Friday 7 September 2012

My mind is reeling a bit from a damburst of ideas yesterday. I’ve been in admin mode this week, with several funding applications to write (that’s one of the things that has to happen when people have stopped paying for recorded music) and a meeting about one of those yesterday went off in very interesting directions that I hadn’t quite anticipated. But by the end of the afternoon I was in a taxi with a dulcitone on my way to Glasgow Print Studio where Alasdair and I would have a second shot at presenting the current state of our piano ballads project to an audience, after its first airing last Saturday at The 78 as part of the Music Language festival.

It was great to see some of Joe Davie’s work in the exhibition (none of our album covers though) and I was particularly impressed that the audience refreshments consisted of good whisky and jelly babies – there was an alcohol-free option too of course. We were sharing the bill with Alan Spence and Alasdair Gray – no pressure then … particularly when they were reading from Glasgow Zen, and the Prologue from Lanark respectively. Anyway, I managed to get a chat with AG about an idea for harpsichord decoration that we had started to think about last year, and the thing about having a conversation with Alasdair Gray is that his mind moves at about twenty times the speed of most people’s, so he had taken the whole project onto another level completely while I was still finding my feet.

Amble made it along, and by the end of our set she had made copious notes of potential further enhancements to what we were doing. So the next step will be to have the three of us in a room with a selection of technology dating from the 1780s to the present.  While all of this was going on, Peter McCarthy and Gail Hennessy were passing through Glasgow on their way back from Colonsay, so I dropped in at Alison’s on the way home to share some Colonsay IPA. Quite a busy day really.