my writing

Category: Music

  • Albi in 1976: pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Chapter 1: Albi I watch the cream and red train disappear slowly around the long bend. The last I see of Jane is her hand sticking out of the window, her fingers spread out like the ribs of a broken fan. I stare along the empty line until the noise of the train dies away…

  • Leonard Cohen at the Opera House, Manchester, Tues, 17 June, 2008

    Dark stage, brightly lit at the back – I expect a Manhattan skyline. The band take their places. LC quickly follows, there’s no spinning it out, he’s right on time, getting to business. He bounds on, he’s up for it, dapper in a suit and fedora, both grey, a double-breasted suit, wide trousers, grey shirt…

  • Cycling the Green Meridian: 7

    Day 7: St-Ouen to Fleury-Mérogis, 53 miles. The flea market. Reuniting two lovers. Suzanne’s grave. A hectic ride across Paris. Satie’s flat. The undertaker. Erik’s grave. Cultural tourism. Gabrielle. The bell not pressed. Depression in a metal cell. I eat breakfast in the bar. Bright sun outside, washed streets, deep shadows, few people. A bar…

  • A Walk across, Paris along the Meridian : 4

    I walk down towards Pigalle. Cheap, grim hotels. Graffiti, ‘CHA CHA I HEART YOU’, many times, obsessively, I remember someone we knew in London, fixated on a call girl associated with a politician, fired shots through her door, blew up a scandal. Walking in front of me an oriental woman in black wide-brimmed hat, leopardskin…

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian : 3

    The Blut-Fin (location of the Mire du Nord, first siting post for Picard’s measuring of the meridian across France, to begin the first accurate survey of Louis XIV’s realm) was one of thirty Montmartre windmills in 1700, milling grains, pepper, spices, locally-quarried gypsum for plaster and porcelain, crushing grapes. By 1830s most had gone, as…

  • A walk across Paris, along the Meridian 2

    I am standing on the Paris Meridian. (A meridian is an imaginary line connecting the north and south poles of a sphere.) The Paris Meridian was decided upon 6.6km (20,317 pieds de roi, in those days) south of here, on Midsummer Day, 1667, when members of the Academy of Sciences gathered to outline on the…

  • A Walk across Paris, along the Meridian: 1

    St-Ouen. Outside le Périph. A large silver ball has landed on a small traffic island. The sun blazes at its centre. Mirrors reflect; a curved mirror bends. And eventually deflects. Passing cars appear, swell, are gone, into St-Ouen. “St-Ouen Bienvenue.” Under Napoleon III, I see a marshal of France on horseback, sabre raised. Between the…

  • Connie Converse’s disappearance on 10 August, 1974

    ‘You don’t go out of your way to make yourself something you’re not.’ After her return from England in January 1972, Ms Converse was adrift. She wrote, ‘the basic nerves and will by which I had always been able to survive my difficulties may have worn out or broken, and might not be easily reparable.’…

  • Connie Converse’s 100th birthday

    Between 1 August, the 100th anniversary of her birth, and 10 August, when fifty years ago she disappeared, I want to celebrate the many lives of Elizabeth Connie Converse. In 1944, age 20, she dropped out of her prestigious New England college, where she was the star student, and went to New York City, alone…

  • Connie Converse: A Singer/Songwriter before her Time

    100 years after she was born, 50 years since she disappeared without trace (10th Aug, 1974), I am celebrating The Guitar Songs of Connie Converse. Written between 1950 and 1955, in New York, and unheard until 2009, I first heard them three months ago and have been playing them since, finding new qualities with each…