Good vibrations

I’d like to proudly announce the arrival of the new guitar in my life, a Simon and Patrick Woodland CW Cedar.  I recently realised that CW stands for Cut aWay (ie the little scoop out of it so you can get your greasy wee fingers at the high up notes).

It sounds beautiful, warm and golden and deeply resonant.  I’m very happy.

However, my focus the last week or so hasn’t been music - it’s been trying to finish a short film about a giant chicken, shot three years ago in Hamburg.  My, it’s a bit of a trial.  I’m so over giant chickens.  It was funny at the time (and it is still a bit funny) but I really, really want to get on in the world of chords and verses and harmonics.   I want to be jamming with folk and recording demos and working on new stuff…instead I am recording conversational chicken, delivered, I quickly realised, rather in the style of a young Barbra Streisand.  Still, providence continues to smile on our cinematic endeavours - a  couple of friends dropped by to borrow an amp so I got a good cow and an excellent pig out of them.

Taking a break from the glamorous world of the talkies, on Friday last, I attended the launch of Glasgow band Vom’s album “Primitive Arts” at the 13th Note Cafe (live performance featuring my borrowed amp).  Vom were as unrelentingly heavy and heaving as ever, to the delight of the brave assembled before them.   Sarah Banjo opened the show, playing her first gig with a full backing band and I enjoyed some great banjo-tastic, mandolin-infused numbers.

Kalbakken were my favourite band of the night though - a half-norwegian brother/sister duo on guitar/fiddle plus one highly skilled percussion practitioner, they rattled through a set of traditional Norwegian folk songs according to their own often avant-garde arrangements.  I was rapt - transfixed and transported.   Flickering shards of light and dark, the rattling of bones, the swift and driving current of blood.   Now that’s what I call folk music!

“The Patron of Music and Pleasure”

“Bes (bεs) n an ancient Egyptian god represented as a grotesque hairy dwarf: the patron of music and pleasure.”  Collins English Dictionary (4th Edition)

Good grief, smarter than imagined?

To beret?

My lover/joint mortgagee has scarpered off to France without me for ten days.   Something about extended family, worried murmurs, fear of chateaus.

I was offered to be brought a beret for a prezzie.  I thought for a moment - berets and I have a somewhat chequered history.   I went through a brief sombre-black beret-wearing phase.  I was in a fey sort of band at the time and it seemed to make a lot of sense.  Sartorial sense, that is, because as we all know berets are not practical hats.  Not in Scotland anyway.  Your ears get cold.  Or if they don’t, you’re wearing your beret wrong.  But I was never really sure if I was wearing my beret right.  You’re always squinting at your reflection in shop windows and trying to adjust it while pretending to scratch your head.

I used to have another kind of beret, when I was in the military - okay, the air cadets.  Given my repellent instincts towards authority and my certified status as a Guardian-reading leftie bleeding heart,  people are often surprised when I reveal my sojourn in Her Majesty’s Tuesday Night Service.  On balance, I enjoyed my time playing at soldiers, going up in aeroplanes and stoking powerful crushes on good looking chums in tight uniforms, shiny shoes and on occasion, one of those bright gold ribbons.  There’s a word for those but I can’t remember it.

But I digress.  My sombre-black fey beret was  lost to me some years ago.  One bright, spring afternoon I realised it was missing from my head on returning to the messy but fun flat I shared with a couple of swell lassies.  An hour or so later, while I was still mourning my loss, one of these lassies rocked in clutching my headgear and grinning with delight.  “Look what I found on the street!”  She looked too happy with her find for me to claim the beret as my own.  I guess she hadn’t noticed it perched jauntily on my wee twee head in prior weeks.

This ended my beret days and after reflection I turned down the kind offer of a new genuine French beret.  It seems to me now that a beret cannot be worn, here, in Glasgow, by me, without a degree of pre-meditation that creates a fatal conflict with the joyful insouciance that should characterise the beret-wearer.   I can’t just throw one on and waltz down the boulevard.  Berets outside France are arch.  What is arch is imbued with cynicism, no matter how playful, and berets should of course be playful but never, ever cynical.

So I respectfully declined and requested some Gallic green devilry  instead.   Please don’t tell whisky I will be cheating on it.