You are allowed to enjoy this…

I’m one of those terrible people who only watches football when the World Cup or the Euros are on, this is probaby because I’m native of Leyton and when I was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s to support Leyton Orient was the football equivalent of nailing your scrotum to a plank of wood. (Talking of that practice, I once had an editor who thing was doing the self-same practice and I remember him having a drunken rant about my safe sexual practices – though I strongly suspect he might have been trying to turn me to the darkside).
But I digress, I’ve been watching most of the matches during this World Cup competition because it is something to do and it is better than the majority of daytime slush they serve up to the underemployed, the retired and the homebound parent. However, this is the first competition where I’ve had little children running around the place and Verity, my nearly-three-year-old daughter has been enjoying the competition herself. I guess it all began when the Daily Mirror gave away a set of Top Trump England Player cards with the newspaper and her nan kept supplying the cards to her.
She has also developed a fascination for flags. The few locals round here displaying the George Cross have had her entranced when we’ve gone for our daily wander and she was equally delighted when The Sun gave away a free flag – this is the only real bonus of having a newspaper shop is we get dabs on all the free crap they make us stuff in the papers. Don’t worry, we do that – there’s no machine to put the supplments and free DVD’s inside – it’s muggins here who has that great duty.
We’ve been playing in the garden with a football and Verity punts the ball and exclaims: “Yes, I’ve scored a good goal!” – the same is said when she throws her blow-up “In The Night Garden” beach ball at me when we are indoors. The main problem is that whenever I turn over the football during half-time because I can’t stand listening to the pundits wafflng, I end up with madam doing a paddy.
“I want it on!” she bawls, “I want the football on”.
“But’s it is half-time,” I reply wearily, before turning the TV to the Disney Channel which usually shuts her up until the second-half starts.
It’s going to be great the next World Cup because I will be having Verity and Herbie both telling me what to do. I think that’s my main role now…and The Missus. We just fetch and carry, clean bottoms, pick up dropped toys, feed, water and drudge our way through the day. Of course, we wouldn’t change it for anything. Every day brings new joys and my only regret is not having a small army of children. However, I think The Missus would have something to say about that.
Meanwhile, being a good boy the year’s accounts are back and I had a visit from the men from the bank yesterday – the experience left me feeling a little depleted. Not because of anything they said, but because dealing with the money-lenders always brings how well your business is doing into sharp relief, especially when one of them says: “Have you tried getting a job and rejoining the 9 to 5?”
“Yes, I’ve tried that,” I replied, “I’ve tried everything.”
Oooh look – there’s Darren pissing in the wind.

Usually Thom Yorke gets my goat, the same way that sanctimonious Irish turd Bono gets my goat, by bleating on about global warming but then embarking on a massive carbon-burning world tour with his chums in Radiohead. It’s one thing to be passionate, but passion and hypocrisy make uneasy bedfellows.
Anyways, dear old wonky eye has given aspiring musicians some words of advice in a new booklet aimed at schoolkids. In it he warns them to stay away from the MusicBizTM because the major labels are on the brink of collapse, echoing my own thoughts.
Yorkie comments on Ed O’Brien’s lobby group the Featured Artists Coalition: “When we discuss it, he says it’s simply a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds. He is involved in trying to build a world where artists would finally get paid. But we are up against the self-protecting interests of that industry.”
Meanwhile, I am sending good vibes across the Atlantic to one of my faves, Daniel Lanois, who has been badly injured in a motorcycle crash. He’s a fine producer and brilliant guitarist and you should check out his “Here Is What Is” and “Shine” albums here.
And here he is:

By now, any of you who sit there reading any of this must be wondering why this guy isn’t in a band or collaborating with other people? Well, that’s a road I’ve been down before and not one that I have much patience for. When I was a younger fellow there were a host of folks at school who got bands together and I was a bit late for the party, finally buying a bass guitar when all the wannabe rockers were gone to earth, not making the move to A-Level exams like yours truly.

My introduction to the bass guitar came from via a school chum. Only we didn’t have a bass guitar in our jam sessions, he had the lovely Fender guitar and the biggest guitar amp I’d ever seen and I had an old 1950’s style guitar (I think might have been his brother’s or his dad’s), with the lowest four strings detuned to get the closest approximation of a bass guitar. Of course, it sounded rubbish, but I enjoyed my role as the back-up guy and so getting a bass guitar seemed right for me.

