Sonica

Wow, this morning was tough! I woke up after far too little sleep with my right eyelid glued shut with blepharitis gunk. It was desperately painful. The pain has eased considerably during the day and I'm not sure it looks anything like as bad this evening which is a relief because yesterday it was noticeable enough for the entire Em cast to ask what the heck was wrong!

I travelled down to Clapham today to record in one of my favourite studios, Sonica. It's always good to be back. Over the years I've recorded a fair amount of material there including sessions for The Busker Symphony, Four Colours, Songs From Hattersley and all of the Pepys Motet. I think Mat and Paul who run the studios think I'm insane. The sessions I've done with them have always tended to be on manic and somewhat ambitious side... particularly when it came to Pepys. There has been a fair amount of ranting, raving and gnashing of teeth within those four walls!

Sonica was the place where I recorded Tanita Tikaram singing on the London Requiem which ranks as one of my all-time favourite sessions. She had always been a hero of mine, right from my childhood years, and she turned out to be so sweet and funny and generous. It's lovely when life turns out like that.

Sonica's only problem is its location. If Highgate is twelve o'clock on a map of London (which it pretty much is) then Sonica is at 6 o'clock. It could be worse: The two locations are, at least, on the same tube line... but at the two opposite ends, with an hour's journey in between.

I stood up for most of the trip down there, boxed into a corner by angry commuters. Fortunately I was by an open window, which meant I could stare into the faces pressed against the window in the next door carriage, and then out into the alluring gloom of the dusty tunnels where, I've heard, an entire sub-species of mosquito has evolved. Someone also once told me that there were scorpions down there. Surely a rumour?

The session went well. The studio engineer was a lovely chap called Sam, and Ben Holder played brilliantly. We rocketed through songs, particularly in the second half of the day when the pressure was on. We realised after lunch that we had just thirty minutes allotted time on each track, which is nothing when you realise that the instrument you're recording almost never stops playing!

Clare Chandler from Edge Hill University popped into the studio, and brought with her, as usual, an enormous blast of sunshine. I shall be working with students at the university at the start of November on an Em album-related project which I'm very excited about. Loads of them are genuine Scousers, so I can think of no better group of students to be involved.

I am thrilled to report that I get a lie-in tomorrow. Not a massive one - I have huge amounts of admin to do - but the idea of not having to set an alarm when I fall asleep tomorrow is almost too wonderful to comprehend. I'm going to eat takeaway in front of the telly tonight by means of celebration.

Quizzy rascal

I opened a tin of tomato soup a couple of nights ago, very excited about the prospect of light snack at the end of a tiring day. I took the lid off the can, and was slightly horrified to find something light-coloured which looked a little like a finger nail inside. A bit of digging revealed it was actually a baked bean. And not just one baked bean. It was a full tin of Heinz baked beans! How bizarre is that? One wonders how many other tins have been mixed up in this manner. More worryingly, it occurred to me that someone might one day open a tin of vegetarian soup and find a meat-based soup inside. We were with my Mum last night, and, as I recounted the story, she chipped in: "I've opened a tin of baked beans before and found sausages inside! In fairness, it did say 'baked beans with sausages' on the label..." The point of my story seemed to be slightly lost on her!

I met Little Michelle in Cambridge yesterday and we had a lovely little drift around the shops together. We found ourselves somewhere near Magdalene college and it suddenly struck me that we might be able to visit the Pepys Library. It's so rarely open, but a quick check on the website revealed we were in luck. Michelle has sung both versions of the Pepys Motet, so was the perfect person to drag along.

The Pepys Library consists of the large collection of books which Pepys bequeathed to his old college when he died. It's a hugely important resource which features an esoteric and highly eclectic set of books including a series of incredibly rare medieval manuscripts. It's astonishing that the collection has survived for over 350 years entirely intact. They even survived the Great Fire of London. The books are still in the cases that Pepys himself designed and had built by navy carpenters. They are actually the first example in the world of adjustable shelves. Fact.

Nathan picked us up from a pub near Lammas Land and we drove down to Thaxted for a ten-minute cup of tea and slice of cake before hot-footing it to a community centre in a deeply rural village near Bishop's Stortford, where the phone reception was non-existent.

We were doing a quiz. It was a quiz for fun rather than a quiz for work. It was one of those quizzes where the quirky personality of the quiz mater shines through in an occasionally brutal manner. There were all sorts of super hero questions and questions about Star Trek and Lego. It was a real geek fest. There was a music round, but it revolved around male vocalists from the 1970s, which was so specific it hurt. It was one of those quizzes which I started to lose interest in towards the end, which is really very rare for me.

