You are allowed to enjoy this…

I must admit that it is good to be writing creatively again. I’ve been putting finger to keyboard and have knocked up 25 pages of my “Melvin” script so far. I’ve got the first two acts pretty much worked out in my head and the third act is coming together nicely too. I was worried that I didn’t have enough dramatic tension, but with a little help from The Missus, we worked something out.
This isn’t some great work, you know. This is just a comedy about a loser who has something really bad happen to him that would normally be a real disadvantage to some, but to him he really capitalises on it.
The film poster should be spelt with the “V” in Melvin capitalised or accentuated someway.

In the bath, a fully-formed idea for a movie script appeared in my head called “Melvin”. This is a bit alarming because I had no plans to write a movie script nor write a comedy script either – but whatever creative spark that put this idea into my head should be honoured, shouldn’t it?
I don’t know whether to write it or not? Even if I write this script, what then? It was strange because I’ve even got a lead actor in mind to go with the script. Weird. Not had anything like this happen to me for a long, long, long time.

Previously, I’d written about how I’d received a letter from the local court informing me that there was to be a hearing to decide whether or not our assailant was going to be absolved of paying his £175 fine for crashing into our property. The reasoning was that our chum was now in chokey and so, for whatever reason, those who make decisions of law had come up with the spiffing idea that we could either appeal for the decision to be upheld or pursue him ourselves. Of course, I wrote strong letter for the hearing which is due to take place in the middle of this month.
So get this…I check our bank account and there’s been another £10 payment of the fine from our chum. So, one can deduce that he is at least trying to do the right thing by paying off his fine, but yet the magistrates court wants him to stop paying. While this earns our chum some kudos for taking up his responsibilities, I am at a complete loss as to why the local magistrates act in this fashion.
I just don’t get it?
But perhaps it explains why the laws of this land appear to be derailed at every opportunity. Again, without making myself sound too much like a right-wing, Daily Mail reader, I would imagine that the bleeding-heart liberals who have wriggled their way into these places of office are making such fool-hardy and destructive decisions. Or it could be a Ken Clarke and the Conservatives who seem to have done a U-turn on crime in this country and think that our streets would be a much better place for the wrong-do’ers of this land. (In this Bizarro world, it seems that the Labour Party really were the Party of law and order!!!)
But as I get older, I get more and more bamboozled by this world and what is happening around me. There’s no wonder why I take refuge in my guitar and music-making!!!

Another memory from my youth comes to an end. This time it is Frank Sidebottom (AKA Chris Sievey) who used to sport a freakish paper mache head and do amazing covers of popular songs of the time along with Little Frank. He used to appear on kids TV and radio and was a genuine cult classic.
I kind of hope that someone picks up the head and continues on – so that the legend of Sidebottom is passed on from generation to generation. But the news is absolutely bobbins.
Here’s Frank in action doing Panic (on the streets of Timperley) a tune ripped off by The Smiths:

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…