidants and thinking 'You really haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, have you?' At least now we all know that echinacea doesn't work.