my writing

Category: Music

  • Swans on the River

    I don’t know where they came from.I saw the last one arrive, descending with an easy parachute grace, its great wings cupping the air as its splayed feet touched the water, entered it, so that it landed with barely a splash. It folded its wings, settled with the others, afloat.There are twelve, dazzling as light,…

  • William Blake & The Art School Ball, 1966.

    p40 On the day of the Arts Ball I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.It is impossible to convey the effect of reading that firework-box of statement and contradiction, directness and ambiguity, celebration and subversion, all carried along on a juggernaut of certainty. Line after incandescent line of it could be the object of…

  • Bob Dylan and Herman Melville: “Blind Willie McTell” and ‘The Confidence-Man’.

    Note: I originally wrote this piece, on the links between a Bob Dylan song and a Herman Melville novel, a dozen years ago, before his Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was still a ‘song and dance man’. It was written in a compressed form for a specialist Bob Dylan magazine. Here I’ll open it…

  • Buddy Holly’s Apartment Tapes

    Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on 3 Feb, 1959. January 1959, late at night in a Greenwich village apartment, his pregnant wife asleep, Buddy Holly is recording. He’s been recording obsessively since he was 14, and for the last couple of years camped in the studio in Clovis, New Mexico, learning how to…

  • Inside the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Aug 21I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space. ‘What…

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

    p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday…

  • 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…