With the honorary doctorate behind me and the magical experience that the day in Winchester brought me, it's now back to the reality of having to deal with the simultaneous task of preparing for the upcoming 'Plectronica' event and also various requests from Cherry Red Records to promote their upcoming 'Sunburst Finish' reissue.
The two things are colliding, head to head at the moment, and I'm becoming increasingly confused by what I'm supposed to be doing from one day to another. To be perfectly honest, it would be better to just concentrate entirely on 'Plectronica' but, as the reissue of Be Bop Deluxe's 1970 something album is due for a November release, I can't escape the duties of promotion that go with it.
Regular readers of this journal, (and of my website forum posts,) will know how ambivalent I am towards those old recordings. If I'd never created another note since that time, I may well be more comfortable with them, and glad to unearth the recordings and 'cash in' on their revival. (If such a thing is possible for artists within the music industry.) But with my unbroken chain of recording work from the 1970s to here and now, I hope that I can be forgiven for feeling a little dismissive of those younger, less aware times.
Yes, I know, I should feel proud of the music I was involved with back then, but here's the rub, at least for me, it was all very much 'back then' and certainly not now. It inevitably no longer reflects the person who I am at almost, (unbelievably,) 70 years old. It was music made by a young, (and even more naive than I am now,) man in his twenties with absolutely no inkling of what life was to hold in store for him.
And life did hold so much more in store as it always does, some of it difficult and challenging, some of it surprising and magical. It seems to me that the hardships of life either harden you up and make you cynical, aggressive, angry and bitter, or somehow knock off and soften the sharp edges, make you philosophical, pragmatic, more gentle and mellow, reflective and wise. I wonder on which side I fall in that equation? Somewhere in the middle I guess...
I didn't intend to ramble on in this journal entry in such a fashion and I think I've lost the thread of what I really wanted to say. There's a new, half-finished backing track awaiting my attention. The dials and controls of my tiny home studio are glowing invitingly in this dimly lit room. Here is where my heart resides, where my dreams struggle to find form but are never perfectly realised. It's the chase, the journey, that yields the best result, not the arriving at a destination, not the goal but the play of the ball. Remember to look out of the window and enjoy the passing scene...
I can absolutely understand how strange it must be to have the distant past brought back up at a time when its has little or no relevance to your work or life . In some ways it must be like someone reading poetry that a person wrote as a 14 year old. But perhaps you could understand from an external vantage point- for example - the vantage point of someone who was 17 in 1976, on the bus on the way home from town, repeatedly reading the cover and sleeve of Sunburst Finish and seething with impatience to get home and play it. Remember how you felt about the music that made a huge impression on you at t…