This morning we woke up and tidied the house for a major rehearsal for Em. Twelve of my favourite people gathered in our front room at 1pm and we went through the ensemble vocals for the album whilst drinking copious cups of tea and eating biscuits and sweets. I think people in the room were differently prepared, shall we say. Some were rather too reliant on those who were better prepared. It was a fairly gruelling rehearsal but at least everyone now has a sense of what they need to go away and practise! There's a lot of material. Next Saturday in the studio will be exhausting unless everyone brings their A game. But what a treat it was to have all of those wonderful people together in a room. It's like a little family. A lot of the singers were in Brass at some point along its journey. Others have come on board with Em, premiering songs at various cabarets or, in the case of the hugely luminous Maeve, reading the script and providing Irish know how! I always feel a bit like a mother hen in those circumstances.

Sadly, I had to dart off before the end of the rehearsal to mark another quiz. It was was in a liberal synagogue in Knightsbridge and went very well. I'm officially exhausted, though. My enormous puffy eye is an indication of how run down I am, but I certainly feel like I'm living life!

Blepha-what?

I'm currently on a train bound for Cambridge. The automated woman's voice has just said "welcome to this.... service... to Cambridge." The curiously unrealistic pause before "service" makes it sound like she's putting the word in sarcastic inverted commas. Like she's only calling it a service because she's been forced to!

I have blepharitis. For the uninitiated, blepharitis is a rather painful infection of the eyelid. The whole thing has gone all puffy and I look well dodgy. Like someone who's been in a fight.

I walked up to King's Cross station this morning from Covent Garden where I've unsuccessfully been trying to get my iPhone fixed. Central London was full of horrible-looking, ageing skin heads. Many were carrying union jacks and some were walking bulldogs, which were also wrapped in flags. Plainly there's some sort of right wing march or protest going on. They were behaving really aggressively, shouting at each other in the street in broad Essex accents with no sense of decorum or how other people might be intimidated by them. I find it profoundly depressing that my country's flag has been misappropriated in this manner. I feel ashamed enough to be British at the moment without this added joy.

I officially hit the wall yesterday morning. That's a silly phrase isn't it?! I didn't physically hit anything and there was nothing official about my waking up so knackered that the alarm clock actually made me scream! It took me thirty seconds to realise where I was, and what on earth was going on! I A lot has been written about sleep cycles. Recent research suggests that we have two of them per night, so it's actually easier to function on just one, than it is if you're woken up mid-way through the second, which is plainly what happened to me yesterday.

Still, the weather was so beautiful as I walked along Parkland Walk to Julian's that a lot of my woes instantly evaporated. The sun was low in the sky, so low that it often blinded me. Great columns of trees were lit up so brightly that they glowed lime green. It seems that very few of the leaves on the London trees are in any hurry to turn brown. I wonder if they've already turned in Scotland?

We finished the guitars in the studio and I'm really pleased with how the songs are shaping up. I feel we're consistently recording to a very high standard, and this makes me very happy, blepharitis or no blepharitis!!

Recording days

We spent all day yesterday in the recording studio. All the way from 10am until 10pm, recording drums and bass. It was a really good session. We worked hard, stuck to time, and got everything done that we needed to do. Nick the bassist and Martyn the drummer played exceptionally well. I was really thrilled. There was a slightly irritating moment when the studio engineer announced we'd have to stop recording for an hour and a half as a result of a church service going on next door. I guess that's one of the perils of recording in a studio which was once the crypt of a (still-functioning) church. I was told it's a bit of a happy clappy church these days, so was quite surprised when clouds of incense stared wafting up the stairs. I don't associate incense with the "shake-your-tambourine" brigade.

Ben Jones and his mate Dan came to hang out in the studio in the evening. It was lovely to see them, and watch them appreciate the musicians and the set up in the studio.

I couldn't sleep last night, and lay, pathetically, worrying about things I couldn't do anything about at 2am. When my alarm went off at 7, I felt like I'd done several rounds in the ring, a sensation which worsened throughout the day!

I switched the news on and immediately learned what a profound dick Theresa May had made of herself at the Tory Party Conference. She may be a deeply religious person but Big G plainly doesn't approve of her antics. The tragic attempts that the Tories are presently making to attract young people are nothing short of laughable, and to see any Tory promising to build new council houses seems utterly bizarre. They sold them off in the first place. Does that mean they're finally acknowledging that Margaret Thatcher was evil beyond words?

The studio went well today. It was guitars from 9am. The lovely Thomas brought a veritable Aladdin's Cave of instruments with him: Acoustic guitars, electric guitars, a twelve string, a slide guitar, a mandolin...

He was on fire and played track after track exquisitely. As I dashed off to Greenwich, an hour before the end of the session, I was surprised to discover that we were already ahead of schedule. Julian and Thomas stayed on to finish another number, which means we've finished eight out of the thirteen songs with another day to go.

