This was a strange time. It was actually the last two weeks before I left to attempt for one last time to avoid the military service. Every year they called me, and this year I went, ready to start work as a volunteer in order to be eligible to be a conscienscious objector whenever I got the dreaded "Cartolina".
I had a loan, for a weekend, of my flatmate Niall's four track mixer/recorder. It was really cool, he still had it in the box, I'd never been able to play with one of those machines and I've not been able to since either. He had a base and an electric guitar lying around, and I had all kinds of crazy instruments. It had been a mad adventure in Glasgow and now I was leaving behind friends and memories.
The title comes from a line in the first song, Shit! which I am listening to now. And I see how much work will have to be involved in ever doing justice to these songs. I inly have a tape mix down from the originals, which are rotting in a case. But these ogg trasncribed recordings for now will be what I'll have to use to remember these songs and perhaps record them again.
That song takes me through some dramatic scenes the year before, which saw a friend getting sectioned, and as a result of that manic episode I let go of almost everything in my life. I felt like I'd even lost my music, as a lot of the surface arguments revolved around it. I didn't want to do music after that anyway. My dad told me "you never stop growing up", that he didn't even then. The recording is so crackly! So box of felt tip pens is me picking myself up after all that to fly off somewhere new.
"Would you like to have breakfast" sounds unbelievably cheesy, but I wrote it at a really cheezy moment, after dreaming that I'd got back together with my then ex-girlfriend Gill. I dreampt of myself running up Cecil St to the end of the road where she lived at the top of a really shit bedsit. Once she had come over with a note to make up after a previous break up and she had all her layers on and I wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, but I felt I couldn't since we were apart, until I read the letter she gave me. And at the end it's not cheesy, it's just belted out too loud. Maybe I'm just all fucking soggy and old now.
I don't have time - as it's 3:30 now to go through the other songs. They are all at the internet Archive. Well, I'm off - to upload a picture for yesterday's improvisation. Maybe it will inspire someone based on how bad it sounds. if He can do it, so can I!!!