Sunday 26 September 2010

A busy day today, but I did get most of my work done lying in the hammock in a sunny garden so that’s OK. This morning I pretended I was on holiday by cooking my Kintyre kippers for breakfast on the camping stove outside. This continued the weekend theme of ‘isn’t it good to be living on an island’ after I met Alison at the market yesterday, and made an impulse buy of some oysters, as the colder weather seemed to encourage their consumption. They were great too.

In total exhaustion last night I flopped on the sofa and watched a documentary I first saw in 1978- check out the succession of looks on Dave Edmunds’ face from 3’30 onwards here as he watches his hero Albert Lee playing on his record. It takes Nick Lowe ages to think up a gag to break the mood of adulation.

Music business contracts can be tiring and dangerous. Robert Fripp has some great advice in his diary here: “if a contract written in English takes longer than 15 minutes to read and/or is less than 95% intelligible, it is declined.” So it’s always cheering to come across a clear, friendly contract that says what it means and can even be a pleasure to read (with relief if I’ve been putting off opening the envelope for a while). Special mention here to Daniel Johnston and to Martin Carthy via their respective managers for exemplary work in this respect.