The bass guitarist is solid, dependable, holding it together; the straight man, the guy in the corner who knows where everyone is going, etc. So it seemed natural for me to go that way and after much cajoling I convinced my dear old grandmother to give me the cash for my first bass guitar, which I still own, sitting in the corner there in its slowly decaying vinyl gig bag. Later on, I blew some grant money on my first four-track and bought my first proper guitar, a Yamaha RGX one using some cash as I got for payment during my work experience working at Macmillian Publishers, working in the production office of the Nursing Times for a month.

I practised and jammed with myself on my four-track, recording horrible little songs and mushing up my guitar sound with my Zoom 9000 guitar pedal. I think I managed to fill a 90-minute cassette full of these horrible songs. But I thought I was limiting myself just doing the four-track compositional thing and decided to get myself into a band. Now I can’t remember which way around it was, I think I might have put an advert in the music press at this time or I might have responded to adverts. I can’t remember. My memory is murky, fogged by lots of other things that have happened in the interim.

But I remember going to an audition for a band near Walthamstow, in Pendlestone Road. I remember desperately trying to impress the guy, who was a drummer, by telling him how I was into “a wall of sound approach” and stuffing a cassette of my songs into his hand. I must have come across like a complete jerk, but I all I wanted was to be accepted. I tried too hard. Anyway, on the day of the rehearsal, the drummer duly picked me up in his car, which I thought was very nice of him and took me to his parent’s place. The trouble was that he lived in the attic and I had to scramble up into the loft hatch, with my guitar and gubbins. I remember this put me off and then I met the bassist, who was a skinhead and wore some sort of anarchy-based T-shirt.

I was standing there with hair down to my arse and wearing a tie-dye T-shirt. I had a feeling that this creative relationship was dead before it started.
So I plugged in, pulled out my Zoom 9000 FX pedal and tuned up. I made my first mistake of asking what they wanted the guitar to sound like. “A guitar?” they replied quizzically. I was into effects and delays and fuzzes and flangers and they just wanted it to sound like a guitar. This is when I realised that I was coming to music from a slightly different angle to everyone else. I was interested in sounds, rather than notes.

The drummer started and the bassist went off and I just jammed along. It was enjoyable, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I just played what I felt was right. Lots of mushy chords, a little bit of soloing here and there, etc. Then they clattered to a stop and asked me to play “that bit” again. What bit? I was improvising. I didn’t expect to have to replay anything. Another classic mistake, Darren.

So we stopped and discussed things and talked about how the drummer could only play for an hour or so a week because the neighbours complained and we joked about things and talked about music. Then the drummer said something that I’ve never forgotten to this day: “Let’s play out to Wuthering Heights…”

And so he put Kate Bush on the turntable and him and the bassist clattered along to the wailing Ms Bush and I sat there, pretending to play along, but not having the faintest idea what I was doing. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I didn’t have enough musical experience to figure out the chords or whether I was just completely banjaxed by the song itself, but I was like a rabbit frozen in the headlights.
Let’s just say I didn’t get that particular gig.

Another audition I attended was with a female singer-songwriter in London. I can’t remember the how’s and why’s but I think I’d sent her a tape and she called me along. I was to meet her at the Oddbins on King William Street and not to bring a guitar. It was all rather mysterious and like meeting a Russian spy. I didn’t know what to think and I don’t think the Missus was that impressed that I was going gallivanting off with some mysterious female to make sweet music.

So I am standing outside Oddbins like a complete spare part when I hear someone calling my name. There’s this young woman in the most battered old car I’ve ever seen and so I have to vault the barrier along the road to get my lift, nearly getting run over in the process. She drives me a short way to an old terrace just off that street, a mere five minute walk perhaps, and I am sitting there wondering to myself exactly what I’m letting myself in for.
The building was run-down, full of art student types and she takes me upstairs to a room with her gear set up. She impresses me with the fact that she owns an actual Fairlight synthesiser that her father bought her (at that time only people like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush were using these very expensive sampler/synths and would have cost the same amount as a small bungalow to afford). She sat me down, handed me a beautiful white American Fender Strat and cued up the recording she wanted me to play along to.

I remember the sense of panic and fear that came over me. There I was in a stranger’s house, about to listen to a song for the first time, expected to play something amazing, using a guitar I’d only just touched, and had no way of adjusting the amp or adding my own effects. It was like telling an actor to act a play he’d never read before and then handing him someone else face to use. I felt sick, sick to the pit of my stomach and time seemed to slow down as she pressed the “play” button on the impressive Tascam eight-track reel-to-reel cassette recorder she was using. How I lusted after her equipment…

So the song began, but there was something wrong with my ears because the bass was mixed so badly on it that I couldn’t discern what key the track was in. It was a horrible mush of a track, no treble or middle, just this thudding distorted bass and I wished for some headphones so that I might at least have a chance of nailing this one down.

