A choir of Castrates to celebrate our love

Hope you can make it to this one. I know a couple of you can finally! We had hoped to get some friends to help out live at this gig but we might have to wait until the next one, details to follow. We are playing with the excellent Lucky Luke, whom I've seen go from a boil-in-the-bag Baby Tiger gig at the Swamp Bar, to supporing Teenage Fanclub at Glasgow Academy.

We put down some keyboards for Tradesmans' Lovesong and it's sounding excellent already. Verity gave it a real 60's pop feel. In this song I'm playing a tradesman based on a number men I worked with when I was a skinny, poofy, non-tax-paying stoodent. I used to work with a lot of really sound guys on summer jobs years ago both in a glue factory (sniff), and on building sites (fart). That didn't stop them relentlessly taking the p*ss out of me but that's ok. It was a great laugh most of the time and apart from my glue factory boss Billy and his sidekick "Ricardo Milano" I liked them all. The song attempts to broach middle-class attitudes to men who get their hands dirty at work and at home, and working-class attitudes to what constitutes domestic happiness. In the end it's just a song about cinemas and wide-screen TVs with a couple of slightly smutty jokes thrown in. If you come along on Saturday 9th September to the Cafe Royal you can hear it!

Nuclear Sail

"Out of my mind on Saturday night
1970 rollin' in sight
Radio burnin' up above
Beautiful baby, feed my love"

By the time 1971 rolled into sight I was brought into this planet. I'm not putting this in because I think it's worth blogging. I'm putting it in because I've definitely hit a transitional phase. No longer part of the "youth" zeitgeist, I can now listen to what I want to listen; read what I want to read; wear what is stocked in one of the two clothes shops I feel comfortable in (remember when Flip was good?) and believe what I want to believe as long as it doesn't question impending mortality. I would hate to be young now.

Because I'm the age I am I went to see Euros Childs a couple of nights ago and remembered all those Gorky's Zygotic Mynci albums and ep's I used to listen to. The first one I got was "If Fingers Were Xylophones" and it's title really was the Ronseal Woodstain of mid-90's Welsh folk-psychedeila to steal a much used metaphor. His first solo album is even better live and although I didn't think it possible I almost reached the ecstacy level gained from seeing Gorky's sing "Christina" a few years ago at the Liquid Rooms.

Small things like that can be a catalyst. I had been trying to record at Red Button last week but couldn't. "It" had gone. The music, the muse, the creativity, the whatever. That can get worrying because it can take a long time to come back. Luckily Wales' resident Madcap Laughs was the catalyst. I've been sitting writing quietly on the electric and a wee amp by the open window. There's a banjo song too called 'Nuclear Sail' at the moment. The title is from a piece by Ian Hamilton Findlay. I'm including submariners, trawlers and freshwater pearlfishers in this one. Freshwater pearlfishers (illegal now), or at least the one's that came from Blairgowrie, admitted to p*shing their pants to keep warm when wading through a river in the winter. Anything to get you through the day.