Julian, I discovered today, suffers from a condition called misophonia, which means he gets uncontrollably angry upon hearing certain sounds. The condition is also known as "sound rage." One of the sounds which makes Julian flip is the noise of someone slurping tea - which is something he accuses me of doing all the time. I have some sympathy for him. Some people make the most God awful sounds when they masticate!

The choir rehearsal this evening at Trinity was a lot of fun. And thankfully we had more men! It's so lovely working with those young people. Some of them sit there, staring up at me, with big smiles on their faces. Some of them make my day when I see them immersed in song. They genuinely seem to embody the notion of singing for joy. We did a big old improvisation and I introduced them all to the concept of heterophony, which strikes me as an evening well spent!

Drums and bass

I did half a day in the studio yesterday. Julian, my producer, came down with a chronic migraine during the morning, so we had to call a halt to proceedings, which was a terrible shame, as I felt that we were destined to end the day ahead of schedule and we now seem to be behind. Poor lad could hardly see the computer screen. We were attempting to record me playing the melodica. It's quite a piercing sound which can't have helped Julian's head. When I started practising the night before, Nathan was forced to leave the room!

Today is a big old day. It's the first point of no return; the stage at which we have to commit to keys and tempi for all the songs. The session involves recording drums and bass. We layer songs from the ground up. After drums and bass comes the guitar, then piano, then strings and then finally, the vocals. As you journey through the various sessions, the songs start to come to life.

So in the absence of a session yesterday afternoon, I did a heap of admin. There's still a heck of a lot to sort out. I'm still trying to track down two performers for the album (a cellist and a singer) and don't really have enough time to deal with the questions which have started to come thick and fast from the performers I've already booked.

I'm very much enjoying being in Crouch End, however. It's such a genteel place to mill about in, and there are some wonderful little cafes and restaurants. The place is laced with memories for me. I lived here, a life time ago, in 1996 and it really hasn't changed that much. It was a funny period in my life. I was at drama school and living in a miserable bed sit. I had a little fridge, a sink, a baby belling oven and a mattress on the floor. The bedsit was in the attic of a rambling Victorian mansion. Bathrooms were shared. An enormous window looked out towards Ali Pali and I used to sit and enjoy watching the tiny matchbox-sized busses passing in front of the building.

I was desperately lonely. Coming to London is a a major shift for anyone. It comes with the sudden realisation that you are utterly insignificant in the world. I used to walk down to the 7-11 (now a Costa) just for something to do in the evenings. I also used to listen to late night radio, and for the first (and last) time in my life, I understood how some people become obsessed with radio presenters, and start to view them as their friends.

Guns will tear us apart again

The scenes from Barcelona on the news this morning were incredibly distressing. Seeing images of women being pulled from voting stations by their hair and people desperately trying to hold onto ballot boxes which are literally being ripped from their arms by riot police is something which cannot and must not be ignored by the rest of Europe. Article Seven of the European Union treaty suggests that any member state found to be using violence against its own people should be suspended. It has never yet been triggered, although Poland and Hungary have sailed fairly close to that particular wind, the latter for its treatment of migrants.

Of course the issue of Catalonia is a complicated one. I'm sure many Catalonians want to remain a part of Spain, and an independence referendum with a turn out of considerably fewer than 50% needs to be treated with caution. But the Spanish government's brutal response to the referendum is an absolute own goal. If I were Catalan and in two minds about whether independence was the right thing, I would almost certainly think it was now. The Spanish leaders, probably out of fear, have shown complete contempt for their own people, and a flagrant disregard for the democratic process.

...And then there's what happened in Las Vegas last night. A group of young people at a country music festival simply mown down. No doubt it will do nothing to encourage the Americans to tighten gun controls. I am astounded that they appear to be so collectively incapable of seeing the irony here. Americans are utterly obsessed with terrorism but apparently happy to equip their own people with the tools to tear each other apart, seemingly without the excuse of a religious ideology.

In other news, I started recording Em in the studio today. We're working at Julian's wife's vicarage in Crouch End which I can walk to. It's actually a most agreeable walk. We both live within a stone's throw of Parkland Walk, a fabulous nature reserve which follows the route of an abandoned railway line which once ran from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace via Highgate.

Getting it right

I watched Strictly Come Dancing this evening, and, apart from being utterly in love with Debbie McGee and terribly

impressed by Alexandra Burke, it struck me what a fabulous display of equality and diversity that show is. Two female presenters. A judging panel which is equal male and female where both males are gay. An openly lesbian contestant. A black woman dancing with a paralympian. Asian, Latina and a multitude of dancers from European countries... old and young dancing together. It's extraordinary.

...And even more extraordinarily, it doesn't feel forced. I haven't often felt like patting the BBC on the back recently. All too often, in my view, they have seemed to want to play it safe to the detriment of art, but this show is, in my view, still getting it right, and it's no wonder that it's still a ratings success.

That's really all I have to write about tonight.