Reich

There was a slightly frightening moment earlier when the doors of my train from Hove to London stopped working just after the first keen rush of passengers had leapt onto the platform at Victoria. I was (and always am) amongst the breed of passenger who relishes a railway terminus because it means we don't need to panic about getting our belongings together. I like to sit for a few seconds to collect my thoughts, unplug my computer, save what I've written and pack my bags.

Unfortunately, I suddenly became aware of the only other person in my carriage banging on the door, and asking me whether I thought we'd be back in Hove before the doors were released. Others passed through our carriage in a similar panic, which became something of a stampede as people rushed to the front of the train, one assumes to try to contact the driver.

It was a good five minutes before the door lights went back on again, by which point I'd resigned myself to a yoyo-style journey back to Clapham Common and opened my computer again. I have never rushed quite so fast to re-pack my belongings however, in the terrible fear that the same thing would happen again, and I'd be the last person on a train that ended up in a railway siding!

So today with PK, we finished off the Pepys Motet and dug out all the interesting soundbites thus far collected for Invisible Voices. There's actually a great deal more than I'd expected. It's really difficult to know quite what to do with then just yet. I'm hoping PK will work some kind of extreme sonic magic which will lead me into a form of musical epiphany. I have certainly never created music in this manner before, and am actually not sure any one has! Very exciting.

I went back to Fiona's last night to find the lady herself, back from this leg of her world tour, listening to Steve Reich whilst preparing us a delicious lentil and chicory salad to eat for tea. The Reich made me feel a little emotional. It reminded me of being a sixth former; listening to Reich in my brother's university halls and with Sam Becker at Paradise Lane. In fact, it transpired that it was reminding Fiona of a similar period in her life; a period more than half our lives ago when we'd only just met. I'm not sure I actually particularly remember a time without Fiona in my life. I remember plenty of things before I was 14 or 15, but I'm not sure I associate those memories with being me. I'm sure that statement makes very little sense, but something happened to me when I started attending the music school in Northampton. It was as though everything suddenly came into colour and the early memories of that set, and all that extraordinary music, feel like part of a continuum of me that I recognise today, A lot of water has flown underneath our mutual bridge.

Fiona and I had much to catch up on. When I last saw her, I was an unmarried man and she hadn't played to hundreds of thousands of Placebo fans in countless South American countries. We filled in most of the biggest blanks before sleep overtook us, and I went to bed with a busy mind, thinking about a million projects, the slightly crazy worlds of Brass and the Pepys Motet colliding like a giant game of Space Invaders in my mind!