Gregory's Girl, 7:84, The Steamie, Chic Murray, Clint Eastwood, Dudley Moore, Napoleon... - I'm nearly finished Alex Norton's autobiography.
I am glad his pal the late Jeremy Beadle suggested that he write it. (really.) Chapter 50 has a wonderful wee John Martyn anecdote which speaks well of the kindness of Blythe Duff. Many moons ago in the foyer of a Bayswater hotel after a Laura Cantrell gig, John Martyn gave some of us a telling off for something or other. Not that great an anecdote admittedly. To quote Neil Armstrong, you had to be there.
I have been writing an insane amount of TV music for project with a short deadline. (Which I can't tell you about.) A mad, intense workload. It never rains but it pours.
Aye but what have I been up to? Em...Walking the dog; baking treacle scones; and putting the finishing touches to the music for a TV doc about poetry for BBC Scotland.
Some treacle scones last week
I finished reading "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" - which was great.
I watched the new Pixar/Disney "Soul". I enjoyed it - while failing to be completely emotionally floored.
I tore through this:
It's a great book which brought back memories of my Lee Hazlewood record-hunting in Birmingham, Bergen and elsewhere, and also of attending his show at The Royal Festival Hall in 1999. It brought to mind my own experiences of working with a few interesting 'artistic types' over the years. Wyndham Wallace's book is a page turnin' celebration of a professional and personal friendship. You can hear that voice in the retelling of some great stories. If you haven't read it and you like the music of Lee Hazlewood - you might just eat it up like me.
Incidentally how would you approach covering a well-known Swedish folk song if you didn't speak the language? Here's how Lee did it:
Now I'm reading Alex Norton's autobiography. Chapter One tells of his Gorbals school days. Someone from the Education Department visits the classroom and, after some spelling and sums, observes the kids being creative with plasticine:
"What's this?", she enquired.
"Please, Miss", said Rab "It's a man."
"And why", she asked, "has it got three legs?"
"Please, Miss, that's his cock."
"I see", she said in an eerily flat tone, "Well take it off at once and make it into a hat."
Comrade Jolly
It's 1983 in the late, lamented Odeon cinema, Hamilton in Deepest Lanarkshire (anywhere in Lanarkshire is Deepest Lanarkshire). I can't remember what I am there to see, but during the Coming Attractions the trailer for Gorky Park flits by. Rikki Fulton (eh?) plays a KGB baddie. Maybe it is something to do with reading John Le Carré or whatever, but over 35 years since that first flickering glance I finally decide to give it a watch. Screenplay by Dennis Potter. Oh. Why there's Michael Elphick. Oh there's Alexei Sayle! And Brian Dennehy. And Lee Marvin....It's dated, charming-in-its-own-way hokum. But at least I now know that for myself. I picked at it and dipped into it over three nights. By coincidence on the third and final day it was announced that its director Michael Apted had died. (Apted was responsible for the 7Up series of documentaries which were both great and grim; watching footage of a 7 year-old talking about how their life might turn out, juxtaposed with footage of the child 14, 21 or 35 years later = yikes.) I'm not really going anywhere with all of this except to say that being glad you watched something isn't the same as recommending it. In the same spirit. I fancy revisiting The Cassandra Crossing sometime. I remember seeing it - the whole film, not just the trailer - at yon Hamilton Odeon, back in the Olden Days. (Funnily enough Richard Harris makes a nice cameo in Lee, Myself and I.)
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