I don’t think I actually played a note. Or if I did, the song was so loudly amplified that anything I’d played was drowned out by it. I walked away shell-shocked by that experience and vowed never to audition for anyone ever again. I actually thought it might have been some kind of psychological experiment conducted by a crazed scientist a la Milgram’s 37. “See how far you can push the silly little guitar player before they explode”. But I remember walking back to the tube station a little upset and confused and wondering if all musicians were like that.

It was safe to say I didn’t get that gig either…

For the last three years, it appears to me, that I’ve forgotten who I am exactly. But the past few days I’ve had a few musical moments that have pulled me back to my essential Darren Lock-ness, if there is such a thing. Who am I? That’s a good question. Who are you? I can’t answer that.
I am the perennial seventeen-year-old, like all men, the boy who doesn’t want to grow up, who is fascinated by technology and gadgetry and the future arriving every day. The boy who wanted to write a for living, but got jaded with it all when he realised that nowadays it is more about keeping the advertisers happy than actually serving your readership. The guy who wants to just have the time to create. To produce, because there’s nothing else to do really. If things had been different, I’d have had a million children by now, but I am grateful for my place in time and grateful that my various creative pursuits fill in the gaps.
But music is more important to me that I can possibly realise. Of course, I’d cut my ears off and break my fingers and throw my guitars out of the window, just for the chance to read another bedtime story to my kids. But music – the purity of music – the way it can transport or lift your emotions and make you fly is something I’ve kept surpressed, or forgotten, or maybe I’ve just been a little distracted by all the other bullshit in my life.
It began earlier in the week when I discovered a piece of music that really turned me on and I managed to find a copy of the album it came from on eBay. “Regular Music” – for that is the name of the album and the band – arrived a couple of days ago and it has been a delight to spin vinyl on the deck for the first time in an age. I’ve not bought an actual record for at least five years, possibly more. But to be transported back to those youthful days and to hear some new/old music that makes the hair on the back of the neck stand up is a joy.
While I was aware that there was a new Neu! boxset being released at the beginning of May, it was over £100 and The Missus would have raised an eyebrow (probably not – she’s too forgiving of my foibles), but I resisted the purchase. Maybe another time, I thought. However, today I discovered that the release is on eMusic and at a fraction of the price. So, OK, I don’t own the lovely vinyl set, but at least I can listen to some of the rarities for the cost of about £15. Result!
Then just about half-an-hour ago I was doing a trawl on said eMusic site when I discovered that an album called “Kinna Sohna” had been released on 30 May 2010. This means nothing to you and that’s fine, so I will explain what it means to me – the perennial enthusiastic seventeen-year-old trapped in the ruined body of a near-forty-year-old.
Let’s go back in time to 1995. I’ve been reading the music production magazine “Sound on Sound” since as long as I can remember and I remember reading an interview with Canadian guitarist Michael Brook talking about the trials and tribulations of recording a new album he’d made with Pakistani Qawwalli singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The interesting thing about this album was that it hadn’t been released on Peter Gabriel’s Real World label yet and Brook had basically been given a load of performance tapes by Khan with the instruction to weave his magic with it.
Now their previous collaboration “Mustt Mustt” was a more traditional affair with them recording together and ended up a unique fusion of Western and Eastern musical culture. It is a good record. But the article detailed how Brook had created what seemed the first patchwork quilt of a recording, by loading performances into a sampler and then adding his own bits to create a completely new work. Nowadays such techniques are commonplace but when I read the article I was completely mesmerised by the idea. When the resultant album was finally released, I rushed out and bought my copy of “Night Song”.
“Night Song” is probably one of my all-time favouriate records. It’s hard to describe – again it is a fusion of Eastern and Western ideas but it feels old and new at the same time and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is more like a separate instrument and because I have no understanding of the language in involved it is more like a guitarist soloing that a person singing to me. And his voice is invigorating, dizzying, logic-defying and takes you to heaven – which is the whole point of a Qawwali singer I believe. It is a fine album – an album I truly love and probably defies other’s description of me – they’d probably think I’d have a Pink Floyd or Yes album held in higher regard. But I don’t.
Whenever I am feeling a little down or need a little pep or want to get the creative juices flowing, this is the album I go to. It is a tonic and I have fond memories of listening to it the album on the way to work and its power getting me through my claustrophobia on the Tube and the murky Monday mornings in Winter in London.
So tonight I discover this album “Kinna Sohna” tonight and it is a live performance of tracks from that album with Michael Brook and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan doing a tribute to the departed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I downloaded it immediately and I am listening to it now as I type. And it is very good. It is also a reminder that this was another gig that I missed due to sacrficing my life to this place, for the recording was made at the Royal Festival Hall on 14 October 2007, about a fortnight after we’d moved to the site of my own personal Waterloo and month before the tribute gig to Simon Jeffes of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which I also missed. Joy and sadness, two faces of the same coin.
But the important thing is that this music reminds me exactly who I am…

Today, it is story time and Verity gives her unique interpretation of the children’s classic “The Gingerbread Man”. Despite only being two-and-a-half, she does a cracking job, complete with voices of the characters, which causes the videographer to lose his composure at a couple of points, such is the delighful nature of her delivery.

