I just found a cold cup of tea by my feet. I hate that. I was so looking forward to it too (3 hours ago).
I was out last Wednesday seeing my old friend Foy Vance tear the Islington Assembly Hall a new arse. It’s so brilliant to be standing in the audience just getting blown away as much as the next guy, hearing all that great music and his outrageously brilliant voice soaring over it as only he can. So many old friends were there too – not least Steve Macartney of Farriers and Gabi Frödén who between them will be singing on a couple of the tracks next week. Yet another of the Macartney brothers appeared, over from Oxford (can’t say that without thinking of Uncle Monty from Withnail & I) for the night. He accosted me in the pub and said something along the lines of:
You see all this ‘you adjust the line balance of the HS204 and synchronise the 607 with the 865’ stuff on your blog… that technical stuff? It’s a loada oul shite
Then my mum called me today and said pretty much the same thing. So no acronyms, instrument names, or anything else of a technical nature in this post. Promise.
I’m just going to talk about “why bother”. The truth is that I don’t have an answer. Is anyone actually going to care in the least about these songs that are so precious to us now? I have no idea. Are they going to like them? I really don’t know.
It won’t change a thing, as they’re going to get finished one way or another. There are so many people out there making great music that never gets heard… for example, my great friend and collaborator Jules Maxwell has three albums of great material that not many people know about. So what is it that takes some records out of this collective audio soup and brings them to a wider audience? Perhaps it is just the big red marketing button that some record company exec decides to press for an artist once in a while… but while that can give an album a burst of success, it doesn’t make for a great record – something that gets celebrated, becoming part of peoples’ lives and stories.
Sometimes, when I consider all that, it seems a bit depressing. Like shouting down a well. But in the end, I come back to a phrase I have spoken in my mind on so many occasions, something in which I find great comfort – “expect nothing”. I said it as a 19-year old going off to live in Japan and now I say it again for the Ramshackle Crow record… expect nothing. If you don’t expect anything specific, you cannot be disappointed. Already the adventure of writing with Maurice, the privilege of having Brian Eno sing on a track, the joy of working with Matthew Rudd on the app… none of these things existed six months ago. Now they do, and it is only fair to that energy and goodwill shown by others I love and admire to push this boat out to see and set sail. I’ll have a carving of Maurice Macartney as a figurehead, and I think that will make everything OK.