The accidental collisions and seemingly random mouse clicks lead me to an amazing piece of music today. For a moment, I was transported back in time, to a younger place, a place when I was seventeen again, where the world held no obstacle and I was a superman, before the cynicism and brutality of life crushed my youthful, optimistic spirit.
There was a link thrown up on my other music site’s newsfeed about a piece of music written for eighteen electric guitars and I clicked on through to the composer’s MySpace page where I found a remarkable piece of music called “The Fourth Door” by a band called Regular Music, which was helmed and written by this chap called Jeremy Peyton Jones. Unfortunately, this album is out-of-print but luckily for me I found a copy on eBay and purchased it immediately. The music is from the minimalist movement and sounds very much in a similar vein to the experiments made by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra crossed with a healthy dollop of Michael Nyman.
Thankfully, by chance or fate or whatever, there was one copy on eBay which I bought up immediately. On perusal of the recording credits, I noticed that the percussionist on that album was a fellow called Charles Hayward who worked with a band called Quiet Sun, an experimental rock-jazz band led by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera. Of course, I am very familiar with this chap and that album but I am always bowled over by the interconnectedness of things, especially in the world of music.

This explains a lot…
As someone who has always had the urge to create, whether it be writing or music, I always wonder what makes me different to other people. Take for instance fellow musicians. In the past, through work assignments, you often come into contact with others who say: “Yes, I also play the guitar” and then you ask them if they’ve written or recorded any songs and they shake their head in the negative way. Being someone who likes to encourage people to push themselves forward, I’ve been in such guitarist’s company and explained to them how easy it is to record and offered them my services or knowledge only for them to do nothing. Then you realise that for these people playing the guitar is more of a social pursuit. It’s about getting together with friends, murdering a cover version and then having a beer. More power to them, I say, but it’s not my modus operandi.
For me it is about pushing myself forward. As I’ve bleated on before, I am not a natural musician and it has taken me years of slog to get this bad. I’ve known other folk who are naturals. Music just flows through them and I am both in awe and a little envious of their talents. I remember back at college, I got shafted into writing the play for the school musical (and then the guys that wrote the music tried to take credit for the words as well and said so in the local paper – much to my chagrin). During this time, I came into contact with a couple of the lads who were playing behind the curtain: a drummer and the bass player and they were both naturals. The drummer was the most down-to-earth, natural human being I’d come across at that age and had a natural self-assurance that people of older years tend to have. He gave me a lot of advice about people and myself and it’s those brief encounters that leave an impression. I’d forgotten his name for a while and then the other week it came back to me in a flash. Somehow my memory had dredged it up from the depths (without me even thinking about it) and I found the guy was now a top-class jazz drummer on YouTube and everything. That made me feel very good indeed. I was right – this guy really was a pro, but then you can just tell.
But I digress…the creative impulse is hard to control – or at least I find it hard to control. For me it used to be writing, but there was no challenge in it because I got to the point where I could write a novel in six weeks and what’s the fun in that? Of course, these novels were probably a load of old rot, but I wrote them purely for the excercise and not to get them published. But then I found another creative outlet and it was the music and then I discovered that this really did take effort and every victory was often marred by crashing depressions – moments where you question yourself and wonder why you waste your time producing this stuff? And then there’s the times when you want to give it all up and sell your instruments and the times when you feel that you have a direct line to the muse and the ideas just fall into your lap.
I always say to The Missus that if fate had played a different game, I might have been a cartoonist. For when I was about 10 or 11, I was fanatical about writing and drawing little cartoon strips. Loads of them, mainly sci-fi, I think it was. But then one day, my dear mother told me that she’d found my sketchbook and commended me on my sketching. The book was hidden, in private, because those cartoons where for me. So I tore up the sketchbook and never doodled again, because I felt my private world had been violated. The ability to create also comes with the need to destroy too. It’s two sides of the same coin.
I always wondered what this process was about and now I know. It is all part of the plan, I guess. Oh well, at least the music making keeps the multitude of voices in my head quiet! <---- THAT WAS A JOKE!